This kit is very… whelming. Sure, the last two kits I’ve built were very avant garde, but Michaelis is in line with the simplicity HG:WFM kits have, but it misses the levels of Aerial, Lfrith and even Darilbalde because it comes with quite a bit of problems I wouldn’t expect in a WFM kit, or just even in a modern HG in general.
Let’s start with the good—the Michaelis is an unfamiliar but sweet design, resembling much like a white knight, fitting for the series’ white knight character having a beefy upper half that slims down the further down it goes. The main and only accessory that you probably get the kit for, the Beam Bracer, is one hell of a weapon and adds a lot to the overall silhouette, giving it quite the asymmetry, which add everything together, Michaelis can rock some sweet looking poses. Also I just thought the barebones inner frame looked pretty cool.
But that’s probably as good as Michaelis gets, because there’s a lot of strange hindrances with this kit. First and foremost, the sprues on the armor pieces are unnecessarily giant, placed in bad spots that leave terrible nub marks, you’ll be able to spot them in both upper arms and the calves. I usually don’t sand for nub marks because using a hobby knife does the job most of the time, but with this, I had to sand almost all of this kit just so the bad nub marks were as hidden as possible. While you can get this guy do great poses, the feet give this kit atrocious balance, so doing any ground poses is a trial and error of getting it to stand, even a simple stance there’s a chance that the kit could fall. Why it didn’t come with the 3 piece stand baffles me, especially because it comes with a stand for the Beam Bracer.
That being said, I detailed Michaelis up hoping it would my improve my opinion on the kit, painting a few areas, blacking up all the recessed pill spots like it’s seen in the anime, putting custom water slide decals to spice it up, and I even topcoated it, but even after all that, it just looks pretty cool, but I’m not jaw-dropped as I was with the WFM kits I’ve done before, which don’t even have decals or was given any topcoat. I don’t really know what’s going on. I think I’m just experiencing huge Witch From Mercury fatigue right now, as it’s the only topic of discussion on [r/Gundam](https://www.reddit.com/r/Gun and WFM kits keep rolling out though they are very similar to each other (cross-compatibility to promote customization). I could just build a fully painted MG right now, but I don’t know when that’s going to happen again any time soon.