A huge line up of retail announcement has descended upon us this week

HELLO!

Welcome back! We are back again this week with our 78th edition of our Let’s Talk Gunpla segment! This week we are looking at some VERY interesting retail announcement this week, not to mention we as well are looking at a pretty HUGE list of announcements too this week. As we look at this huge list of retail announcements, we felt that it would be better for us to make this to two parts, since really there is just so much awesome here to just do in one go. Honestly, all with all the awesome line up of kits that Bandai had in store for all of us at the start of next year… It would really be insane of us to try to talk about it all at one time.

Plus as we were looking at this long list of upcoming awesome kits, we are starting to think that the Retail side as well looked to have some pretty interesting kits coming at the start of 2019.

So without further ado, let us get into the retail announcements, shall we?

HG 1/144 FD-03 Gustav Karl (Unicorn Version) (HGUC)

Release Date: 2019/02

Estimated price: JPY 2,040* (MYR RM 75.13 / USD $ 18.01 *)

*The price is subject to change, depending on the situation

This is one that we can honestly say since its reveal earlier this year and up until its official announcement this week, is a kit that we really didn’t expect to see to be brought to life.

For something that was, in our opinion first introduced in the Hathaway Flash novels, we really didn’t expect to see the Gustav Karl finally being made into an HGUC kit, though. Honestly, we thought that we would be seeing the Penelope or Ξ Gundam to see the light of day first before this kit. But thanks to the small role it had in the Unicorn series, we get to see this being made first before the other two Gundams. Though the only thing that it did during the anime was getting its ass kicked, but really if it didn’t get the screen time we might not be able to see it in its awesome glory here.

But we really do hope that if this does well enough, we might inspire Bandai to finally make the Penelope Gundam or the Ξ Gundam into a proper gunpla form.

Anyways, enough talking let us go back to the kit itself.

Well if we have to be honest, it really looked quite impressive. It’s bulky, it’s huge and at the same time, it looked quite familiar, well in a very GM Quell + GP02 kind of way. I don’t think that this might be one kit that people would struggle to make up their minds with when they see this awesome piece of plastic and despite we hoping that this would do well, if we were, to be frank, by looking at the looks alone? I don’t think it would struggle to sell.

Not to mention too, the HGUC Gustav Karl’s price is quite reasonable too. Though the look and the price is not the only thing that impresses us when we take a look at this awesome thing. There is more…

Like for instance, when we all take a look at the HGUC Gustav Karl’s leg section. When we all saw it, we all were quite concerned, because, with our previous experience with huge HGUC kits, huge armor bits on the leg leads to limited moveability on the legs. However, as we learn more about the kit, it doesn’t seem like that might be the case here with the HGUC Gustav Karl.

Since it looks like Bandai realized this and they addressed this issue with giving it a pretty sweet joint on the HG Gustav’s lag unit. The improvements that were made did address our biggest concern with the kit. and honestly, we weren’t expecting Bandai to address this issue when we saw it. Right after when we saw what Bandai did to this, it made us a lot more excited to get the HG Gustav Karl and really making us look forward to see how it would work in IRL. We aswell liked all the awesome things that were included with the kit, especially when we saw that awesome shoulder shield mechanism on the HGUC Gustav Karl! We always like this particular feature, since it does make the MS look a lot cooler then it needs to be, not to mention we do think that is a very practical equipment to be included on any MS.

Honestly, this is really one retail kit that we are looking forward to getting our hands on next year.

HG 1/144 AMX-104 R-Jarja (HGUC)

Release Date: 2019/01

Estimated price: JPY 1,615* (MYR RM 59.48* / USD $ 14.26*)

*The price is subject to change, depending on the situation

Out of all the kits that were announced this week this is the only one HG kit that honestly? We really don’t know that we wanted it till we saw it being announced this week officially under the retail banner.

Well, the reason for this is that even though the R-Jarja is a cool looking MS, but we don’t think that they made the MS look cool in the whole ZZ Gundam anime. No, it isn’t because of the quality of the animation of the time, but it was more like they made the R-Jarja looked, kind of goofy and weak throughout the anime.

So yeah, we weren’t that thinking of wanting to see an HGUC R-Jarja being made.

