APC Toys Night Countess (TFP Airachnid) review

2012 felt like a painful year for the toy side of Transformers. While the media side was strong with Prime Season 2, Fall of Cybertron, Rescue Bots, and the pre-Autobot Megatron comics of IDW, the merchandise mostly consisted of price inflation woes, smaller toys, cheaper plastics, and the lines we had being inferior to the 2011 offerings. While I did own figures from the PRID line, I still wish I got the First Edition toys or even better iterations that HasTak are still afraid to make. This is no further from the truth than the worst toy of that year, Airachnid. How Hasbro thought a Deluxe Transformer with holes shot through its palms, exposed hinges that aren't concealed by already thin panels, limited hip movement, and a cockpit seat that does nothing except limit the head's articulation, I will never understand. And thankfully, APC Toys does a much better job at tackling this issue nearly a decade since the PRID figure's release with their First Edition-esque Night Countess. 

Here we have the Night Countess in her helicopter mode. It may look a bit like a fish in this mode, but it at least resembles what the show design looked like. It is a small strength that the otherwise poor PRID Deluxe manage to retain, but this figure uses more believable rotor blades that not only blend in better but also don't look as toyetic as on the official version. The cockpit is also better designed in terms of appearance, looking more intimidating than it normally does. The feet are more prominent thanks to the paint, which is something the original sort of did right even though it was barely painted. At the very least, no obvious 5mm ports to ruin the look.

For a size comparison with a Deluxe helicopter from a few years before the Night Empress was made, here she is next to Siege Spinister. So as you can tell, the size isn't quite far off from the kind of scale you'd expect from a Deluxe helicopter, but it should be worth mentioning that NE is generally smaller despite costing more overall. We'll see if the engineering is worth it.

Speaking of, transformation is quite involved for a figure like this, as it is nowhere near the simplicity of the shitty PRID toy. You're not just flipping the toes out or shifting the arms and chest down. This time, there is better part integration to compliment the very sinister aesthetics of Airachnid, and the figure's backpack is nowhere near the same level of hindrance it once had. For example, she has no stupid cockpit hood! And her head doesn't have a seat glued on the back! The only real issues I have with the figure have to be the tolerances on some parts. The wrists are tighter than they should be (especially with the small ball joints or wrist swivels they have) while one of the helicopter blades is a little floppy; the heels are the worst of all since they have no indent to "lock" in place. At the very least, the robot mode is much better made this time around than previously. The arms look more proportionate with the panels that remain, the legs are better defined, especially around the hips, and the color scheme is much more prominent for the purple and gold, making her hotter, deadlier, and poisonousier more poisonous than Beast Wars Blackarachnia. The golden fembot was fitting for a femme fatale who isn't fully evil while this fits the goth queen vibe. Also I swear if someone thinks I'm bring down bad like a lot of meme pages are nowadays, I'm going to rip faces off.

Her head sculpt is well detailed and surprisingly sharp for the "horns" that go on the back of the figure. Her eyes are painted instead of light-piping, and the general sculpt work combined with the deco makes for an exquisite piece. (Even with the slight blemish on the left eye I might fix). Her articulation consists of a ball joints at the head, shoulders, wrists, diaphragm, and hips. There are hinges for the double-jointed elbows and single-jointed knees. There are also bicep and thigh swivels, though the former, along with the shoulder joints, has a few issues with bumping into the torso. Still, it easily beats the original PRID Deluxe, even in spite of the flaws mentioned. It's undoubtedly night and day.

She can even pull off a Spider mode simply by compressing the legs and coattails into an abdomen while the back panels are hinged up to tab in the legs. Each leg has 3 points of articulation, meaning you could have them tall and frightening or low and predatory, like in her debut episode.

Here she is in-between her rival, Arcee, and Soundwave, who literally went "down came the vast, predatory bird and took the spider out". The scale with these figures works quite well if you ask me, even though Arcee is a little taller than she normally is. But that's besides the point. I really love how much my TFP collection is shaping up to be way better than it was a decade ago. Night Countess does feel cheap in some areas, and the initial asking price seems too high, but with some discounts and a few hundred bonus points from making a ShowZStore account, you can get her at $12 more or less like I did. She easily outclasses her shitty PRID counterpart at that price.

Final ranking: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ and a half out of ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