Halloween Edition Imperial Royal Guard

Unlike last year, for 2025 Hasbro not only announced their Halloween Edition figures, they actually got them into stores, too! What a concept! You already know what the back of this box is going to say: Celebrate the season with specially designed Star Wars figures from The Black Series. These Holiday Edition figures never get anything new. But this figure is a Royal Guard, and we've already reviewed a Royal Guard, so the text from that one is much more informative: Resplendent in crimson robes and armor, the Imperial Royal Guard protected the Emperor. Secrecy shrouded the Guard, with rumors abounding about the sentinels' backgrounds and combat capabilities. Ah, so you see why they couldn't just copy that over, then. Red probably would have worked for one of the Giftsmas figures, but this is Halloween, so this time the character with the tall, domed head and the long floor-length robes is done in white - it's a ghost! Not a Force Ghost, just a ghost ghost. Considering the Royal Guards have worn red or, in a few instances, black (and if you count the prequel Senate Guards, blue), making one in white is something new no matter what. Though now we kind of want to see some Royal Guards deployed alongside Snowtroopers. This is, fully, the same figure as before, just done in new colors. Okay, the softgoods robe is a different cut, scalloped instead of smooth, but the sculpt underneath it has the armored breastplate and boots over a rumpled cloth bodysuit. It's funny to remember that, since the Royal Guards were never seen in anything but their robes in the movie, they could have been wearing anything at all under there; the idea of them having armor - let alone this specific armor - is one of the many now-canon ideas that were introduced in a comic. Of course, the comic showed the cloth suit being black rather than red, but that wouldn't matter on this release anyway. For a sculpt from 2017, the articulation remains on par with modern toys. This ghosts haunts your house with swivel/hinge rocker ankles, double-hinged knees, swivel thighs, balljointed hips and torso, swivel/hinge wrists, elbows and shoulders, and presumably some sort of joints in the neck and head, though the shape of the helmet keeps the head from moving much at all. You can swivel it to the sides, slightly, but he definitely won't be nodding any time soon. The cloak obviously moves out of the way when you pose the figure, but it ends up looking like a tent in a lot of poses. It's slightly translucent, which leads us into this toy's best feature. This Royal Guard is a ghost, and what do ghosts do? They glow. If you remember when we wished the bones on the 2022 Skeleton Clone Trooper were painted in glow-in-the-dark paint, this figure takes things even further, making the whole thing glow! The figure includes the same two accessories as the original release - a small blaster that can holster on the hip, and a long force pike - and they're molded from the same GitD plastic as the body. The robe is thin enough that, much like Jesus, the body will glow right through it, and since the eyes and mouth are painted with regular black paint, you can still see them as negative space when the lights are out. How fun! The Halloween Edition figures follow the Holiday Edition figures' lead in including a small pack-in figure. There are only so many tiny things available to use, so we've seen this one plenty of times before (and will even be seeing it another time this year): just like the first year's Were-Wookie, the Royal Guard includes a bogling. Native to the planet Bogano, boglings were introduced in 2019's Jedi: Fallen Order. They're like a cross between a bird and a fox, and were scientifically calculated to be as cute as possible. Look at the way it nervously holds its little arms in front of its chest! The deco on this one isn't really ghost-specific - it's green, with red eyes, a white ruff of fur at the neck, and gray fur creating a pair of "shorts." It's painted with white fangs in its mouth, so it reallt just feels like some sort of generic goblin or something. That's right, they made the Bogling into Boblin the Goblin! Despite being a Halloween Edition figure, the Royal Ghost Guard showed up at Target in August, beating the Walmart and Fan Channel exclusives to market by at least a month. And amazingly, it sold for the standard $24.99 instead of having a $3 surcharge like the Skele-Clone Trooper did! Hasbro might have been able to get away with just making the figure plain white, but glowing is cooler and makes the toy even more desirable. -- 10/12/25 Did the face make sense to you at first? Tell us on our message board, the Loafing Lounge.