Gunpla Build - High Grade Dragon Gundam (Photos)

29 Dec 25 12:56 UTC

After ten months (ten!), I took some photos of Dragon Gundam. Not many photos, mind you, but it still counts.

And in doing so, I was finally reminded of why I never got around to doing so back in February.

Form Over Function

As a piece of animation, G Gundam is an example of what Disney labeled the Plausible Impossible. In order to pull off all their cool moves, the show’s mobile fighters stretch and squish and bend their bodies, either in ways which seem believable in the moment, or in ways which are so subtle that they don’t even register.

But that can’t happen in real life. And so what you wind up with in the case of Dragon Gundam is a model with fancy, ornamental armor that actually has to obey the laws of physics.

In other words, it’s a huge pain in the ass to pose.

I’m just going to enumerate some of the high level issues:

  • The hands are so far embedded into the yellow dragon gauntlets that they’re incredibly difficult to swap out. They’re also really hard to rotate and reposition when they’re in there.
  • Because the dragon gauntlet is so large, the rest of the arm is not, which makes them feel extremely short and stumpy. And stumpy arms are not conducive to action poses
  • The shape of the upper arm is so ornate that it’s hard to tell where the elbow joint begins and where it ends
  • The beam sabers that are mounted on the backpack get in the way of the ponytail. To be clear, they can be rotated to the sides a bit, but that only slightly mitigates (rather than eliminates) the problem.
  • The skirt armor gets in the way of the legs.
  • The shoulder armor falls off All. The. Damn. Time.

Even if you consider the Dragon Gauntlets to be part of the arm, they still look too short

This punch doesn’t look very fearful when it barely has any reach

I wanted to do a version of this pose where the spear was angled downward, but the model just wasn’t having it

So yeah, this is why I gave up in February. It’s too hard to pose this thing in a way that does it justice. Just counting the photos from this December shoot, I got less than 20 total, which is not great. But at this point that’s all I’m willing to do.

Posing using the extra long stretchy arms, which are not quite as versatile as I imagined

Using its stretchy arm to breathe fire ala Shenlong

With its beam flags displayed

And now, finally, it’s ultimate technique, the Shin Ryuusei Kochouken:

This looks cool and all, but it’s a huge pain in the butt to get it all set up.

Comparison with Shenlong

Lastly, we get to the inevitable comparison:

I still think that Dragon Gundam looks the best of the two. Even if it’s color palette is more unharmonious, overall it’s a better execution of the concept of a chinese dragon-inspired mobile suit. They definitely got it right the first time.

Conclusion

This kit is just like all the other P-Bandai G Gundam models, only moreso. It’s perfectly detailed, with perfectly accurate colors, and it’s also not very fun to actually pose and play with. I hate that that seems to be the trend with this product line, but at this point it is what it is.