Iteration is the key to improvement!

Pretty much everyone (except me) had a pretty lukewarm reaction to the Age Of Extinction Leader Optimus Prime. To me, it was a good effort to bring an impossible design into real life. To everyone else, it was a resounding meh.

It’s apparent that the designers on the Takara side of things agreed because this is the second improved version of the Leader AOE mold. I scored mine insanely cheap because it was missing his sword and shield. Let’s take a quick look at Optimus in all his enhanced glory!

Robot mode

The improvements made to Armor Knight Optimus are obvious.

He looks incredible. They did some pretty extensive remolding on his chest, head and forearms. But the big improvement here is the paintjob.

The painted details are gorgeous. The paint is especially nice on Prime’s head.

Speaking of his head, Optimus has a really cool face switching gimmick that lets you change between his masked face and his unmasked face. The spinning mechanism used for this is simple but effective.

For posability, Armor Knight Optimus has the same posability as the original AOE Leader Optimus but they added in wrist swivels as well as some articulation in his thumbs. That doesn’t sound like much but the original mold had a lot of posability to begin with and the wrist articulation adds a lot of personality to the figure.

Vehicle mode

The truck mode on the first version of this mold was already great to begin with but Armor Knight Optimus still finds ways to improve on it. The paint on this guy is actually beautiful and there’s just so much of it. The paint really brings out all the details of the mold and makes you realise how little of it the original AOE Leader mold actually had.

The tyres on Optimus are rubber and roll really well. You can also store all his accessories neatly in this mode… too bad I don’t have them.

Closing

Armor Knight Optimus is a great looking figure even with the massive backpack still hampering the figure. In fact, I think that I prefer this guy to the TLK Voyager Optimus even though that figure handles its kibble vastly better. A nice paintjob goes really far.

I really like Armor Knight Optimus… but I’m not going to hunt down a complete copy of this guy any time soon. However, I am going to hunt down the final evolution of this mold as soon as I possibly can.