You may or may not remember that after building the RG RX 78-2, I decided more or less immediately that I needed to have its MG counterpart, the 3.0. Like the RG, this version is modeled after the life-size Gundam in Tokyo, and, well, it looks awesome.

Now since I bought this kit in no small part because of the color scheme that it already comes molded in, doing a full repaint didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Ultimately I settled for painting the inner frame and panel lining plus weathering and a flat topcoat on the armor.

But first I snapped the kit together unpainted – I’d never done this before, but in this case, I was really kind of stumped as to what I wanted to do with the kit, so I needed to see it fully assembled first.

Which means we get to do a full-blown OOB build review, of course. Here’s a shot of the box contents all laid out to get us started.

I was a bit surprised by the low parts count. Of course the RX 78-2 is a relatively small MG by its nature, but this really doesn’t look like much, and snapping it together barely took me longer than the average RG kit. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing – the kit has a full inner frame and articulation is about what you’d expect, so it doesn’t need to be more complex, but I think it’s something worth pointing out. Note also the small PC sprue.

The first thing the instructions tell you to do is build the core fighter. I did this last, but here it is anyway. Evidently this is the exact same core fighter that came with the 2.0 version. It looks okay and the transformation works really well, but I don’t understand why the landing gear comes molded in clear plastic. So that you can make it look like it’s hovering? Obviously painting this is an easy fix, but it’s really weird.

Assembly of the suit itself starts with the torso, which consists of three sections plus a core block that you add later if you want to display the core fighter separately and/or you want to use an LED unit – the LED won’t fit with the core fighter in there. The shoulder joints here are pretty involved – those panels on top actually move up to allow more articulation, so there’s more going on than you’d think at first glance.

Next is the backpack, which of course is pretty simple because, well, it’s the RX 78-2. The color separation with that white stripe is nice, and what you don’t see is that the boosters also come with clear pieces that go inside them. I didn’t insert these for the snap-fit build because I knew I was going to paint them and they would never come back out.

Here’s the neck assembly. The hinge that the head attaches to is clear, obviously, because the LED goes underneath it. Once the whole neck/collar section is attached to the torso, it’s very easy to remove it to access the LED unit.

Up next is the head, which is beautifully detailed, as you can see. The vulcans are molded in yellow, the vents on the face mask are actual slits – the works. My one gripe is that the rear camera isn’t inserted in such a way that the LED can light it up – and I didn’t realize it would be impossible to remove until the exact moment I snapped it in. Not a huge deal because I wasn’t going to paint it, but keep this in mind in case you want to do that.

These are basically the halves of the elbow joint, and they’re a massive, massive pain in the ass to assemble. Everything else about this build is fun, but I really hated this part.

Worse yet, after painting I had to assemble and then take apart one of the elbow joints again, and the plastic had apparently become weakened and one of those O rings just ripped right off. The O rings are what holds the elbow together, so that pretty much destroyed the joint. At this point it still more or less holds up even with the shield attached, but I’m thinking I’ll eventually have to glue it in place or figure out a way to strengthen it with a wire.

Once the arms are assembled, they look as slick as you’d expect and they bend almost 180 degrees.

The shoulder armor is one of the reasons why this kit has so few parts. Here’s everything piled up and then assembled – very simple stuff. Surprisingly, though, almost everything moves, giving the arms a lot of room. I was a bit miffed by the simplicity here at first, but it’s actually ingenious – none of Bandai’s occasional over-engineering, it’s just simple and does what it needs to do. There’s almost too much moving stuff on here flopping around, if anything.

And here’s what we’ve got so far. It’s not just the angle, by the way, the hands really are a bit too big.

Unlike the shoulder pads, the feet are insanely involved. What you’re looking at in the first picture is one foot/ankle plus all the parts the second one consists of. As you can see in the second picture, though, articulation is really good. These feet do what they’re always trying and failing to do with the RG feet, basically.

Other than the hip joint and exactly one armor piece, the legs are 100% identical. One of my favorite things about them is that the knees don’t seem to completely explode when you bend them 180 degrees. I know people like these shifting armor plates, but on some newer kits it’s really kind of crazy.

