Mission Vao & Carth Onasi

Finally, some buddies! A former street urchin, Mission Vao's quick reflexes and agile thinking have helped her out of many dangerous situations. Because Knights of the Old Republic is a roleplaying game, there are good and bad endings depending on the choices you make. So, like, here we've got Mission, the spunky, upbeat teenager whose best friend her entire life has been the giant Wookiee Zaalbar; but at the end of the game, if you have her foolishly confront the Sith Lord Darth Revan, things can go really badly for her. Spoilers: Revan does not kill her; instead, he makes Zaalbar, the one being she loved and trusted more than any other in the galaxy, do it, so that betrayal is the last thing she ever knows. Damn, Rev! Good thing that's the non-canonical ending! KOTOR came out in 2003, so the character models are... definitely showing their age. Like, they're not Metal Gear Solid "let's draw a shadow on a flat plane as a way of suggesting a nose" bad, but they really weren't distinct. So is it intentional that the sculptor seems to have made this toy look like voice actress Catherine Taber (who also did The Clone Wars Padme), or just coincidence? She certainly looks more like an adult than a teenager (Mission is 14). If you remember the Bastila Shan and Darth Malak reviews, those figures were based on a now-cancelled KOTOR remake, which is why their designs didn't match the classic looks. Well, it seems the message that the game is no longer being made has finally filtered down to the licensees (or that Embracer Group was barely changing Mission's design), because this is almost exactly the old familiar style: thigh-high boots, a sleeveless shirt and a vest over that. She wears her belt lower on her hips for this toy, her shirt is slightly unfastened at the collar, the thing around her left arm is a tied strip instead of a flat band, and her kneepads are a different style - all way smaller changes than the other characters underwent. The vest is a separate piece, if you want to remove it. Her vest and pants are a dark beige, her boots, belt, and gloves are brown enough to nearly be black, and her shirt and head-bra are somewhere in between. Her skin is a pale blue, like Aayla Secura. Mission has mostly standard Black Series articulation, but her chest is a balljoint and her waist a hinge, which is a little above average. The thighs and knees both turn in the same way, which is needless, but her lekku are soft enough that they don't impede her head movement in any way. Her kneepads are separate pieces that just float on the legs, so you mat have to manually reposition them to get the full range of motion. In the game, Mission is your "tech" companion, and when she first joins your party, her default weapon is a blaster just like this toy includes. And yet "Mission's vibroblade" is a specific, named weapon, so why doesn't the set include that, as well? Though he's seen his fair share of war, career soldier and skilled pilot Carth Onasi remains dedicated to the Republic's ideals. Carth is the first companion you get in the game. You wake up on a ship that's under attack, and the two of you share an escape pod down to the planet surface. As much as KOTOR tries to duplicate the beats of the Original Trilogy (which is to say, the beats of Joseph Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Face, as least as they were whittled down and honed by George Lucas), the pre-"Refusal of the Call" portion of the story on the planet Taris goes on forever; it's at least a quarter of the game before you can leave and start doing anything interesting, to the point where for years (until fanmade 4K-upscaled texture packs became feasible) the single most popular mod for the game was one that lets you bypass Taris completely. Do you know how boring you have to be to make "skip this part" more popular than "put in big titty goth girlfriends"? Part of the problem is that, for a long time, your only companion is Carth Onasi. He eventually mellows out, but at the start of the game he's got major trust issues (justified, but still), so he's always suspcious, confrontational, and grumpy, and is just generally a pain to interact with for hours and hours. You can tell he was designed by a bunch of people who just lived through the '90s idea of what "cool" was, because he's got heavy stubble and a haircut where two little strands hang rakishly over his forehead. The hair is molded as a separate piece so those can dangle accurately, by the way. Carth's outfit is even less changed than Mission's was - if this isn't just his 2003 design, then he was going to be a 1:1 port in the remake. Okay, the thing he wore on his upper body always looked more like a jacket than a vest, but you can see how the game model could be interpretted this way without necessarily being "wrong." Even if a jacket would look better. Maybe that's the change Embracer Group made? The vest here is made from PVC and just sits over the torso, with the collar thing he wears beneath it being molded and painted on the chest. His shirt sleeves are sculpted with wrinkles, but his pants get a texture in addition. Because of the vest, Carth only gets a balljointed chest, no waist of any sourt. He does have pec hinges though, but on mine there was a small problem: the right pectoral insert piece wasn't sitting right, threatening to fall out of the chest every time it moved; to fix it, all I had to do was push it in until the peg slipped into the pocket it was supposed to, but things could have been a lot worse. Also, Carth has a holster for his blaster, and it's actually attached to his leg the way a real holster would be, meaning you can't turn the right thigh or lift the leg very far before the plastic stops you. Still, we'd rather have that than just leave it unattached. Since giving him the abuility to dual-wield blasters is one of the smartest early decisions you can make in the game, both his hands have their trigger fingers extended. And hey, you could give him Mission's gun, if that wouldn't leave her defenseless. All the more reason Hasbro should have included her sword. As we get more Knights of the Old Republic figures, it will be interesting to see if Hasbro rereleases some of their older oens. Like, they did a carded version of Revan in 2021, and a "Light side Revan" in 2020 (based on the Galaxy of Heroes mobile game), but will we see them again? Or how about Zaalbar, who lingered on clearance five years ago because there was no indication any other characters were coming? Now that we've got Mission, we really need him again; maybe they can pull a Krrsantan and do a better, less "repainty" version of him. And at that point, maybe they'd consider re-dos on Bastila and Malak, so they can have their proper outfits this time. I don't know that getting the entire crew of the Ebon Hawk would be necessary for my collection, but there are definitely a few I'm definitely looking forward to. -- 09/05/26 What companions do you want next? Tell us on our message board, the Loafing Lounge.