STEP 2 : The Build With this kit you get a basic build. There is nothing crazy going on here. Everything comes together fairly well and it's something you can do without any prior model experience. The arms are actually pretty neat and the blue part of the lower arm comes in three pieces, giving it a well needed panel line. The shoulders are well designed, giving colour separation and the ability to open up. The legs also have good part seperation. It will only take an hour or two to complete. I did it very slow over the course of a few days.
There are some very hard to fix nubs on this kit. The buster rifles have many nubmarks on the top which I tried hard with my sanding sticks and blocks to remove. I couldn't get them however, perhaps my method isn't good. If you sand these you're going to want to put them together first to get an even surface. As always there is a seam line going down the center of each rifle. Fixing it is more of a headache than it's worth for me. I find seam line removal very stressful as it can ruin a kit and erase detail. I will practice this more on No Grade kits to improve my technique. I'm certainly not taking chances on a kit of one of my favorite Gundam designs.
For the shield it actually is made of more pieces than I figured. You can see in the picture two areas that need paint. Thanks to part separation it will be easy to paint green on the top of the white piece and red on the rim of the yellow piece. If you want you can use the provided stickers for both of these details. I don't recommend it for the red trim and the green sticker will go over a rounded edge which is never a good thing.
Basically for building the Wing Zero the only challenge will be removing nubmarks on the buster rifles and the red pieces. Take care not to cut close to the pieces when you remove them from the runners. Even on the white pieces if you cut too close I have found it will leave little holes. White pieces are naturally easy to sand and you can often get away with just cleaning the extra plastic off with a hobby knife.
Out Of The Box Appearance When the kit is done you will notice one thing right away. It needs to be detailed! Very badly.
Basically panel lining will bring out all the nice detail in this kit. and indeed they do a good job with the panel lines and detail. It's accurate and referring to the anime will show all the parts that need detail painting. I like the appearance of the kit and it's colours are fantastic. The red, blue and yellow go together perfectly. This is an excellent tone of yellow. With detailing the Wing Zero is going to look just like the anime.
The circles on the shoulders absolutely need to have black painted in. The tips of the wings must also be painted yellow. It includes stickers for this part which is honestly not that bad if you don't want to paint it. I'm not looking forward to painting that part honestly. Mainly for how much trouble I have with yellow paints. But it's an important part of the design. Thankfully the kit has colour separation for the blue parts of the wings.
I'd be here for a long time pointing out all the areas to detail on this kit. I like to detail paint so I'm happy to do this and make it as accurate to the anime as possible. In the show the panel lines are very dark so I'll be using black panel liner on the white pieces instead of grey. I will paint in green on the rectangle pieces beside the chest camera also. It's going to take some work but for the Wing Zero it's worth it to make this model look awesome.
Now for posing. Well straight up this is not a kit to mess around with. Just posing it for these pictures I had amazing trouble with the left arm popping out constantly. The way the ball socket connects to the shoulder is terrible. The wings are also prone to popping out with poor polycap connections. The shield is the worst part, it just barely connects to the arm. I don't understand why they gave the shield a bracket piece instead of a straight up peg to go into the arm. Because of this the shield will pop out if moved around.
I don't mess around with these kits, I build them and display them, so this is not a great issue for me. Certainly this kit is easier to mess around with then my Real Grade RX-78, Zeta and Justice Gundam. However it is disappointing how easy parts pop out. In that regard this kit feels behind it's time.
You can do the spin attack pose pictured above but some things look better in the anime than in real life.
The wings will open but without detailing the insides it looks very plain. and they don't raise up too high. In this picture I tried to recreate a pose from the fight with Epyon and that's as high as the wings would go before popping off. The wings on this design are sort of strange to begin with they appear very short and stubby.
Gimmicks The biggest gimmick is it's "transformation" to Neo Bird mode. It's kind of dumb. It was dumb in the anime and it's dumb in model kit form. It never looked good. I honestly don't like the alternate mode of any transforming mobile suit. All you do in this kit is turn some parts around and pop the shield on top. I think this will be the only time I "transform" it. You have to replace the feet when you transform it also.
The double buster rifle pose that the Wing Zero is famous for, and even pictured on the box doing, is impossible with this kit. The fists cannot go together and attempting this will make pieces pop out. You just can't do it. Perhaps you can sort of get it if you try hard enough but I wasn't going to mess around with this as the hands kept splitting in half. I don't want to lose them as you only get one set of hands with this kit.
The top guns are here, although you will have to paint them as they are molded on the chest piece. The white pieces do not flip up, they must be removed to show the guns underneath. The shoulders will also open up.
Overall Thoughts This kit is not overly impressive but it looks good. It is a nice representation of the Wing Zero and with some more work it will end up looking pretty good. There are spots of bad design and in general it doesn't feel up to the standard for a kit made in 2014. However it does do great in part separation on certain areas. Compared to the original No Grade kit it's quite a sight to behold how much better it is. This HG Wing Zero will be a pretty neat display piece and just looking at it in a neutral pose shows how cool it looks.
Next up I will be detailing the kit so stay tuned to see how that goes.