Yeah, um… remember how in my review of the RG Sinanju, I said I probably wouldn’t get any more RG kits? I bought this one like two weeks later. Basically the reasoning was that I really needed to have at least one version of the RX 78-2, and I wasn’t sure I was interested in actually devoting the time necessary to one of the MG versions, so I got this one.

Now the reason I’m writing this blog is basically that this kit changed my mind about both the RX 78-2 and the RG line. Because it’s friggin’ awesome. But it took me a bit to get there.

If you’re wondering why there aren’t any build pics here, aside from the fact that everyone and their grandmother already has this kit anyway, I really thought I wasn’t going to write about it at all. See, about five minutes into the build I applied a little too much pressure to one of the feet trying to clean up the panel lining I’d attempted to do, and the inner frame seriously just exploded on me. I screamed and I cussed and I fixed it with superglue, but at that point I pretty much had my mind made up that I hated this kit and wasn’t going to waste any time taking build pictures for a blog that I wasn’t going to write.

Until I completed it, and now I’m in love with the little guy. It’s just such a great looking kit and unlike others, apparently, I really also have fairly minimal issues with parts falling off – certainly compared to the rickety pile of flimsiness that is the RG Sinanju.

I’m not sure I’d say I enjoyed the build all that much – I still have the same issues that I had with the Sinanju in that I just don’t like working with these incredibly tiny parts, and this one has them in spades, much worse than the Sinanju, actually. It’s insane how small some of this stuff is – sometimes you really have to be careful not to lose a part among the sprue clippings on the table. And yet the detail is sharp and the end result looks fantastic. Just look at the core fighter. This thing is about 1.5 inches long, it’s fully detailed and transformable, and it looks excellent just out of the box. Actually it’s so tiny that I never realized that sticker on the left winglet had peeled off until I looked at it in this picture at about three times its actual size. Oops.

And that’s my segue to talking acessories. You don’t get a whole lot – the rifle, the bazooka, a beam saber with a peg that fits in the hands, two closed fists, and the shield. But it’s all really nice looking – again, just OOB like I’ve decided I’m building all of my RGs. You can also attach the bazooka to the back and the rifle to the shield, so the kit can actually carry both, plus the shield, and still have a hand free to wield the beam saber. Which, by the way, is ridiculously big. I could barely fit it into the picture.

My only complaint here is that the part on the shield that plugs into the arm is way too thin. There’s no friction at all, and it just falls out. It’s actually the hand holding up the shield here. If you want this thing to actually do its job, you’ll have to modify it.

I didn’t use any of the regular foil stickers because fuck those (seriously, they do nothing but look ugly and yes, I’ll probably bring this up in every single Gunpla review), but the kit also comes with a whole bunch of regular clear stickers that have small foil sections that fit on various details. These actually look excellent, and of course because the armor is mostly white and other light colors, there’s also very little silvering. I ended up using all of the stickers on the armor, and between those and the effect of the different shades of off-white, the kit really looks so good that I just don’t feel like it needs any painting. It’s perfect the way it is.

This being the first RG kit, poseability is actually not all that great yet – as you can see, the arms and legs only bend a bit over 90 degrees, and I had a difficult time getting the suit to kneel for that bazooka pose. It’s perfectly serviceable, but not all that impressive. The limbs do already have the sliding armor parts that move out of each other’s way to improve poseability, though.

And I just have to stress again how great this kit looks. The detail is sharp, the proportions are just about perfect, the colors somehow make the simple color scheme look good, just everything about this thing is awesome. You’d think it shouldn’t be possible for a design that’s almost 40 years old to translate into a model kit that can compete with absolutely anything from the modern era of Gundam, but it can. And I don’t really have much of a nostalgic attachment to the original Mobile Suit Gundam show. This is just a damn awesome kit.

Building this kit has also convinced me that I need an MG RX 78-2, and obviously it has to be the 3.0 because I sure do love me the color separation with those different shades of grey and off-white. I may have to actually just build the kit and not do anything but do panel lines and clearcoat everything, but we’ll see what I think once I actually get it out of the box.