Duke's shin guards are a little extra but I'm having no trouble scanning these. What would you trim?
Either his old-timey khaki military shirt or everything else that he's wearing. The shirt on the one hand, and the rest of the shit that he's wearing on the other, are representative of two different and mutually-incompatible aesthetics. I mean, Duke was kind of a throwback to an earlier style of military battle dress when he was first introduced (though he eventually ended up in a much more modern uniform), but this new design severely exacerbates the sense of his discontinuity between his various costume elements by having him continue to look, from the waist up, like someone in the middle of fighting WWII, while covering him in bits of "future-y" armor and pointless LEDs from the waist down. I've seen people referring to these designs as the "Gears of Joe" style, and that seems apt enough, but it works in
Gears of War's retro-futuristic fantasy setting because that's basically an alternate-history Earth where fantasy versions of NATO and the Warsaw Pact go to war with nukes and satellite lasers in a time roughly analogous to the 1930s in terms of culture and politics, so military technology and military fashion are developing "out on synch" in comparison with the real world, and you end up with pencil-moustached officers wearing dressy, high-collared uniforms under heavy sci-fi armor covered in LEDs:
Where this
doesn't work is in the "G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero" setting, which has always been characterized as nominally taking place in our world, "20 minutes in the future." Granted, character designs (particularly for the Cobra faction) could often become rather fanciful, but there isn't even a pretense here of taking notes from current ideas for next-gen military equipment (I certainly doubt that we're going to be slapping random LEDs on everything or going into battle with armor on our shins but not on our torsos over the course of the next couple of decades).
A better idea would have been to take a page from
Ghost Recon: Breakpoint players:
...Or hell, just make the straight-up, up-scaled recreations of the original 1980s 3.75" figures that everyone was expecting in the first place, but Hasbro seems to be stuck in a trap of trying to have their cake and eat it too, retaining anachronistic elements of the original figures married to wildly fanciful sci-fi design notes far removed enough from the real world to keep suburban soccer moms happy (despite these figures supposedly being aimed at adult collectors).
