Snake Eyes is an odd character to me. I like him, I like thinking about the adventures he goes on. Though, there’s too much of him and honestly, any interpretation of him that disregards the goggles doesn’t appeal to me much. To me, the only real Snake Eyes designs are the original and the ’91 version. So with that out of the way, this Ninja Force version doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on, huh?
I should be sentimental and waxing nostalgia for him, as technically this was my first Snake Eyes and one of my first GI Joe toys. I was born right as GI Joe died, so most of the figures I had that weren’t my brothers were bought in ’96 and ’97 on clearance. Cheap left overs or not, I was delighted to have my own GI Joes as a kid, but the scenario somewhat oddly shaped my views on a few things. For me, almost the entirety of GI Joe was a blank slate, where I only knew a couple of characters, and the basic scenario of GI Joe vs Cobra. Over time an occasional Sunbow re-run, Street Fighter II, or a watching of our GI JOE:THE MOVIE recording would influence my world a bit. For the most part, I made up my own characters based on what figures interested me the most.
1993 Snake Eyes was not one of those figures I liked a lot; in fact, I barely remember playing with Spider-Spawn at all. So despite being baby’s-first Snake Eyes, I don’t really have any great memories of him. The Night Creeper and Bushido were far more captivating to me than this Snake Eyes ever was, probably because their sculpting made it a lot more clear what they were, whereas Ninja Force Snake Eyes doesn’t give someone much to go off of. Looking at him now, there’s a lot of detail here I can appreciate in the design, but as a kid the smooth mask and predominately black color didn’t make him very interesting.
Looking past that, the sculpt actually is fairly strong. There’s some nice texturing on his sweatshirt that highlights the body-armor he wears on top of it, without using paint. The smooth battle-mask is kind of an interesting riff on the original look… Though I still think it makes him look too much like Spawn. At a glance, he appears as though he’s covered in copious amounts of grenades like a stereotypical figure of his era, but most of those are small Nageteppo smoke grenades. His assortment of flares, smoke grenades and explosives seems a lot more natural and interesting, than something like Sonic Fighters Major Bludd. Of course, all of this is stifled by that fact that he has a spring-gimmick in both his hips and his arms. I try to look past these as highlighting them is repetitive, but Snake Eyes suffers a lot for how obtrusive his particular gimmick is.
Snake Eyes comes with three different swords (One from Ninja Force Storm Shadow, one from Dojo and a curved sword, which was new.), a knife (also new), two claws (’88 Stormie’s), nunchucks (from Nunchucks) and a figure stand, all cast in bright, powder blue plastic. Most weapons from the parts-tree era were just reused sculpts, so I find it odd that Snake Eyes came with two that were new. It’s not an amazing allotment of weapons either way; I wish he had a little blue pistol like the one holstered on his leg. The same set in yellow was included with Ninja Force Scarlet.
On a good day, you can still get 1993 Snake Eyes for around $5 loose, and $15 to $20 carded, with the carded examples proving to be the more common ones. “More common carded” is such a funny idiosyncrasy,as you really only see something like that happen with stuff people were hoarding in droves. In some ways this Snake Eyes is kind of an iconic figure, representing his last outfit in ARAH. Yet, he’s also a really bad figure for the action feature, so that’s probably reflected more in his pricing.
The Viper Pit 