Full Mechanics Calamity Gundam

Built and decaled by me. A hell of a paint job by my father.

Oh boy it’s another Full Mechanics kit, and I definitely had a word or two with my experience on one last year. I won’t sugarcoat it—they’re still overpriced for what they’re worth, and Calamity’s the biggest offender considering it retails for $60 and has the least amount of parts of the druggie trio. I had my big qualms with Raider’s price, but at least you can find some decent sales on it and it offers quite a bit more for only a few more dollars from the Calamity, and Forbidden… it’s still in WIP, and although it’s the priciest, it has so much going on that the engineers had to find their way to not make it an MG by just not giving it a complete frame.

Anyway, Calamity—this certainly does not blur the line between FM and MG, it definitely builds like an RE/100, but it packs a shit ton of surface detail, as expected of a 1/100 SEED kit. A lot of this build is just slapping giant pieces together, and honestly there really isn’t anything wrong with that, until I discovered that trying to disassemble it is quite tricky because of the way everything fits together. But yeah, unless you’d call this connection noteworthy, this build has not much going on.

Cuz this kit’s all about the looks, and yeah it definitely exceeds in that department no doubt. Once I finished snap building, I pulled the trigger on the Aile Calamity on P-Bandai which funnily enough is almost $10 cheaper than getting regular Calamity in US retail stores, and offers just a whole bunch more in a much cooler color scheme. As this (OG Calamity) is my dad’s kit, all the detailing went on him, and boy did it take him weeks to get this done, which I’m not sure if it was a nightmare or a field of dreams to do. For the kind of person he is, it was probably both. The surface detail just screams “paint me,” especially for the backpack cannons, but he just went ballistic everywhere, which shouldn’t be surprising to me at this point, but goddamn he made this singular color of plastic into something truly wicked. 

For the decals, yeah I just used the provided stickers. They’re definitely not great, but they’re better than Raider’s basically because the plastic is not black that shows the outline of the sticker very clearly. To my surprise, there’s actually not a lot to put on via the manual, so I used a bit of the leftovers to my liking. 

It was time to piece everything together, and damn it is truly something, and… not as busy as I feared it could be? The GINN we did a few months back I thought was overdone, yet somehow for the Calamity, it looks just right, standing proud and mighty with its awesome detail and proportions. It’s easily something that could be stared at for hours, and my dad certainly admired his own crazy work of all the goddamn painting he did on it.

Finally, posing—for as much articulation the kit comes with, there’s not really a whole lot to do with it due to the lack of accessories. Once you fit it with the bazooka and shield, the only straggling piece you have from the entire kit… is the swappable hand. Having the bazooka as its only hand weapon, it feels kinda restrained to pull off cool poses, especially with the connection to the hand being so-so and the fact that it gets in the way of the cannons a lot. Nonetheless, even with the limited poses I got, it still looks absolutely wonderful in the shots I took. 

So that’s Calamity, and it’s a very form-over-function build to me. Like Raider, it really shines in its looks, having a great design accompanied by my dad taking its full potential of painting, but there’s certainly not a lot going on outside of what you see. At least with Raider, that thing had claws and a spiky ball that could fit on its crotch. It could also transform. I’m quite mixed with this build overall, but, I’m hoping for Forbidden to change that around, considering out of the entire druggie trio, that looks like one hell of a kit to play around with.