Shadow (with Rings) (Sonic the Hedgehog (Jakks Pacific)) Review

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Shadow (with Rings) (Sonic the Hedgehog (Jakks Pacific)) Review

Shadow (with Rings)
Sonic the Hedgehog (Jakks Pacific) (Jakks Pacific)Anyone remember Sonic Heroes? I've played a bit of it, and reviewing these Jakks figures has made me want to pick it up again. I've already talked about Team Sonic, and next is Team Dark: Shadow, Rouge, and E-123 Omega.

Shadow is meant to be the "dark" counterpart to Sonic, except it didn't take long for him to go from bad to good, and the only dark part about him is his appearance. He has a more stern expression, with a frown that looks like a thin smile from some angles. The paint for the face is fine, but there's some bleed from the muzzle onto the eyes, and it's quite noticeable. The quills on the sides curve up rather than down, and there's also various red highlights on the head, all of which sports clean edges.

At the usual height of 4" tall, Shadow's black fur is complemented by his multicolor shoes and gloves, with red, white, and black, and gold paint. They suffer from noticeable bleed, just like the face, but the usual of a metallic coat for the gold colors is a nice touch. The white patch of fur on his chest is pretty detailed for how small it is, and there's more red highlights for the forearms and shins. While the paint could be better, even for a mass market figure, they at least nailed the sculpt. Articulation is also the usual with swivel head, swivel/hinge shoulders, hips, and knees, and ball wrists and ankles. The legs are pretty loose on mine, and I'm not sure if that's a QC issue or the joints wearing out a bit on mine. The original release had a Super Ring (worth 10 rings in the games), but the reissue came with three regular rings instead. They're designed to fit on posts to hover, but these figures don't include such posts.

Next is Rouge the Bat, and like Shadow, I picked up the reissue after missing out on the first release. She also has a disinterested look with a thin (but unpainted) frown, and wears both eyeliner and lipstick to bring out her appearance. The lipstick only being on the bottom lip may seem like an error, but that's how it's supposed to be, even though it doesn't exactly line up with the mouth. Unlike Shadow, Rouge has much better paint, with no bleed and clean edges. She's certainly one of the nicer-looking figures to come out of the line.

Also standing 4" tall, Rouge has more clothes on her than just gloves and shoes. I guess girls in the Sonic universe have more modesty than the boys. Anyways, she has a one-piece suit with a heart covering the chest, gloves reaching the elbows with pink cuffs, and high-heel boots that also have pink cuffs in addition to hearts on the forefoot area. Being a bat, she has a pointed tail in addition to wings, placed on her back rather than substituting for her arms like a real bat. The wings can hinge forward and back, and she also gets swivel/hinge elbows on top of all the usual articulation. However, the elbow and knee joints are on the upper arms, so only the gloves and boots can turn, and the wrists and ankles are just swivels rather than ball-pegs, making them redundant. Her accessory is one of her heart bombs, which can rest on her left palm, provided you have it facing straight upwards.

Rounding out Team Dark is E-123 Omega, and being an Eggman-produced robot, he has a much different design. His head doesn't consist of anything more than just eyes peeking out from under a hood, and Jakks' technique of putting most of the colors in separate pieces of plastic ensures they didn't have to worry so much about paint errors on the "head." Omega has a big diamond-shaped torso as well, and some of the pieces of it have a bit of a texture, feeling more like they were 3D-printed rather than traditionally sculpted. I'm not sure if that was the case, but it still feels odd for this line.

Omega is a little bigger than average, emphasis on "bigger" as he's just 4 1/4" tall. He's supposed to be taller than that, but I've known Jakks for long enough to know they aren't always great with scale (just look at their Pokémon line). Still, he takes up more space than these figures usually do, and his paint is pretty darn good. Not as good as Rouge, but still fairly neat. The more symmetrical appearance allowed Jakks to cut down a bit on tooling for him for his limbs, and you can tell by how both feet have the copyright information. What isn't symmetrical is the omega symbol, as it's on the front of the left shoulder pad, and the back of the right shoulder pad. It's supposed to be like that, probably because of texture design in his first appearance (Heroes), and Sega just kept it like that.

Like Rouge, Omega also moves a bit more than usual, with swivel/hinge shoulders, elbows (forearm swivel), hips, and knees (shin swivel), ball wrists and ankles, and swivel waist (no head joint for obvious reasons). The hinges in the hips are rendered useless by the panels hanging of his waist, and those should've been hinged as well to allow for more leg range. My Omega was misassembled, with the right bicep plugged in wrong so that the elbow hinged side-to-side as a result, but it's nothing simply popping out the arm and reinserting it the correct way couldn't fix. If Shadow's still wondering where that damn fourth Chaos Emerald is, then he's in luck because Omega has a yellow one. Why hasn't Jakks done a release with a full set of Emeralds yet? Jazwares did it at least twice, and I would like for them to do the same.

Sure, Shadow may be one of the more popular Sonic characters, but his figure here was pretty weak due to the paint issues and weak leg joints. Rouge and especially Omega are a little better, but better articulation would've helped them both. These three will make for a good set on the shelf, and continuing to build up this world is something I'm more than happy to do.

- 1/9/25