HG Black Knight Squad Shi-ve.A

Built and painted by me.

Ah, SEED Freedom—a movie following up Destiny 20 years later, and for as stupid the whole movie is, it is so damn enjoyable. With the movie brought multiple HGs, and damn, having built this and the Mighty Strike Freedom, this line of kits are no slouch. 

The Shi-ve.A wasn’t the first choice I wanted out of the new HG line, but it was the only one available at a hobby shop that I traveled 20 minutes to get to, and it was literally the only kit I considered getting before I’d leave empty-handed. I finally got around it last week, and upon checking that it had a mustard-looking gold frame, I wanted to paint it up, which I did hastily with a Tamiya Gold spray can. 

Like it has been said around, this build is a bit more involved than most HGs, it lacks any polycaps and unlike most HG:WFM kits, these aren’t reliant on C-clips. I’d say it’s comparable to the HG Moon Gundam and Full Mechanics kits, which let’s be fair that FM kits are more than just “upscaled HGs.” With a frame painted with a spray can, the frame is solid, though I had to sand the joints a bit as they were too tight for my liking. Beyond its build, there are a lot of accessories to play around with, and I know it’s not for everybody, but I really dig the beam cape.

What I don’t dig though is the massive amount of color correction that has to be done. The color correcting stickers suck balls, I only used the ones for the thighs, the cameras and the orange triangles. Everything else was painted, and I could’ve definitely done a better job, it’s just that the ones for the foreleg really don’t have any grooves to allow the paint to stop, so I kinda just covered as much of the flat surface as I could, and if it leaked onto the edges then so be it. I did better with the backpack, and as for the foot—I just used a sharpie for the black, and didn’t really care for the gold at the heel; that can just be part of the gold frame. As always, I did additional hand painting here and there, and did the small amount of panel-lining that was there to do. I opted not to put any generic caution decals on Shi-ve.A cuz I felt like it could ruin its knight aesthetic, so I left decal-less and gave it a flat topcoat as usual.

Overall, it was a fun kit to work with, nothing extraordinary, but it’s pretty good. The color correcting is a bit of a pain, but it’s manageable. It really excels at its build quality, because it’s just solid, it can pull any pose you can think of, it has a lot of beam effects to work off of, I guess the thing that might hold you back is whether or not you like the design or not. That’s about it, thanks for reading!