it's not a figure that sets the world on fire for me.
It's like you just keep coming back here to punch me right in the dick while blowing vape-smoke in my face.
The complete and utter randomness of whether a "mainline release" will be a total, Pursuit of Cobra-style modern redesign (SAW Viper), a weird, nonsensical mashup of 1985 and 2025 gear and aesthetics (Footloose), or a 90-99% faithful recreation of a vintage ARAH figure (Hawk, Bazooka, Shipwreck, Wetsuit, Mutt, et al) is slowly driving me insane, I think.
I'm at the point of being thankful they don't all look like the wave 1 figures, and just trying to accept that most of these releases aren't going to be the faithful adaptations of the ARAH looks that I, personally, really really want the line to be. I think I've mostly been able to be successful at not holding it against this line that it's not just 'bigger ARAH figures.'
Two big sticking points for me have been Ninja Force Storm Shadow, as everyone knows, and Desert Scorpion -- who I think has a cool figure here in Classified, but I still think the ARAH one is just straight up better.
I also think the redesign they did to v2 Storm Shadow is terrible, but I care less about that design overall so my fix to that figure was good enough.
Playing with some swords for Budo in case anyone is interested. If you hate bad quality pics of a poorly lit shelf then, I don't know what to tell you. Do your own sword stuff with Budo and leave me alone.
Could NOT get this to focus on both the figure and sword, but whatever. This is the smaller of the Articulated Icons katana (I guess it was supposed to be a wakizashi but.. it isn't). You can't tell by the picture, but the absolutely terrible handle they sculpted for this thing works better on Budo than it does in Articulated Icons. It has a VERY modern look and doesn't look a single thing, even squinting at it, like a Japanese Ito. But again, works in your favor here since it can really pull off that 'modern tacticool katana' look. But with a nicer blade profile and nicer paint than Budo's smaller sword. Bonus - it technically fits in his tactical scabbard, but the point pokes out a tiny bit.
Option 2 is the old NECA Ryu sword. I still have this laying around as I actually use it with one of my AI samurai since their swords, again, kind of suck for actual samurai.
This one definitely has the look of a more traditional ancestral katana (or tachi) for Budo. Like he busted this out of the family collection to take on Cobra. The benefit of this one over the longer katana he comes with is that this one has a far superior sculpt and superior paint. I imagine it would look really good with the traditional armor, but I'm not going to bother swapping all that shit just to find out.
I thought about testing ML Spiral's katana as well, but I fucking hate the typical Marvel Legends flat primer grey those cheap fuckers use, and I've never bothered to paint them. So... just these two unless I think of something else. Can't decide which one I like more but I'll probably end up going with the AI sword just to stick with Budo's more tactical look. Not 100% sure on that yet, though.
