Kit Review

Straight build + Panel lining

1/100 Aegis Gundam - Size comparison with the universal reference — a cigarette box. It's a tad bigger than the other SEED ki

Size comparison with the universal reference — a cigarette box. It's a tad bigger than the other SEED kits.

1/100 Aegis Gundam - Articulation is... well... it's a transforming kit, so it's hard to judge. There are a lot of moving joi

Articulation is... well... it's a transforming kit, so it's hard to judge. There are a lot of moving joints, but the durability feels a bit lacking..

Upper body close-up. If you look carefully, the waist structure looks pretty flimsy.

Action pose... something feels a bit off.. -_-;

The beam saber has a pretty unique shape, doesn't it.

The left hand includes an action-style open hand with nice detail.

Together with the 1/100 Strike. The Aegis is bigger.

Mobile Armor Transformation !

To transform, you first need to remove the hands and set aside the side armor pieces.

There's this odd gimmick where only the rear section of the upper torso slides backward..

And then the head ends up buried in like this.

The arms rotate this way and that to form the claw appendages..

The legs form claws too.. The armor on the front of the body splits apart, folding up and down.

The front of the torso splits top and bottom, then you spread the limbs out and align everything..

1/100 Aegis Gundam - Cruising mode complete! The blade-like tips of all four claws are supposed to line up perfectly, but the

Cruising mode complete! The blade-like tips of all four claws are supposed to line up perfectly,
but the joints are all over the place so actually getting them aligned is a real struggle.

Barely managed to get the blade tips lined up.. It's about 25cm long, which is pretty sizeable.

1/100 Aegis Gundam - Attack mode. Nothing too fancy — it's basically just the four claws spread wide open. The pose it used t

Attack mode. Nothing too fancy — it's basically just the four claws spread wide open. The pose it used to torture the Strike..

It looks pretty menacing and intimidating.

Included 1/20 Athrun figure

Straight build photo before panel lining (front view)

Straight build photo before panel lining (rear view)

Following the Strike Gundam, its rival the Aegis Gundam has now been released. The biggest feature of the Aegis Gundam is that it's a transforming kit capable of converting into MA form.

The Aegis Gundam is a Gundam with a Char-type pinkish color scheme, and the molded color in that tricky pink range is actually at a reasonably acceptable level. It's larger than the Strike and has a lot of stuff hanging off it, giving it great volume — but since it's fundamentally a kit built around transformation, it does have some weaknesses when it comes to articulation and joint quality.

The transformation system itself has a lot of genuinely clever ideas. The Aegis Gundam's MA mode requires the arms and legs to each transform into crab-leg shapes, and the body itself has to twist and contort in all sorts of strange ways — and this complex transformation system is actually implemented quite faithfully. That said, precisely because so many parts rotate and bend in so many places.. the joints overall tend to be loose and it's hard to get everything to hold a pose. It kind of gives you the same feeling as looking at the MG Zeta Gundam — very much like a floppy octopus.. (and the thing already looks like it belongs to some multi-limbed cephalopod family to begin with..)

In MS form it holds together reasonably well when just standing there, but once you start transforming, the arms, legs, and side sections don't lock in properly and tend to pop off or wobble around a lot. In cruising mode, all four crab-leg tips are supposed to line up perfectly to look great, but that just doesn't... quite work. T_T So floppy.. On the other hand, when you spread the legs wide open in attack mode, it actually holds together much better. Attack mode does give off a pretty imposing presence.

In MS form the charisma that comes from its relatively large size is a plus, and the clever, intricate transformation system is genuinely appealing — but the joints that are just too hard to control make it difficult to give this kit top marks. It's largely down to the nature of the mobile suit itself so there's not much that can be done, but I can't help feeling that if the joints had just been a bit tighter, this could have been a really great kit. ^^

1/100 Aegis Gundam | 2003.2 | ¥2,200

AIThis page was translated by Claude Sonnet.