Kit Review

Straight build + Panel lining + Stickers

HY2M Gundam - Size comparison with a cigarette pack... though calling it that is pretty embarrassing;; It stands about 75cm t

Size comparison with a cigarette pack... though calling it that is pretty embarrassing;; It stands about 75cm tall.

For a proper size comparison with a cigarette, a shot like this is way more appropriate..

Unarmed state

Looking up from below, you really feel the grandeur of this ultra big scale.

Shot looking down from above

Upper body, front view

The head design came out pretty clean.
Interestingly, you put seals on the head antenna. (per the manual..)

Backpack

Arms

Legs

Feet that are roughly a size 235

Full-articulation fingers... they're stiff enough for the weight, which I like.

The hands feel a bit too big though..; almost gorilla-like..

Since the hands are so big, you can actually shake hands with it like this.

The finger articulation feels pretty natural.

Even big scale kits can't escape the obligatory limb articulation shot.
Considering the size, it's not too bad..

The weapons are secured with bolts, naturally.. otherwise they'd be way too heavy to hold

Attaching the shield. First you screw the shield mount onto the arm..

HY2M Gundam - Then you slide it in from the side like this. It's almost like the same method used in HGUC/MG kits from 2005 o

Then you slide it in from the side like this.
It's almost like the same method used in HGUC/MG kits from 2005 onwards was already being used here first.

Once you screw a separate shield mount onto the backpack..

You can also recreate the configuration of the shield hanging on the back.

HY2M Gundam - Action pose. It's so big that posing it is a struggle, and so is taking photos.. ugh.. Still, since you can adj

Action pose. It's so big that posing it is a struggle, and so is taking photos.. ugh..
Still, since you can adjust the joint strength, it's not nearly as floppy as you'd expect for the weight.

The sword-drawing pose looks natural enough..

HY2M Gundam - But pull it out and there's no beam saber. Ahem. That's literally all there is.. feels like a relay baton at a

But pull it out and there's no beam saber. Ahem. That's literally all there is..
Feels like a relay baton at a school sports day.

A beam rifle that doesn't look out of place even when a person holds it -_

Beam rifle size comparison. Absolutely massive, right.

Shield size comparison

Size comparison across grades. Even the PG doesn't reach its knees..;;;

A shot with the MG Gundam Ver. O.Y.W. 0079.

The process for lighting up the head LED is a bit unusual.
First you lift out the center of the head..

Then you pull out the small pin that was embedded inside the head.

Flip that pin 180 degrees and reinsert it.. there's a magnet underneath it.

HY2M Gundam - And that's how it lights up like this. It uses the exact same parts as the standard MG HY2M head light-up set,

And that's how it lights up like this. It uses the exact same parts as the standard MG HY2M head light-up set,
so it's a light-up system using a magnet and Hall IC. Since it's literally the same part from the MG version, the brightness isn't all that great.

Dim the lights a bit and you can actually see the glow.

HY2M Gundam - When you think about the size, you can't help but wonder if just that one tiny light-up is really all you get.

When you think about the size, you can't help but wonder if just that one tiny light-up is really all you get. Hmm.
Though I guess comparing it to the HY2M Glorious series wouldn't really be fair?

An HGUC fits right in one hand!

● In the summer of 2002, a pretty wild item showed up in the Gunpla world — the 1/24 Ultra Big Scale HY2M First Gundam. 1/24 is a scale normally used for car models, so it was an absolutely enormous scale for a robot in the Gunpla lineup. Sure, there's also a 1/12 Zaku, but that's more of a store display stand model.. This 1/24 HY2M RX-78, however, is clearly a 100% injection kit assembled from 333 parts as a proper product. It's just the size that's completely absurd..;;

First of all, the box alone boasts the biggest size and heaviest weight in all of Gunpla. Many of the parts are individually injection-molded and packed in non-woven fabric pouches like resin parts, and the parts are so large that there are barely any attached to a single runner. The assembly process is like constructing a building — you build it up piece by piece starting from the feet, then the legs, waist, body, head, arms, and so on.. which means if you want to paint it, separating everything back out is going to be a real pain. (Not to mention that painting itself would require an enormous amount of paint and sheer effort.)

The construction-like building process itself demands a fair amount of physical labor, and that's not just because of the size — it's because the thing is incredibly heavy. Just one leg weighs 1.5kg, and the whole body comes in at around 6–7kg, so trying to hold it with one hand while tightening screws is just brutal T_T. You basically have no choice but to stand it in place and walk around it, attaching this part and that part as you go.

Once it's finished, the sheer presence it commands from its size is hard to put into words.. Looking at the photos above you might not get a real sense of how big it is, but seeing it in person, you can't help but feel a bit stunned by the scale. It's technically 75cm tall, but in person it feels even bigger than that, and while the scale reads 6-something kg, when you actually pick it up it feels more like ten-plus kilograms — brutally heavy. That's probably because you're trying to balance all the limbs while lifting it, which makes it feel even heavier. Anyway, with this kit it's the weight, more than the size, that really gets to you. My arms ache every time I move it..

