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Spoiler Preface!!!

This post has screenshots from season one of Gundam: Iron Blooded Orphans. While it doesn’t show anything I would consider a spoiler, I know that sometimes even a mere screenshot is too much for some, hence this warning just in case.

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Let’s look at the other half of the Barbatos (is it really half? I think I covered more than half in the last post? Whatever).

Head

The head is made up of two big inner frame pieces, but they can’t connect to each other without some help:

In that case, let’s bring in the rest of the crew:

High Grade models usually have fairly simple heads, which use fairly few pieces, but this one’s got a lot going on. There is a lot of layering of parts:

I’m not sure if it makes it look better than normal, but I do think it looks pretty good.

Interestingly enough, the back of the head is extremely unarmored. I truly hope that Gundam frame is sturdy:

Arms

This is where I am going to rant a little bit. I am not a fan of what Bandai decided to do here.

The kit comes with two of these shoulder sections:

As well as Three. Different. Arms:

Three different, fully built, fully functional arms.

I mentioned this in the intro post, but this kit allows you to configure the Barbatos in either its First or Fourth forms. The difference between the two is that the First Form lacks shoulder armor, and it has different left arm:

As you can see, it has a big old gauntlet strapped to it. For reasons I do not know, apparently this couldn’t be achieved by simply equipping the extra parts to the standard arm. No, they needed to build a separate one.

To be fair, the third arm does look visually different:

This change seems in part to be a functional requirement, as the third arm has connection points for the two gauntlet pieces. However, it also looks like a deliberate visual alteration, even though you can barely see the actual design of the arm under the gauntlet.

Regardless of the reason for these shenanigans, the problem I have with this third arm is that it is a waste. The only reason it is included is so that you can configure the Barbatos in its First Form. Quite frankly I do not understand why that was considered important. The mobile suit doesn’t look very good in the First Form, not to mention that it moves on to the Second Form after only two episodes of the show. I would have preferred it if the kit only supported the Fourth Form, and used the plastic freed up from that third arm in service of something else. For instance, maybe they could have used it on the mace to add the “spike rod” feature:

Or they could have added the hand guard to the sword:

Or they could have just used the extra plastic to enable some better part separation across the body of the model. All of these would be a better use of material than this extra arm.

Okay, now that I have that out of my system, I guess I ought to talk about the general design of the arms. I like them well enough. The blue piece on the elbow adds both a nice dash of color and a nice sense of parts separation that we don’t typically see on High Grades¹. So does the cabling.

In terms of articulation, the arms have a decent amount of bend:

One thing I will give Bandai credit for is that it is very easy to separate the arms from the shoulder. If you want to switch between the First and Fourth forms, you can do so without worrying about breaking anything.

Shoulder Armor

These were a pain in the butt. Three different colors of paint, plus panel lines. I lost count of the amount of times I had to paint, top coat, paint, top coat, etc in order to keep the red and yellow paints from bleeding all over and ruining everything.

In the end, at least they came out well. I ended up using come glossy Pledge on the yellow part, to make it stand out against the matte white. You can’t see it well in the photo, but it looks great in person.

Backpack

Here are all the parts:

This is a fun backpack design. It is extremely compact, yet feature packed. It has a moveable thruster in the center, and two hard points on the size for securing weapons:

Most mobile suit designs struggle to offer so much utility, regardless of size.

But wait, there’s more! You can pop off the hard points:

And then attach one of these control arms:

This allows you to equip the Smooth Bore Gun, assuming you have it.

And with that, the only things we haven’t covered are the weapons. We will get to that next, but for now, here is a teaser shot of the finished Barbatos: