Now that the Maganac is assembled, let’s talk a bit about it.
I really like this design. It vaguely reminds me of a Zaku, what with the monoeye, the Heat Hawk, and its fairly bulky shape.
On a whole, however, it doesn’t really look like most mobile suit designs. For one, you don’t see many mecha which use so many earth tones. The closest I can think of is the Gundam Local Type North American version, but that’s a case where the brown parts look more black (or dark grey) under certain lighting conditions. Case in point:
It is almost as if the Local Type is ashamed of being brown, and tries to hide it. The Maganac, however, is brown and proud.
Another unique characteristic of this mecha is its use of so many multi-sided polygons. Mobile suits typically make heavy use of rectangles and triangles, but rarely anything more complex than that. However, the Maganac is dotted with pentagons, hexagons, and octagons (or in the case of the chest, an octagon with the top half cut off). You can even argue that the shield is kind of shaped like a hexagon.
These geometric shapes make the Maganac feel wonderfully different. Not fully robotic, but not quite human, and not quite ornate. It is just … cool. Something about it just works for me.
Here is another great feature - the kit is so precisely engineered that you can equip the gun by simply sliding it into the hand from the top. This means you do not have to take it apart, which minimizes the risk that you accidentally break one of the hands.
Unfortunately, this leads into one of my negatives for this kit - it only comes with two holding hands. No open palm hand, no trigger finger hand, and no fully closed fists. This is typical for budget priced High Grades, so it is not too surprising, but I always advocate for having as many hand parts as possible. Also, while you can plug the gun in to the hand easily enough, the same is not true of the Heat Hawk. That means you will have to disassemble the hand (and thus run the risk of breaking it) sooner or later.
Now for another gripe - while the kit looks fantastic, the articulation is a bit rubbish. The head has very little movement left or right, and pretty much no movement up or down. The legs have decent forward motion, but cannot move back all the way, on account of the rear skirt armor being in a fixed position.
One more gripe - the piece that secures the shield to the arm does not fit very well. If you handle the model properly it will (probably) not pop off, but be careful.
Here is the Maganac next to good old “Master Quatre”:
They look great together (as they should), though I am surprised at how much taller Sandrock is.
These two kits together are an amazing demonstration of what kind of parts separation and color you can get on a High Grade with clever layering of pieces and a bit of paint. If this is a sign of what is to come for this Grade, sign me the heck up.
Now here is a more ponderous comparison. Here is the Maganac next to the Real Grade Tallgeese.
Here we have a High Grade on the low end of the price/detail spectrum, and a Real Grade on the higher end of the price spectrum. When you look at them side by side, it is clear that one is made out of more parts, and has much more fine grained detail. And yet part of me wonders whether that really matters. That is to say, does the Tallgeese look good because of all the detail, or because it is simply a good design? If it were a High Grade kit - perhaps one which only used a single shade of white plastic, or which required you to hand paint certain parts - would it still look good?
Similarly, if the Maganac had more part seperation, would that really make it look better? It would certainly make it look better as an “out of the box” build, but how much a of a difference would it make compared to painting it?
I guess what I am trying to say is that in the end, piece count alone is not enough to predict how good a model is going to look. It all comes down to the design of the mobile suit, and the design/engineering of the kit.
I did not (yet) do a full photo shoot for this kit, but I did try a few poses with the Heat Hawk to determine whether its extra large size really does make look cooler.
This standing pose is not bad, but I don’t know if it looks significantly better than if it were holding a Zaku’s axe. Let’s try another one:
In this case, the bigger axe does help, quite a bit actually. I will have to try a few more poses out to continue testing the theory.
For now, however, I am still not quite ready to set up for a photo shoot, so this will have to do. Suffice to say that if it was not clear by now, I am a fan of this kit. Between this, the Sandrock, and the Gundam Astaroth, I am batting .1000 when it comes to sub-$15 model kits.