Packaging - ****
As I said before, Hasbro’s really got their game on with the collector crowd in this series. The overall card design mimics the vintage cards to a tee. The peg hole is die-cut but not punched through and the bubble has been downsized to approximate the vintage “coffin blister” look.

The graphics on Luke’s card front are directly reprinted from the first wave of Star Wars figures, complete with silver header, bars, full photo art, and the Kenner logo. The back shows the original carded figure and previews of the release wave.

Yoda’s is a direct reprint of his debut card from the Empire Strikes Back release, complete with the red movie lettering.

To ensure the card stays mint, Hasbro has packaged the whole set in a resalable clamshell with the OTC logo across the bottom and embossed Rebel and Imperial symbols at the top. While I’ve seen plenty of these clamshells smashed or scuffed, I’ve also always been able to find one that is in decent displayable condition. 
Overall, it is truly an eye-catching piece of work.

Sculpting - Luke: ***; Yoda: *** ½
Mark Hamill seems to be the bane of Hasbro sculptors, as they’ve just had a hell of a time trying to capture his likeness. It might be the way his face changed cosmetically after his car accident before the shooting for ESB started. He went from fresh farm boy to slightly haggard in a few years. In a way though, it worked for the character, especially in the final scenes with Vader. A few years later, Hamill personified a much more mature-looking Luke. While there wasn’t anything drastic about the change, there are definitely three different looks to the Skywalker character (four if you count the heavy make-up version seen in the infamous holiday special). 

Either that or he’s just got one of those hard-to-capture Bill Shatner faces. 

Meet country bumpkin Luke everyone.

There is a definite Hamill look to this guy, especially when you view him slightly from the side, but there’s just something about that hair along with the slightly open mouth that makes him look a little too farm-boy. Okay, the hair is a pretty accurate cut in the back, but the font is missing the part. Instead the hairline just kind of “mop-tops” its way over. The hand sculpts are decent, as is the chest line. The legs and wrapped boots are really close to the movie costume.

The other little miss has to do with the peg holes in his feet: they’re simply not deep enough to accommodate most of the stands that come with other figures in the Star Wars line. While he can certainly stand on his own, he’ll need some help in more extreme poses, and there just ain’t much there to grab onto the peg.

Yoda’s pretty darn close to the way he looked in Empire and Jedi, but you can tell that the features have been softened a little to compare with the prequel versions of the Jedi master. His hands are nicely done and can hold his cane, or any lightsaber from the prequel Yodas if that’s your wish. The legs are pretty cool – I believe this is the first look at what Yoda’s legs actually look like, since I don’t seem to recall him ever sporting shorts on camera. The upper body gives him a subtler hunch than other sculpts, including the vintage figure. The lower part of his robes are cloth as opposed to sculpted plastic.

One thing that greatly mares this figure is the pronounced molding line on his head. I’ve seen it on others as well, so I know it’s not an isolated incident.

Paint - ***
This is probably the weakest category for these two.

For Luke, there just isn’t much to paint. His hair and face ops are clean down to the white on his teeth, and the wash on his wrapped boots are nicely done. He just doesn’t have a very exciting color scheme.

Yoda’s ops are pretty clean as well, but the skin wash is just too dark. The Yoda puppet was pretty pale in color, while the prequel puppet and CG Yodas have been darker in tone. This one is definitely more of a prequel skin wash.

The hair is a little sloppy in back but not too bad. His eyes are really clean and have a nice yellow tone. The finger and toenails are slightly sloppy, but not too terrible. 

Articulation - ****
I think I’ve only given a four star rating in this category to Hasbro on one other occasion –the vintage style Han Solo—but if they keep improving on their figures this drastically, I’m going to start doing it much more often. Of course these figures are slightly higher-end than the basic releases, so we’ll have to wait and see what the standard Episode III figure articulation is going to be like.

Like the previously reviewed Han Solo, Luke also has fourteen points of articulation, and ball joints to spare! He has the ball-jointed head, elbows, hips, knees, and ankles like Han, as well as cuts at the wrists. However, his waist articulation is much cooler. Instead of a traditional waist cut, Luke has slotted swivel point in his torso, which lends to some pretty nice posing options, especially since the joint is hidden by his jacket.

Yoda is simply the most articulated version of this character ever produced in this scale. With ten points, he beats out the Yoda that came with Chian. Muppet master has a ball-jointed head and shoulders, as well as cuts at the elbows, wrists, waist, and hips.

I believe the ball-jointed head is a first on a Yoda figure, and for this character it’s almost a necessity for pose recreation. The shoulders are a little tight, but I’m not planning on putting him in too many extreme postures. The angles on the elbow cuts are done well enough that Yoda can cross his hands over his cane as well as hold relatively neutral positions –the left one does work better than the right at just hanging by his side though. The one complaint here is that his hands don’t quite meet up too well when crossed over. This is something the figure in the Yoda and Chian set does better.

The individual leg articulation hasn’t been used on this character since the original vintage release. This is the first modern Yoda to have two separately articulated legs in this scale.

While he doesn’t have ball-jointed knees or elbows like Luke and Han, I can forgive Hasbro for that since it is kind of hard to articulate a character this small.