Jada Toys: Ultra Street Fighter 2 The Final Challengers Ryu Action Figure Review

I’ve only played Street Fighter a handful of times over the course of my lifetime, but with toys this good, who cares?

These figures have been covered quite sufficiently by numerous reviewers at this point, so I don’t have much to offer that is new. In short, these are terrific action figures. I’ll be covering Ryu this time, and Fei Long later in the week. But I don’t need an entire review, with a bunch of words and such. I mean, I’ll make some words, but the basic facts are that I can’t believe that these are being made by a company that has in essence just recently entered the 6-inch action figure world.

These are well-engineered, well-articulated, great looking figures. I don’t even want to say “import quality” because they lack some of the occasional fiddliness that import figures can have. That these are 25 dollars feels like I still owe Jada Toys money.

The only complaint I have is that I had to heat up the torso to get things moving. But once I did that, everything moved excellently. There’s a double ball joint at the neck, double ball at the torso, double elbows, double knees, great hips with a wide range, excellent ankle with some twists right at the bottom of the pants…everything you want.

The articulation means that he can get some deep crouches and can lean back pretty far. His head has a ton of range due to the neck setup. I find that the more range a neck has, the more it seems to enhance every other pose.

These toys feel as if they were made by people who actually play with action figures. I make that distinction because it seems like all too often there’s a point in action figure creation where nobody stepped in and played with the figure. There’s a clearance that doesn’t work well, there’s a joint that is inhibited, or there’s just a stiffness. Every line is guilty of that. Sometimes it’s understandable due to the nature of a design, sometimes it’s just frustrating.

But this time, I didn’t find myself reaching that frustration point. Ryu moves extremely well. I think the only thing that hinders any posing is his shirt, and that only gets in the way of bringing his arms closer together for his hadouken pose. But even then, it can be finagled.

Ryu comes with two sets of hands: fists and hadouken…ing hands, that double as chopping hands and whatever else you can think of.

He comes with two heads: regular and angry. Despite the cartoonish nature of the sculpts, the heads feature that swanky paint-printing procedure, which elevates the sculpts.

Finally, he comes with his hadouken effect and poseable stand.

Yeesh, I’m going to be collecting another line here…