Nightbrother Warrior - TBS [P4] - Six Inch Figures (GG05)

Set in dark times, soon after the execution of Order 66, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order features Nightbrother warriors – territorial and extremely hostile fighters known for a proficient use of mixed combat styles.

So, this isn’t Savage Opress? We get the point of the Gaming Greats collection from GameStop, but didn’t Hasbro think that collectors would rather see Savage Opress from The Clone Wars instead of a generic Nightbrother Warrior from the Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order video game? More than ever, the latest Star Wars Entertainment, no matter how good or how poor, takes precedence over anything else under the Star Wars license. We get it. It’s essential to have products available at retail for the latest happenings in the Star Wars universe, but licensees, especially Hasbro, are growing ever ambivalent to the many Star Wars sources that built up the collecting hobby to where it is today. Without getting any higher on a soapbox, the Nightbrother Warrior is an excellent addition to The Black Series 6-inch line. We imagine that many collectors are eager to add it into their collections. A Savage Opress lookalike, Hasbro took 2021’s TBS [L50] Darth Maul (Sith Apprentice) figure, repainted it in yellow, gave it a new portrait and a new skirt, and packaged it as another character in the Gaming Greats sub-collection of The Black Series [Phase IV] lineup. The teal-colored packaging is quickly adding new colleagues under the Gaming Greats heading.

The recently released Darth Maul (Sith Apprentice) is a sharp action figure. And with other characters in the Star Wars universe looking similar, it makes complete sense why Hasbro would revisit this tooling and develop action figures based on it. Darth Maul without the shirt on allows us to see the body tattoos that are typically hidden under the dark garb the Zabrak species wears. This figure’s upper body and head sculpt were all-new components, and Hasbro took most of it to create the Nightbrother Warrior figure. But for the Nightbrother Warrior, they tooled an all-new head sculpt and skirt and repainted it to give us yet another all-new character. Nightbrother Warrior shows that Hasbro is interested in taking the 6-inch further than expected. And we hope they come back to The Clone Wars and figure out a way to bring us the multiple versions of Savage Opress in this line. There is a lot of low-hanging fruit in The Black Series line, and Hasbro will continue to find ways to save on tooling costs by giving us reworked existing sculpts with tweaks to develop new characters. It’s a good-looking figure for what it is. Hasbro doesn’t need to spend a lot of money creating new action figures. Nightbrother Warrior is proof of this assertion.

If we had to nitpick about the Nightbrother Warrior, we’d have to point out that the paint operations aren’t as perfect as we’d like to see. It’s not that the factory did a poor job of applying them. The paint operation programming seems to have crowded the alternating yellows and blacks, and it all seems to run together, especially in the figure’s face. We’re confident that the Photo Real process prevented full-on disaster her, so that’s a great thing. The new lower skirt doesn’t inhibit the figure’s movement at all. The articulation in the upper body and old parts work together in tandem to allow the Nightbrother Warrior to pose in various ways. Nightbrother Warrior comes with a cool-looking battle-ax. The figure holds it well, and its four-edged blades are menacing but also beautiful. Because all of the Zabrak action figures thus far utilize the original Darth Maul tooling, they’re all starting to look too much like one another. It would behoove Hasbro to tweak a wrinkle here or there to give these figures a little variety. Would it be that cost=prohibitive to make slight changes as these suggested? No matter your position, if you can handle the $26.9 MSRP, we believe that you will enjoy the final result of the Nightbrother Warrior action figure.