First Impressions

Finally, I’m building a modern Wing kit! My first ever build 20+ years ago was the positively ancient HGFA Gundam D-Hell Custom, and my first Gundam series (like so many of us in the US) was Wing.

The Leo is by far my favorite “grunt” suit, admittedly mostly for nostalgia reasons. I do genuinely love the simplicity of it. The shoulder-mounted shield has also always provided an element of asymmetry that really appeals to me. Also the Dober Gun might be my favorite weapon in all of Gundam, which unfortunately is the Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Film of this kit.

Right away, I noticed the “Gunpla Evolution Project” logo in the top right of the box. I wasn’t sure what this was, so I looked it up, and apparently it was a relatively short lived (5 kits) series of kits across different grades where Bandai tested some new techniques and technologies ( Gundam Info announcement / Bandai Hobby page )

For this Leo, it looks like they were testing some new joint parts, because I’ve never seen this style before. I was also shocked by the relative lack of polycaps! And complete absence of any stickers! What wizardry is this kit?

Body Building

This build went extremely fast. All snapped together in just a few hours. As a newer kit, the plastic felt good and trimmed up easily. That said, as nice as the plastic was, I ended up with much larger nubs than usual, but I’m not sure why.

I was working with a new pair of “workhorse” nippers, the GodHand PN-125, to cut parts off the runners. Still sticking with my Tamiya nippers for cutting off nubs and a Tamiya knife with Olfa blades for cleaning things up. Maybe some combination of those things just meant I was cutting a bit different than I have on other kits.

I was really impressed by the clever joint work on this kit. Even with only six polycaps for the whole thing, the level of articulation is excellent! The shoulder joints are designed in an especially cool way that I think is really unique and different compared to other kits I’ve built. I don’t remember if this is a canonical detail or just a “feature” of this kit, but I was a bit caught off guard by the lack of articulation around the head/neck.

All the details look incredible, and I love that they didn’t go the sticker route for anything. I was expecting the red details on the head, or even the face camera/sensor to be done with a sticker, but nope! All plastic!

By the end, this tiny terror snapped together into the imposing-looking, explosion-prone menace that we all know it to be.

Get Equipped

If there’s one downside to this kit, its that there are very few accessories and weapons to go along with it. Granted, I haven’t built many grunt suits, but this loadout seemed… sparse. Also, we’ve only got the two closed hands to work with - No open hands for more fun/dynamic poses. That’s not particularly unusual, but it is something I noticed while deciding what poses to try out.

On the flip side, the limited set of accessories are all beautiful. The Leo shield has always been one of my favorite bits of Gundam mobile suit design, and it is just as impressive in plastic as it is on screen. The gray pops out of the olive perfectly, and the articulation once mounted on the shoulder is great. And finally, both beam saber hilts can be mounted/stored behind the shield, which is unnecessary but a great detail.

I can’t quite put my finger on it, but something seems off about the coloring of the 105mm rifle. I know that it’s technically screen accurate (see below) but something still looks wrong about it to me. Maybe it was my lighting, but it just felt wrong the whole time I was tinkering with poses.

The combination of the great articulation, clean lines, excellent detailing and color separation, and simplistic weapon loadout meant I managed to put together what I think are some cool looking shots right in my build space. No action base needed!

Oh, and I have to mention again, they did my boy dirty by not including a Dober Gun.

Mission Complete

The HGAC Leo is a beautiful kit, a quick build, and I’m definitely going to put a few more of these together over time. While I haven’t actually built an Entry Grade kit yet, I think that this is probably as simple as an HG can get, before dipping into EG territory.

The fact that I was able to snap this together in just a handful of hours and it still looks this good without paint or anything is almost criminal. I expect when/if I step into the world of weathering and painting, I’ll use a few HGAC Leos as test canvases because they’re so easy to build.

I still can’t shake the disappointment of no Dober Gun though. If only there was a Leo kit that had some sort of… full weapon set…

Oh well would you look at that!