#1144 scale

visit : www.gundamfreaks.wordpress.com:)

visit : www.gundamfreaks.wordpress.com:)

visit : http://gundamfreaks.wordpress.com/ :)

RX-80WR White Rider (ZEUS)

I’ve run out of kits I’m not saving for customs, and I haven’t bought anything P-Bandai in a while, so I tracked down one of the designs I really liked. I know there were other I was into, but this was the only one that immediately came to mind. If you don’t recognize the White Rider, it’s one of the two prototype units for the Pale Rider introduced in the recent game MSG Battle Operation Code Fairy. It certainly does stand out, with the crown, cape, and heavy crossbow. You can easily tell the design came first and they had to create lore to justify it all later.

The Good: Never built the Pale Rider, but this is a pretty good kit. Good range of posability, full accessory storage, some interesting gimmicks, and some cool use of new parts, such as only the right outer arm being new to accommodate the Prototype Shekinah. The cape and Shekinah also balance each other well, so there’s no stability issues.

The Bad: The Shekinah is a completely new piece, and it’s transformation requires quite a bit of prying things apart. It probably wouldn’t be too hard to have designed it to be fully transforming, especially since the barrel does that already.

Last complaint is the stickers, which there are a lot of. This can happen when you’re trying to add new details to an older kit, and granted it comes with doubles of some since you can display it with or without the ZEUS System active.

The Details: And I didn’t use any of them. I did basic panel lining and black fill in recessed areas, and metallic red for optics and the like as I chose to display it with ZEUS active. In addition, I added gold anywhere the stickers said to add it or yellow, and a few more spots on the Shekinah, ankles, and a few miscellaneous other areas. I also added silver to the chest vents, cape, and the top of the Shekinah.

I considered painting the Heat Rapier as if it was active, but as its main weapon is the Shekinah, I wasn’t sure how often I was going to have it out.

Overall, this was a good kit, with a very fun design and main weapon. Don’t know if I’d suggest tracking it down unless you really dig its aesthetics like I do, but if that’s why you want you won’t be disappointed. I did consider, and may still, track down its brother, the Black Rider, but I’m not in the mood to build the same kit twice in a row. Maybe some day.

JMF-1337B Blazing Gundam

The God Gundam. The name they can’t use in the US, but was the titular Gundam of its own series. It is typically referred to as the Burning Gundam, but the instruction manual for this kit refers to it as the “G Gundam,” which I don’t think is a bad choice, but it is odd, especially considering the name “Blazing Gundam” is definitely in reference to that colloquialized name.

Also, fun fact, the Build Burning and Try Burning Gundam were named without knowing that the God Gundam had its name changed in other territories. Further adding to the strangeness of the God’s legacy.

The Good: This figure looks really good. It reuses a lot of parts from the old God Gundam kit, but changes just enough minor details to look like it’s own unit rather than a repaint of an older one. It also has quite a few melee accessories, and a much more wieldy expanding parts gimmick compared to the Helios and Livelance.

The Bad: What holds this kit back is the very old God Gundam kit it’s based on. Tons of polycaps, not that great articulation, and it’s Beam effects are supposed to be used on both the tonfa and sabers, but get jammed in both very easily (I nearly tore them trying to get them out).

I know it goes against the theme, but this really should have been a completely original kit. Reusing old runners is what hampers it more than anything, as everything new is very cool, but what isnew is just aesthetic and weapons.

The Details: This is a very simple kit, and as such only really required black panel lining and black fill, with metallic green eyes. Most of the important fill details have stickers, as well, so don’t feel like picking up a paintbrush is too essential to get it to look good.

Overall, it’s perfectly fine, and looks good, but suffers heavily from being built upon a very old kit. If you care more about appearances than posability, it’s perfectly fine, and even then you can still get a few good poses out of it, but you’re missing out on the fun of martial arts poses. Definitely the weakest of the three I’ve handled, but still not terrible.

Also it’s call tag is dumb, but I don’t think anyone else cares.

