I’ll admit this KO was an impulse buy. I didn’t know much about it in advance, but, like a mouse, I’m just a sucker for shiny objects. Like any other fan, I’ve always drooled over the Lucky Draw gold chromed out versions of G1s, and so of course I had to get the e-Hobby Gold Jazz and Silver Bluestreak (err, Silver Silverstreak?) reissues, which I’ll (eventually) cover in a separate post.

But as far as the Masterpiece series goes, I wasn’t really expecting much from a gold painted KO Lambor / Sideswipe, and boy was I in for a surprise. There’s some real creativity going on here, as far as a KO goes, and I think the final result is that they’ve almost created an entirely new character here that feels like it fits in with the official series. Hence, they added their own custom name, calling this release MP-12J.

I think these are the same accessories that come with the official MP Swipe, including his boxing gloves. Those are nifty idea that I think were featured in the cartoon, but a pretty boring design IMO. They’re just squares, man.

Ok, let’s get down to it. When you change up the colors, I think it really gives the figure a totally different feeling. Unlike the G1 colorways like Tigertrack and mold variants like Red Alert, this guy looks like a completely different character to me, perhaps mostly because of the gold helmet. If they had given him a black head, I think he would look a lot more like Swipe, but I’m glad they didn’t.

All in all, a KO is still a KO, with no real collectable value per se, but these days it seems like toy companies are pumping out so much product that it’s questionable as to the selling value of collections in the future. So if you’re into collecting as an appreciating asset, KO’s are definitely not the way to go. That and they decrease the strength of the brand and waste Hasbro and Takara’s time in lawsuits with bootleggers, when they could be working on new releases. But if you’re purely into these things for the sake of ACTUAL appreciation of toys, this guy is a great pickup!