War in the Pocket

At last, the promised review of the 1/400 scale Gundam Collection Musai!

I have decided to start with my complaints, because I have a lot of them. However, I want to note that they are mostly nit-picky complaints and you will find by the end that I do like the model very much. I just think it is important for you to know what I didn't like about it though...

First of all, calling this a “pre-painted model” is a straight-up lie. There is NO paint on this model anywhere. The green parts are molded in green, the gray parts are (mostly) molded in grey, and you put the two together and it mostly looks right. This works fairly well, but there are places where a little paint would have helped... Of course, the White Base model had some unpainted parts (*cough* gun mounts *cough*), but the trim along the wings was painted red... on the Musai, the Komusai’s wheels aren't even painted black. None of it is pre-painted, and there are parts you’ll definitely want to paint. That includes panel lines of course... I guess the quality paint job we saw on the Big Zam, which included panel lines, does not carry over into the larger models.

As I said, I did paint in the panel lines... the model just doesn't look right with them unpainted. There are a lot of them to do, but it was manageable - it just took a long time. I also got some orange and red clear paint and did the windows, which, as I mentioned in my first post, are clear plastic for some reason. Why they didn’t mold them in translucent red I don’t know...

The clear plastic tree also includes six little arm things you can stick in the Musai and then put your figures on the other end so it looks like they’re flying around the Musai... it is a cute gimmick, though several of the holes for the arms are unattractively obvious on the side of the Musai. I’m just saying, if they couldn’t hide them better they should have left them off.

The model was quite easy to build, and I rather enjoyed the building. Panel line painting I hate, building I can do! I do have two complains in this department though... first, sprue placement. Those plastic trees have to attach somewhere, but if a model is not meant to be painted, the places where you removed the sprues will be a little ugly. With White Base, the plastic was usually white and they often connected the trees in places that later got covered... I am very pleased with the invisibility of my sprue leavings on my White Base. With the Musai, we are not so lucky. I have several big ugly trimmed edges right on the side of the Komusai, the sides of the main body and vents, and several other extremely prominent locations. I cleaned some of them up, but others I don’t think I can fix without painting over them... if you really want the Musai to look good, you will want to paint the entire thing. And it is freakin’ big, that will take a while. My second complain is about a mystery screw... there is no screw in the box, yet the instructions have something about screwing a couple pieces together... what gives??

That reminds me, the sliding pieces suck. I mean the hangar pieces that slide out the back and you stick the Zakus in them... they are terrible. Nasty plastic-on-plastic sliding pieces, they move very awkwardly and without that strategically placed screw I am slightly worried they might break or get stuck in there. The other moving bits work nicely, but the sliding hanger pieces are not well designed at all.

So what was good? Well, the quality of the plastic and the detail on the model is excellent. It built easily and without incident (except for that screw thing). Despite having no pre-painted bits, the use of grey and green colored plastic pieces works quite well, so even with a few prominent snip marks where I cut the piece from the tree, I am quite happy with the appearance of my model. The included stickers are very nice - the clear parts fade to nothing if you rub them on real well, so they look as nice as proper decals. The included Zakus are nice, and I like the detachable Komusai with its little wheels... it’s cute. The stand is nicer than the one White Base comes with, and I like that it comes with both versions of the bridge. Besides, it’s huge! Not White Base huge, but it is a very large model and it looks quite impressive with my Gundam Collection figures.

So is it worth it? It was worth it to me, I like the Musai and this is a pretty stunning recreation of one. It is just as expensive as White Base yet has only about half the plastic, and it doesn’t have an exclusive figure like the White Base’s Guntank or Big Zam’s Core Booster, but I think for the serious collector this is worth getting. Just be aware of the work that will be involved if you want it to look good... while it is a great model, it is certainly not “pre-painted” like the figures we’re used to.