Congrats on the find,
@Damien
You're the first. You now have the responsibility to give your candid thoughts on these things. Don't sugar coat it. If you want, post pics, I guess. Do you ever do that? I can't recall a post where you've posted pics.
I post pics of things sometimes. My place has just the absolute worst natural lighting in basically every room, and I am not a photographer, so the pics I take are rarely very good at all. But if people are looking for specific poses or size comparisons, I should be able to get the job done.
So, sitting with these for the last little bit (yes, I admit it - I gave up and went home for the day), my feelings are definitely mixed - leaning towards the more positive side of that.
I think
He-Man is the strongest (ha!) figure in the initial three. He's a good figure that's doing a lot of the things we all want to see on a modern figure - excellent neck articulation, a lot of different torso movement, etc. But there's limitations up here that I'm not fond of. The forward crunch is not great. The backward extension is good but it gaps up when you use it too much. The butterfly joints are great to have, but still have a lot less ROM than they should. The connection between the abdomen and the pelvis is a bit gappy for no apparent reason.
I do want to point out these are largely minor criticisms. It's a lot of 'this is cool, but with a little more engineering put into it, it could be a better and more useful.' The only actual criticism I have of He-Man is that his thighs are already starting to feel loose from a half hour of messing with him. It almost feels like the switch to the simplified construction without the thigh swivel (which I kind of miss but kind of don't) has also made it so the entire leg is just less durable. That is something I very much do not like.
The costume details, paint, etc, are phenomenal. And despite the looseness in the thighs and where the articulation could be better, he's REALLY fun to pose.
Tri-Klops is my main man when it comes to bad guys but this figure isn't really it for me. That is not REALLY a criticism of the figure but, as I've said previously, a criticism of the design of the character in the movie. I do want to get one thing out of the way because I've seen it mentioned inaccurately in early reviews: Tri-Klops' visor DOES spin. Fully confirmed. I'm doing it right now. Spin spin spin. Yay triangle-eye.
The figure moves really nice. Everything feels very good. His arms/hands seem a little dinky, but that may be true to the movie design so what do I know. It's a very well-realized version of this design. I just really dislike the design. Particularly the legs. Don't like him with the look of pants, especially not with the weird subtle camo pattern. It's done really WELL, for what that's worth. I just hate it.
I will say that his butterflies are the most worthless of the three figures. Literally barely even functional, to the point where I'm not sure why they bothered. He's a fun figure. More/better articulation than any Tri-Klops figure before him, I'd say. But goddamn I don't like this design. Again, though - a lot more painted details than any of us are used to on our non-import MOTU toys.
Man-at-Arms is not as good as He-Man, but still really nice. Again, the amount of paint detail and stuff on this is quite nice and better than usual for Mattel. Same artic as He-Man. His butterflies, weirdly, feel like they pull out more to give him more range, but are inhibited more by his armor. So it becomes a wash and his ROM there is basically the exact same as He-Man. Which, to be fair, is pretty good considering the armor he's wearing. His hips feel solid so far.
My biggest problems with MAA are that his stupid tiny gun's handle is very wide and doesn't work well with the included hands, and (the same problem I have with EVERY MAA figure EVER) I wish Mattel could figure out some way to do the upper arm armor that doesn't suck balls. I've never owned an MAA figure where his upper arm armor wasn't basically falling off all the goddamn time and this figure is no exception to that.
I didn't mention it before, but all the figures have drop down hips. I didn't mention it, because drop down hips are basically worthless and I don't understand why any company bothers with this unless it's just a 'happy side effect' of how they're designing the articulation these days. Because.. yeah.. worthless, but not intrusive or bad. Just lacking any practical value for me.
I took a couple of quick pics that I'll load up here in a few minutes when I can put them on a hosting site first.
