Frame
The frame of the MGEX Strike Freedom—I knew what I was going in for, but I’m still awestruck regardless. It is undoubtedly fucking awesome, but it does need a lot of care put into it.
The entire kit has already been airbrushed, but for this post I just want to talk about the frame alone, and for #1, it kinda sucks that every non-frame color is part of the frame’s assembly and that the most common gold looks subpar, so it’s not possible to do the frame OOB at all.
For the injected gold, well, what we opted to paint it with is not even gold. It’s actually Alclad Pale Burnt Metal, because it was the one gold my dad had that was not easily to rub (I wanted to avoid top coating so it wouldn’t be too thick) and my oh my it serves great contrast with the 3 other plated gold colors. Albeit too much on the lightbox, but the difference is not as exaggerated irl, trust me.
Disappointed with the fact that there were still gray inner frame pieces and that the vents were regular ‘ol plastic, ya bet they were painted differently. The gray was painted into bronze and aluminum to accentuate the gold instead of contrasting it, and the vents were given a metallic, multi-stage coating (of paint). It certainly helps with the gold frame, though it’s a shame that the hands are not really given a frame on the back.
Painting enhancements aside, holy shit, these joints have to be sanded like hell. I hear the frame OOB is already tight, so the painted pieces make it worse. Luckily, with the help of a sanding stick, an exacto knife and my experience of building mecha musume, I’m able to get the joints at a perfect fitting, if some being just a little tight and some being ever so slightly loose. With that situated before assembling the entire frame together, it was time to put the frame together.
Without a doubt, this frame is extraordinary. The frame is so layered in pieces, I wouldn’t be surprised if this frame alone has more parts than most HGs and maybe most FM kits. It’s especially crazy in the bottom half, with the skirts having so many pieces in them in which they’re usually just one piece, and the legs which get thicker and thicker. It’s very reminiscent of the PGU, but feels more intricate and complex due to its smaller size and the fact there are so many points of articulation.
Speaking of which, the posing of this frame is superb. It’s basically RG God Gundam, but much tighter, and I don’t know how much the armor will hinder its movement. Again, it’s all on the legs, but that’s where it’s most important and the area where Bandai can show off their engineering the most. Being sanded heavily, I had my fun time coming up with the insane poses I could pull off, but I expect that when fully armored, it won’t be as good as the frame’s articulation.
Overall, this frame is fucking something. It’s a shame that most of it will be covered up, but I’ll be able to cherish these photos forever. See you when the kit’s completed!
Completed
After over a month’s work, our MGEX Strike Freedom is complete, and oh boy I’m exhausted. Besides my mecha musume kits, I’ve been working with 1/100 SEED kits back to back and between them and this, there hasn’t been a middle ground between simplicity and complexity. The frame itself is a kit on its own, it is what Bandai heavily marketed for the extremeness of MGEX, but the rest of the kit ain’t no slouch either. Bandai basically took everything from the PG Unleashed and crammed into a 1/100 Strike Freedom. For what could be one piece in a regular MG, is separated into 4 or 5 in this kit. Sure, the armor pieces cover a lot of that frame, but there’s still so much of the plated gold peeking out. Add on the 3D and metal stickers, you get yourself the most complex looking MG ever, which goddamn it should be considering its monstrous price.
Like I said in my post about the frame, do handle this kit with care. This Strike Freedom can pull any poses off and hasn’t snapped on me once, but that wasn’t without the help of this cool trick called sanding your joints which helps articulation feel a lot smoother. I even used Super Lube® for the wing connections on the backpack because my god, it is what the main problem I faced with the original MG Strike Freedom, and hearing that it’s still a problem on the MGEX made me overly cautious with these joints. They creak any time they move, which scares me, but they luckily have not snapped on me and as smooth as they can move around, they’re able to maintain the wings’ position.
For the major gripes I have for the build—the beam sabers. First, they’re somehow loose on where they’re holstered, and the fact that the only hands that can hold them are the crappy 3.0 hands that they still somehow use and have not figured out how to improve them >!Psst, just ship the Sazabi Ver.Ka’s hands goddammit!!< In addition, SF can’t stand for shit, though it’s rather impressive that it can stand with the backpack at all, and the feet, while super robust, can be cumbersome because of that fact.
I hate Bandai waterslides, so you can probably tell that I didn’t use them. This is my first time using G-Rework decals, and oh my god… I get it. It kinda sucks how there’s no manual to place the decals, but I managed to use G-Rework’s images as reference with my tablet. I didn’t count how many I put on the main body, but for the backpack alone, there are at least 160 of them. Fortunately, they are awesome to work with, and I’ll even say they’re better than DelpiDecal in terms of convenience. They come out of the sheet within 5-10 seconds, and once they’re applied with some mark setter, it’s stuck onto the plastic like dry transfers. These are the definitive set for the MGEX. I don’t even know why the decals included are lackluster, especially in color, in the first place.
Finally, once the 200+ decals were applied, it was time to pose, and boy the size of my lightbox is really starting to limit me. With its wings spread out, Strike Freedom just takes up the entire area, so I’m stuck with either taking photos of it up close or far shots that unfortunately show the sides of the box. The kit can do marvelous poses, it’s just that my setup has now become the bottleneck, and it sucks :( Still, taking pictures of it in its complete state, there’s just so much that’s going on in the shot, whether it’s up close or far back. It really portrays the gloriousness of this kit, and puts the original MG to shame. I can’t imagine the fact that Strike Freedom’s legs aren’t this bulky in canon. I’m exhausted looking at the gold at this point, but it really is a treat for the eyes. This is undoubtedly the ultimate Master Grade, though if we ever had the audacity to get the Deep Striker, maybe it’ll have competition. Special shoutout to USA Gundam Store for fucking us over for an entire year until we finally got the kit, but by all means, the MGEX Strike Freedom is truly once in a lifetime Gunpla experience.
