Kit Review

Straight build + partial paint + panel lining

HGUC Gundam GP03 Stamen - The universal standard for size comparison — the cigarette box. This one's actually among the small

The universal standard for size comparison — the cigarette box. This one's actually among the smallest in the HGUC lineup.

Only did partial painting on the shield. The color balance is way off.. -_-;

The shield folds just like in the specs.

Those massive tail verniers...

HGUC Gundam GP03 Stamen - The verniers are mounted in the back, but the joints are solid enough that it stands up nice and st

The verniers are mounted in the back, but the joints are solid enough that it stands up nice and straight.

Upper body close-up.

Both arms have the folding arms perfectly reproduced.

The articulation is... not exactly great.

Action pose

Bazooka action pose. It's a weirdly shaped bazooka that's really hard to get the hands to grip...

Even that tiny little backpack has a beam saber storage bay that actually opens and closes. Nice.

Both hands come with resin-style open hand parts. Nice~

The bazooka folds in half just like in the specs. For future storage in the Dendrobium...

Together with the MG GP03.

Together with the HGUC GP series. They're also known as the "panel lining trio." ^^;

HGUC Gundam GP03 Stamen - A straight build photo before any panel lining. The GP series really does look bare without at leas

A straight build photo before any panel lining. The GP series really does look bare without at least some panel lining...

The Core Fighter has pretty poor color separation, so it looks really bare -_-;

For some reason, GP03 Stamen got released before GP02. It gives off a very similar feel to the earlier GP01/FB in terms of quality, and has quite a lot of parts for its small size.

Like the rest of the GP series, the GP03 really demands panel lining — and since I do mine slowly and in two passes, it ended up taking me over 4 hours just for the panel lining alone. The molded colors and plastic color tone are actually pretty good overall... but the blue on the shield is completely absent. And unlike the GP01, there aren't even any stickers included, so I had no choice but to do partial painting. I tried mixing white and blue to match the color, but as you can see in the photos, it came out looking completely different. (T_T) On top of that, the included Unit 3 Core Fighter has no color separation for the yellow and gray sections, so going by molded color alone it looks really bare. The GP01 and FB had decent color separation on their Core Fighters... this is a bit of a letdown.

The joints are stiff enough that it stands up straight just fine despite those big tail verniers on the backside. That said, the articulation feels like a step down from the earlier GP01s — the range of poses you can pull off with the legs is pretty limited. One really strange (?) thing is the bazooka... you just can't get it into the hands properly. There's even a dedicated bazooka hand included, but if you put the hand on first, it won't attach to the arm, and if you attach the arm first, you can't get the angle right to hold the bazooka. In the end, the only way to make it work is to slightly spread the hand part and kind of force it on. I've seen plenty of cases where a bazooka is too loose to hold, but this is the first time I've seen one that's just impossible to grip because the angle simply doesn't work out. -_-;;

In terms of detail, it's nearly on par with the MG Stamen. The panel line layout is almost identical, both folding arms are perfectly reproduced (the old kit did this too, to be fair), and even the beam saber storage bay in that tiny backpack opens and closes — you can really tell a lot of care went into this kit. Especially noteworthy is that both hands include those natural open hand parts in a resin style. Including the dedicated bazooka hand, there are 5 hands in total.

Looking at the photos alongside the GP01s above, you can clearly see that the GP03 is noticeably smaller. According to the specs, the GP01 stands at 18m, the GP01FB at 18.5m, and the GP03 at 18m as well — so they should all be roughly the same height. But the HGUC GP03 is definitely smaller. It's even smaller than the old GP03 kit released over 10 years ago (which, to be fair, was probably a bit over-scale due to the limitations of detail reproduction at the time). In the MG line the GP series are all the same height, so why the lore-breaking size difference in HGUC? My guess is that they scaled it down to fit inside the HGUC Dendrobium that was released later. It looks even smaller in person — it's kind of compact in its own way, I suppose... ^^

Aside from the slightly small size and the complete lack of consideration for the shield's molded color, the kit quality is satisfying overall. It's also personally one of my favorite Kadoki-designed units. ^^

HGUC Gundam GP03 Stamen | 2001.12 | ¥1,600

AIThis page was translated by Claude Sonnet.