With the Gundam Ground Type completed, let us finally take a look at the full assembly:
Visually, it looks great. The colors are right, the details are all there, and my attempts at weathering it are … well, they look good enough.
Anyway, time to get to some poses:
During this photoshoot I discovered that the Ground Type has some balance issues. You do not want to pose this when the backpack is full of 180mm cannon parts, but even with an empty pack it often falls over.
It balances much better without the pack. For instance, it can (barely) stand on one foot:
And it can do a solid split:
As for the rest of the articulation, the head struggles to turn to either side. I think this may be a quirk of my model, as I have seen others who have gotten a much larger degree of rotation. The arms are pretty standard for a High Grade. The legs are actually quite good, as we will see soon. The articulation around the torso is so-so. The model has a tendency to fall apart at the midsection.
During the photoshoot I also that the Ground Type is not very conducive to many poses (I guess you could say it is non-poseagenic?). This is a mobile suit that has a very boxy, almost tank-like visual appearance, and in the 08th MS Team OVA it rarely jumps around or uses flashy attacks. This is a mecha that is all about careful movements, steady stances, and lining up a shot before pulling the trigger. It looks better in simple walking poses and certain kinds of firing poses.
For example, it looks fine here:
And here:
And definitely here:
But not so much here:
This looks okay:
I even managed to attempt this classic bit from the show:
I had to detach the head to make it work, but I’ll take it:
On to the beam sabers now. They do not stay in the hands securely, so they have a habit of falling out if you tilt them downward, or even to the sides. This dashing pose worked out:
No idea what I was trying to do with this one.
At this point in the photo shoot I was getting demoralized, so I did not try to do much more with the beam sabers :(
Next I tried to fit the EZ-8’s parachute pack onto the back of the Ground Type. I predicted that it would fit, and … it does!:
Which means I could pretend it was jumping out of a plane. Note that I was too lazy to connect the straps to the shoulder armor:
All of these poses are serviceable, but they do not feel exciting. Of course, we have not seen it with the 180mm cannon, because I decided to save the best for last. It really feels as if the articulation on this kit was designed solely to accommodate the Ground Type’s most iconic pose. You know the one. It is the first thing you see on this kit’s Amazon listing:
And it is on the side of the box:
As it turns out, not only is this pose possible with this model, but it ends up being one of the easiest and most stable configurations you can put it in:
How stable is it? I took that photo when the kit was on my workbench. I then left it in that pose as I moved it to the other room to start the photoshoot. I put it down, put the shield back in place, and this is what it looked like without having to do any adjustments:
The trick to this pose is in getting the legs in the right position. They will bend as far as it looks in these photos, without straining either (this is what I meant when I said the articulation was built to accommodate this pose. It feels as if they made sure the legs could bend as needed at the expense of everything else). Once they are in place, the rest of it comes together with ease. This is also the only weapon the Ground Type can aim straight ahead like this (another reason why it feels like the kit was designed around this gun).
I feel like it is impossible for the Ground Type to not look cool holding this cannon, whether it is kneeling:
Or standing:
That is it for the action poses, but there are a few other gripes I have with this kit.
Bad Hands
The kit comes with a very standard “trigger finger” hand, like so:
First off, the way the gun is shaped, the trigger finger is not even resting on the trigger. What the heck?
More importantly, when I try to put a gun in it, it ends up like this:
For whatever reason, the connection is just not very strong, so any sort of movement causes it to loosen up and separate.
Of course, the model also comes with two standard closed fists. These are sized such that it can hold its guns with a good, tight grip. On the other hand, as I said before, the beam sabers are far more loose. Simply put, the problem is that the grips on the guns are all the same size, but this is a different size than the beam saber handles. This means the fists (and the trigger finger hand) can only be sized to fit one of these two weapon types.
There is a solution to this issue, one that can be found on, ironically, my old High Grade EZ-8. You can see it here:
Here we see the good old “peg and hole” system. The hand has a rectangular notch etched into it. Meanwhile, each gun (and, usually, the beam saber handles) has a similarly shaped peg sticking out the grip:
This allows each of the weapons to lock into place. The hand can then be molded to be large enough to hold the largest weapon, without having to worry about smaller weapons slipping out.
I do not understand why the Gundam Ground Type - a much newer model kit than the EZ-8 - lacks this simple, but extremely effective feature. I can say that this is certainly not the only High Grade kit I own that lacks this feature, and that baffles me to no end.
Protecting the Shield
“Protecting the Shield” is a bad subsection title, but it was the perfect opportunity to take a potshot at the NFL, which insists that somehow shields need protection.
I do want to talk about shields though. Namely, the Ground Type is the third model kit I own that uses this kind of shield:
The crazy thing, though, is that very single one of them is built differently. Considering how much Bandai likes to reuse parts and molds, I am astounded at the fact that something as simple as this shield was not standardized long ago, especially considering how much they like using it.
Because each version of the shield is built differently, each one has a different way of attaching to their respective model, and believe me when I say that not all of them are created equal. Starting with the oldest iteration first, we have the EZ-8. This one uses peg and hole system:
As you can see, the peg itself is fairly long, and its round shape obviously facilitates the rotation of the shield. Despite being the oldest, this is by far the best iteration in terms of the stability of the connection. The EZ-8’s shield only comes off if you want it to.
Next we have the Gundam Ground Type. This uses a long rectangular peg that plugs into a hole in the arm:
Here is the what the actual peg looks like:
I lack the engineering knowledge to explain why a peg that is this size and is this shallow is going to provide an unstable connection, but it very much does. As a result, the shield pops off constantly. Why they did not use the EZ-8’s design is beyond me, as this one is just all around worse.
Lastly we have the latest version; the shield for the Gundam Local Type. I cannot actually show you what it looks like on the kit, because it broke. That’s how bad a design it is. Instead, what I can show you is what it looks like in the instructions:
You have two short, thin tabs on the wrist that connect to the shield. If you are thinking to yourself that any amount of pressure applied to the edges of the shield could cause these tabs to break clean off the model, then you have figured out how mine broke! The shield is now permanently super glued to the body.
While this may be the worst design, at least there is a reason for it. Namely, this design allows the beam sabers to plug into the wrist (as you can see in the instructions above) so as to facilitate poses like this:
This may not be a good reason, but at least it is a reason. That is more than what I can say for the Ground Type.
Hanging with EZ-8
I feel obligated to at least try and end this post on a more positive note, so here is the Ground Type hanging out with its comrade in arms:
These two should pair perfectly together, and thankfully they do. Both their similarities and differences become so much more stark when they stand side by side. This really makes me want to get one more Ground Type to round out the full squad.
Conclusion
This is still one of my favorite mobile suits, but this is not one of my favorite kits. The balance issues, the floppy shield, and the oft-limited articulation are issues that cause various degrees of pain. Worst of all is that the kit fails to be pose-agenic (I decided to own this stupid made-up word). In the past I often complained about kits that came with a bare bones set of accessories, as it often limits the number of kinds of poses one can do. In this case, we have a model that is armed to the teeth, yet so few of its weapons really work well. It feels like such a colossal waste.
Maybe I am just missing something. After doing the photoshoot, I must admit that I had a number of ideas for other poses that I think would be quite a bit better. However, I still have not found a way to make gunpla photography fun, so I have to get myself in the right mood to do it. If I do manage to shoot them, I promise to make a followup post with the results. For now, though, I am going to leave it up on my shelf, where it looks good and I cannot be disappointed with its flaws.