This kit is now twelve years old, but as we are going to see, it still features a lot of the hallmarks of modern High Grades. That mostly checks out, I think. There’s no exact date upon which High Grades entered what I’d consider their modern era, but in my mind it started sometime around 2012, and really kicked off in 2015, the year they released the Revive Gundam.
Of course, that means that if this kit were a few years older, it probably wouldn’t have any of its niceties, so I guess we lucked out.
Looking at these runners, they look underwhelming, but that’s probably because I just finished building a massive Ver. Ka:
I went back and compared them to the parts layout for similar High Grades (like the Gundam X itself), and it turns out that this is actually pretty comparable.
Beam Rifles
These are simple affairs, being made of just two parts. There’s a seamline of course, but it’s fairly hard to see. I still tried removing it, but I think you can get away with leaving it be.
In terms of color correction, the area around the grip is supposed to be blue, and some of the grooves along the barrel are actually supposed to be filled in with black (or gunmetal, or whatever color you’d prefer). It’s easy enough to do, but it adds quite a lot to the overall look:
Feet
The feet have a toe bend, which is something that even a lot of newer High Grades sometimes lack. But this one needs it for its transformation, so I guess that’s why it’s here:
We get our first taste of color correction here, and it’s something you end up having to do across the entire lower body. Airmaster has a whole bunch of those little gaps in its armor, which you’re supposed to fill in with black (or very dark grey) paint. This is far from the only Gunpla that does this, and in theory it’s one of the easiest things to paint, but in my experience it actually requires a certain amount of deftness to get it right.
Basically, you don’t want to fill in the entire crevice. Instead, you just want to fill in the deepest part of it. If you fill in the whole thing, it’ll just look like this overly large, flat, black void in the armor. Whereas if you fill in only some of it, it creates something of a 3D effect, where it looks like there’s an actual hole in the plastic.
Here, I can actually explain it better using the lineart as a visual aid. You want to paint them to look like this:
Instead of this:
The catch, of course, is that the former approach is much easier than the latter. Instead of just filling the crevice full of paint and letting it dry, you instead have to be either super precise with your paintbrush, or spend time painstakingly scraping away the excess until the paint’s in the perfect size and shape.
I personally find it worth the extra effort to do this, but your own mileage may vary.
There’s one more bit of color correction to do, which is to paint this little area on the back of the foot grey:
Legs
This kit does the thing that most modern High Grades do, where the shin armor is a separate part, so that it can hide the seamline in the front:
As for the backside, the leg has a fin going right down the center, and the seamline is placed up right against it so that you can’t really see it:
(There’s still a little bit of a visible seam in the thruster that’s immediately below the fin, but it’s so small that you could easily ignore it).
These are simple tricks, but they make the build so much more pleasant.
Now we have to get to some complaints, as the legs feature my two biggest gripes about this model. First, this is where we have to the most color correction by far. If you did absolutely nothing to the legs, they’d be completely, utterly white, and in this case it’s just not a good look.
The second problem are these, which I presume are leg mounted thrusters:
If you compare these to the lineart, you’ll see that they’re supposed to be much smaller in size:
I suppose I could have tried painting them smaller, but there’s no real guideline to help you know when to stop and when to start. I think the easier thing to do would have been to make them smaller. Not only would it have been more accurate to the lineart, but it would be more realistic. When you have a tiny gap in the armor, it makes sense that it might be dark inside, as there’s not enough space for light to come in. But when you’re talking about an opening this big, you have to assume that you’d be able to see something.
It still looks better than if I had let them be, but I reserve my right to complain.
Skirt Armor
The side skirts are made out of just a single part, and it’s the only place on this model where we have to color correct using white paint:
That white paint marker I bought a few months ago is continuing to pay dividends. I got a nice even coat even against this red plastic.
Looking at the front and the back, we have more holes to shade in:
This is also the first time we see some yellow armor. Overall there’s not much of it on this MS, though when it shows up it adds a nice punch of color.
If I were to critique the skirt armor from a visual perspective, it reminds me a bit too much of Wing Gundam and Wing Zero. It’s an unfortunate flaw of Gundam X’s mobile suit designs. They’re weirdly beholden to some of Wing’s gimmicks and aesthetics, and while most of the suits manage to iterate and improve upon them to forge their own identity, there are still a few things about them that feel rehashed or recycled. This is one of them.
Chest
Two observations here. First, the chest is easily the most colorful part of the body, so it’s no surprise that it has a lot of parts separation.
Second, the whole thing is built around this cool hinge mechanism in order to accommodate the transformation gimmick.
In terms of color correction, you can (and probably definitely should) fill in the chest vents, and there are some thruster ports in the back.
There’s also this area at the bottom of the torso:
I’m not sure if you’re actually supposed to paint it. Judging from the shots in the manual, I couldn’t tell if it was paint or a shadow. But I went ahead and did it anyway, and I think it looks pretty good.
