I was always interested in the design of the Graze, kinda weird that I held out from buying a kit for it until now. But when I saw this at my usual hobby shop for $12.8, it was enough to convince me to get myself a 1/100 Graze.
Box:
The box is your typical 1/100 IBO boxart. You get the Graze in the front using his axe with rifle in hand, as well as images of the pilots and the units from the show at the bottom.
Parts:
You get 3 grey runners...
...2 green runners...
A multi colored runner, which has a darker shade of green and some yellow parts. The white parts aren't used on the actual kit, but i'll get to that soon. He also comes with an entire runner for the axe, which is quite interesting.
He still comes with a polycap sheet though, so he won't be able to hold as many poses as he could've, oh well.
He finally comes with this bluish grey runner, which are meant to be used with the white parts for a certain "marketing scheme" which I will get to later as well.
He also comes with a foil sticker sheet, which is thankfully not as large as the 1/100 Barbatos's sticker sheet.
Manual
He comes with your average manual, inside it you get instructions, which actually tell you to build the inner frame first, which makes it easier for me as I don't have to go on dalong for references using frame pictures now. You also get a part count as well as the color guide.
Inner Frame:
The inner frame is very simple as expected. The difficulty of the build is only marginally harder than an HG. It looks good enough and it's overall accurate to the Graze frame that's never shown in the show, and I overall think it's a good one.
Frame Articulation:
The neck is actually on two ball joints, one that connects the head to the neck, and another one that connects the neck to the body. So you actually get some really nice hear articulation with this guy.
The sensor on his head is on a ball joint as well, meaning that the sensor can actually move around! I
really like this gimmick, I love it when monoeyes move around, be it a Zaku, or this.
The torso has a hinge that moves outwards and a little bit backwards. This combined with the ball joint for the shoulder gives him quite nice forward movement.
His arm has a bicep swivel, and elbow is on about a single jointed 155˚ bend, which is quite average bend, and a good one for a single joint. He doesn't need more, but more is always good.
His torso can also go backwards and forwards for an abcrunch. It can also turn around decently well.
Notice that there are pistons in this waist area, these actually do work and move, which is a nice detail.
His waist is surprisingly limited, giving you only some outward movement.
His knees are double jointed, so you can get some nice movement with the legs, as well as a swivel at the thigh.
His ankle rockers are also extremely impressive.
Overall, the inner frame is really posable, and I really mean it when I say that.
Completed Product:
He looks quite good I would say. He's simple and doesn't show much color separation OOB, but he is a grunt suit, and the colors are completely anime accurate. Still, you'll at least want to bring a black marker for him, grey won't be very noticeable with the green and grey that he's molded in. He'd benefit from any detail really though.
The large armor pieces for the head combined with the part that you put on his chests limits head movement quite a bit. This is as far as you can go for looking up, which is honestly not that much.
His head does have a gimmick that allows his head to split and reveal his sensor, which can still move. However, it's very hard to move the sensor with the armor on, so you'll probably want to remove said armor parts when you want to move the sensor. Still a cool gimmick though.
His new shoulderpads do indeed limit upwards shoulder articulation, and his armor parts do hinder his elbow movement down to about 120˚, not too limited, however it is slightly noticeale.
His waistskirts and sideskirts do heavily impact the already bad waist articulation, in total giving him sub-par waist movement, which is a bit disappointing.
His ankle rockers are also not nearly as great compared to his frame's rockers. His armor does hinder him quite a bit, but the same can be said for most IBO kits.
Accessories:
You get everything that you'd expect to come with a 1/100 Graze and more, let me go into more detail with each them.
First you get an alternate head part with the commander's antenna, which allows you to display the kit as the Graze Commander Type. A very minor difference and works perfectly the same. But in the show apparently it's performance is better. Just paint him red and better would become 3x better.
He also gets a pair of open hands, which look more natural than the 1/100 holding fist hands when posing in a neutral pose, as due to it being 1/100 scale instead of 1/144, the gap between the fists are quite noticable. Still, i'm glad Bandai included these, something that Bandai should really do with recent HG's, as they've been coming only with the holding fist hands to save costs. Stop trying to hoard as much cash as possible and think more about your customers Bandai!
He gets booster parts that can be put on the suit in two different ways.
For the ground use booster, you'll need to use a grey part and put the boosters on.
Then you just plug it into the holes on the backskirt.
Then boom! Ground use boosters are equipped and active.
For space use, you'll need these two parts instead, and put them onto their respective pieces. They aren't just the same part however, and one part is used for a certain side.
You just plug it into the boosters in the back and make him fly.
I also forgot to mention that the thrusters can move a bit.
For weapons, you get his Battle Axe, which is a nice size and looks quite good.
You also get his rifle, but his shoulders can't really support the weight of it due to the polycap. Thankfully, there are two ways to help with this.
You can switch the regular barrel for a much shorter one to convert the rifle to the short rifle.
He also comes with a hinged second handle like most other rifles in the Gundam universe. So that can help with weight issues.
Remember those white and blueish grey parts? Well, they are the armor parts to make the crudely repaired version of the Barbatos's arm. So if you have the 1/100 Barbatos, you can take his normal left arm armor, replace it with these parts and remove the shoulders to downgrade him to his first form. Bandai did this to further market the kit, so people would buy it for the armor if they already bought the 1/100 Barbatos. It's kind of a cool addon if you have the 1/100 Barbatos and wanted the Graze as well, however I do not recommend buying the kit just for this bit armor. It's just Bandai trying to market their kits more to earn more green.
Also, if you take off the shoulders of the Graze, you can put them on the 1/100 Barbatos to turn it into his second form. You don't have to paint it, but you will have to if you must have it completely anime accurate. However, you should note that you're cannibalising the Graze to do so, and painting them would make them non-anime accurate for the Graze. So what would I have to do if I wanted to display them both, you ask? Well, you'll have to buy 2 1/100 Grazes, which was probably another marketing stunt of Bandai to sell more kits. I am honestly getting a bit annoyed of Bandai's recent sneaky methods to sell kits, and wish that they would just go back and continue making more MG's instead of messing around to try and earn more cash than they already have. *sigh*
Gimmicks:
You can pop open his read calf armor to reveal thrusters.
The pistons in his torso deserve another mention, and so do the opening head panels and moving sensor.
Verdict:
The 1/100 Graze is a nice kit. It's very simple, about the same difficulty and simplicity as an HG, and about the quality of a RE/100. But in my opinion, instead of making it a NG, they should've just made it a RE/100 as it is essentially one. The only difference being the IBO inner frame for marketing purposes. This is slightly more complex than the HG version though and comes with a lot more detail and gimmicks. So it's not just an upscaled HG, which would be bad as the large size would make less detailed surface make the actual kit look bland. This is no MG though, so don't expect any complexities in the build or tones of gimmicks and moving parts. The kit doesn't fail in much, but doesn't accomplish much either, overall giving you a very mediocre, solid kit. Overall, i'd recommend it if you like simple builds, cheap kits, or if you're a 1/100 scale purist, as I doubt we'd ever get an MG from this guy.
Pros:
-Solid Build.
-Inner Frame is quite articulate.
-Not many stickers used.
Cons:
-Polycaps make kit a bit loose in places.
-Leg articulation is greatly limited by ankles and skirts.
-Most stickers that are used are on curved surfaces.
Neutral:
-Simple, quick build.
-Barbatos arm parts.
No comments:
Post a Comment