>>65649492013 and early 2014 was a surprising improvement with Prime ending on a strong note and Thrilling 30 putting out some of the greatest CHUGs we know, but then AoE came around and we just sort of collectively realized it was only going to go downhill from here. You cannot possibly imagine the distaste of walking into a TRU and only seeing rudimentar overpirced one-step figures plastering every single store, with maybe only one or two Deluxes around at best if you're incredibly lucky, and neither of those looking particularly good or remarkable either. Other than Evasion Prime and perhaps Hound, there really isn't any other particularly memorable mold from that toyline, which is not surprising considering how little of them were made in the first place.
From that point on, it only got worse. Combiner Wars was basically a tasteless market exercise in replacing an entire Generations line with rudimentar, hollow, aesthetically repulsive and nearly unpainted Deluxes and Voyagers purely for the sake of combining into disproportionate and bland-looking gestalts that look more like stacked up Playskool vehicles rather than actual collectible figures, and it's not like we had a strong Robots in Disguise line to compliment that year either, with those also suffering from the exact same cheapness. Titans Return finally felt like a step in the right direction, with the forced Headmasters gimmick being somewhat intrusive but at the very least also giving us some far more intricate and elegant designs than what we had seen in Combiner Wars, but once again, we also had another movie line plagued with cheapness and poor distribution just in case we were finally having a good year in Transformers at last. And then, here we have Power of the Primes, and lord... We're just scraping the bottom of the barrel here.
