Last week was a good week for wizened old force user pre-orders because I got the Amazon exclusive Palpatine set from Hasbro and the prequel Yoda set from Bandai. Let’s take a look at my little green friend, Yoda!
Yoda comes in a glossy black box. There’s no window showing off the figure, but there is some nice photography that communicates what’s inside well.
The set is chock full of good stuff including:
- The figure
- Three different cloak options (action, seated, and neutral)
- Three heads (side-eye, neutral, and concentration)
- A lightsaber
- A cane
- A Jedi Council Chamber chair
- Three sets of hands (lightsaber grip, neutral and force-push)
The heads are very good portraits of the CGI Yoda from the prequels. It is a little silly since the side eye portrait is so similar to the neutral portrait, but for posing I found that I liked using the side-eye head more than the one with the eyes front.
The heads pop on and off the upper neck ball joint easily and stay on securely. The photo-real paint application is pretty good here, though it seems oddly dark, almost giving me the impression of when toy companies outline figures with dark black lines to give it an animated look (e.g. NECA Ninja Turtles)
The closed eyes and scrunched up face feels less like meditation and more like when Yoda is using The Force to lift something heavy.
Yoda also comes with his Jedi Council chair which features some texture details for the cushion and bright metallic paints for the base of the chair.
The chair and sitting robe piece work together to create a nice portrait of Yoda seated and ready for council business. The way this works is that the chair cushion can pop off, leaving a cavity for Yoda’s legs.
The sitting robe piece splits along a seem at the side and can be placed on over Yoda’s head. It looks a little silly standing up, but very nice once all put together.
The robe piece works really well to sell the illusion That Yoda is curled up on his council chair.
The robe pieces are fairly easy to exchange by sliding the arms out of the sleeves. The action robe is a wonderful inclusion as Prequel Yoda did get up to far more athletics than my generation ever imagined after watching the OT.
The action robe has a nice sweeping flow to the sculpting and looks great in a wide variety of lightsaber attack poses and works well with the articulation.
The hands are all nice and expressive and work well for what you want to have a Jedi do. The lightsaber and cane are adequately detailed and get the job done, however the saber does not have a removeable blade. The cane also has a weird little peg on top that I thought might have been a mold-flashing error, but I think it’s intentional so that Yoda holds the cane securely in his neutral hands. The peg fits between the fingers on the neutral hands.
The overall build on this Yoda is also very well done. They managed to make him even shorter than the Hasbro version and still packed a ton of articulation into the figure.
Yoda has the following points of articulation:
- Swivel/hinge shoulders, elbows, hips, and knees
- Ball and socket head, lower neck, wrists, butterfly shoulder, and ankles
The ball and sockets on the ankles are barbells, so they can adjust two directions at once and allow for good balance across poses. The shoulder butterfly joint is attached with one ball and socket inside the body and it pops out pretty regularly on my figure’s left shoulder. It also leaves a pretty big gap when you pull the arms across the body in a two-handed saber grip.
Paint is pretty flat on this figure with not much shading or washes and the face printing is fairly effective if a little over dark. Overall I like this figure a whole lot. The additional articulation solves an issue I had with the Hasbro figure and is a ton of fun to play around with. The inclusion of the council chair also adds another visually interesting display piece for the shelf and the set covers the bases on prequel Yoda display options well.
