Once again, I learn something new every time I build a kit:
- I swear the Gundam Markers look like they have the exact same tip as my old marker, but my wife disagrees. She thinks they have an even finer point. I guess I’ll find out soon enough.
- Whenever I talk of High Grade kits, I always refer to them as just that, High Grades. But online, that’s not the way it works. Sometimes a person will say “HG”, but other times they’ll say “HGUC” or “HGAC”. I finally figured out that this is referring to which Gundam universe the kit comes from (HGUC being Universal Century, for example).
Furthermore, this isn’t just a parlance made up by the fans. HGUC, et al is an official branding. Specifically, the HGUC brand is part of a multi year effort to come up with High Grade kits for almost every single mobile suit to show up in the UC. The line officially began in 1999 and is still ongoing in 2016. And while I can’t speak for the very oldest HGUC kits, my research suggests models from the the last few years have drastically improved compared to older HG’s, with articulation and detail that was once impossible at the 1/144th scale (at least until Real Grade kits showed up). Looking at these two kits, the Kampfer is from 2008, and the EZ-8 from 2013, and based on their reviews, I think they both fall into the new era of awesome HG’s.
- If you’ve built any Real Grade kits before, you know that they have their own unique branding (ie. their boxes, instruction booklets, etc all have a common visual aesthetic). The same thing is true for the HGUC line. The boxes use the same fonts and and style, as do their instruction booklets. In fact, these may be my favorite instructions yet. The cover on both booklets shows a nice closeup of the kit, with a bunch of technical specs (in English!) listed down the side. Height, weight, reactor output - it’s all that wonderful minutiae that only a model kit fan would care enough about.
Both booklets also have lots of close up photographs of different parts of the kit. This is extremely helpful, as the photos show you how Bandai decided to panel line the model, something I find helpful in improving my own skills
For arbitrary reasons, I decided the EZ-8 gets built first, so that’s where I’ll pick up with in the next post.