Legacy Evolution Leo Prime

Prelude: Okay, let’s the obvious out of the way first: this figure here is called Leo Prime, but long-time Transformers fans know, of course, that this is really Lio Convoy from Beast Wars II. Not sure why they changed the Convoy to Prime here, but left it intact for Big Convoy a few years later. Anyway, this here is Lio Convoy, leading the fight against Galvatron (no, not the one you’re thinking of) on planet Gaia. Let’s say go! 

Robot Mode: Roughly 90 percent of all Transformers that become four-legged animals of some sort share a similar design: the beast’s head is either on the chest or the back and the robot is just the beast stood upright. Lio Convoy is the outlier here, because his design is wonderfully asymmetrical with the lion’s head on the right shoulder and the lion’s rump on the left. Okay, he’s still got the beast’s hind legs as his robot legs, but still: a very original, unique design, making him instantly recognizable.

Now this is my fourth Lio Convoy figure after the original, the Robot Master, and the Masterpiece, so comparisons will abound. Oh, and I will be calling him Lio Convoy throughout this review, just so we’re clear. He is not Leo Prime to me.

Size-wise Lio is a Voyager-class figure, placing him between the Masterpiece figure and Robot Master, and fulfills the modern expectations regarding articulation. No twisting wrists, but otherwise he can pose freely, or as freely as his design allows him to, given that the big shoulder pads do restrict him a bit, as do the pods hanging off his upper arms, which become the front legs of the lion.

Much like the original figure and its earlier successors, Lio Convoy offers quite a few gimmicks. The left part of his chest opens up to show a Matrix. The front legs of the lion can flip forward and extend long claws. The furry parts on his forearms can also flip forward and you can attach two of his four guns there. The two larger guns can also attach to the sides of his mane, while the smaller ones are actually hidden inside the mane and flip out. The only thing this figure cannot do in comparison with the original (and the MP and RM figures, too) is flip out all four mane parts of the lion head and have it rotate like a buzzsaw. That was my least favorite gimmick of this figure, though, so I am not sad that it’s not included.

So bottom line for the robot mode: pretty good. It looks the part, it has most of the gimmicks, and is a nicely articulated, finely detailed figure on top of that. So no serious complaints here.

Beast Mode: Lio Convoy transforms, you guessed it, a lion. A white lion, to be exact. An old joke in the Transformers community is that he scanned Kimba the White Lion as his beast mode. The transformation is complex, given Lio Convoy’s asymmetrical robot mode design, and is rather similar to the transformation scheme of the original figure, too. Not as complex as the Masterpiece version, mind you, but not exactly a 1-step changer, either.

The finished beast is clearly a lion, no doubt about that. The proportions are more or less realistic, no complaints here, and while you can see some parts of the robot mode on its chest and on the hind legs, overall the beast mode looks pretty wholesome and near-organic. The hind legs (the robot mode legs) retain most of their articulation, while the fore legs can only move below the knees. The lion’s mouth opens and you can do a bit of tail-wagging, too, if you want.

Now let’s come to the negative: the beast’s head. Yeah, it does give a somewhat good impression as a lion’s head, but a) it looks nothing like the head of the beast mode we saw Lio Convoy sport on TV and b) it’s eyes are utterly dead, a place where lost souls go to die. The 40th Anniversary T-Spark version of this figure fixed those problems, giving us a much more anime-accurate head. Lio Convoy can also deploy his mane-mounted weapons in this mode, naturally.

So bottom line here: a nice beast mode in general, but even disregarding the lack of resemblance to the animated lion, the head’s dead eyes drag this mode down quite a bit. A pair of painted-on pupils would have sufficed to mitigate that a bit.

Remarks: Lio Convoy is probably the best-known Japan-exclusive Transformers character after Star Saber. He was created for the Beast Wars II cartoon and toy line in 1998. Since that series never made it into the Western world, most non-Japanese fans didn’t know about him until a bit later, but by now he’s firmly entrenched as a franchise character. His first Western figure debuted 2008 in the Universe line and now we get him in Legacy Evolution, too.

So how does this figure here rate compared to earlier versions of Lio Convoy? Overall I’d put in on par with the Robot Masters figure, as it’s a nice toy adaptation of the cartoon character, featuring almost the entire range of gimmicks of the original figure in a more streamlined, less clunky form. That said, the beast mode really needs a better head, so if money is not the issue, I’d recommend you get either the Masterpiece version or the 40th Anniversary T-Spark figure instead.

Considering that both those other figures cost a lot more than this one, though, this figure here is doing pretty well in the dollar-for-value category. Not perfect, but a nice toy version of Lio Convoy. Recommended to Beast Wars and Lio Convoy fans, unless you already own the Masterpiece.

Rating: B 

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