However that all changed when we finally get to see this kit in its all glorious HG form, as the one that we see here. Regardless of what we know, honestly the look of the R-Jarja is really what got all of us here got pretty excited for it.

Seriously why wouldn’t you be? It seriously looks fucking brilliant this. The red and yellow color scheme really works well here, as well it does look like all the HG R-Jarja is able to pull off the action poses the same as we’ve seen in the anime. We admit from what we see from the promotional pictures, the kit so far is looking pretty impressive to us.

Though it must be said that, we were a bit concerned when saw the shoulder armor gimmick. Why? Well, we were a bit concerned about how it would work in real life..since the shoulder armor is designed to swivel around like that, that it might not be not as tight as the rest of the kit.

Then again we do realize that we can’t confirm this yet since we do have to wait till we get to see more of it next year. But regardless of our worries on the matter, we do admit that isn’t really something that would really stop us from getting this awesome piece of plastic art.

Because really…we were quite taken by how badass this kit looked. Even though in reality the R-Jarja is quite…shit.

but at least it had the look, isn’t that all we really needed an HG kit to be?

Moving on…

Figure-Rise Standard Build Divers Diver Ayame

Release Date: 2019/03

Estimated price: JPY 2,040* (MYR RM 75.13* / USD $ 18.01*)

*The price is subject to change, depending on the situation

Finally, we get to last bit of this weeks Let’s talk Gunpla segment and to close we are going to be talking about a Figure-Rise Standard Divers Diver Ayame. Yes, the one kit that a lot of people that we’ve talked to have been looking forward to getting.

Honestly, before we decided on talking about this kit, we actually were kind of hovering in between talking about the awesome looking MG Sinanju Stein Narrative Version and this. But since we do have some pretty strong feelings about this particular Figure-Rise Standard kits that are based on Gundam anime characters we decided to be talking about this kit this week and move the MG Sinanju Narrative Version next week.

What strong feelings that you guys have there over this kit?

Well to put it simply? We honestly adore how the Bandai made the Diver Ayame looked. We do think that it looks surprisingly good, though it might not have a huge line of weapons or equipment’s as seen with the previously released Diver Nami. But as soon as we saw how good this looked, we kind of understand why this was highly requested by a lot of people right after the release of the Diver Nami.

Also, because it doesn’t have a huge repertoire of weapons and equipment it does kind of explain why the kit is a bit cheaper than the Diver Nami. But it is not to say that she doesn’t come with any weapons, she does. She does come with a throwing knife, Yes, she only gets a kunai, nothing more.

Though we wonder as we looked at this kit if the Figure-Rise Standard kits can be equipped with weapons from any of the existing Gunplas…hmm.

Regardless, we all do think that this is a pretty interesting kit that and we are really looking forward to getting. We do hope that in the near future we might be seeing more Gundam anime characters being made into kits like this and hopefully that Bandai would do more Figure-Rise kits based on other Gundam series characters.

Really we want to see more characters being made into the Figure-Rise Standard kits, honestly, we feel like that would really be really exciting if they do venture off there.

Because honestly, we do hope that they’ll do Char and Amuro Figure-Rise kit so we can recreate the dueling scene with both of them together. Really all of us here would be interested to see that happen one day.

Or they could give us more Fumina. Actually, when we think about it…all we really want is to have more Fumina kits.

Because really Fumina is really the best girl.

With that ends our 78th episode of our Let’s Talk Gunpla segment and our first part of a two-part retail release announcement of this week! We are looking forward to talk about more of the retail releases, but to be honest even the ones that we are covering this week are looking really promising. We really can’t wait to talk about the others for the next week’s segment! 😀

And there is still a lot of AWESOME kits to look forward to! 😀

Anyways, we will be back with more Let’s Talk Gunpla Segment and to continue talking about more Retail kits on the next coming Wednesday and hopefully, this week Kimi will be back again this Sunday with the review for the HG 1/144 ZGMF-X099T Dom Trooper. So, do look forward to that.

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Anyways, we shall see all of you again next week, and we hope that you all have an awesome week and weekend ahead! Have an awesome Gunpla building time there as well and until next time!

Ciao!