Master Grade 1:100 Wing Gundam

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Finally! The first Gundam I bought all those years ago when Gundam was shown on Toonami and was cool and popular now has a pwoper awesome master grade!
The first Wing Gundam I ever had was 1:144 scale, the colours were nothing like the real thing... before and after I tried to paint it. It fell apart after a while due to the many many times I transformed it. It was... It was pretty bad, I'm not gonna lie.
This, however... Oh man, this is amazing. The build was great; there was no point at which I thought, "Ok... getting booored noooow..." It was a lot of fun putting this guy together. I was also very impressed at the complexity of the build; it was on a par with my Unicorn and, I won't lie, it was a lot more interesting to build and a lot less of a pain. There were no annoying bits that didn't like to stay and kept popping off unless coerced gently but firmly to click into place...
The colours are nice and vibrant and pretty anime accurate too; you've got the standard bright red, a nice dark navy blue, a bright yellow with a hint of orange and a nice clean white. It's got a really nice lean, slender feel to the mould without suffering any weakness. It's a good, strong, sturdy model that has no trouble holding pretty much any pose. It's uber posable; the articulation on this bad boy is fantastic. With an action base you could pull off some seriously impressive poses. And I really like the wings; they have such a wide range of positions, it's great for aerial poses. The joint strength of this kit is brilliant, something that really impressed me; combining the low weight of the limbs with good joint strenght leads me to believe that everything's going to stay nice and solid for quite some time. There are really only two slight niggles; the arms like to pop off at the shoulders if you play about with them too much, but that's forgivable. The shoulders are also brilliantly articulated as you're able to pop them forward and bring the arm right out and accross the front. Also, the wrists are a little loose and wobbly, but that's nothing major; that could be corrected with a smudge of super glue over the ball joint.
The Wing Gundam has a fairly large rifle and you might think that, with slightly loose wrists, it would have issues there. However, the yellow claws on the arms incorporate a lovely little design feature: they clip onto the back of the rifle, keeping it locked and steady. Without them there would be rifle drooping issues...
It also comes with the mandatory beam sabre and the shield has a brilliant little feature to store the sabre handle. In the anime, the sheild would split open and the sabre would pop out and they've incorporated this design into the model. It works so well; it's a tiny little addition but it just adds to the overall awesomeness of the kit.
I didn't do anything major to this kit. I did some panel lining, but there wasn't a lot of grooves to ink which is always a positive. The original Gundam Wing series kits were covered in grooves, lines and the kits look pretty intense when inked. This is much better. For decals I used a few of the dry rub transfers on the wings, but I used mainly the clear stickers; some from the sheet for this kit and some gleaned from leftover sticker sheets from other models.
The final feature of this kit is the transformation into Neo-Bird mode. It's a nice transformation, although it does cause some slight problems. You have to rotate the waist 360 degrees and that tends to cause the side front and back skirts to pop off which can be a bit of a pain. But, once everything's changed around and the transformation's finished it holds very well; nothing flops about or wobbles which is great. It looks great, holds together really well. It's a generally brilliant mobile armour mode; puts a lot of Gundam's mobile armour modes to shame.

Overall, this is an awesome kit and I have nothing at all to complain about. It looks fantastic; it's a little more slender than it would have been in the anime, but that's in no way a negative point. There were practically no loose parts that needed gluing. In fact the only piece I glued was the v-fin/ forehead jewel. I'm so glad that we're finally getting some Gundam Wing master grades. The Wing Gundam, then the Deathscythe Ver Ka. (even though they're calling it the Endless Waltz version... ¬_¬). Hopefully we'll get a Shenlong master grade soon... And I really don't mind if it's the ver ka.

End geek mode.