Next you build the waist, and then you put it all together. Nothing terribly interesting here, the RX 78-2’s skirts are their usual blocky selves. Note, if it amuses you, that yet again my camera thought the feet had to be in focus. I swear I actually tried to avoid it this time.

And here are two shots of the suit all put together, with and without the accessories. I was having an oddly difficult time getting it to look good in these pictures and I couldn’t figure out why.

The accessories are probably this kit’s biggest weakness. Apparently they’re completely unchanged from the 2.0, and without even having that kit, I just get the feeling that it shows. The beam rifle especially just looks big, blocky and monochromatic, the attachment clip for the shield is silly, and the bazooka… I guess the bazooka’s okay. Honestly, posing up the suit OOB with the beam rifle in its hand, it really looks like the rifle belongs to another kit. It’s just weird. Obviously I decided to remedy this with the ol’ airbrush the second I had snapped it together, but if you’re just going to snapfit and panel line this kit, you’ll be pretty disappointed in the weapons.

Here’s a shot of all the accessories once I got them painted. More on this further down, I just don’t have a picture of them before painting because, uh, I forgot to take one.

I also couldn’t test the LED before painting because I didn’t have the batteries. Here’s what the finished build looks like with it installed.

It works extremely well no matter how you move the head around, I just think it’s really lame that the only LED unit that’s available as a regular, non-P Bandai release is the green one. The eyes are supposed to be yellow and the camera red, so we’d either need an LED in at least one of these colors, or, obviously, a clear one and clear yellow and red pieces for the eyes and camera. It still looks good this way, it’s just not accurate and it bothers me. I’m sure you could mod the LED, but, uh, not me.

After building the kit and giving it some thought, I decided I would actually do the weathering with it mostly assembled. One problem I’ve had with weathering in the past is that because I always paint basically every part separately, I sometimes ended up with things that didn’t make sense or didn’t line up correctly. So this time I went to the other extreme and did it all on the complete kit.

The obvious key advantage of working this way was that I could actually see where the dirt and the scratches were going on the suit, and especially with the numerous small parts, it would have been impossible to do a lot of this convincingly otherwise because there’s streaks and other things going across several parts. The less obvious advantage is that it’s just more fun to work this way because you’re not staring at small pieces of plastic for 20 hours.

The first thing I did was the panel lines, for which I just used a grey Gundam marker. You can pretty much just do a pin wash with these, which works really well on this kit at least when it’s not painted – a lot of the panel lines are really thin and shallow, so I kind of wonder what would happen if you painted the parts first. You might have to scribe them before painting.

Up next were the stickers; I normally wouldn’t use these on something I paint, but I was really curious to see what it would look like to use the stickers here and then do weathering and a topcoat over them. In some places, like the shield and the shoulders, I also damaged them slightly to suggest scratching. As you’d expect, the stickers look totally fine on the white parts, but even with the flat topcoat, there’s visible silvering elsewhere. I promised myself a while ago to experiment more and try more stuff, so I don’t regret doing this, but I’m tracking down waterslide decals from now on, 3rd party if necessary.

Another thing that doesn’t work too well with stickers is drybrushing. I don’t know why I didn’t notice this as it was happening, but as you can see here, when I drybrushed the heat streaking from the chest vent, it ended up highlighting the outline of the sticker. From a distance, it basically reads as heat damage and looks fine, but up close you can tell what happened.

Then I did paint chipping. As usual, I used Tamiya’s chrome silver on the darker parts and gun metal on the lighter ones.

Up close, I really hate these long scratches I tried to do on the chest. They look fine in real life, but magnified like this… not so much. I really need to learn not to go overboard with the paint chipping. And weathering in general, but that’s a whole other problem, ahem.

The foot here looks much more convincing.

The final step was the dirt. I sponged on Tamiya’s brown first, followed by dark grey to knock it back a little and suggest dried dirt in some places. This second step made all the difference in the world to make the dirt look more convincing, and I’m really happy with how it came out.

Finally, I drybrushed some black on the chest, shoulder and head vents and around the vulcans on the head. And then I used the same technique to add these black marks where projectiles would have bounced off or exploded on the shield, which worked out very nicely.

And then I had to pry it all apart again to topcoat it and paint the inner frame. This ended up taking way longer than I expected, and I spent most of the process terrified that I’d break something. Which of course I did, but luckily the damage turned out to be completely invisible on the final product.

