Kit Review

Straight build

Upper body front shot

Arms

That backpack looks amazing.

Legs

Front of the legs and top of the feet

Action pose

1/100 Gundam Astray Gold Frame - Articulation is excellent as expected. And since the plated parts add extra friction to the

Articulation is excellent as expected. And since the plated parts add extra friction to the joints, they're nice and tight — even better!

Drawing the sword!

Together with the Astray Red Frame

1/100 Gundam Astray Gold Frame - The lore always had them differing only in frame color, but it's amazing how much the overal

The lore always had them differing only in frame color, but it's amazing how much the overall feel of the suit changes just from that color difference. :-)

Ever since the 1/100 No Grade Astray first came out, anyone who saw those under-gated outer armor parts pretty much knew a gold-coated Gold Frame release was inevitable. And sure enough it happened — though surprisingly, instead of a standard retail release, it came out as a Hobby Show exclusive. That said, quite a lot of stock was made available for a limited edition, so for a good while you could easily find it at pretty much any shop, making it a "limited edition" that wasn't really all that limited. ^^;

The gold coating itself is in good shape overall, and crucially, since the mold was designed from the ground up with coating in mind and uses under-gates throughout, gate marks on the gold-plated surfaces are barely visible from the outside. It's definitely one of those properly done plated kits where the under-gate treatment was applied the right way.

The original 1/100 Astray was already very well received, but a common complaint was that despite its excellent articulation, the joint strength at the knees and a few other spots left a little to be desired. With the Gold Frame, however, the stiffness that comes naturally with plated kits actually works in its favor, giving the joints a noticeable boost in tightness — making it an even better kit overall. All in all, it's a solid, good-quality coated limited edition at a relatively reasonable price. The one downside is that the pilot figure of Lowe Guele (Guele~ tasty Guele~) that was included with the original release has been left out. Why on earth did they drop that?;; It would've been great if they'd at least thrown in a clear version of the figure as a special limited-edition touch...

What I do find a bit puzzling is why they never released the standard Blue Frame. They set up the whole concept so that different suits could be represented just by swapping frame colors, and then just let that go to waste — that's not very Bandai of them.

1/100 Gundam Astray Gold Frame

AIThis page was translated by Claude Sonnet.