I thought I wouldn’t be touching another HG SEED Freedom kit ever again, but after two years since it’s been released, I finally built the movie’s poster boy, the Rising Freedom. I’ll be honest, I was never a big enough fan of the design that I’d consider getting the kit of it, but my dad got it on a whim, gave it to me as a spontaneous gift, and well, I guess I have a Rising Freedom now. If I’m the one that’s supposed to build this, then I’m making the kit to my liking.
If you’ve built any HG SEED Freedom kit before, you exactly know what you’re getting into with the Rising Freedom. Its build is a teensy bit more involved than other HG kits as it has quite a few tiny pieces and interesting ways of assembling pieces together, and it’s also sticker hell as these new designs are a bit too intricate for an HG to fully color separate in plastic. Out of every CE 75 kit I’ve done, the Rising Freedom by far is the worst offender of sticker hell having over 30 stickers to make the kit as color accurate as possible, but even then you still have to do a few more touchups with paint yourself. However, I wasn’t even sure if I was going to put those white stickers for the wings as the white stripes were the thing I disliked the most about the design as a whole. But, the wing construction is designed with the intention that the stickers would mask the connection of the blue and dark blue pieces, so I painstakingly put those 16 stripes on, and… y’know what, it actually looks pretty good!
But that’s also because I also painted some of the colors. Out of the box, the blue was not accurate to the anime at all and I really hate how Bandai keeps using navy blue instead of black for Freedom kits (even though Rising Freedom is the one where it does have navy blue), so I replaced to those two colors with Tamiya Light Metallic Blue and Rubber Black respectively, and I painted the red with Metallic Red for the heck of it. Though subtle, these colors improved my opinion on the Rising Freedom quite substantially, but since I was changing these colors, I would have to paint the color inaccuracies myself instead of relying on the stickers to do most of the job.
I did quite a bit of hand painting for the Freedom, and to be frank, it wasn’t fun. Turns out TS-82 and XF-85 Rubber Black are not the same shade of black. Using X-13 Metallic Blue is quite annoying to coat consistently. While the white plastic feels premium, like the Calibarn, it makes panel liner smudge like crazy, making it a real pain in the ass to clean up. Once I got that settled, I of course applied some 1/144 Delpi generic caution decals, and did something different for topcoating where I used a semi-gloss can as I wanted to keep the shine of the metallic paint but not make the rest too shiny, but I’m not gonna lie, it not only removed the shine from the painted parts but even from the bare plastic too, which is… not what I exactly wanted, but uh, I’ll take it I guess.
It was finally time to pose, and it poses alright. Having done 3 SEED kits in a row, I’m feeling the fatigue of posing kits with large backpacks—you can’t pull any ground poses as it can barely stand on its own, you’re going to need to use an action base for it to do anything which I’m not gonna assemble and waste another AB7 for, and you’re not only posing to make the mobile suit look good, but you gotta consider how the backpack affects the silhouette as well. Like what people have said about this kit, moving the wings on this kit is a pain, especially considering the extra wing binders and the cone piece move independent from the main wing unit, which makes handling the whole backpack quite a hassle. I copied whatever poses were on the manual, and once I got the Gundam to Full Burst Mode, I really didn’t have it in me to pose anymore, so I called it a day.
Overall, the Rising Freedom was certainly an HG SEED Freedom experience alright. It looks pretty good, but it takes quite the painful effort to get there and doesn’t feel as satisfying as completing say an RG or MGSD that required less effort to get lookin’ good. I knew what I was expecting going in this, yet I’m still exhausted anyway. God I hope my dad doesn’t surprise with any more HG SEED Freedom kits, because if he does I might do some unethical, environmentally hostile things to them. Anyway, thanks for reading. See you later.
Ranking: A
