I’ve seen so many people describe Reborn-One Hundred kits as being “High Grade quality in a Master Grade size”, but I’m not so certain that that’s true. I’m probably going to say this multiple times throughout this post, but it feels more like something in between.
Look at those parts. Is that the level of an MG? No. But it’s still more than your typical HG.
It’s the same deal with the sticker sheet:
It’s not nearly as large as the sheet you’d get in a good MG, but even the most generous HG won’t include quite this many markings.
A few more observations before we continue. First, the instruction manual. It’s long and narrow, and unlike any other Gunpla manual I’ve ever seen before:
It’s also in color. This is still rare for P-Bandai releases (at least in my experience), but it’s not unprecedented. Just this year we saw the same thing with the Leo-R.
My current working theory is that Bandai is doing this on purpose. (I think) They’re printing color manuals for kits that are “on the bubble” so to speak, where they’ve made it P-Bandai exclusive in an excess of caution, but which they might turn into a retail release later on if it sells well enough. They’ve already done this with some of the High Grade Gundam Wing releases, like the Deathscythe Hell and Altron, so we know there is precedent.
Now let’s look a very … unique gimmick. Here’s a shot of the model’s feet:
And here are the model’s … feet?
Which gives me a chance to use one of my favorite stupid Simpsons jokes:
The truth, that second one isn’t a foot, but rather a cover that goes over the foot. This comes from an extremely brief, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment from Gundam F91. As I mentioned in the introduction, there’s a scene in the film in which Den’an Gei’s march in a military parade, and if you look real close, you’ll see that they have these covers on their feet:
This is apparently based on a real world thing that they do with tank treads, applying rubber covers so to minimize the damage they might otherwise do to a city street during a military parade. I’m both shocked and impressed that someone decided to include such an obscure little detail like this.
Alright, now let’s get to the build.
On Stickers and Stuff
I used some (though not all) of the included stickers on this model. I'd do a simple test where I'd see how obvious the transparent sticker outline looked. If it was blatantly obvious, the sticker came off, but if it looked largely invisible then it stayed on.To my pleasant surpise, most of them ended up looking pretty good. As for the ones that didn't, in some cases I tried to replace them with equivalent waterslides I had lying around, and in other cases I just omitted the decal entirely.
For what it's worth, the only sticker I consider mandatory to use is the Crossbone Vanguard logo that goes on the chest. The model is detailed enough that it looks great even without other markings, so if you don't like the way the rest of the stickers look, just leave them off.
Beam Rifle
This was the first thing I put together, and I took it as a good sign for the rest of the build. It’s color accurate out of the box, and while there is a seamline, it’s so subtle that you could easily get away with ignoring it.
As you can see, I added a bit of metallic color to it. Not sure if that was the right decision, but it is what it is.
Beam Sabers
These have a nifty look to them. They have a little bit of shape and flair instead of just being tubes:
Also, as I was building I noticed something - the color of these beam effect parts are different than others. They’re much lighter in color than usual.
Here, take a look. I placed the beam blades for this kit on the left, next to the beam blades of another Master Grade on the right:
Now I’m going to have to go back and see if they actually changed the color across different shows and films, or if this change was more arbitrary in nature.
Feet
I really like the way this is constructed.
First, instead of using actual polycaps, it uses regular plastic parts that are shaped like polycaps. This should lead to sturdier joints.
Second, all the seamlines on the green plastic are hidden by this grey part that wraps around:
This is not an aberration; the entire model goes out of its way to try and hide seamlines as best it can, which I greatly appreciate.
Now let’s talk color correction. On the back of the foot you’ll find what looks to be cabling or tubes or something:
This is made of blue plastic, and I have no doubt it would look fine that way, but I decided to repaint it metallic grey (I did the same thing with some identical cabling on the leg).
Beyond that, there are all sorts of other surface details here. I painted these in a dark gunmetal; again, this is not an aberration, as the rest of the model is filled with similar details. I recommend doing at least something to them, even if it’s nothing more than coloring them in with a black panel lining marker. They add so much extra depth and detail to the final model.
Here now are the finished feet:
(PS - I don’t plan to use the foot covers, but I still topcoated them just in case)
Legs
I ended up assembling and topcoating the upper leg first, in order to ensure that they got full coverage:
Here they did the thing where they turn the seamline into a big deep channel for you to panel line, which is fine with me.
Now here’s the cross section to show you how the rest of it comes together:
We get some nice part separation in the front ankle guard, and of course that giant thruster coming out the side.
