G.I.Joe Ninja Battles: Snake Eyes Vs Storm Shadow

Review by Dkun

I never played with G.I.Joes when I was a kid, so I have little attachment to the characters and the series in general. So in all other circumstances I would have never picked up this set. However the Wal-Mart by my college was selling this for about $5.00 clearance, and for five dollars I've bought dumber things.

This set comes with a neat looking base, two GI Joe Ninja characters, a ton of weapons and is titled in big letters "NINJA BATTLES". It's pretty exciting and eye popping. The packaging was awful to get into. The amount of tapes and twist-ties and those little clear elastic bands that were on this figure were enough to make me scream in frustration at least twice. One of the features of this base is that it can break. Sure that's a neat feature in all but when I actually saw the construction of these pillars I cringed a bit.

The entire thing... was held together with a twist-tie. At first I thought this was just the way to keep the structure together in the packaging, but the base itself had holes to put the twist ties in to keep it secure. That's right, this toy is supposed to be held together... By twist-ties. I screamed and proceeded to use this as a nun-chuck and hit my room mate with it. After I vented all of my frustration I decided to give up on the twist ties and removed them from the pillars entirely. Thankfully it will still stand up, but if I so much as breath on it, this thing comes crashing down immediately.

If crashing pillars isn't your thing, you could always go ahead and glue this together. Once the display is assembled it does look very nice. Other 3 3/4" figures could get in there and have a fight or something, I mean that's why I bought it after all. I decided to set the display base down and look at the actual figures. In this set you get Snake Eyes and Storm shadow. They look pretty neat, and are your average GI Joe figures. There's nothing really new here. Storm Shadow's a really cool figure whose costume I really liked. However the lower part of his coat limited his leg movement so I cut along the painted applications to increase his range a bit.

Well that and the ridiculous number of weapons this set came with. There are so many extra weapons that this set comes with that I don't even know what to do with most of them. There are six swords, two sheaths, two Chinese swords, two staves, two decorative guandao, a bow and arrow, a pistol, an Uzi, a hand held set of claws, an assault rifle, some incense, candles, a green light thing, and two missile launchers!

I need to talk about these weapons for a second. If there's one thing I know about it's that GI Joe weapons can tend to be a little over the top. The first one is a bizarre launcher that shoots a giant disk. Okay that's not too bad.

The other however is a rocket launcher, with a rocket missile, that is attached to a string with a zip line. ... I don't get it.

This set was quite frankly one of the silliest things I've ever bought in my life. However at the same time it was still sort of entertaining. The ludicrous weapons and nicely detailed but constantly falling display base all have a way of clicking with me that reminds me of when I was a kid and all of these ridiculous features were cool. For five dollars, I have no regrets.

Now if you don't mind me, I'm going to go use this set for what I really bought it for.