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So, finally pulled the trigger on Savage Noble/"Beast Changer". He's a character I've wanted since I was a kid (my parents never got him for me, sadly), and I've been putting off tracking him down until now. Also grabbed a Night Viper, since someone posted him here recently and I thought he looked cool.
Anyway, Savage Noble is pretty cool, if a bit weird - his whole thing on the show was that he was entirely organic with no cybernetic components whatsoever (unlike the Maximals in BM, who were cyborgs). Thus, he shapeshifts from one organic creature to another - in his case, his Savage form is a Lindwurm dragon (a long, snakelike dragon with arms, wings, and a tail but no rear legs from European mythology) while his equivalent of a 'robot mode', Noble, becomes a werewolf-looking thing. Both of his forms are unusual, considering he's basically Megatron's cast-offs - while the dragon half makes some sense, it's the wrong species of dragon (TM2 Megatron was a Western dragon and had all four limbs), while to this day I still have no rationalization for where the wolf mode came from. Despite the odd concept behind him, the toy itself is pretty fun - both of his arms have plenty of articulation and his thumb claws can be moved forward, letting him grab and hold things. He also has two gear-driven gimmicks, with the one available in Savage form being his snapping jaws, which open when you press a button on the left side of his (eyeless) head. Sadly, his wings are static.
Night Viper is also great, despite his rather clunky appearance in snake mode. He's a Basic-class character - the smallest size class of the Beast machines line - but still packs a lot of articulation thanks to all the extra joints in his robot legs, which become his snake body in beast mode. He also has a springloaded function I didn't know about until after he was already in-hand - pressing the yellow marking on his frill makes his snake head lunge forward and jaws pop open.
