After nearly three weeks of building, the Real Grade Tallgeese is finished:
My feelings are … mixed. Does it look good? Absolutely. Does it look as amazing as I made it out to in my head? Not quite.
The glossy plastic, while a cool idea, is not working for me. It feels particularly brittle, and not quite shiny enough for its intended purpose.
Furthermore, the level of detail is impressive as always, but sometimes it gets distracting. There is just so much to take in.
The proportions are not all that great in person. The legs are so straight and spindly, the torso too narrow, and the skirt armor too wide.
It also feels finnicky due to all the moving parts. The head struggles not to lean to one side or another, and it never feels like I can get the shield in a position I like. The side skirts keep opening up, and sometimes it looks to be standing straight from the front, but from the back it looks like it is dancing it out:
To be fair, the build is proving sturdy so far. Nothing is falling off, which puts it in a better place than my older Real Grade kits. Yet it still suffers that same awkwardness, where you just cannot get it to stand still, in a nice pose, without something flopping over or opening up.
I also managed to break something. I unintentionally (and stupidly) top coated the right control arm after it was fully assembled. This caused the joints to freeze up. I loosened up two of them, but the third one simply broke clean off.
I managed to fix it by using a spare part[^1], but then another one of the other joints broke rght after that. At that point it was toast.
Thankfully, the Tallgeese can still hold up the gun without the control arm; the only real consequence is that it looks a bit goofy to see a mobile suit fire a gun that large without anything to help support it. But then again, this is a giant robot we are talking about. A little bit of unrealism is nothing when dealing with a piece of machinery that is physically impossible.
I wish I had some more photos, but after feeling slightly disappointed in this model, I am simply not in the mood to do an elaborate photo shoot. I will get to it eventually. For now, enjoy this picture of the Tallgeese trying to pick a fight with a big kid on the block:
