Bret:  One of the key points on this is that I don’t think people realize it exists any more.  The SAGA set is still getting big money on Ebay, but that release lacks ankles.

Recently, Chris has gone on mission of death and destruction, claiming that I have forced him to do reviews of certain figures.  None of this is true.  (Some of it is true).  In an attempt to exact revenge, Chris has, in turn, forced me to do this review.  It is unfortunately a necessary evil on our road to filling out our galleries and reviews to eventual completion.  We have a VERY long way to go to complete our quest.  Most of this is because we would very much prefer to ensure that we have packaging images for all of the items we review.  This may not be possible, but we’re going to at least try to knock out all the basic figures going back to 1995.  Along the way, if we can hit up an item other than a basic figure, than we’ll go for it.  Chris had this set in a box for a while, and has been hounding me at least 3 times a day for the past 2 years to get the review done.  I’ve completely forgotten why.  Probably because he doesn’t have the loose figures.  This is my burden as a completist, I guess. 

Shadows of the Dark Side (“SOTDS”) was never an official name for this line look.  I believe that Mr. Curto over at Rebelscum had coined the term, and it stuck.  It was essentially a continuation, of sorts, of the Legacy Collection methodology.  In the 2008 TLC (Blue) and 2009 TLC (Red), the line was split into two parallel parts; One for nonsense animated styling for the Clone Wars, and one for realistic styling for everything else.  The packaging was nearly identical, except the Star Wars logo had a subline of “Clone Wars” for that expression, while lacking any further clarification for the main line.  SOTDS did the same.  It had the Captain Rex portrait with some dark clouds in the background, and included “Clone Wars” for that expression as well.  However, unlike TLC, there were two problems with this.  First of all, Captain Rex, as cool as he may be, was not representative of the realistic non-TCW line, but there he was anyway.  And second, TVC was launched at the same time, and for some reason, Hasbro decided to offer realistic figures and toys in both line looks.  Some collectors consider SOTDS (realistic) and TVC to be essentially interchangeable in spirit, even if the packaging was wildly different.  I’m not sure of the reasoning for this, but there were a lot of items released in SOTDS that probably could have just been in TVC packaging.

As for the subject matter, there was a lot of collector support for the Republic Commando figures.  I absolutely loved the video game, it was one of my favorite Star Wars VG’s at the time, although it’s slipped in my personal rankings over time.  I enjoyed the ability to bounce between the members of the squad instantly while on missions.  I found the setting to be immersive, and the gameplay was a blast.  Lots of action, some cool strategy, and a few memorable moments.  One in particular stands out during some battle where 3 of the squad went down, and I had one left.  You had the ability to revive other members, so you could restore your team.  In this case, there were several times where the health of the last squad member was dangerously low, and I kept managing to revive another teammate, only to have the previous one go down again.  At one point, I was in the middle of reviving, when the reviver was killed, but the action was set in motion in the nick of time, so I was able to get up even though I think for a few seconds all four were essentially dead.  I somehow managed to survive long enough to revive the whole team and win the battle.  It was definitely a rush!

When Scorch finally arrived in The Saga Collection in 2006, it was immediately a hugely popular figure, and was also caught up in the silver foil chase nonsense.  So he was hard to find for a bit.  It wasn’t long before that sculpt was used to repaint the entire team in a 7-pack that included 3 Geonosians.  It was a great set in 2006, but as figures advanced in quality and articulation with TAC and TLC, it was soon apparent that the swivel shoulders and lack of knees and ankles made the 2006 sculpt woefully inadequate.  In 2009, as part of TLC’s Evolutions 3 packs, Hasbro updated the sculpt to include knees and ankles, and decorated it to create the character Fi Skirata.  I have no idea who that is/was, but the sculpt was further updated with ball jointed shoulders, and became an updated release of Delta Squad in 2011’s SOTDS line.  This time, the 4 squad mates were joined by a solitary Geonosian.

The figures were nice at the time, but posing them today is an exercise in frustration.  The figures aren’t well balanced, and the articulation has poor range of motion.  The ankles, of course, were long before the rocker style, and the knees don’t reach 90.  The hips/thighs are hard to engage meaningfully.  In the end, they’re really not that fun, but they do look nice.  Hasbro took some shortcuts even as they improved the articualion.  Notably, Scorch no longer has his hip canister, and Sev is missing his shin pack.  The paint apps are decent, but the weathering and battle damage was changed significantly.  It’s more subtle this time around.  The rifles have some nice metallic weathering on them that was missing the first time around. 

The best figure in the set is actually the Geonosian Warrior.  It’s a slight repaint of the one that came together with Kit Fisto in the Arena 2-packs.  It’s as good as it gets for this character, unfortunately, the releases were tough to get because they were in larger packs that could be hard to find, especially today.  I would like for Hasbro to try their hand at a TVC update to the Geonosian Warrior at some point, but nowhere near my top wants.

The set is definitely an improvement over the 2006 release, but there’s plenty to be frustrated about.  I’m not sure if I’m particularly thrilled with a re-do of the Republic Commando for TVC, but I assume there’s some support for it.  Like most, I’d rather have The Bad Batch first, but after that, I’d be fine if they found a way to slip a Commando into the line.  It’s just not a priority for me. 

For some reason, a while back when he first created this page for me to review, I had left a note for Chris that I believed this set came and went with little fanfare back in the day, and that a lot of collectors today might not realize it even exists.  Naturally, have no idea why I thought that.  I guess I’ll find out if that’s true in the comments below.