Sabine Wren/Stormtrooper - R - Mission Series (MS08)

A crew member on the Ghost freighter, Sabine Wren uses her skill with gadgets and explosives to cause trouble for the Empire's Stormtroopers..

With improved paint operations on the simply articulated Rebels action figures, Hasbro takes a few steps forward with wave 2 of the Mission Series line. None of the figures have exactly perfect paint jobs by our assessment, but to deny that you cannot see a marked improvement would be more functional than Hasbro saying kids don’t need or want articulation. The long-awaited Sabine Wren and Stormtrooper Mission Series set should have made it out before the end of 2014. You know the reasons why so we won’t get into that now. And we should also quickly introduce and dismiss one figure in this set because we have already seen it before multiple times. Yes, we appreciate the movement Hasbro has made by packaging a key army builder figure in with the main characters. But how many Rebels Stormtroopers are all of us going to need? Maybe that’s a rhetorical question. Anyway, the included Stormtrooper here is 2014’s R Stormtrooper (SL01) figure that hasn’t made a return appearance at retail since the initial shipments of the Rebels Saga Legends line hit around the Thanksgiving holiday in 2014. (Most – if not all – of us haven’t seen Rebels Saga Legends since, so you’re not alone. Maybe the inclusion of the Stormtrooper is wise in retrospect.) It’s certainly not a bad choice, but for $10 we believe that kids and collectors are looking to score two “new” figures. Maybe we’re off on that. Who knows at this point? We still think the excitement for Sabine Wren will outweigh another repackaged figure anyway.

So let’s talk about Sabine Wren. She has a cocky and confident stance and looks great in the few poses she can achieve. The sculpt is fantastic. To the collecting community’s chagrin, her helmet IS NOT removable. This is however very deceiving because you can see the back of her hair protruding out from the base of the helmet. The paint operations are bittersweet. When compared to most Saga Legends and Mission Series figures, Sabine Wren looks gorgeous. But due to the reduction in the preciseness of small details, many of the final paint operations are screen inaccurate. For example, the Sabine Wren action figure has a solid gray right shoulder pad when in actuality a silver and gray checkerboard pattern is present on this part. Other details have been muddled here as well. But Hasbro did a fairly good job at ensuring the broadest strokes of her deco were carried forward onto the figure. She isn’t perfect, but she also could have been a train wreck. This may be a sad sentiment in this day and age, but we should consider ourselves fortunate with how Sabine Wren turned out because the final figure could have been a whole lot worse if they took all of the shortcuts they probably wanted. Besides, other things should make collectors and kids happy about Sabine Wren anyway. For instance, Hasbro tooled functioning holsters for her two included Mandalorian blasters. They fit nicely into place (although you should know that they’re extraordinarily small) both in the holsters as well as her hands.

Many collectors are asking about her human likeness and when will we see that in action figure form. We hope Hasbro isn’t this cheap, but we see them reusing this action figure’s body with an all-new head sculpt. It’s not that this is a bad sculpt at all. It’s quite the opposite. But it would be a lazy move if they just tool a new portrait and add it to the same old figure at a later date. Then again, we may be all desperate enough by the time that happens that we’ll gladly take it. (Yeah, that sounds a bit facetious.) Still, Sabine Wren is proof that minimal articulation, if done right, can look halfway decent. But at the same rate, it kills the joy for collectors who would love to see this character realized in super-articulated and perhaps realistic scale. The collector focused figure options have become increasingly diminished over the last couple of years. It seems as if any cool options, like a realistic Sabine Wren, for example, is completely unlikely at this stage of the game. So, for now, you’ll have to find time to enjoy the Sabine Wren/Stormtrooper Mission Series (MS08) set. We honestly believe that this two-pack is a great effort. Even the paint on the Stormtrooper is much improved from the basic figure released not long ago. Could things be bettered? Could there be more articulation? Absolutely. But Hasbro is no longer catering to adult collectors anymore. We feel that alienating adult collectors is a decision will hurt the Star Wars brand and the bottom line over time. But these are our options, and they’re not necessarily so terrible.