| HGUC
1/144 MSN-00100 Hyaku Shiki
Series: High Grade Universal Century (HGUC) 1/144 Title: MSN-00100 Hyaku Shiki Release Date: 10/1999 Suggested Price: ¥ 1500 No. of Parts: 93 + polycaps + paper stickers Plastic colors: red, yellow, gray, bluish white Gimmicks: gold finish, clay bazooka, beam rifle, beam sabers (2)
Contributor: Elliott "Hiddenpower" Solomon Date: January 15, 2004 Woah, be careful when you open the box when you buy this kit, you might be blinded by the reflected light.
This head suffers from a couple of problems; most notably the fact that it has very obvious seam lines down the top of the head, which are made even worse by the contrast with the gold finish of the kit. The faceplate, and the part that goes around it are all molded separately so as to hide the marks where it has been cut and it does this fairly well, but there is no effort at all to hide the two cut marks that you get inevitably across the back of the mohawk sensor. Also this kit doesn't come with a sticker for the front camera, which I would say is essential considering the huge seam line across it which makes the head look terrible. Overall it has an average range of motion.
This is very nice indeed, the torso has great mobility and is jointed at the abdomen so it can twist independently of the lower torso. The skirt armor is very poseable at the front but on the sides it can't move more than about 10 degrees, which restricts the poses you can do with it. The backpack is beautiful with separate red parts for the power transfer cables and fully poseable binders. One problem with the binders though is that they get in the way of the shoulders and stops them from moving as freely as they could were the binders not there, which means you have to remove them to twist the arm to the correct position if you want it to pose with arms about the head.
Very nice poseability but again there's the problem with seam lines and the cutting marks. Though the makers have done well to hide the joints in the arm so you can't see the polycaps. The hands aren't the regular ball joint configuration but instead have pegs and a polycap that only rotates about one axis, this means it reduces the number of ways you can hold the weapons but increases their stability. The hands themselves aren't the standard HGUC ones made out of a polycap-like material but plastic ones with a removable back plate on them to put weapons in. The problem is Bandai only included 3 sets of hands; two regular gripped ones for sabers, and only one right-handed trigger hand for the beam rifle, which kinda sucks.
These are great compared to the rest of they kit, most of the seam lines are beautifully hidden as are cutting marks which shows the great foresight that the rest of the kit lacks. The knee on this kit is double-jointed, allowing for some great poses and, if it wasn't for the awkward side skirts on the skirt armor, it could knee quite easily. The feet don't show the seam lines as much as other parts, which is surprising, and the cutting marks are all hidden away out of sight.
Nice little gimmicks here, first we have the clay bazooka, which is a simple two part mold but it fits snugly and doesn't show it's seam lines that easily. The beam rifle is also molded in two parts and the top power cables need some painting to look like they should. The two beam sabers are nicely molded in clear plastic for a realistic look, but it's all clear plastic, including the handle, which means breaking out more paint. For the saber handles and the beam rifle I'd recommend using a gold Gundam marker unless you can easily get hold of some gold paint, in which case you don't need my recommendations :p
While the engineering that went into this kit was a little lackluster, the gold finish just drowns out any problems with the kit and you can hardly see any of the problems I mentioned without looking at the kit closely. I'd say it's well worth the buy for the gold finish, and from what I'm told it's a better value than its MG counterpart. Overall Rating: 4 out of 5 stars <<back to Gundam |
