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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/ToaArcan on 2025-09-30 09:27:07+00:00.

Under Siege

Part 2

After Power of the Primes had finished being disappointing and overall mid, Hasbro relaunched the line with the War for Cybertron Trilogy, which was about the final days of the war on Cybertron and the exodus to Earth. It’s not to be confused with War for Cybertron the game, which is about the same thing.

Yeah, Transformers has like ten subtitles that it reuses constantly. You get used to it.

The first chapter of WFCT was 2019’s Siege, which focused on the final battle for Cybertron. Yeah, they started at the end. The subsequent chapters had nothing to do with Cybertron. Hasbro were being weird with this one.

Siege’s intent was largely to make figures based on the classic G1 designs, but with space-y altmodes. Some figures got actual space altmodes. Others got Earth modes but a bit to the left. And leading the charge for the Decepticons was Megatron.

Siege Voyager-class Megatron released in the first wave of toys, and was initially met quite positively. If you’ve been in a Transformers fan space since, this might come as a bit of a surprise to you, because this figure is not well-liked now. But we’ll get into that.

He largely achieves the goal of looking like the classic character, but he’s a lot squatter and bulkier. He also includes a large sword/gun, loosely based on the blade that came with the original Japanese version of his G1 toy. He’s slathered in battle damage scuff marks, something shared by most returning characters in the toyline, apparently intended to capture the feel of the desperate final days of the war (Characters showing up for the first time in Generations mostly had less battle damage paint).

So, what are people mad about with this one? Well, they don’t like the proportions, his lack of wrists (something most Voyagers have from this point out), his huge tread-backpack (which tends to get dislodged whenever his waist joint is used), the fact that his head doesn’t tab in in robot mode, or the ubiquitous defect that causes his right ankle pivot to not tab in properly. The battle damage paint was also almost universally despised, so that wasn’t doing him any favours.

Deco-related concerns could be alleviated somewhat with the 35th Anniversary Voyager-class Classic Cartoon Megatron, which repainted him with a G1 cartoon-accurate colour scheme, and the cel-shading effect that the cartoon was far too cheap to have but might exist in rose-tinted memories. It does match pretty well with the Transformers: Devastation game, which also featured a G1-esque Megatron with a tank mode, though.

The last thing people hate this toy for wouldn’t really manifest for a few years, though. See, Siege Megatron had arrived in 2019, and with the exception of an even-less-popular retool of him and one other figure, he would be the sole G1 Megatron available until 2025. He ain’t going anywhere.

It started in a strange place. Generations Selects is a small offshoot toyline, where Hasbro releases all the weird repaints that used to be the domain of FunPub. And there, they would release Voyager-class Combat Megatron.

Again based on the unreleased G2 Hero deco, the lost colour scheme finally became widely available, which probably would’ve been a bigger deal if the colours weren’t dog-ugly. Notably, this figure had an alternate head, based on the miner design from the IDW comics. None of the design’s unique details, like the caution striping and red markings on the helmet, were painted, leaving them completely white, making it a little strange that they used the head for this deco. Maybe it’s because the only other released toy with these colours was repainted from a miner Megatron figure?

Oh, also, remember this headsculpt. It’s gonna get stupid when we get to 2023.

2020 brought the Earthrise toyline, and also the small matter of a worldwide pandemic that shut down most of the planet and confined everyone to their homes. In addition to the whole “deadly virus making everyone’s lives suck” thing, it also made collecting plastic robot toys marginally more annoying. No longer able to go outside, everyone had to buy online, and online stores started running out of stock thirty seconds after preorders went live.

One of the more controversial aspects of Earthrise was the high amount of figures from Siege who were suddenly getting updated toys. Optimus Prime, Starscream, Skywarp and Thundercracker, Ironhide, Prowl, Bluestreak, Smokescreen, Ratchet, Barricade, Soundwave, Laserbeak, Ravage, and yes, Megatron all received toys of their Cybertronian forms in Siege, and then immediately received new ones with their Earth modes (AKA the designs most people actually wanted) in Earthrise. This trend would continue into the following line, with Ultra Magnus, Mirage, Sideswipe, and Red Alert seeing their Siege toys replaced with newer plastic.

In the eyes of the fandom, Hasbro had essentially sold them some compromised figures for one year, while fully intending to replace them with newer, more satisfactory ones in the following two years. Now, not all of the new toys were seen as improvements. Some are seen as sidegrades, others are viewed as a step back, and the Prowl/Smokescreen/Bluestreak/Barricade mold is largely considered a substantial aesthetic improvement, but is also much more fragile owing to an overabundance of clear plastic. The only version of it that has an all-opaque plastic construction is a toy of Prowl’s corpse. Hasbro, why are you like this?

Unfortunately, Earthrise Voyager-class Megatron, a partial retool of the Siege figure that was mostly intended to replace his Space Tank altmode with an Earth tank, and to make him look even more like the cartoon, was on the losing side of the equation- This toy is almost uniformly regarded as a big step back from the Siege version.

His head looks worse, his colours are blander, the tread backpack is still there, but is now bigger and squarer. He has an extra part that comes off the back of the tank and does nothing for the robot. The sword-gun, which transformed into the tank barrel on the Siege toy, is now a static piece that includes a blade, most of the front of the turret, and the gun barrel, and it looks absolutely awful. He still has the Siege battle damage, despite almost all of the other figures in Earthrise abandoning it like the bad idea it was.

Tragically, it wasn’t supposed to be this way. The designers of the toy admitted that they hadn’t intended for the new Megatron to be a partial retool of the Siege figure. He was supposed to be a new mold entirely. But unfortunately, COVID reared its ugly head again, cutting both the budget and the time they had to design him, and the results speak for themselves…

The original Siege tooling wasn’t done either. Released on Netflix that year was an animated series that told the story of the War for Cybertron Trilogy. It was bad! But to go with it, Hasbro released a special line of figures called the Netflix War for Cybertron Trilogy toys. These were mostly Siege and Earthrise toys, but even dirtier and grimier.

Megatron was now a dark metallic silver, and had actually lost most of his Siege weathering in favour of painted-on scratches and scars, and came with some extra accessories. Sounds like an all-around improvement, right? Yeah, well, the Netflix Voyagers, an in fact a lot of Voyager-class toys over the next two years were prone to severe photodegradation, even if they were kept away from sunlight. These things can yellow in the box. There’s always something.

Generations Selects provided a little respite for the Earthrise version of the tooling, by releasing it in G2 colours, full on lurid neon green and all. The figure looks substantially better in the loud 90s colours. A shame, then, that they deliberately took out the port that would’ve allowed him to mount his cannon on his shoulder, like the original G2 toy. Oops.

Selects also provided the only Megatron toy for the following half a decade that didn’t share DNA with the Siege mold, in the form of Super Megatron, a retool of Titans Return Voyager-class Galvatron. I’ve largely ignored Megatron’s alter-ego in this writeup, aside from when he and Megatron share a mold/tooling, largely because Galvatron had his own similar journey of “None of his new toys are adequate,” except most of them just kinda sucked. He’ll be getting his own post eventually. Hopefully it will be shorter than this one. Needless to say, the TR toy was a pretty infamous lemon, held back severely by its gimmick and the placement of the weapon. This toy fixed both of those!

Super Megatron is pretty good. He’s based on…

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