Last year, as part of the huge Diamond/Pearl push, the Jakks toy company seemed to leapfrog backwards right into boring old PVC figures again. Albeit with much nicer sculpting than in 1999. Happily, those immovable little statues have morphed to include some clever action features... the Battle Bases sets lets you keep the clean sculpts of good PVC work but does not lose the physical fun of the action figure lines.

The stroke of brilliance here was to load the spring-loaded silliness into the bases, not into the figure. So the Chimchar set comes with an appropriately skinny and small-bodied Chimchar... who stands atop a plastic volcano platform that will launch him into the air at the touch of a button. If they had tried to incorporate a jumping feature into Chimchar, he would have necessarily been weirdly-formed and out-of-scale with other figures.

The further brilliant bit was to give each base the cut of a puzzle piece, so you can attach all the bases together to create your own giant playset. Each set comes with two smaller puzzle pieces, intended to form paths between bases. As a fan, I appreciate that Jakks gave each path piece element-appropriate sculpting. You get water pieces with Piplup and grass pieces with Turtwig. They could have easily cheaped out and made one set of connectors and just shoved them into each package.

Clark enjoys making one long, random path out of all the puzzle pieces.

We picked up most of Series 1 during Target's Pokemon sale (which continues through the end of March, I believe). Series 1 Battle Base sets are normally $10, which is actually a bit on the pricy side. Target's sale puts them at $5, which is fantastic. We got Pikachu, Turtwig, Piplup, Chimchar, Weavile and Buneary. The only other Series 1 sets are Cranidos and Bidoof. In my experience, those last four did not ship at the same time or in the same numbers as Pika and the three D/P starters, so they seem to be harder to find.

The Series 2 set has Sudowoodo, Starly, Ponyta and Misdreavus. I may have to get the Misdreavus set even if we can't find it on sale, because Misdreavus is that awesome.

But while we could not find Series 2 in stock, Target did have the Battle Link 2-Packs... where you get two pokemon and a single, smaller battle base. Target currently has these marked down to $12 from the original price of $15, which is nowhere near as cool as the $5 Battle Base price. We'll probably pick up the Lucario/Croagunk set, but this line also has a Buizel/Mantyke pack and the obligatory Pikachu/Raichu set. There is another subset of Battle Links, slightly cheaper with only one pokemon per pack and an even smaller base, no larger than one of the connector puzzle pieces.

Out of the Battle Base sets we have so far, Weavile is far and away our favorite.

The Weavile figure - again, wonderfully sculpted as skinny and top-heavy - stands on a little ice chunk. The ice bit gets plugged into the base and then you position a convincingly translucent ice cage on top of Weavile. When you press the button in the back, Weavile is launched, smashing through the cage. Very cool.

Interesting toy design trivia: the bases that are designed to seriously launch something (Weavile, Pikachu and Turtwig... Chimchar's base is not spring-loaded) have a failsafe switch on the bottom that means the button will not depress unless the base is flat on the floor. So you can't hold the launching base up at someone's face and erupt a Pikachu at them. At least, not without knowing about the secret safety switch and holding it in yourself.

Between the action bases and the connector pieces, there's a lot for Clark to do with these toys. It is also nice that the bases are largely figure-agnostic... so Clark can put his Super Hero Squad Wolverine on Chimchar's volcano base and toss Wolvie skyward.

My biggest complaint about the line is that, even though they can make the figures as close as possible to the source material, there are still examples of characters being made out of scale, just so they can all use roughly the same amount of plastic. Poor Piplup is freakin' huge (and also suffers from being permanently attached to his launcher mechanism, making Piplup the only figure I've found that breaks the clean lines rule), and some of the single-pack Battle Links are really sized off. Empoleon and Torterra, most notably, are no larger than a Buneary.

But overall, it's a very smart decision for a Pokemon toy line. You get battle action, good character representation, and a constructibility element. If these had debuted just a few dollars cheaper, I'd be more inclined to collect 'em all.