Best GEL pen? Definitely.
TL:DR - the Pilot G-2 is an excellent pen - reasons follow. (NB, the Zebra Sarasa looks just like it but IMO does not work just like it. YMMV.)
I’ve used Zebra and Pentel gels; on occasions both dried and needed a scribble-start, or skipped, or went faint.
Pilot gels, in all the colours I’ve used (bring back Hunter Green, dammit!) and configurations I’ve owned - mostly discontinued and now hard or impossible to find, also dammit! - have never done any of that.
It’s significant that the G-2 refill will fit a lot of other pens whose manufacturers you might expect to be a bit dog-in-the-manger about using their refills and nobody else’s. Pilot’s rep seems to be Just That Good.
Here’s one of those discontinued configurations: Gel-X had the same thumb-push operating system as the standard G-2, but was a bit thicker overall and with a wider grip section that - for me, anyway - made it more comfortable to write with, especially during long sessions.
The G-2 Pro is its apparent replacement, but I haven’t seen them for sale in Europe and I don’t need one anyway, since I was able to nab a few Gel-X’s from eBay when they started getting hard to find. That turned out to be a smart move.
I wish I’d been as smart with this:
It was the G-23 Luxury, an understated elegant bit of kit which looks more expensive than it cost (£5.95 from CultPens back in 2007) and was a lovely pen to write with, the closest to a fountain-pen of any non-fountain-pen I’ve handled so far.
It not only took standard Pilot gel refills (off to a good start already), the pen’s steel body / aluminium cap construction gave enough extra weight that I only needed to guide it over the page, without needing to press down. Like I say, more a fountain-pen than a ballpoint.
I’ve seen reviews that took exception to its asymmetrical cap, for instance this:
…there is a notch in the barrel that a matching point on the cap has to slide into like a puzzle piece to get the cap on securely. This is endlessly frustrating to me, because I am used to just popping the cap on and going. With this pen, I have to pay attention more to what I am doing. The horrors!
If presumably-adult reviewers still need Mummy to hold their hand while crossing the road, that’s their problem not mine.
Its replacement is the Pilot Metropolitan gel rollerball: I have one but (a) it looks, feels and until uncapped IS annoyingly similar to its fountain-pen sibling and (b) seems to have been discontinued, which suggests that someone at Pilot though the same.
I lost my shiny sleek G-23 in 2017, went looking for a replacement, found that it too had been discontinued (Pilot do this a lot, it’s annoying) so went to eBay… And then left again after finding the only one available was £59.95 + £19.95 for shipping.
Once again and as usual, it’s always the good stuff that gets lost; I’ve still got the couple of £1.49 still-in-production G-2s I bought at the same time as the G-23. They’re still going strong and have been refilled many times.
But only once with Hunter Green.
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