I also painted all of the inner frame for the first time. I really couldn’t cut any corners on this one – there’s so many moving armor parts that reveal inner frame underneath that it was easier to just paint everything than spend two hours trying to figure out which parts would be visible and which not. It’s basically all of them anyway. So I painted everything gun metal over Vallejo’s black surface primer, except for the parts that have bronze detail stickers, which obviously I painted with Tamiya’s bronze, but I can’t say I like how that turned out.

The bronze’s a nice color in and of itself and I’m sure I’ll end up using it again on something or other, but against the gun metal of the rest of the inner frame, it’s just too dark and doesn’t pop at all. With hindsight, I should’ve used gold on these parts, but there’s no way I’m ever taking the elbows apart again, so it won’t get fixed.

The gun metal looks good, although I’m always a bit disappointed by what the topcoat does to the metallic sheen. I used semi-gloss as usual (which is why I can never topcoat my kits after final assembly, I just like the effect of shiny and dull parts next to each other too much) and the effect’s still there, but it just never looks as good as before topcoating, and I really can’t imagine leaving these moving parts without a topcoat is a good idea.

I really can’t quite recall why, but at some point I decided that the dark grey of the backpack and the weapons needed to be black with silver drybrushing. In all honesty, I’d forgotten how good this simple combo looks and I’m very happy with how it turned out.

The weapons, of course, also have paint chipping, soot and dirt on them, and I did a wash on the internal mechanical parts of the beam rifle, but I don’t particularly like how that turned out. Because it’s metallic, I didn’t want to use a gloss coat under the wash, and of course that made a mess. It still looks better than without the wash, but not that great.

The sabers also have heat streaks where the beam blades come out because beam sabers generate heat – true science fact. And I did a yellow candy finish on the camera to make it look more like a lens.

One thing I’m definitely doing again is painting the hands. I just painted them gun metal with the fingers straight so that the internal parts of the joints would retain their original color, and it looks really good – certainly much better than the unpainted hands I have on the Sinanju.

Probably the weirdest feature of this kit, to me, is the clear parts that go in the thrusters. I have no idea what these are supposed to represent, so I painted them clear red with silver on the inside, which looks nice and shiny, but now it kinda looks like there’s pieces of candy in the thrusters. I dunno, guys, I tried?

Poseability is very good, although due to the small size of the kit, there’s quite a number of parts that attach with ball joints, most notably the feet. Because I wasn’t being careful enough when I painted these parts, many of them now don’t fit well anymore. The feet in particular keep popping out. Lesson learned for next time – don’t get paint on polycaps, and always mask balljoints and moving pegs.

As you can see, I had a lot of fun playing with this kit for the photoshoot. Other than the problems caused by my painting and general mishandling of the kit, it’s very easy to work with and has basically no parts that fall off when you’re moving things around. The hands hold the weapons perfectly (although getting the kit to hold the bazooka is a bit difficult), and you can pull off all kinds of cool action poses with it.

My only real complaint, if I have one, is that I don’t see what’s “3.0” about this kit. That’s not really a knock on the kit as it is – it’s a good, solid MG that holds together really well. But I just don’t think there’s anything here that’s a significant step up from other MGs I’ve built, it’s just a good kit and that’s that. Seems to me like they just made a new RX 78-2 and decided to call it the 3.0 version because they didn’t know what else to call it – the engineering certainly doesn’t warrant the label.

And because I have to close every build review with a recommendation, I’d say get this if you like the look of it, simple as that. I know some people don’t like this particular interpretation of the RX 78-2 because other versions are more anime accurate, and I don’t think building it yourself will change your mind about that. But if you’re like me and you like the detailed and more realistic look, there certainly isn’t anything wrong with the kit that should make you think twice about buying it.

As for my paintjob, I’m glad I tried a lot of new things here and overall I’m very happy with the result. I originally wanted the weathering to be a bit more subtle, but looking at it now, I actually like it more than I thought I would when I started the build. But exactly because I’m far more enamored with this thing now than I expected to be, the broken elbow joint and the two big errors on the chest piece really bother me, and I’m seriously considering buying another kit just to replace those parts.

Then again, maybe I’ll just leave well enough alone and move on to the next kit. There’s no such thing as a perfect build anyway.