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Welcome to Vector Productions
A Gunpla Blog Featuring Custom and Straight Builds!

Sunday, March 2, 2014

HG Masurao: Review

Tonight I will be giving my thoughts on the High Grade Masurao from Gundam 00!  The first completely unique suit that pilot Graham Aker piloted in the anime, the Masurao was very samurai inspired and I have always loved this design.  Now, giving that the pilot is one of my favorites and I enjoy the look of this mobile suit so much, then you'd likely conclude that I would love the model of it right....well in the end that's only partially accurate.  Lets go over this more.


Alright so lets start with the head.  Very excellent construction and parts separation here.  The two antennas can rotate back and forth.  And the front face mask is removable so that you can see the face of the Flag underneath if you so choose to display it that way, however painting is required in order to achieve this.  I had no problems with this area of the kit at all, and in fact it is one of my favorite parts of the model.  I did mess up on the orange that I painted on the hidden face but in the end it wasn't nearly that bad.

The torso is pretty well done.  The construction is anything but standard, but that's due to the way the Flags, etc were designed anyways.  The shoulder sockets move decently enough to help the arms make the iconic "crossed" pose from the anime.  The middle of the torso can also open up, which I believe is a gimmick left over from the HG Susanowo but I haven't built that kit yet so I cannot say for sure.  Overall I didn't have any complaints on this section and I really like the way my paint job turned out on this too.

The waist...is one of the most simple builds I've ever seen on an HG kit.  It was literally like 2 pieces and 2 polycaps.  As such, nothing really to say here about this, it's all black and functions as intended.

The arms are very nice and can be done without painting if you don't wish to do so and still get the accurate colors.  The elbow can bend a full 90 degrees and the optional hand parts are exceptionally detailed.  The shoulder armor is a slightly odd design but it works just fine, even with all my layers of paint they both went together just fine.

The legs are pretty well done, but this is where my first real complaint will come into play.  And that complaint is on the hole that connects to the polycap on the waist, it is horrible.  Before painting it was almost impossible to get it to stay on during posing, and after painting it was so hard to put on that I broke the connector for the right side binder off completely.  Now, the painting issues are my fault alone, next time I build this kit I will take precautions to make sure paint doesn't get into that area of the legs.  The rest of the legs are fine however, and have excellent articulation and coloring.  As for the binders, they attach to the same piece that connects to the waist and I think that is what makes them so weak.  But the binders themselves are well done, and the connector on the inside of them that holds the beam katana's works very well.

As for accessories, not much here.  You get two beam katana's, one shorter than the other; and 2 beam blades, also one shorter than the other.  The katana's fit pretty well in the open hands of the kit, and can pull off it's poses excellently.  It also comes with a small clear circular effect part that goes in between the two head antennas.  While I don't remember this ever happening in the anime, it's a nice add on and looks very nice.  My problem with it is that it comes molded in clear, not clear orange as it should be.  This makes no sense as there is a runner of clear orange for the katana blades, a runner that is unique to this kit, so why wasn't this part just included on there when there are no other clear pieces in the kit?  The final accessory is a small coated copper wire that goes on the back of the head, which is intended to simulate the Masurao's power cable.

Final thoughts on the HG Masurao are pretty well, while not the best it could be, it is still an excellent model of the mobile suit.  I did run into some problems along the way, some that have caused me to not even want to look at it for the time being but I do intend to fix them and will probably buy another one and do it better.  Specifically I will leave it in a gloss coating, which this one did have before a flat coated it.  I would definitely recommend this kit to anyone who is interested in the Masurao, or in it's pilot Mr. Bushido; if you're not however, then you may want to skip this one.   Here are some images of my kit, there will be more someday once I fix the things that I broke and/or lost, like the left elbow joint which has prevented me from even putting that arm back together...

























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