>>10703561Continued, when Hasbro *did* start designing their own toys after they ran through every Japanese transforming toy they could acquire, and then some, they unambiguously sucked as a step down from Takara and even Bandai's designs. Futuristic vehicles made around this kind of concept art, which was a reverse of the process where the toys would come first, and then the characters were designed around that, was never going to be good and Hasbro did not have the design skill to make them function as well as they could (the the fault also lies somewhat on Floro Deary's designs, as good of an artist as he was, he certainly wasn't taking into consideration the fact these were going to be functioning toys).
Meanwhile, Takara's Japanese designs were still kicking ass and evolving in amazing creative ways, to the point they would continue this evolution into their own toys branching off of Transformers entirely and partnering with Sunrise to create the Brave series when their G1 continuation ran its course.
The one time Hasbro did actually make the toys all on their own and had it succeed, was when Kenner's design team made Beast Wars, which took full advantage of the concept of ballpoints to offer less limited articulation, creating more dynamic action figures that also had plenty of play functions. Though this still came after G2 and Machine Wars started introducing the concept, Beast Wars embraced it wholeheartedly.
Oh, and there was Europe, they made some alright toys during the time G1 was pretty much dead, still not the quality of Takara's Car Robot and Microchange toys with die cast and lots of folding ingenuity, but they were better than Hasbro's Season 3 toys, that's for sure.
>>10703576Transformers has been engineered by Takara for most of the franchise's lifetime. The designs are a joint effort between America but Japan still does almost all of the engineering.