XXXG-01L2 Gundam Livelance Heaven

This was an oddly hard model to photograph. When taking photos, you don’t want there to be a ton of negative space, and that can be an issue when what you’re photographing is long and slender. Pole arms fall into that category, and the fact that the Livelance comes with a very long beam effect doesn’t help. I only photographed it at full length four times (three of which were in Scythe Mode), and ended up cutting off the end of it in three of those to keep a balanced composition, with the only exception being held incorrectly in order to fit it in frame. I suppose I could have had it lancing another unit to fill that space in, but that might have also taken focus away from the Livelance. Tricky business, it is.

The Good: This is a fairly posable kit, with a lot of extra joints; a sliding shoulder joint, an extra waist joint, and the knees are detachable to increase their range. That extra range is very helpful since it’s using a two-handed weapon, and can achieve a decent number of poses that utilize it effectively. It also has bent-wrist holding-things-hands to help with that as well.

Also, while the Helios had a ton of new parts, the Livelance is a good example of reuse of old parts, with very few extra parts in comparison. It even took me a day or so after its reveal to figure out what it was based on, and the pun in the name, which is a sign of a good revision.

The Bad: One of the advertised gimmicks is swapping parts between kits, but since the Freedom and Deathscythe are from different lines, there’s some looseness that makes it not really work. Also, since it reuses parts, there’s some stickered detail that isn’t sculpted.

Biggest issue is the pearlescent white isn’t great. Especially on the head, I had several issues of marring, staining, and cracks formed just by piecing things together, so be vary careful when assembling specifically the head.

Also, would have liked it if the cape had a lock when not active.

The Details: Apart from the black panel lines and fill, I added a number of metallic blue details (some of which replaced stickers) to the head, shoulders, scythe, and the front of the cape, as well as under the translucent blue on the forearms to embolden the color choice while retaining the details, unlike what I did with the Helios where it was directly under the plastic. I also added some yellow paint to the front and back of the back skirt, and to the inside of the cape (where the aforementioned missing detail was).

Overall, I like this kit, and if the other recent Wing kits are anything like it, I might have to try them out. But it’s also very creative in its own right, and makes me excited for the other Breakers kits I plan on building in the future.

MSB-GH03 Gundam Helios

I actually play Gundam Breakers. I run an entirely SD Gundam team, and typically swap between Gold and Silver Rank in 3-VS-3. It’s a…fun game, but I can’t help but feel that the more mechanics they add every update, the less easy it becomes for new players to pick up, even if they make it easier to get upgrade parts. I’ve been playing since Lv5 Parts were the highest you could get, and 800,000 was a high CPWR. Still, I sign in every day, so it must be doing something right.

The Good: This guy has a forearm swivel, and that should say a lot. Most Gundam with large forearm accessories, like the God or 00 Sky, don’t have that. It also has great ranges apart from that, with more modern parts for all its joints, and very few reused parts apart from the back pieces.

Also, with the backpack removed, it’s a very sleek design.

The Bad: That big backpack with its many cannons does have some parts collision issues, but I weirdly haven’t had balance issues with it when the wings aren’t, like, very far back.

Also, it may not have a lot of reused parts, but it does have a lot of reused runners, so there are a lot of extra parts that don’t necessarily connect to each other, but perhaps you can find a use for them?

The Details: While there were a number of stickers for this kit, most of them were for the green stripes on the backpack. I replaced those with paint, as well as used metallic green on the eyes, inside the cannon barrels, and behind the translucent parts (mostly because I did it for the chest and continued to do it throughout).

I did black panel lining and fill throughout the kit. I also added a few drops of yellow in the triangles in the knees and back skirt. The stickers have black in the inner triangles, but some of the official images and paint model don’t have that, while others do. I decided to go without.

Overall, this is a much better kit than I thought it would be. I was expecting it to be more of a cash brag and reuse many more parts, but it ended up being an insanely posable and well designed kit. If you were on the fence about this kit, I would say to give it a chance.