Last year my wife and I decided to diversify our collecting habits by focussing on a new line - specifically, Hasbro's Micro Force. These figures retailed for $2.99US (around $4.00NZ) in blind bags of two. We managed to collect full sets of both Series 1 and Series 2 - however, while three more series were released, these never turned up at any of our local stores. With interest in the line diminishing, Hasbro recently opted to reposition and rebrand the line as Micro Force WOW!, now selling four figures at a time in a new lightsaber-shaped blind box. We finally came across the first series of this new line at Hobbyco during a recent trip to downtown Sydney.
These new packs retail for $17.99AU. That's around $19.00NZ - or approximately $4.75NZ per figure. Given that the figures have more than doubled in price, we opted for a single blind box to begin with. Fortunately, we nabbed a great quartet. As well as new figures, the WOW! line also includes holographic (read: unpainted translucent) versions of previously released sculpts. We only received one of these however - a red holographic version of the Darth Maul we obtained in Series 2. The other three figures we pulled - holographic K-2SO; Luke Skywalker (Jedi Exile); and Bucket (R1-J5) - were entirely new for our collection
While we were rapt with this particular pack, we're not entirely sold on picking up more than these. Truth be told, we lucked out in getting pretty much every figure we wanted from this wave. The remainder are resculpts - or holographic rereleases - of characters that we already have in our collection. The considerably higher price of these new packs is also a big deterrent. It's a little frustrating to be honest. It's clear that Hasbro is attempting to offer a more involved blind-opening experience - perhaps in an attempt to emulate the wild success of lines like LOL Surprise! But once it's open, the lightsaber serves no extra purpose as a means of display nor has any other playability to offer. Further, given the low production costs of these figures, there's every chance that the lightsaber packaging may very well cost more than the items it contains - and this might go some way towards explaining the significant increase in prices. At the end of the day, it's hard to see how the addition of such a gimmick can save the line. While Hasbro might have been disappointed with the sales figures for the earlier waves of this line, there's every chance this was simply down to poor distribution (a complaint also shared by 3 3/4" figures right now). My wife and I would have invested heavily in Series 3 through 5 - had we been able to find them.
In short, we're hoping that Hasbro soon take this line back to its roots, and once again give us the chance to pick up simple (and cheap) packets of these fantastic little figures. Until then, we're unlikely to be dabbling much more in this line.