Nosecone
Rather than doubling as a shield, like on Wing Gundam and Wing Zero (or even the Zeta Gundam), the nosecone here is simply mounted to the backpack.
It also falls victim to one of my pet peeves with Bandai. If a mobile suit has Vulcan cannons in its head, their engineers are extremely good about molding the muzzle, and usually even part of the barrel, as details in the plastic.
But if there are supposed to be Vulcans anywhere else on the body, they get lazy. Most of the time, at best, you’ll get a small, cylindrically shaped area with a flat front. And that’s exactly what we get here:
If you paint it up just right, it will kinda look like a Vulcan cannon from a distance, but as soon as you get close the illusion falls apart.
Thankfully, the rest of the nosecone looks sharp. There’s some nice surface detail on the blue plastic, and if you panel line it with some dark paint, it really enhances the overall look.
Now we just slap it on the back, and we’re done.
Head
Pretty standard High Grade head in terms of assembly. It doesn’t really do anything to hide the seamlines, but the head is so small that they’re not exactly easy to see.
We have another bit of unfortunate color correction here. The chin is made of grey plastic, but it’s actually supposed to be navy blue. Why they didn’t just mold the part in blue plastic is beyond me; it’s not like the blue runner was running out of space.
Arms
The shoulders have a seamline, but only along the top, and it’s only there in one place:
It’s weird, but it’s also small and easy to remove.
Overall the construction here is extremely standard, with the same partial inner frame that gives modern High Grades such nice articulation. By far the most interesting thing is that the wrist armor is two-toned, half white and half red:
I honestly never really noticed this until now; I’m pretty sure I just mentally assumed it was all red. This fits with my recent assertion that the body part that gets the least amount of attention on a Gundam is its arms. But now that I see it, I think it’s a really cool look.
Holding Hands
Like most cheap High Grades, we only get a single pair of holding hands, and they're BOTH trigger finger hands.If this were any other model I might be upset, but since Airmaster only ever fights with akimbo Beam Rifles, I'll allow it in this case.
Wings
This is the only part of the build that feels really fresh and interesting.
The whole wing apparatus is built on a bunch of hinges, and is essentially draped over the shoulders like a shawl or a stole.
In terms of color correction (aside from the sticker), there’s a bit of the wing that needs to be painted red:
When it’s all assembled, the whole wing apparatus will look like this:
And then they’re attached by plugging them into these pegs that are on the torso:
Pot O' Paint
It took me a very long time to realize this, but those little pots of hobby paints - the kind that is typically meant for use in airbrushes - can be used for hand painting. I wanted to try it out for myself, so I bought a few pots of basic colors to see how it'd go. This build was my first chance to use one of them, specifically this pot of red:
I learned a few things along the way. For one, this shit is potent. It's so strong that it smells, and it's extremely difficult to get it off a paint brush. And goodness help you if you accidentally spill any of it ...
Most importantly though, you need to thin it. Ask me how I know!
Seriously though. It may look and feel like it's a good consistency right out of the pot, and it will even look like it's a nice even coat while it's drying. But as I found out, once it's fully dry it may not actually look all that smooth (if you look really closely, you can see what I mean on the paint job I did on the wing)
So yeah, thin your paints. I think. I'm not actually sure how much it will help until I try it myself.
For now, the jury's still out on whether this kind of paint is worthwhile for larger jobs, but I think it might be okay for smaller jobs at least.
Missiles
The final piece of the puzzle are the shoulder mounted missiles. They’re made entirely out of white plastic, but the tips are supposed to be red:
Reasonable minds can disagree here, but as small and as simple as these missiles are, I think that touch of red is really important for the overall look of the mobile suit. Without it I think it would look weird; in fact I think I’d rather take the missiles off entirely than have them on there completely white.
Cleanup
After finishing the Nu Gundam Ver. Ka, I had just enough top coat left in the spray can to use on this model. But I was reminded that sometimes that’s not a good idea.
Basically, at some point while using this can, I didn’t shake it well enough, so when it got to the end there wasn’t a proper mix of paint, solvents, and whatever other chemicals are inside. That meant that a few (not all, but a few) panel lines bled out, in some cases quite a lot.
I scraped off the “bleed marks” (there’s got to be a better name than that) and re-sprayed them a new can of paint. Most of my cleanup efforts look pretty okay now, but others not so much. In particular, both the black and grey panel lines on the the missiles bled severely, and due to their size and shape, cleanup was difficult bordering on impossible.
I can definitely notice these flaws up close, though I admit that I haven’t put the finished model in the lightbox yet. Hopefully the bright, soft light will mask the mistakes and make it all look okay. Considering how rare this model is, and further considering that it comes from one of my beloved Gundam shows, I really want it to look good.