Vertebreak (Kingdom)

The name or term "Vertebreak" refers to more than one character or idea. For a list of other meanings, see Vertebreak (disambiguation).

Vertebreak is a Predacon Fossilizer from the Kingdom portion of the Generation 1 continuity family.

She'll vertebreak your heart. And your femurs. And your spine.

Vertebreak may be a fossil, but she's still brimming with primal beast power! Her slight, skeletal frame, uncoupled from the usual muscular might of other beasts, may make her appear to pose a lesser threat, but Vertebreak possesses every other trick in the book to compensate. Once you're in her jaws, she will never, ever let go.

Toys

War for Cybertron: Kingdom

Someday someone will dig up my dried up old bones; they'll say this poor man died of thirst in the desert alone.

• Vertebreak (Core Class, 2020)
  • Hasbro ID number: WFC-K3
  • TakaraTomy ID number: KD EX-02
  • TakaraTomy release date: April 24, 2021
  • Accessories: Tail/"bone weapon"

• Known designers: John Warden (Hasbro)

Part of the first wave of Kingdom Core Class figures, Vertebreak transforms from a Dracorex skeleton to a 3.5-inch tall robot and back. Her tail can detach in robot mode to use as a weapon or store on the robot mode's back.

Unlike Deluxe Class dino-skeleton characters in Kingdom, she cannot disassemble into weapons and armor for other figures. That said, the tail accessory is 5 mm compatible (The figure even has 5 mm hands rather than the 3 mm most core figures have), allowing larger figures to wield it, although the 3 mm post at the end makes it a little more difficult for those with more shallow hands.

Be wary with her tail; as it's a rubberized plastic similar to fire blast effects. As such, it can cause paint chipping (her hands, being painted, can fall issue to this) or potentially warped plastic. Similar to blast effects, it has also been reported that her tail can deteriorate and bond with the harder plastic of her or other figures hands. This can lead it to stripping paint from the harder plastic on removal. [1]

In Japan, Vertebreak was released as a TakaraTomy Mall exclusive.

She was redecoed into Dracodon.

Notes

The Dragon King Queen of Hogwarts—uh, I mean, Cybertron.

• At Hasbro PulseCon 2020, John Warden referred to the toy with masculine pronouns. By contrast, Vertebreak was referred to with feminine pronouns at a November 2020 virtual unboxing event, as attested by Ben Yee in his Vertebreak review: "yes, she according to Hasbro at the Kingdom unboxing event". Her bio in the Transformers: Earth Wars video game would continue this direction for the character by using feminine pronouns.
• Though Vertebreak doesn't completely disassemble in the same way as the Deluxe Fossilizers, designer Mark Maher—when revealing Dracodon—referred to him as a Fossilizer, indicating that they are considered one and the same.
• In a piece of promotional artwork for the Kingdom line revealed during said PulseCon, a mostly purple Vertebreak is shown with a different chest design, possibly reflecting an earlier stage of the character's development.
• In real life, the status of Dracorex as a valid genus is controversial as the type specimen has been argued to actually just be a misclassified juvenile Pachycephalosaurus (a common issue in paleontology due to the frequency of immature animals looking quite different from their adult forms).
• Product descriptions by Hasbro used on various online retailing websites, such as Amazon, refer to her alternate form being a "raptor fossil". This was later corrected in statements by Hasbro, presumably mentioned at the Kingdom unboxing event.

Foreign names

• Japanese: Vertebreak (ヴァータブレイク Vātabureiku)