No debating it now: Masterpiece has finally hit the Skids.

TakaraTomy has started off the new year right on Twitter with lineart for the next Masterpiece figure: MP-TBA Skids! And both the lineart and the accompanying Tweets seem to indicate (via mechanical translation, in the Tweets' case) that we're in for a change in the MP approach.

The lineart is very clearly not based particularly heavily off of Skids' extremely light appearances in the G1 cartoon, and the accompanying text reads: "With instinctive deformation and a wide range of movement, it is a new work that will be a hybrid version of MP these days!" ("Deformation" is the usual auto-translate word for "transformation" or, if you work for Hasbro, "conversion.") So from the sound of things, we're looking at a refocusing on comfortable transformations and good articulation, at least as far as Skids is concerned. The "Hybrid version of MP these days" part makes it sound like we could be looking at a line-wide shift in approach as well, but only time will tell.

This strikes us as both a potentially welcome and unwelcome thing. The pursuit of animation-model accuracy produced some fascinating results but also some disturbing trends in terms of complexity and price. A reversal on that aimed at leaning more towards the early Autobot Cars era of MP, with high-quality but still not ridiculously expensive figures, would certainly be welcome! Though stylistic mismatch between Masterpieces is definitely a concern here. But we'll have to wait and see both how Skids turns out and what the full implications of his new direction ends up being.

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