#80: Star Wars - Darth Maul Returns battle pack

I don't remember the last time I actually bought a Star Wars figure anywhere other than online, so this is a nice change. This Target exclusive battle pack has a great character selection. Usually there is at least one figure included that I wouldn't want, but if these figures had been singly carded I would have bought all three.

Remember that comic where Darth Maul shows up on Tatooine, with a robotic lower half of his body to attack Obi-Wan? They made a comic pack for it, so there's already been a robo-legged version of Darth Maul. The Clone Wars cartoon has decided to bring him back with robot legs sooner in the timeline, so that's what we get here. He's pretty cool looking, and his chicken legs are well articulated. He has an interesting play feature that is fortunately built into the accessory, so it's not obtrusive. His lightsaber splits into two pieces which plug into a ring of energy so that the whole thing can spin around (see video below). If you don't like it, Maul can just hold the lightsaber. It's a win-win.

The second figure in the set is a Nightsister, one of the Sith witches of Dathomir. In the show, they are responsible for unleashing Savage Opress upon the galaxy as well as restoring Darth Maul's lower body. The cool thing is that their designs are based on early concept sketches for Darth Maul. This figure doesn't exactly represent anything shown on the cartoon, so it's basically a concept art figure. Cool!

The final figure in the battle pack is the only one that's been released before. There are two versions of Savage Opress in the Clone Wars line. The shirtless version has been re-released at least once and has always been more plentiful. The armored version has always been harder to find, and I was never able to find one, so I'm quite glad to see it re-released for this battle pack. He includes a lightsaber and a huge axe.

It looks like they're still doing that galactic battle game, so there are three stands, a die, and a playing card for each figure included. One of the other nice things about this battle pack is that it's cheaper than the others. The normal price for a battle pack tends to be around 25 bucks, but this one is only 20, like they used to be before all the sudden jumps in pricing. Good deal!