Since it's such a massive kit, I was worried it might end up looking toy-like once finished — but the completed impression is... anything but. With reasonably good molding, stable molded colors, and decent detail, it's clearly a different level of refinement from finished toy products. It's a 100% Bandai injection Gunpla, just with an absurdly large size. It has 333 parts alone — who could call this a toy? ^^;

That said, looking closely, the proportions do feel a bit off in places — the hands in particular are noticeably large and look a little strange. The hands are so abnormally big that you can actually shake hands with it, and the arms are slightly long relative to the legs, so depending on the angle it can look a bit gorilla-like. But since it's such a large kit that you can't take in the whole silhouette at a glance (;;), the sheer presence of its size kind of overwhelms that awkwardness. It's passable enough.

■ The biggest concern was, naturally, joint strength. First of all, this kit is not made in China — it's an original product from Bandai's Shizuoka factory. This isn't some sloppily made kit; it's a proper Bandai Gunpla that went through the full development process. The Bandai development team knew that large kits like this would struggle with joints, so they put a lot of thought into joint strength.

In particular, all the joints are ball joints, which is a structure that can make posing tricky even with the slightest looseness. However, every single one of these ball joints is built with a screw-tightening mechanism that lets you adjust the joint strength, so you can dial in the stiffness to your liking. In practice, you'll want to tighten everything as much as possible to keep things from going floppy.. but as long as you crank the joint strength up nice and tight, this big heavy beast stands up solidly and straight.

The rubber + nut tightening system used in the full-articulation fingers — which are about the size of a human hand — is also very well done, keeping everything stiff and locked in place despite the size. The rubber-plate finger locking method is quite clever and effective too. (See the assembly process section.) The only thing is that the thumb feels ever so slightly looser than the other fingers.

That said, no matter how stiff the joints are, weight is weight.. The body does tilt ever so slightly to the left where the large shield is held, and if you hold the arm out horizontally, it does slowly... slowly drift downward under the weight. But for most poses, you can consider them 99% locked in without any wobble. Given the size and weight, the adjustable joint strength system is a huge success. :-) At the very least, it stands up far more solidly and straight than the PG First with its notoriously weak ankles.

Among all the joints, the ankle and lower body-to-leg ball joints — which bear the most weight — are made from seriously heavy metal ball joints. If you look at the runners carefully, you'll notice four plastic ball joint parts left over. It seems like the original design used plastic ball joints reinforced with screw inserts for rigidity, but after durability testing during development revealed issues, those four ball joints were swapped out for metal ones.

However, because the joints are tightened up so stiff, getting action poses out of it is a bit of a struggle;; The articulation itself isn't bad, but bending the joints takes real effort, so setting up action poses feels like a chore.. Between the difficulty of posing it and the difficulty of photographing it (the angles are hard to work with since it's so tall;), I wasn't able to get many action shots..

A few disappointments: no beam saber and no bazooka included, and there's no cockpit or Core Fighter recreation whatsoever. I can understand leaving out the bazooka, but at this size, a light-up beam saber would've been absolutely killer... The beam saber is just the handle with nothing else. It's big enough that you could run it on regular AA batteries, so it would've been great if they'd made it like a traffic wand — a real missed opportunity.

The HY2M light-up system is included, but it's disappointingly limited to just a faint glow in the eyes. On top of that, the light-up system itself is literally the same tiny unit used in the HY2M MG kits, so the brightness is weak.. For a kit this absurdly large to have such a tiny little light-up feels completely unbalanced;; They might as well have left it out entirely...

◆ Honestly, the hardest part of this kit wasn't the grueling assembly or the weight — it was actually doing the review; Since it's such an enormous kit, getting decent photos with proper lighting and angles was an absolute slog. T_T To get shots that looked close to the real thing without flash, I completely dismantled my five-light studio setup and reconfigured it in one corner of the room, then spent an entire day shooting near the ceiling from every possible angle and lighting combination before picking out the review photos. Even after all that backbreaking effort, I'm personally not happy with the photo quality at all T_T. Sob.. Such a shame.

Come to think of it, panel lining was also quite a chore, but the photography was so much harder that the panel lining doesn't even stand out in my memory -.-;; For panel lining I just went with the brute-force approach — Gundam Marker plus a Rotring pen, double panel lining as-is. Of course, it didn't go on cleanly in one pass, so I had to go over the same lines multiple times. And the seals — why are they so big and so numerous..

Anyway, this is a kit where I opened the box, shot the runners, struggled through the assembly, did panel lining until my eyes gave out, and hunched over taking photos until my back gave in — it's the hardest review (in the most literal, physical sense) I've done since Dalong.net was founded. This was a kit I always knew I had to review someday, because it felt like you couldn't truly call yourself a master of Bandai injection kits without tackling it.. and now that it's done, I'm left with a strange sense of emptiness ^^;

And for all the talk about how big it is, personally my dominant memory of this kit is not "big" but "heavy." After lugging this thing around, picking up the PG First feels like lifting a feather.. -.-;;

The ¥78,000 price tag is pretty outrageous, but on top of that it's a rare kit that hasn't been reissued. It's the kind of kit that'll be remembered as proof that Bandai once released something this insane in injection form, and it's the kind of kit that makes you excited to wonder what they might come out with in the future. It's definitely a Gunpla that deserves a place in history — one where you can taste the Bandai development team's spirit of limitless challenge. :-)

HY2M Gundam | 2002. 8 | ¥78,000

AIThis page was translated by Claude Sonnet.