I’mma be real with y’all, this kit was a doozy.
GQuuuuuuX is currently the hot topic of Gundam as it’s a new Universal Century TV series that’s airing right now, but the HG of the titular mobile suit has been out since January, but they didn’t hit US shelves until like… April, and it was quite hard to come by. I was able to snag one at my local hobby shop with the help of my father, and while I’ve been having a worrying backlog to deal with, I wanted to get around this HG as I’ve been having a delight watching the series.
I grew to like the GQuuuuuuX designs over time, and while this kit is certainly a looker, the modeling experience was not fun. The design is SuuuuuuPER intricate, with the kit starting you off with not one complicated head, but two of them, and the rest of the build being avant garde. As I’ve seen people saying, this does build like an RG despite not having an inner frame, everything feels unusual and my god are some of the parts tiny and finicky to deal with. There is a lot that goes on in the legs, and on top of all that you do deal with a bunch of stickers to fill in a lot of the yellow that is missing from the plastic.
Once the build is done, you pretty much get to the worst (but optional in all honesty) part, which is making the kit as color accurate as possible. I feared I was going to have a rough time detailing everything up, and rough it was. There’s an abundance of gray, white, yellow and blue areas that need to be painted in, and it’s such a pain in the ass that I didn’t even get the kit to be fully accurate. Apparently, the white is supposed to be two-tone, but I wasn’t gonna bother doing that in the first place. The two-toning I did do was anything that needed white, I just hand painted those areas in pure white and called it a day. There were so many spots for the yellow, I forgot to paint a spot by the rifle’s scope and in the fingers. As for the blue, I painted using the closest blue I had on me, and again, called it a day. The inner part of the shield is wildly color inaccurate, I didn’t bother correcting any of it at all. As you can probably tell, there is way too much to fix to get this as color accurate as possible, you’re probably better off doing some of it until you’re satisifed, because that’s essentially what I did.
Surprisingly, while the GQuuuuuuX’s design is super busy, it doesn’t really require panel lining. The neck has a lot of it, and I wasn’t feeling motivated to panel line the white in the backpack. I did red sticker decals last, and while it initially looked like the right move for Bandai to implement the red details, they are somehow worse to deal than the yellow stickers. They’re quite small and are placed in really small areas, namely the shoulders and the torso. They’re finicky to deal with, and I lost my shit trying to loop the ones on the legs, that I said fuck that and hastily used red paint as an alternative, and it turned it pretty well while also being so much less of a hassle! However, that triumph was immediately ruined trying to align the arrow decals on the backpack, which like the rest of the decals, was a bitch to apply.
Exhausted from detailing, I was really not feeling the HG at that point, but I still had to give it a flat coat and pose ‘er up, but the topcoat went so well, I was feeling a bit positive by the time I fully assembled it in its completed state, and wow, posing the GQuuuuuuX is SuuuuuuPER fun. It helps that at any angle the kit looks photogenic af, and as long as you got an action base, it can really pull off any pose you can imagine, even with its single jointed knees and elbows. It shouldn’t be a surprise that it’s solid as a rock, but it is surprising the kit can pull ground poses at all with its minimal footing. Polarizing as it may be, it does look very stylish; it basically looks like a race car. The fun I had posing the GQuuuuuuX definitely alleviated the pain.
Overall, this kit is too small to encapsulate a design like this. Bandai really did everything they could to get the kit as color accurate as possible, especially for an HG, but there’s still a long way to get every detail as accurate as possible to the source material. While a Real Grade could reach perfect color accuracy, I would definitely prefer to see this design in 1/100 scale, and honestly with how busy the design is I hope Bandai would go straight for a Master Grade, unless they find a way engineering a Full Mechanics without any stickers, or the only way the design can have perfectly molded detail in 1/100 is an MGEX. Either way, Bandai did have a lot of balls making this an HG, but my pretentious ass of wanting to get it color accurate has burned me out. Oh well, time to build a Sazabi that came out of nowhere
