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Savage Opress (CW3)

November 24, 2012 | By Errex More

Whatever your stance is in the “Bring Back Maul” issue, one of the cooler side effects of the whole thing was the introduction of Savage Opress into the Clone Wars mythos.

Savage starts out as a Night Brother, the downtrodden other half in Dathomir culture. After a rather brutal selection process, Savage ends up indentured to Asajj Ventress, who in turn brings him back to Mother Talzin, the Night Sister Matriarch to be transformed by Dark Force Magicks into this particular version of the character.

This is Savage Opress in the early stages of his training as a Sith warrior under Count Dooku. He is depicted as a bare-chested juggernaut, covered in the tribal tattoos that identify Dathomirian Zabrak males.

The character design lends itself particularly well to be made into an action figure. There is not a lot of intricate detail sculpted in this figure, but the body proportions look appropriately powerful and the face sculpt is full of character. Also, this is the very first time we get really pointy horns on the head of a Zabrak.

The lower half of the figure is sculpted like puffy pants and heavy boots, with a rubber skirt piece that has a sigil engraved at the front and cuts to the sides to allow some functionality to the hip articulations.

At the time this figure was announced and after a few copies trickled down at retail, not a lot of people was thrilled to find out that this version of Savage Opress lacked ankle joints, since up until then the Clone Wars figures had generally been as close to the super articulated model as the character design allowed.

However, for 2012 standards, I find that Savage Opress has quite a reasonable articulation spread, composed of:

• Ball jointed neck.

• Pegged hinge shoulders.

• Pegged hinge elbows.

• Swivel wrists.

• Swivel waist.

• Swivel hips.

• Pegged hinge knees.

As one would expect, the rubber skirt piece still hinders a bit the hip joints, but it is not a big issue for me anymore, especially considering that I finally made peace with Hasbro’s cutting back on articulation, at least as long as it’s not as blatantly absurd as they did in other lines.

The paint applications on Savage Opress are neat an clean. His upper half is molded in a light yellow plastic, over which the tribal tattoos were stenciled using pure black paint. Savage’s lower body is molded simply in gray plastic, with only the boots painted in a darker hue and with metallic accents for the armored bits and other decorations on his belt and bracers.

In the show, at this stage in his training, Savage used a mean looking halberd instead of a lightsaber, and this weapon is included along with a second halberd that has a projectile-launching gimmick built in.

It is one of those mechanisms were you press on the back of the projectile until the force build-up against a retaining piece is enough to propel the bolt forward. I’m sure there is a simpler, technical term for such devices, but it works reasonably well and the weapon doesn’t look too awkward for it.

Apart from the pair of halberds, Savage also comes with a display base, a game die and the corresponding Galactic Battle Game card.

Even though this particular version of the character is not the one I was really chomping at the bit to get, I must say I was quite impressed with this figure of Savage Opress.