HG 1/144 Principality of Zeon Mass Production Mobile Suit gMS-01 "Gelgoog" (Shiiko Sugai Colours)
Another GQuuuuuuX kit! This was one of the first main series kits that I really wanted to get my hands on, primarily due to its resemblance to my favourite suit design, the GM. It's an incredibly impressive kit, achieving some really notable colour separation and flexibility.
Despite being a Zeonic suit and the GQuuuuuuX universe's version of the Gelgoog, this suit more closely resembles the GM from the main UC universe. The reasoning behind this is pretty interesting - after Char steals the Gundam, he tells Zeonic to stop production of their current projects - their late war suit being the MS-14A Gelgoog - and begin reverse engineering the Gundam into a mass production suit. So Zeonic's new suit, the first proper gMS line mech, resembled a mass production Gundam - a GM (although the standard colours were still the green used on the original UC version of the Gelgoog). You can see some of Zeonic's design language in the suit still, especially retaining the Gelgoog's "snout". Funilly enough, it shares more design concepts from the later Gundam QuuuuuuX then it seems to from the original Gundam, especially with the arm design.
As with the other GQuuuuuuX kits, the colour separation is excellent, with the only correction needed being a little grey on the boosters in-between the piping details, which is honestly a really minor fix compared to a lot of other colour innacurate HGs. I was rather unhappy with how Bandai chose to depict the visor however, with it being a simple gloss green piece without even any metallic injection or shiny foil sticker. To give it a little more impact, I repainted the piece with a blue/green metallic marker, and added a little of my UV-reactive fluorescent green metallic marker to the three "eye" parts to get them to glow like they do in the box art.
Apart from this, and my usual weathering on the grey parts, there wasn't any other detal to add to the kit. There's a single detail sticker for Sugai's custom unit insignia, although I wish there were a few more markings. The build process was super streamlined - the arm really only contains 5 parts and still has more range of motion than a lot of older and more complex arm designs. There's some nice detail on the legs to achieve the yellow propellant tanks built into the legs while maintaining full colour separation.
There's a nice set of accessories for this kit. There are the two beam spray guns, redesigned to help them fit in with GQuuuuuuX's art style, as well as a beam saber with two beam effects. A cute gimmick of this kit is the fact that you can attach one blade to either end of the beam saber, reproducing a version of the beam naginata that the original UC Gelgoog had.
Another nice detail is an extra piece that clips to the back-skirt, that holds both beam spray guns and the beam saber. It's nice to be able to store all the extra weapons on the kit itself, rather then them getting lost in storage.
The kit also comes with an open left hand, and a specialised left-hand piece to replicate the "stigma" weapon that Sugai uses in the show. It's such a thematically interesting weapon - it's the communications cable that the mech uses to circumvent lack of radio communications due to Minovsky particles, but used as a sort of Scorpion-esque grappling tool, just like how Newtype abilities are co-opted for war instead of for communication. It's been replicated pretty faithfully, although I think the wire used is a little thick, given how the wires in the show are so thin as to be almost invisible.
I'm really pleased with how this kit turned out. I think it ended up being a super clean build, and the details really pop, plus it's a super easy and fun kit to pose. I might end up getting Bocata's custom as well somewhere down the line, given its Zeta-inspired colouring, but for now, my next project is going to be the Red Gundam (so I can get it out before the series finishes).
