Leave the figure.  Take the accessories.

-Peter Clemenza, The Godfather.

There are shortcuts, and then there are shortcuts.  The Saga Collection was full of repaints, repacks, and retools, but Hasbro really took the easy way out on this one.  They took the TSC 013 Darth Vader, glued the removable helmet onto the head, and added some metallic “battle damage” on the right shoulder.  The figure was already pretty lackluster when it was released a few months earlier, but they went to well yet again.

Rather than use a better existing sculpt, make a new sculpt, or do something more significant than they did, Hasbro basically just repacked the figure, with some meaningless modifications.  Instead of using a helmeted head, they took the existing removable dome and glued it on.  This leaves a bit of a gap in the overall head sculpt.  It’s understandable when the dome can be removed for other options, but that’s been taken away.  The only other change to the figure was that Hasbro added some paint modification to the right shoulder armor, which is supposed to indicate the damage dealt by Luke’s lightsaber out on the Bespin gantry.  Weak sauce. 

It’s even more weak sauce than this review, in which I basically repeated what I wrote in the first paragraph to make the second.  I bet you didn’t even notice.  That’s how bad this figure is.  It brings your standards down.

So never mind that.  The figure is basically terrible, and serves no real purpose in your displays.  The real reason you are reading this is because of the accessories.  They’re pretty cool.  You get three different boxes, which are intended to be Force-thrown by Vader to the outmatched Luke.  Most likely, you’ll use these as excellent background fodder. It’s only a shame that we are limited to three of these.  Two of them are repainted from completely unrelated sets, while the thin squarish box is unique to this release.

I use these 3 little boxes for all kinds of diorama fodder for the photography used on Banthaskull.  They’re worth the price of admission.  The figure itself should be sleeping with the fishes.  5/10.