Shae Vizla
Like Darth Malgus, Shae Vizla (VC101) is another character from the Star Wars: The Old Republic online game. She appears for the first time in the same trailer video where Malgus debuted, infiltrating the upper reaches of the Jedi Temple on Coruscant and keeping at bay the non-Jedi security forces inside.
The character is clearly designed to appeal to fans of bounty hunters, mandalorians and hot girls wearing armor. With that in mind, the Bioware design team deserves credit for not making her look like she was just a female version of Boba Fett.
One thing of note with this figure is that it comes with a regular, barefaced head and a helmeted version. The helmeted version looks really good and it seems to be screen accurate, but the un-helmeted one isn’t as nice.
As I mentioned, Shae Vizla is supposed to be a stunningly beautiful woman, but the face sculpt is homely at best and the hairstyle doesn’t correspond to what is seen in the trailer, where she is shown having shorter hair, not the long red hair the folks at Hasbro gave her in the card back illustration.
Vizla wears armor, but the design is peculiar because it is not symmetric. Each pauldron, or thigh guard are a different design, as if this was a suit of armor cobbled together from various sources, and only tied up by a common color scheme, consisting mostly on gunmetal gray and some accents in light purple, copper and red.
In fact, I thought they had taken the whole asymmetry thing a bit too far when examining the misaligned abdomen armor plates, but then I realized that the lower torso is actually sculpted in a contraposto stance, meaning the figure is supposed to have her left shoulder slightly rolled forward.
This pre-posing choice seems odd considering the extensive articulation model Shae has, consisting of:
• Ball jointed neck.
• Pegged hinge shoulders.
• Pegged hinge elbows.
• Swivel wrists.
• Floating torso.
• Swivel hips.
• Pegged hinge knees.
• Pegged hinge ankles.
Even though all of the joints work well, the asymmetric shoulder armor design gives her an uneven range of motion at each arm, although, as a whole, the articulation works just fine.
The paint applications on Shae Vizla are really good, very neat and clean, although I wonder if the looks of her face would have improved if the head had been cast in flesh colored plastic with the hair painted on instead of the other way around.
Other than the optional heads, Shae comes armed with a pair of blaster pistols, a couple of flame effect attachments that can be connected to ports on her gauntlets and a partially removable rocket pack which has a hose coming out connecting to the upper side of her chest that seems to be glued in place.
The great thing about this figure is that one doesn’t really need to know anything about the character nor have played the game to get it and that is a good thing, because either as a collectible or as a plaything, Shae Vizla is simply great.
Errex Score: 95/100
Category: Featured, Other Games, Star Wars, Toy Reviews, Video Games
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I've been collecting action figures since the original Kenner Star Wars days. Nowadays, I still collect pretty much anything that catches my eye.Subscribe
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- IAT’s Review Roundup (Jan 14th-20th) | DoomKick.com | January 25, 2013
I really like your site,very informative with a comprehensive and accurate critique of the figures you review. I like it because I own almost everything you review. I do have a question, what is the best way to store a figure collection long term? I have a lot of Star Wars, GI Joe, LOTR etc. I need to put in storage for an uncertain period of time. I don’t want ruin any figures in my collection. Any help would much appreciated.
I asked the guy their opinions on the Action Figure Blues Podcast this week. So make sure to listen later in the week!