Beautiful photos, R_R_X.
Well, I did a quick opening of the boxes and was blown away by the presentation. I'll share some pics of that instead, as I haven't set up the figure yet.
First, there is the outer shipping box which is made of thick cardboard and protected further with those plastic corner parts. This took the brunt of any dings or mis-handling by the shipping folks.
Inside that, there is plain cardboard box, as extra protection.
Inside of that, we have the figure presentation box itself, which is a thing of beauty. It is made of a slip cover and the figure box itself:
There is a cover which has foam on the inside. It captures the scene where Gandalf rides out of Minas Tirith to save Faramir and his troops from the attacking Nazgul:
Upon removing the above cover, you get the first level of the figure. You'll notice that the head sculpt is not attached to the figure but protected even further inside its own box:
The sculpt is heavily protected in its own presentation box:
Going one level deeper, you'll get the figure base and Shadowfax, which is heavily protected by additional foam:
Here is Shadowfax once the cut-out foam is removed:
The horse is definitely made of polystone and it is heavy.
With the exception of opening up the head sculpt box, I did not remove any part of the figure, as I didn't want to risk losing or breaking anything.
Final thoughts - This figure is amazing and that's from just looking at it in the packaging. It is without a doubt one of the top figures in my collection.
I do have the original GtW release and look forward to comparing the two, aside from the head sculpts which is obviously day and night between the two.
I'm a huge collector of all things "Lord of the Rings" and am so glad to add this set to my collection. Big kudos to Asmus for continuing to raise the bar with their releases.
