I’m having a hard time grading this.  It’s got some things going for it, it’s got some things holding it back, but it’s got some things specific to my sample that make we want to tear the arms off a gundark, and then use those arms to beat down another gundark. 

Here are the positives:  It’s a new beast.  It’s been a minute since the last release of a brandy new Star Wars creature.  Someone can let me know if I’m missing anything, but I believe the last creature debut was the 2008 Sarlaac.  Continuing the tradition of large frightening animals to feature in a Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens gave us this weird Rathtar.  It was a silly thing; a rolling, snarling, toothy maw with a bunch of flailing tentacles.  It earned the nickname “spaghetti monster.”  But it deserved to be immortalized in rubbery plastic, and here we are.  Love it, hate it, or don’t care, Hasbro converted the film design into a neat looking facsimile.  It displays well.  The sculpt, the details, the color, the scary mouth…it all looks good and is painted nicely.  It is potentially pretty poseable, but I’ll get into the problems with that in a minute.  The creature can pretty much swallow an action figure whole.

And here are the negatives:  First, the thing is very frustrating to assemble.  It comes with instructions and there are various bits of additional input from around the community, but there’s no way around it:  It is hard to put it together.  Twelve tentacles are packaged separately from the body, and must be individually attached.  The tentacles are marked “A” through “L” with corresponding letters near the appropriate sockets.  The tentacles have “mushroom plugs”, while the holes would appear to be designed to easily snap into place.  The very first one (“A” for those keeping score) probably shaved about 10 minutes off the end of my life.  10 minutes of futzing with the damned thing got me nowhere.  I gave “B” a shot, and after applying some force and turning it like a screw, it stayed in place.  I continued with “C” through “L”,  All of them were difficult to some varying degree, but after introducing my hands to pre-arthritis, I got all the tentacles to snap in place, except for “A.”  For the purposes of this gallery, I managed to get it to stay in place.  It’s only slightly more stable than 5POA Chewbacca’s bowcaster.  After an excruciating experience, I grabbed the Force Link to hear the sounds, and IT PLAYS THE SOUNDS FROM THE CANTO BIGHT POLICE SPEEDER.  What?  Yeah. These things made me angrier than Peter on meth.

The figure isn’t terrible.  He’s got an interesting outfit.  His face has a pretty good likeness to Jonathan Scott, the Property Brother whose close friendship with J.J. Abrams landed him the bit role of Bala-Tik.  The figure is the normal (sub)standard 5POA.  Nothing special, but it’s a good thing that along with the debut of the Rathtar, we get a character debut pack-in figure.  He comes with a big weapon that he can hold well.  As you can see, it fits in the mouth of the Rathtar.

There’s one other thing that hurts this set, which is that it is from TFA.  Sure we want toys that span the Saga, but TFA exists awkwardly as both far enough in the rear view mirror that we’ve moved on to the next thing, but also too recent for us to feel nostalgic.  So while it would have made more sense 2 years ago, we also could have waited a bit longer to get it.

It’s great to see the return of Star Wars beasts.  Even though the merits of the on-screen design are debatable, Hasbro has given us a faithful recreation, and it’s appreciated.  The assembly required is enraging, my chip produced the wrong sounds, and the figure is 5POA.  The set looks pretty good on a shelf.  It could have been a 6, or even a 7, but the frustration it caused me leaves it with a disappointing 5,

Also, Jonathan Scott didn’t play Bala-Tik, but just for a second you considered that it was possible, didn’t you?