As soon as I pulled MAFEX’s brand new Kylo Ren out of his plastic shell and fiddled with him, I knew that this was going to be a divisive figure. I will say upfront that I fall more on the relieved side than the other side, but, as with all things, the reactions to this figure will depend on personal taste.
I think Kylo Ren is the last MAFEX figure that I preordered before the Threepio/Artoo set hit and made us all question how the quality was going to be going forward. I had both of the Bobas preordered before him, and thankfully they both ended up being very nice figures, so I was hopeful that Kylo would continue the winning streak. I’m still not at a place of blind confidence, but I’m kiiiind of getting there.
Kylo seems to merge all the strengths and weaknesses in MAFEX’s figures into a single humanoid shape. I’m going to do this review a little different than the word-vomit I usually do and break it down into two sections: what works, and what doesn’t work.
WHAT WORKS
MAFEX has shown that they can do higher-end toys that look great, pose great, and are a ton of fun to play with. Both of their Boba Fetts immediately became the gold standard for 1:12 scale Boba Fett figures, with the good far outweighing the niggling bad. So when they’re good, they’re good.
Kylo does seem to continue this streak. While Figuarts figures are a bit on the smaller side and therefore occasionally don’t fit into the pre-existing Black Series collection as seamlessly as you’d like, unless you’re willing to overlook some minor size discrepancies, Kylo is closer in size to his Hasbro counterpart, and thus scales better with the vast Black Series collection. All of his joints work very well, and he’s exceptionally easy to pose.
MAFEX opted for cloth robes with a bit of wire in the hood and front section to allow them to be articulated. I think this version of Kylo’s hood is the most successful of the three action figure alternatives out there (unfortunately I don’t have the model kit, so I’m not going to count that here). It takes some fiddling, but with the Figuarts hood essentially creating a train tunnel for his head to peek out of and the Hasbro hood being a bit too small and restrictive, you can get a decent screen-accurate aesthetic with this version if you bend the wire just right.
On first sight, the robes don’t seem to fit as well as one would like, but that’s just first impression, and even if they could stand to be a touch snugger, the more I messed around with him the less of an issue it became. I think tighter robes might have been more restricting to his articulation, so I’m choosing to opt for movement over tighter clothing. They are definitely baggier than they should be, but, again, how much of an issue that is will be up to you.
Kylo comes with a several different hands, a stand, an alternate unmasked head, a melted Vader mask, and a couple different lightsabers. Some of this I will cover in my “what doesn’t work” section, but I will talk about what does work here. The hands are all great. He has fists, gripping hands, and two different versions of splayed hands, both of which work very well in portraying different levels of force-use or just plain action poses. I’ve come to love the extra hands I get with most import toys and really miss them when I get a figure without. They add so much more to the language of a toy in posing, playing, and displaying.
His lightsaber is very well done, and, while replicating what we see on-screen with lightsabers (the white core with colored glow) is impossible, the saber at least has a very nice look, with dynamic sculpting to replicate the uniquely ferocious nature of Kylo’s imperfect weapon.
He comes with an unlit saber that he can hold and a second unlit saber than can secure to his belt. More on that later.
Kylo has a double ball-jointed neck (top and bottom), double elbow and knee joints, ball-jointed wrists and ankles, and a ball-jointed torso and hips, so he really has no issues getting into a variety of poses. He can even grasp his lightsaber hilt with both hands, although not quite as perfectly as I’d like.
So overall, he has a lot of great qualities, which makes the few cons all the more annoying. They don’t kill the figure, but they do need to be pointed out, in the hopes that MAFEX might at some point fix these issues.
WHAT DOESN’T WORK
The first problem is the alternate head. Don’t get me wrong, I like getting a figure with both masked and unmasked heads in one package, something neither Figuarts nor Hasbro did with Kylo. But the unmasked head is … not really good. It might be the paint, it might be the sculpt, I’m not sure, but while it evokes Kylo, it also doesn’t really look like him. I mean, it does, but a version of him run through a Ken doll filter or something. it’s way too manicured and “pretty,” like a slightly androgynous male model cosplaying as Kylo. I feel like Hasbro did a much better Kylo head, especially, as seen here, with added paints.
I don’t know if the MAFEX head would look better with a repaint, but as is, it’s not something I’d use. Their upcoming Finn figure has a much stronger likeness and paint job so Kylo might just have come at the wrong time before they upped their game. As it is, I’m sticking with the helmeted head anyway and will use a repainted Hasbro cast if I need him to be unmasked.
The lightsaber that is supposed to peg onto his belt really doesn’t do its job well. The pegs don’t hold, and the lightsaber falls off without much effort. It was a nice idea, but unless you attach it and then don’t move him at all, it really just hinders his toyability more than it helps.
The melted Vader mask looks a little better than what we saw in the promo pictures, but it’s too small. There is no way Vader’s head fit in there because the melted mask is smaller than the unmasked head that comes with this figure. It was a nice inclusion for completion’s sake, but Hasbro’s melted mask that came with the SDCC Kylo is the winner in this category.
The last issue is the peg system they use on their hands. Calling it a “peg system” is technically accurate, but, functionally, it could use a lot of tweaking. The pegs on Kylo’s hands are essentially straight posts that allow you to slide his hands on and off. While that simplifies the swapping of hands, there’s not really a lot to keep the hands on when you’re moving them, so they have a habit of coming off if you’re changing the position of the hand. It’s really hard to have a pretend lightsaber fight if you’re constantly having to slide a hand back onto the peg. One of C-3P0’s biggest problems were the straight posts that didn’t even work from a friction standpoint, meaning his hands, feet, shoulders and everything slid right off without much effort at all. This does not a fun toy make. And I can’t wrap plumber’s tape around the pegs on all my toys. If they instituted a better pegging system it would help enormously.
So, as you can see, there are only a handful of things that don’t work, but these things seem to be a reoccurring theme with the MAFEX toys. These could be benchmark toys — and a few of them that I have definitely are — if a few of these issues were ironed out. If a bit more effort was put into the pegs, I could forgive any other minor issue I run across with MAFEX figures.
Overall, as I said when I started, Kylo is going to be divisive. I think he looks better in person than the somewhat slightly ill-fitting robe makes him look like in pictures, but he’s an expensive piece to buy just to judge in hand, so there’s definitely a catch-22 situation here. In my opinion — an opinion weighted heavily to how much fun I can have with a figure — this is the best Kylo out there, edging out both Figuarts and Hasbro in key areas. Even being the best, he could be better, but as we’ve seen, he could be a lot lot worse.
You can order him from Big Bad Toy Store