Speaking of which … if you look at the lineart for this mobile suit, you’ll notice that it does the thing that a lot of Zeon-coded MS do, where the insides of thrusters and other open ports are either painted full-on red, or at least lined with red. This is a huge pain in the ass to do on smaller models, but the Den’an Gei is large enough that it was relatively straightforward, so I went ahead and did it everywhere I deemed necessary.
Lower Torso
We’ve got one of those swinging pelvis joints, which is always welcome:
We also get a moveable rear skirt:
And for some reason the underside of the all the skirt armor pieces are extremely detailed:
However, weirdly enough the outside of the skirts look very flat and plain. Consider doing something, anything to plus them up, whether that be adding some of the stickers, and/or painting in what few surface details there are:
From a pure visual design standpoint, this is the most disappointing part of the mobile suit. There’s just not a lot going on here.
Upper Torso
This is the core upon which most of the chest is built:
Below you can see the shoulder sockets, which are made out multiple bits of sturdy plastic instead of polycaps:
Once everything is fastened together, we come to a choice. In the film, the Den’an Gei’s cockpit hatch is red, but in the original lineart it was grey. The model comes with both variations, so you get to decide which one you want to use.
Or you could be me, and have the choice made for you. I wanted to use the grey one, but I had a really hard time getting the Crossbone Vanguard sticker properly aligned, and I ultimately damaged it. I had better luck when applying the second sticker to the red hatch, and so that was the one I was forced to use.
(Note that the hatch is purely decorative, and cannot open up, like it might on a Master Grade)
Backpack
This is the rare case where we get a seamline, though almost all of it ends up being covered up.
There’s also a ton of surface detail here, so feel free to go nuts and make it all look pretty:
Arms
These are, of course, asymmetrical on account of the left arm mounting the beam shield emitter (which, interestingly, looks exactly like the one on the F91).
There’s not much else to say about these, except for the fact that I just noticed that there’s a little beam gun right below the shield emitter. How did I miss that?
Shoulders
On the right shoulder, we get a rounded, Zaku-esque pauldron:
And on the left, we get a boxy thing that holds the mobile suit’s missiles:
Speaking of which, the missiles themselves are a separate part that slots right in:
This is the one area where I feel this model falls a bit short. It would have been nice if somehow the missiles were all further separated, so you could do action poses where they fire off individually.
Holding Hands
Here's another way in which this kit is similar to a High Grade - it only comes with three holding hands, and none of them are an open palm hand.So I cracked open my box of holding hands to see if the largest size might fit on this model, and sadly they do not. This despite the fact that the Den'an Gei is so small that, even at 1/100 scale, it's less than a head taller than a standard HG kit.
So .... no open palm hands for me, which means no two handed rifle poses. Damn.
Head
I could have sworn I took some WIP shots of the head, but I can’t seem to find them. Damn.
Be that as it may, I do have a few observations about it:
- It’s made out of quite a lot of parts, moreso than you might think
- The eyes are made by applying a shiny foil decal, and then applying the clear blue lenses on top of that
- There are vulcan cannons in the head, but they’re buried pretty far in there, so I didn’t bother painting them.
- The head is the only part of the body with a really noticeable seamline, right in the back:
All the surface detail back there makes it really hard to sand it down, and if you don’t line up the parts correctly before applying cement, it will look very obviously misaligned (like mine does in the photo above)
My advice is to just leave it alone. If that’s the worst seamline on the entire model, in an area that most people aren’t going to see, then that’s pretty great.
Anyway, here it is from the front:
Conclusion
Now that the build is done, we get to the million dollar question - how does this really compare to the other grades?
Well, if I were to compare this build to a modern Master Grade, then of course it comes up short. It simply can’t match the level of part and color separation that you get in a modern MG, to say nothing about the gimmicks.
But compared to an older Master Grade I think it actually fares surprisingly well. In my experience, older MG’s require as much or more color correction, have far more seamlines to deal with, and even often come with polycaps (which this kit does not).
Indeed, I have multiple old MGs (circa 2000, 2001) that I’ve started and then stopped building because I was frustrated at how much crap I had to deal with. In their own way they were/are as much like glorified High Grades as RE/100 is.
Here’s how I’d ultimately put it - picture the nicest, fanciest High Grade build experience you can imagine, and make the final model slightly (but only slightly) larger. That’s what this was like.
And I think that’s pretty great! The engineering on modern HG’s is so good that, while they may lack all the fancy bells and whistles of MGs, they still manage to look phenomenal without much extra effort. And that’s definitely the case here as well.
If the other RE/100’s are anywhere close to being as nice to build as this one, then sign me up for more.