I was originally going to hold off on posting anything about this kit before I finish it, but I did want to do a full build review, and I ended up taking so many pictures that I figure it’s probably better to break this up into two or more blog posts. We’ll start with this build review, and then I’ll probably do a more in-depth review of the OOB kit and ultimately a discussion of my paintjob, whenever that’s finished.

Note: as usual, that plan lasted about as long as it took for it to come in contact with the real world. I finally finished painting this kit almost a year later, and you can check it out here.

Anyway, the PG Strike came out in 2004, so it’s no spring chicken anymore, but after having snapped it together, I have to say it holds up fine. Since it’s over a decade old, it seems to predate most Gunpla blogs and Youtube channels out there, and there aren’t nearly as many reviews as of more recent kits. All the more reason for me to give you a detailed look at it, of course.

The box isn’t much bigger than the MG Sazabi Ver. Ka’s, and with the Unicorn being the only other PG under my belt, I was a bit surprised by the low parts count. It’s been a while since I built the Sazabi, but the two kits are probably similar in complexity. The Strike is hardly a daunting build, it’s just big because it’s 1/60.

I won’t bore you with a detailed play-by-play of all the sprues, let’s just look at what’s interesting from today’s perspective. For one, you get three die-cast parts that go in the legs and the hip. Apparently they used these a lot more often in earlier PGs, but I don’t quite understand what they’re for. Probably to make the joints tighter, but I wonder if they don’t just destroy the polycaps in the long run.

The yellow bag contains the parts you need to assemble the LED unit because apparently there were no pre-assembled LED units in 2004, and the chrome plated sprue has the blade for the preposterously named “Grand Slam” sword and a bunch of pistons that are all over the kit, but mostly hidden under its armor.

You also get two manuals. The “construction manual” is the one with the actual building instructions. The other one has the guide for the stickers and a whole bunch of Japanese text and artwork detailing the suit’s features and (I assume) its backstory. It also has a page that seems to say that the Sword Striker and the Launcher Striker are forthcoming, but as we know by now, that never happened. The kit does have what appears to be attachment points for them on its shoulders, though.

The first thing you build is the feet. It was kind of a recurring theme for me during this build that the kit reminded me of RGs in some ways, and this was one of them. You put together the the jointed inner frame, then you add the armor to it. Note the nice color separation on the underside of the feet.

These red parts snapped together with a really violent click, though, and I’m more than a bit worried about what’s going to happen when I try to take them apart for painting. One of the ways you can tell this kit is old is the much harder plastics used and the tight parts fit in a lot of places.

Up next are the legs, which are by far the most complex and also the best part of this kit. For some reason I got it in my head that I wanted to cut all the parts off the sprues before I assembled them, and I ended up with this.

Ulp. And this isn’t even everything, of course I forgot some stuff.

The first thing you do is sandwich one of the die-cast parts in between two plastic halves for the knee. You can see the shiny metal in the middle there. Looks neat, but I don’t know how I’m going to paint this.

Next you attach the upper thigh to the knee. It contains this fairly complicated hinge mechanism that allows the armor plates to shift out of the way of the knee so that it can do a full 180 degree bend. Another way the kit seems a bit like a precursor to the RG line.

It already looks pretty cool here, but wait’ll you see it with the armor attached.

Next is the lower part of the knee assembly with a mechanism that’ll allow the knee armor to move around when it’s attached.

Note the frankly insane amount of surface detail on the inner frame. Sadly, 90% of this gets covered up by armor, and it’s also crazy shallow, making it difficult to paint. At this point, I’m not sure what I’m going to do with all this yet. The easy copout solution would be to paint it black and then drybrush silver all over it so that at least the detail will pop, but we’ll see.

