Kim Arashikage (2013)

I’m somewhat sad to say that I’ve missed out on all of the San Diego Comicon GI Joe exclusives since the year of the hooded Cobra Commander. Every time I’ve tried to get them via Hasbro’s online store, I’ve met with zero success. So, I don’t have last year’s Kim Arashikage to compare to this repaint from the latest Retaliation wave. Now that I have the latest version in hand, I would much prefer to have the all red version than this attempt at a recreation of her movie mountain battle outfit.

That particular scene was some of the most impressive action of the film, and the outfit she wore was colorful and different from the usual ninja garb. Some have complained that it wasn’t red, but I imagine the yellow was chosen to keep her easily identifiable among the dozens of enemy red ninjas in the mountain scene.

Sometimes a toy can get away with simply adding detail via paint where none exists in the sculpt. Unfortunately, that practice doesn’t work here, as the uniform has too many folds to convincingly portray black straps and such using flat painted lines.

The weapon assortment is impressive, as it has been for most of the 2013 movie line. She’s equipped with an opening zipline backpack, though the string included is woefully short. I actually opened this figure with my young son, and we were expecting to hook up the zipline and send her flying a decent distance, since the other movie figures with this gimmick had lines of six or seven feet in length. When I opened the backpack and pulled out the string, it extended about eight inches. We were both surprised and annoyed. The line is useless. On top of the short length, the design of Kim’s hands wouldn’t allow her to securely hold the line’s handle too well. The same goes for the weapons. On a positive note, most of the weapons can store in the opening backpack.