Thanks for the review and pics Panos!
It wouldn have been nice, since they had to make new mouldings anyway, to have the two swords correctly carried at the waist. It would restrict his left arm movement, but as his arms are already severely restricted by the shoulder armor, what difference?
Still, I welcome a Samurai Special with open arms and will certainly buy them in numbers, in the hopes that this helps spawn a full Feudal Japan theme. It looks like it would be easy to customise some different color Samurai, albeit they'd lose the leg printing but that's a small price to pay.
If I were designing the figure I'd have made rectangular shoulder plates (more accurate to that clip to the arms, much as the old-style European armor does. That way the pauldrons could be removed and attached to different klickies, and the arms would have a wider range of movement. We have to bear in mind the difficulties of moulding in hot plastic, so the solution they've come up with may be the only one possible.