This is the assembly of the shin and ankle. These two long parts that are pointing outward in the fourth picture then fold down and attach to ball joints on the ankle, which makes them move up and down when you move the ankle side to side. It’s quite striking (haha) in real life because the entire lower leg seems to be in motion when you move the ankle, but in static pictures, it kind of loses its impact. There’s also an opening flap on the back and a hydraulic piston. In fact, the shin is more complicated than the upper thigh. as it has moving parts on all four sides.

And then you plug the legs together. Up until this point, they’re actually identical. The only difference between them is the direction in which the hip joint is attached and one armor piece in the back.

Oddly enough, the hip joints are more or less cube shaped. With my spotty knowledge of Gunpla history, I find myself wondering at which point it became standard for these to be spherical. They tuck in between the armor parts rather nicely, anyway.

Here’s a look at the knee bend. Note how the knee armor first pops out, then moves backwards to become flush with the leg again at full bend. This works 100% smoothly, and it looks fantastic. You also have to love the overall patterning of the white and off-white armor with the dark inner frame showing in the gaps… like you’d expect on an RG today.

Unsurprisingly, the waist unit and the skirts are a far more simple affair than the legs. The skirts generally consist of about four parts each, including the side ones with the opening hatch to store the knives.

What’s really disappointing to me is that for some reason the vent on the side skirts is molded into the white armor and not into the grey inner frame part behind it like on the other skirts. That seems like a really weird oversight. I’ll just paint this, but it’ll be a pain – the vent is almost a centimeter deep. Sigh.

The waist unit also contains the final die-cast piece to form one of these moving hip joint mechanisms that never made much sense to me.

Up next is the torso. Spoiler alert: this was the one part of the build that I did not enjoy.

It starts out interesting enough as you build it basically from the inside out, beginning with the cockpit seat. The seat can slide forward and has a screen in front of it that folds up and down.

Once this section is done, though, there’s problems. You next build the shoulder joints, basically, which attach via these slits seen on the side above.

And while these look nice what with the four chromed pistons and they also work very well once you have them on, parts fit here is a disaster. Basically, one of them was so loose that I was wondering if it was meant to slide up and down as part of the kit’s articulation, and then I tried to put the other one on, which was so tight that I had to shave off some plastic to even get it to fit.

I kind of mixed up the next few steps. What you see here is the front cockpit hatch and then the chest armor, basically, which slides over two clear pieces (that end up being more or less invisible, like so much of the cool detail on this kit) to form part of that distinctive looking Camaro chest grill. What, I’m not the only one who thinks the Strike looks like a Camaro, right? Guys? You guys?

Uh, anyway, I don’t think this is the order you’re supposed to do it in according to the instructions, but what I did next was assemble and attach the lower half of the torso, seen here first without and then with the armor on.

This section was damn near impossible to put together, which is why I forgot to take a picture of it separately. I don’t know if I just screwed something up, but basically it consists of two halves with a polycap and a hard plastic cap wedged between them, and absolutely nothing fits. I squeezed, I cursed, I took it apart about five times to check whether I’d done something wrong, and then I just shaved off plastic until it would close up well enough to clip the white armor pieces on it.

The waist joint is still holding up fine, so I didn’t end up destroying anything, but I was pretty concerned that I would. I’m not sure if this is my fault or the kit’s, but it sucked.

The last thing that goes on is what I decided is the backpack, and then you attach the torso to the legs. The proportions are a bit exaggerated because of the camera angle here, but the Strike does have extremely long legs for its torso.

And yeah, I know that’s not a backpack, and I know there’s nothing there because it’s where the Aile Striker goes, but it amused me to think of this as the backpack because it’s a Gundam and they all have backpacks.

On to more pleasant business: the head!

The first thing you’re likely to discover is that the eye piece is actually on the same sprue as the hands, and it comes pre-molded in grey and clear plastic. Since I always have a difficult time getting the eye stickers on straight, I thought this was a great idea for about ten seconds. Then I realized it’s just about impossible to paint the grey plastic here to match whatever I’m going to do with the inner frame.

