I clearly need to re-watch Iron-Blooded Orphans... Despite it being one of my all-time favorite Gundam shows, I didn't immediately recognize the kit this week. I had to look up who Julieta Juris was... And then, after watching a quick 30-second clip I remembered. Her.
So - this week I'm building the HGIBO Julieta's Mobile Reginlaze.
Honestly, I think this might be my least-favorite of the Graze-derived HGIBO builds I've done so far.
We start off strong with the typically-minimal Graze sticker sheet. A few yellow bits for the glowing AHAB reactor parts. A little yellow lens for the head camera, and another one for the interior eye. Looks good! Nothing actually color-correcting!
And somewhat atypically - we've actually got two different shades of white in this kit. I guess I don't know if that's intentional or some weird manufacturing defect? But it's kind of neat to see two-tone white in a regular HG kit, even if it isn't very visible once the kit is built.
So, this is my first real complaint with the kit... That central piece of armor - the green with the white - is loose. Super, super loose. It kept popping off when I was posing the kit. Couldn't touch the chest at all without it coming off. So I had to cement that bit - and I hate cementing anything on a gunpla build.
My second complaint is the head here... Kind of all of it? The green collar-y bit didn't want to stay attached to the rest of the head. I kept popping it off. I haven't cemented it just because there's not a lot of mobility in the head so I'm not touching it much anyway - but that's going to be its own complaint when we get to the posing.
I'm not sure how visible it is in these pictures... It'll be very visible later... But the green plastic is kind of terrible to work with. It marks very, very easily. And some of the gates are in very inconvenient places, so there's some really obvious nub-marks in this build.
That could certainly be addressed with some paint, but it's really ugly on a straight-build like this.
There's a good selection of equipment in this kit... There's the two gauntlets, the rifle, and the twin piles... Unsurprisingly there's no extra hands or stand. But these are some fairly odd hands that aren't going to work with a lot of the option parts out there - so you're really limited to just these two holding hands.
Here you can already see one of the very-prominent nub-marks up on the shoulder.
And those gauntlets clash pretty heavily with the twin piles. It really feels like you're only meant to equip one of the options at a time, which is sort of disappointing. Especially since there's no way to store the piles or the gauntlets when they're not in use.
There's a wire included so you can pose the claw launching out of the pile. It's a decent effect. The claw is super light so you're not going to have any problem posing it out on the wire.
I like the gauntlets. They look like they could be used both offensively and defensively. But, again, they clash with a lot of the other equipment... And, again, there's no good way to store them when they're not in use.
(And here you can see those terrible nub-marks again.)
We get an alternate head part with a commander fin.
I'm not sure if this is an official build option, but you can take the barrel off the rifle and make it look more like an SMG or pistol.
And there's several ways to store the magazines/batteries on the kit. They can plug onto the butt-flap, the hip armor, or the shoulders. I wish we had that kind of versatility for the rest of the equipment.
Like the rest of the Graze designs, the head opens up to expose the eyes within. And I guess this is as good a place as any to complain about the head.
It's not great.
That collar really gets in the way when posing. And if you fiddle with it too much it'll separate from the rest of the head. Obviously that's not going to matter much once you've settled on a pose and put it up on your shelf... But it was a pain during these photos. Especially when I was swapping head parts and opening it up to expose the eye.
So, yeah, this is probably my least-favorite Graze-derived kit.
The design itself is good. I like it. I just didn't enjoy the build so much.
I don't think that green plastic matches the art very well... And the nubs were kind of terrible... And there was some serious looseness... And there's no good way to store most of the equipment...
And it's kind of all especially-annoying when I look at how solid the rest of the Graze-derived kits have been.
But it's still not a genuinely bad kit. It still looks pretty good up on the shelf alongside all my other HGIBO kits.
