The Gundam Maxter is ready for its next match.

Gundam Fight! Ready … Gooooooooooooooooo!

I’ll echo here what I said about Gundam Rose, which is that this too does not feel like a normal High Grade. It has bright, brilliantly cartoony colors, lots of subtle color separation, and almost no seamlines.

It was also another very pleasant build. While it does require some painting to make it truly color accurate, it’s not a lot, nor is it particularly challenging. These G Gundam High Grades are proving to be minimal investments with strong returns.

Accessories

The mounting pegs on each pistol are certainly visible, but they’re not as much of an eyesore as I expected them to be. For a certain distance they just blend in:

I tried to come up with as many stereotypical poses as I could think of, such as a cowboy-esque quick draw:

And a comical, “shoot your guns in the air cuz’ MURRICA!” pose:

As for the shield, well, it doesn’t really work well as a shield:

Not only does it look like Maxter is holding up a urfboard rather than a shield (which, to be fair, is technically true), but the blue plastic is so thin and translucent that you can see through it.

As an actual surfboard, however, it works pretty well. The feet clamps work surprisingly well, provided you have the board secured to a sturdy base:

Seeing Gundam Maxter fly around on his hover surfboard is as awesomely silly in person as it is on TV.

Articulation

I didn’t fully test the articulation, but I can tell you that I always felt like it could do the things I needed it to. Any problems I had weren’t due to the articulation, but rather due to the fact that boxing poses are really hard to get right.

If your mobile suit has a gun, you can just point the gun somewhere and you’ll have a pose. If it has a sword, you can make it take a big swing, and you have a pose.

But when you’re doing a hand-to-hand combat pose, everything has to look right. The placement of the feet, the position and angle of the head, the rotation of the torso, and even the height of the shoulders. If any one of these looks off, so will the pose.

For example, this one here? Not to great:

This one here? Slightly better:

And this one here? Probably the best of the three:

But then you have shots like this one, which doesn’t look much like a boxer’s pose:

And this one here, where I tried and failed to make it look like it was ducking and weaving:

The point being that even small, subtle tweaks can make a world of difference.

Super Mega Action Pose

Just like Gundam Rose, Gundam Maxter comes with an Action Base and a couple of effect parts to allow you to create an action pose where all their gear is flying off and sh*t’s going crazy. Like this:

Here’s how it looks for Maxter:

I’m not sure if it looks quite as good - the fact that the chest and skirt armor are shooting straight out, rather than at any sort of angle, makes it look less organic and more staged. But it still does a fairly good job of portraying the Maxer in motion.

Boxing Mode

With its chest armor expelled and its gloves on, you know Chibodee Crocket is ready to get serious:

I think my favorite thing about this is the skirt armor. In normal mode, the front skirts look like football pads. But in Boxer Mode, that very same skirt armor instead resembles a pair of white boxer shorts. It’s amazing how a change in the model’s silhouette can so drastically change the appearance of things:

If you’re wondering how the boxing gloves attach, there’s a little T-shaped hole in the blue knuckle dusters, and a similarly T-shaped peg inside the gloves. It’s not a very deep connection, but somehow it’s rock solid.

The only issue I have is that, because they gloves are secured to the arm, the hands cannot rotate. There are certain poses where you might want the inside of the glove to face away from the camera, but that’s simply not possible.

With Gundam Rose

I love that these were the first two members of the Shuffle Alliance in this new line of G Gundam kits. As you might expect from a show that loves to marinate in stereotypes, the champions of Neo France and Neo America don’t see eye to eye at first, but in the end they become strong friends and allies:

Conclusion

I’m not just happy that we’re getting new G Gundam High Grades, but also that they’re turning out so well. This is Gundam Maxter, exactly as it appears on TV, with all its gimmicks and abilities. I’m happy to have it on my shelf, and I can’t wait to see what Dragon Gundam and Bolt Gundam look like next (it also makes me secretly hope we’ll get some supporting characters, such Rising Gundam, and Gundam Spiegel.