For the most part, I can take or leave Gundam anime. Sometimes it because the anime is pants, but others it's just me. Gundam 00 hit when I was preoccupied with other stuff, and was neither interesting nor terrible enough to hold my attention. In so far as I have gathered, 00 sounds a fair bit like the core concept of Gundam Wing, except they swapped out the romanticism for real politik, and brought back some of the Genetic Engineering stuff from Seed. That said, I could be wrong, and I'm mainly here for the robots. And the 0 Gundam is that robot, something I got for purely superficial reasons, only to find there was an in-joke at play. Also: photography was a pain in the arse.
The 0 Gundam is noted for being the first of its kind in its universe, and serves as a callback to the original RX78-2 Gundam. This wasn't immediately obvious with its original colour scheme, a rather boring all grey job, but a refit and change of pilot saw it sport parade colours and it became inescapable. This makes it an interesting mix of styles, the overall form evoking the simplicity of the 1979 version, but you also have 00 elements like the chest, and the optional GN drive. There's also a chunk of GM in there too, given its weapon loadout. To hammer the effect home, the 0 Gundam is most famously piloted by a character actually voiced by Tōru Furuya, aka the original Gundam pilot. As that character is the the main antagonist of the show, and uses it in the finale, its hard not to see it all as a meta joke or subversion. This is the sort of trivia that fascinates me.
As kits go, the O Gundam is quite satisfactory but perhaps flimsy. I finished primary construction in an afternoon, and was pleasantly surprised by the joint design, which I felt was better than it needed to be. I do like how some armour segments are cast as one piece, sliding around joint assemblies. The separation of colours is generally good too, with only a modest sticker sheet. There's several places where you'll need to go in with grey or black to offset the sea of white, which I attempted to mixed success, but nothing was really a nuisance. I was actually trying out a new type of marker with this one a “0.05 Unipin Fineline”, which makes a reasonable stand-in for Gundam Marker, but I think I should try it on a less white gunpla. Meanwhile, those long limbs have a good range of motion, and the plastic colours pop. However, the skinny portions and relative simplicity of things mean that the model feels light, with the gun being loose enough in the hand to prompt some irritation. Also, and I mention this as a curiosity, not a criticism, there's two different ports for a flight stand. One actual criticism easily made is that the kit has relatively few accessories for what amounts to a final boss. This is true to the source, but some dynamic hands wouldn't have hurt.
In many ways, I didn't appreciate what the O Gundam was. I mean, I got visuals, but I didn't get the history, and I didn't get Bandai was going for with the kit. Its essentially a no-nonsense kit for beginners, where they went simple, but not cheap. The colour separation and engineering is too good to have been phoned in. As such, I can honestly recommend it on those terms. I kinda want to build another as a custom project...
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