Future Century Model Kits

Dragon Gundam Incoming 2024-08-23

Once Bandai released new (and, sadly, Premium Bandai) High Grade Gunpla for both Gundam Rose and Gundam Maxter, it was bleedingly obvious that they were going to relase the entirety of the Shuffle Alliance. The only lingering questions were a) Which one would they release next?, and b) When would they release it?

Now we have our answers - the next one is Sai Saici’s Dragon Gundam, and it’s coming out this winter in Japan (though folks in the US will have to wait until January 2025):

Gunpla Build - High Grade Gundam Maxter (Build) 2024-04-18

You know the drill. Let’s look at the runners:

One of my most common reactions is to say something like “There aren’t as many colored parts as I thought there’d be”, but not this time. There’s plenty of red and blue plastic in this spread. And of course, we get the Action Base just like we did for the Gundam Rose.

Gunpla Build - High Grade Gundam Maxter 2024-04-15

We interrupt our streak of old builds in order to do a fresh, new, just-arrived-in-the-mail one. I’ve been eagerly awaiting this kit for months, and now it’s finally here:

That’s right, it’s the High Grade Gundam Maxter from Mobile Fighter G Gundam, by far the most American mobile suit ever created (yes, even more American than the one dressed like the American flag).

Gunpla Build - High Grade Gundam Rose (Part 1) 2023-10-31

Its time to see what the best of Neo France’s Mobile Fighter engineering has to offer. Here are the parts:

That’s quite a lot of runners. Now granted, two of the runners are for the Action Base 5, and one contains the effect parts for the Rose Bits. But even if you remove those, you’re left with eight runners. That’s quite a lot for a High Grade.

Now it wasn’t until after the build that I realized that I didn’t take a photo of the decal sheet. That was a major oversight on my part, since the decals are important to the story of this kit.

Best I can do is grab this screenshot from Mecha Gaikotsu’s video review, which shows the sheet after all the decals have been removed:

There are two on the left that are the usual decals for the head, and one big one on the right for the Core Lander’s windshield. That leaves just six very small decals for the rest of the body. When you combine that with the number of different colored runners in this kit, and one thing becomes clear - almost all of the color separation you see on this Rose Gundam is from color separated plastic. That’s a big deal for a High Grade, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it comes together.

G Gundam Primer 2023-10-27

I’ve gone from having exactly zero model kits from Mobile Fighter G Gundam to having two of them in short order:

I figured it would be a lot easier to write about them if I did a little primer about how mobile suits work in this particular show. Note that this is not a primer on the show in its entirety. I tried doing that in my first draft, and it got real messy real fast.