Then there’s the assembly of the LED unit, which the instructions expect you to get right based on a picture that looks like it was photocopied in 1985. It also doesn’t work too well, to be honest. Maybe I assembled it wrong, but it seems to require a good bit of pressure on the battery to get the contacts to work, and even after bending them outward a bit, it still turns on and off randomly.

You assemble the inner parts of the head, and the LED unit fits right in there with its power switch sticking out the back. Sadly, the switch is covered up once you get the armor on, so you have to take that armor piece off to switch on the LED. It certainly looks better this way, though, and honestly, I don’t know how people really use these light-up gimmicks. You can’t leave the batteries in there anyway, they’ll leak and destroy the kit.

Note also that the vulcans are separate parts, which seems excessive given the lack of parts separation in the side skirts mentioned above, but I guess if you want to paint them a different color from the rest, it’s easy enough to do.

And here’s the head all done with the LED lit up. I must say, it’s a very nice-looking head. Tbe LED isn’t anywhere near as bright as the current units, but it does a decent enough job of lighting up both the eyes and the camera.

For some reason the instructions tell you to build the weapons at this point, which I didn’t do because I’m not crazy. Everyone knows the weapons are supposed to be the thing you realize you still need to do when you think you’re done. And why would I build weapons for a suit that doesn’t have arms? What madness is this? And why am I asking so many rhetorical questions?

So anyway, I skipped ahead to the shoulder armor. Nothing too complicated here – everything opens and moves, but the construction is fairly simple. You will have to glue those flaps on the front and back to their hinges, though, they don’t stay attached at all.

With the arms, I took the same route as with the legs and cut all the parts off the sprues before I started. They’re actually pretty complex as well, but as you can see, the parts count is considerably lower. I also had Kira Yamato stand there for the picture because this deep into a build, strange things amuse me. Note that the miniature stands up perfectly without a base.

The Kira miniature is actually really cool and I’m half thinking I might try to paint it. We’ll see. I do suck at miniature painting, so there’s that.

Assembly of the arms starts with the shoulder joints, which are also cube shaped.

Next is this hinge mechanism that goes inside the biceps and then attaches to the elbow. As you can probably guess, its purpose is to make the armor plates move out of the way to allow for more articulation, and as you should also be able to guess by now, this not only works beautifully, but also looks fantastic.

You then assemble the lower half of the arm, which is… jointed in the middle. With pistons. Not anatomically accurate if we’re looking for human anatomy, but it does allow the hands more room to maneuver than the stupid ball joints that every Gundam’s hands are mounted on, so it definitely helps, especially with some sword poses.

Here’s a look at the completed arms with and without armor, and at the elbow bend. I don’t know about you, but when the arm’s bent all the way, it looks to me like it’s been taken apart and reassembled. It’s so cool how everything on these limbs shifts and moves.

Next we have the hands. I don’t have much to say about them other than I’m still not, and never will be, a fan of fully articulated hands on Gunpla kits. The PG ones manage to look sort of okay because of their size, but even these have this weird gap between the palm and the first finger segment that just looks spindly and stupid. On the plus side, the Strike’s hand armor comes in two pieces, one of which moves slightly, and they’re different colors.

And yes, that is the hand gesture that you think it is.

Here’s the Strike Gundam all snapped up, waiting for his weapons. Unlike with the MG RX 78-2, for some reason, I had no trouble at all getting a good picture of this guy. He looks great from just about any angle.

Anyway, on to the accessories. I was pretty dismayed when I started on the beam rifle because it seems to largely consist of just two halves that you snap together.

But then you realize that the additional outer casing parts actually cover up most of it, so there’s enough parts separation to make painting this in a reasonably interesting way easy enough, and most of the seamline gets covered up as well. It actually looks ok on the barrel, too, for some reason.

Fun tidbit: the trigger is a separate part. It doesn’t move. It’s just a separate part.

