This kit is now twelve years old, but as we are going to see, it still features a lot of the hallmarks of modern High Grades. That mostly checks out, I think. There’s no exact date upon which High Grades entered what I’d consider their modern era, but in my mind it started sometime around 2012, and really kicked off in 2015, the year they released the Revive Gundam.
Of course, that means that if this kit were a few years older, it probably wouldn’t have any of its niceties, so I guess we lucked out.
Looking at these runners, they look underwhelming, but that’s probably because I just finished building a massive Ver. Ka:
I went back and compared them to the parts layout for similar High Grades (like the Gundam X itself), and it turns out that this is actually pretty comparable.