Be whatever you want to be.
Amalgamous Prime's exceptional transformation abilities were later passed down as the Transformation Cog, essential for all Transformers to transform into their alt modes. He himself constantly experiments by transforming his own body parts to create new alt modes, and these body parts hold the potential to power up all Transformers.
So the story of The Thirteen originally appeared
in The Covenant of Primus, a book that laid out their history, from their origin as a species to the start of the Prime cartoon (remember, this is when Hasbro was fruitlessly trying to push all their continuities into one aligned story). In that book, Amalgamous was introduced as the ninth Prime to be created; but if he was also the first one to have the ability to transform, what were the first eight doing until he showed up?
Just hanging out? Waiting?
Amalgamous' "thing" was that he was constantly shifting shape, perpetually re-forming into new and interesting forms - hardly something that seems conducive to making a solid action figure. And that may be why this one is based on his appearance in Transformers One, where he had two legs, four arms, a hunched posture, and a head that seemed to be based on Shockwave. Shockwave? Can you imagine, one of the Thirteen Primes having something to do with Shockwave! That'd be nuts!
For something that's supposed to be a constantly-moving pile of shapes,
the toy is surprisingly smooth and simple. The limbs are nearly perfect rectangles with very little detail sculpted into them until you get out near the extremities. The hands are unimpressive claws, while the feet are big digitigrade tank treads. His head is halfway down his chest, thanks to his hunchback, and there are big elements on the shoulders that are round lights or something with pointy flares over top of them. It's a distinct appearance, to be sure, but that doesn't necessarily mean good.
Especially when we move on to the articulation. The way Hasbro's chosen to display Alamgamous' unique powers is to take a cue from the Legacy Evolution Junkions or the Siege Weaponizers, where he can be taken apart for later recombination. Unfortunately, the pegs connecting the pieces right now are necessarily shallow, so the parts tend to fall off when you try to move him. Add to that the fact that the non-separable joints are
all furiously stiff, and the shoulders designed to accommodate those double-arms are weird and not immediatey intuitive, and you've got a robot that is not very fun to pose right out of the box.
And that frustration carries over to the conversion. We're not going to list all the steps here, but take an example: the first step in the instructions is to tip the head down into the chest; a very easy, commonplace thing, yes? Well, you go to do this, and like a normal human person, you push down on the head to accomplish it; except that Amalgamous' head is one of his removable pieces, so that's a loose connection, and all pushing down on it will do is make the head pop off into your hand. And then the second step is to open the panel on the back of the neck, and that thing is so stiff the only way I could do it
was to jam something in there and pry the damn thing up. Pry it off. The toy fights your attempts to play with it at every step.
The altmode Hasbro has chosen for Amalgamous is some kind of walking tank, a massive chunk of armored weapon standing on four legs. It's an interesting design (Prima stays losing), looking like something you'd see in a game splitting the difference between Metal Gear Solid and Horizon Zero Dawn. It never really stops looking like a robot that's been folded in half, unfortunately.
Amalgamous is armed with both a scythe and a pistol, and those combine to form the gun barrel for the tank. All the AotP Primes also come with ancient artifacts related to their power. You might expect that Amalgamous
would get his magical Transformation Cog, but in fact he gets two - I guess not even it can pick a single permanent shape! One is round, with silver plates around the edges, like the T-cogs in Generation 1 and most other continuities, and is hidden inside the toy's head with the 5mm peg on the end acting as his eye. The other is pointier, like the T-cogs seen on the Prime cartoon, gets no paint over the translucent yellow plastic, and can fit on the end of the scythe. Twice the transformation capability!
Like we said, Amalgamous as a toy is treated somewhat like a Weaponizer, with his parts coming apart and rejoining in new configurations - their way of doing the "he can change into anything at any time" gimmick. It's all very Vehicle Voltron. The instructions show
a few suggested ideas for things you can make, and they're all little self-contained vehicles. Like, take two of the forearms off, put them back-to-back, and you have a little "car"; the other two forears have wings that fold out and sculptural details that, when put next to each other, look like a cockpit, so that's now a plane; plug the shins together with the gun barrel between them, and it's a mini-tank. The main body remains entirely unchanged, so that's kind of boring.
Alternately, you could put the robot's shoulder-things
in the center of the car or plane, making them look like semi-autonomous drones (the shoulder-thing serving as a pseudo "eye" that personalizes them), or you could put the car-halves on the side of the mini-tank and mount the plane on top, creating a mega-mini-tank. You could probably come up with other interesting things, if you're the type of person who was great with Modulok.
Amalgamous Prime has grown on me the more I play with him. I really didn't like the toy at first, but getting used to the weird quirks of extremely loose parts on extremely tight joints and limbs that don't move the way you'd expect them to has slowly improved my opinion. He's still never going to be a Toy of the Year contender, but we're not going to give Hasbro too much hell for trying something new.
-- 03/17/26
What's your best Amalgamous creation? Tell us on our message board, the Loafing Lounge.
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