Also, there’s a little grenade in the launcher that you can take out. Take that, Sinanju.

Then there’s the Grand Slam sword, which only has the second dumbest name out of the accessories you get with this kit.

It’s absolutely gigantic, but honestly, I’m not a huge fan of this thing. The handle looks… well, like nothing, really, and while the coating on the blade certainly does what it’s supposed to do, it also means this thing’ll be a problem to paint if I want to do some weathering on it, for example. And the blade is slightly bent, probably as a result of the coating process.

I’ve just never been a real big fan of giant blades on mecha. I like swords and knives fine in other contexts, but why would the Strike Gundam swing around a surfboard blade the size of a house if beam sabers exist?

Speaking of blades, here are the “Armor-Schneiders”.

I can’t type that without snickering. See, German is my first language, and yeah, “Schneider” does translate to cutter, but it also means tailor, and like the English word, it’s a very common last name, and it just sounds like about the last thing you’d pick as a threatening, cool name for a knife. I’m sorry, but I guess my own language just doesn’t sound scary to me no matter how many bad WW2 movies I watch. Your mileage may vary.

A more objectively observable problem with these things is that they come pre-assembled on the sprue with the hands, which has zero benefits other than the fact that they’ll be a pain in the ass to paint and nub removal, as you can see, was a problem too. I don’t understand why this was done at all. Two parts for the handles, one for the blade, and they could’ve been on one of the grey sprues. I may just ignore these when I paint the kit, to be honest.

The shield goes together about how you’d expect. It has a little moving blast shield part for the slit, an attachment mechanism for the arm and a handle, plus some very nice red/yellow color separation. I really like that there’s a clear part in the slit – I’ll be doing some battle damage to that.

The attachment piece actually clicks into an opening mechanism on the back of the elbow, which works extremely well, and you can attach it either behind or on the side of the arm. It’s extremely well thought out, and because the suit also has similar contraptions on top of the shoulder armor, it doesn’t look out of place at all.

And we’re done. Yes, I posed him with the sword I just said I don’t like. What you can’t see here is that you can also attach the rifle to the… let’s say the belt, as with most Gundams. It attaches very firmly, and between that and storing the Armor *snicker* Schneiders in the side skirts, the Strike can actually carry all of its equipment. Would’ve been cool if there had been a way to mount the sword and/or the shield on the back, though.

Now I’ve complained about a few things here and there, but make no mistake, the verdict on this kit is a resounding “buy this fucking thing.” For a PG, it’s relatively cheap, and despite being well over a decade old at this point, the engineering holds up 100%. I can only imagine how this kit must’ve blown everyone’s minds back in 2004. It also really doesn’t look dated at all – there’s a very modern sleekness to the overall appearance of the kit. The MG FAZZ, for example, came out only a few years before, but the kits look like they’re a decade apart. I really came away from this build thinking this kit must’ve been way ahead of its time.

Where it does show its age is in some odd choices when it comes to parts/color separation and the occasional parts fit problem where it suddenly feels like a Kotobukiya kit. As of this writing, I haven’t tried to take apart the inner frame yet, but I know it’s going to take forever, and I very much fear I’ll break something. But then again, the parts fit isssues are really only in the torso – everything else is fantastic, and the legs in particular are incredibly fun to build.

And when it’s all put together, you have a version of the Strike Gundam that’s about as poseable as it’s beautiful. I keep staring at it and I can’t find a single square inch that I’d change. Everything about it looks great.

So that’s it for the snapfit. As I said at the top, I’ll probably do a more in-depth review of the kit in OOB condition with a pose photoshoot. It’s likely going to be a while until I paint it – I’m still waiting to get the Skygrasper kit, and I kind of want to see the Gundam with the Aile Striker attached before I finalize any decisions on color choices and weathering. Plus everytime I look at the damn thing, I want to play with it. Did I mention I really like this kit? Because I do. I really like this kit.