General Grievous is the first official figure in the deluxe line as evidenced by his D1 designation on the card back. We’ve had a crack at a six inch scale Grievous from The Disney Store and an excellent model kit from Bandai, but I have still been looking forward to Hasbro’s take. Let’s take a look!
Grievous comes in a bit of uniquely sized box. It’s smaller than what we saw with the Gamorrean and Molloch and about the depth of the regular Black Series box and just a little wider.
Grievous comes with a blaster, a removeable cape, and four lightsabers with removeable blades.
I was particularly impressed by how chrome the sabers look for a factory paint job. The gun has a slight warp to it and is cast in a metallic plastic that almost has a glittery feel to it.
The gun fits in the hand when split apart pretty well. It doesn’t work as great when the hand is pegged together, but it works okay.
The cape is actually really nice for mass produced soft goods. It’s soft and drapes pretty nice. I kinda tucked it under the back trapezius armor plates. The part where it doesn’t quite work for me is the front clasp. The piece and the stitching is just a little big and awkward and can’t be easily tucked under the collar so it often blocks the collar armor piece that I want to see the cape drape under.
I do like the little pouches for the sabers, though I’m surprised that all four are on one side.
Overall I think the body sculpt is very good. Grievous is appropriately spindly and his off white armor pieces feel nice and sharp.
Grievous is famous for his splitting limbs and this figure actually has that functionality, though it does come at a slight cost to articulation. The four arms peg together at the bicep and forearm to make two arms.
Unfortunately, you can’t bend the two arms once they are pegged together and the arms are straight when together. I found this a little frustrating, but I can understand the engineering difficulty. I just wish it pegged together in a more natural pose because it is stuck at a pretty awkward angle.
EDIT: Kylo Ryan below suggested that you can get some elbow movement if you align both hinge joints. While you can’t get the typical forward hinge that I’m used to with a figure, he can hinge in and out.
So it’s not exactly what I’d like, but it is less limited than I originally thought for two arm poses.
You can also swivel them somewhat which adds to your posing options.
Thanks, Kylo Ryan!
The articulation is pretty good with:
- Ball and socket at the head, the neck, the hips, the mid-torso and where the arms connect to the body
- Swivel/hinge at all four shoulders and feet
- Swivel at each bicep and the forearm
- Single hinged elbow and at the dog ankle
- Double hinged knees
I really like how well he can crouch down and the two joints at the neck help Grievous look forward well in a crouch. The only articulation point I’m really missing is a swivel at the wrist, but you can kind of approximate that with the forearm swivel.
The feet could have been better articulated to help balance the figure. The swivel is where it attaches to the calf and the hinge is where it attaches to the foot. If these had been reversed, I think that we would be able to flatten the feet in wider stances.
The head is pretty sharp and the eyes have a nice detail print. In general paint is pretty minimal but there is some choice weathering around key indented armor details.
The figure does seem slightly under-sized to me, though it’s tough to tell real scale with a fully CGI character like Grievous. He is a little smaller than the Bandai model kit.
He’s a little taller than Obi-Wan and the Clones when his legs are crouched.
If you stand him a little straighter, he can tower over the others, but it doesn’t look quite right to me.
Overall, I like this figure quite a bit, but for specific things. The cape and the connected hands are kind of weak, but I really have a lot of fun playing with the figure without the cape and the arms separated.
EDIT: I got a couple questions about how CJESIM’s cape looked on this figure, so here are some pics. Works pretty great, I’d say.
