Man, I got so many things about this kit. It’s one of, if not the most glamorous HG of all time, it’s so majestic, royal and regal, but its pilot is anything but, being a wimp, simp and an overall idiot. It’s also the most I’ve spent so much extra for—I got it on an Action Base 7, I bought the WFM weapon display for the funnels, gold decals and a can of gloss coat. That’s not even mentioning how much painting I did. Safe to say, this is a glorious kit with a dominating shelf presence, but definitely took some effort and additional accessories to get there.
I snagged this kit for $40 while visiting a local hobby shop, and I’m glad I did as it was the only one in stock and I haven’t seen it anywhere else. As my 5th HG SEED Freedom kit, this kit feels similar, yet still has a few surprises. It has crazy part separation with the gold and white, a little bit of two tone white, and an extensive amount of seam line removal to do, because there are a lot of those. Out of the box, the gold colors do look nice, but neither of them are under gated and still have the terrible injection look to them, so I painted them up with Alclad Pale Gold for the inner frame, and Tamiya PS-13 Gold for the armor. I left the rest alone and proceeded to build the kit which actually gets quite involved due to the part separation, and goddamn the wings/funnels take years to do due to all the nub removal and seam line removing that needs to be done. Luckily, partsforming the wings from its closed state to open state isn’t hard, and the Wings of Light I was originally so enamored by really shines in my bare eyes. Even without its funnels flying, this kit stands out so, so much, it’s crazy that they provided them with the kit in the first place, along with 16 beam saber effect parts in total to use for every funnel. Bandai didn’t do this with any HG Strike Freedom, but they know SF sells, while Cal-re.A… well nobody likes their pilot, so they might as well cram as much as possible.
The detailing is where this kit becomes crazy. I said fuck the stickers as Tamiya’s X-16 Purple looked exactly the same, and damn, painting the areas that needed it was a lengthy and tedious process. I tried as best as I could making it as clean as possible as the paint needed to stop on edges where they are hard to clean up, if you get what I’m saying. Since they were on the funnels that needed painting, that took a long time. As for the body, I basically sprinkled some Vallejo Gold on the white, Vallejo Red on the thrusters, and gave the Hyper Impulse Gun on the chest a spray of Tamiya TS-18 Metallic Red.Â
And oh god, panel lining—that was a bitch. Using a Micron pen, it just smudged everywhere all over the kit, and since I sanded a lot of the areas, if it smudged there, I wouldn’t be able to clean it up with my thumb. There’s a lot of lining to do on one side of the funnels, so that’s not fun doing it 16 times, 32 when you separate the funnel in two. It was a big pain in the ass. Doesn’t help that the pen likes to die quickly.
As I said earlier, I bought a set of gold decals from Delpi Decal. I didn’t plan on getting any but the ones they provided look so cool, I had to get them. They add a lot of regality to its already royal look, and they had additional generic caution decals, so I plastered a few of them there. For the cherry on top, I waited a day for the humidity to be low and tried using a glossy top coat for the first time—it was real easy as I’m expecting the thing to shine rather than not, gave it a few coats and got a desired result.Â
Finally, posing—as I anticipated, it looks really beautiful on the lightbox, but damn, can it barely fit once the Wings of Light are attached. With it painted and coated, this thing is solid as shit, so posing this was not a problem at all. I just wish the hips had some movement as they are static, and the swords are so ass on the holsters I just didn’t put them at all as they were barely gonna be there anyway. The bases that come with the WFM weapon display set are small, so it takes a balancing act to get them to stand upright, and they only come with 6 arms, leaving only 6 funnels to display, but damn it takes up a lot of space. As its archnemesis to Mighty Strike Freedom, I of course had to do a bunch of poses with them together, and if you wanna know how stable Cal-re.A is, I got so annoyed trying to deal with MSF through the photoshoot.
Overall, this is a magnificent kit, but it is pricey and is quite a fixer upper when it comes to its colors. Does this overthrow the Infinite Justice Type II as the best SEED Freedom kit? Hell yeah it does… but I’ll see how Athrun’s Z’Gok competes. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next time!
