It's a design flaw of the Full Cloth. Looks menacing with the additional armor parts but impedes articulation.


MG Tallgeese done !

Some thoughts...

Pros:
1. Quick and easy build. No complicated and confusing parts. Good for people like me who doesn't have much time nor patience.

2. Near perfect proportions, and in fact there are some improvements over the original anime version. For example, fat chunky thighs which are the highlight of the Tallgeese; larger shoulder armours.

3. The yellow trim are actual yellow plastic, not just stickers. Apart from the wing bits of course.

4. The grey parts do break the monotony and provide some variation in terms of colour in an otherwise very white kit.

5. Articulation-wise it is pretty amazing - knee and elbow armour separate into a few parts to allow maximum range of motion, the shoulder joint swivel front and back and even pops out laterally, the booster pods open up like a blooming flower when deployed. The hips don't move as much as other MGs due to the attachment of the side skirts, but it is more than adequate for posing.

6. Extra boosters on the rear armour are nice additions.

7. Recoil action of the Dober gun gives it a realistic feel, although it's a relatively useless gimmick. The Dober Gun now has more detail too.

8. Loads of Katoki-styled red decals which somehow avoid making the kit look like it is suffering from chicken pox, unlike the Unicorn.

9. The shoulder manipulators (or arms? attachments? for the shield and gun) can detached and covered when not being used.

10. Nice curved beam sabre blades, although I'm not fussed even if they gave me straight ones. My kits rarely pose with beam sabres anyway. Guns all the way.

Cons:
1. Fcking useless hands. I have no idea why Bandai insist on using this hopeless design for their Wing MGs. Stick with 2.0 or even 3.0 manipulators please. The lack of a wrist that flexes/extends also inhibit posing, especially with the bulky body of the Dober Gun.

2. Very top heavy kit, and the polycapped ankles do not help things either. I wonder why Bandai didn't use ABS for the ankles.

3. Ankle guards are held only by friction. You're better off gluing it to the bottom of the calves otherwise it'll pop off every time you adjust the ankles.

4. Due to the crappy wrists and palms, there's no proper way to pose the Dober Gun. There's not much room to fit the gun properly underneath the armpit (like my picture), and if you use the original attachment on the shoulder it looks very awkward. You can't pose it on top of the shoulder like a typical bazooka either.

5. I've not much faith in the sturdiness of the two thin pieces which support the booster pods, especially the lower joints which are likely to be worn out by friction and succumb to the weight of the pods in some time.

6. The waist lacks rotational movement although flexion and extension are pretty decent.

7. No blue sticker for the horizontal eye piece. This is however easily fixed by painting the posterior surface of the transparent eyepiece. Would also have loved a bigger eagle decal for the shield.

8. The front edge of the wings should be yellow plastic instead of stickers, as mentioned above. Again easily fixed with paint but why leave this out when there's already a huge yellow plastic tree for so many parts.

9. Forget about mounting the shield using its useless hands. The handle is also too flimsy to support the weight of the shield. It's best left attached to the shoulder manipulator.

Delicate parts to watch out for when assembling:
1. The undersides of the shoulder hatch - there's a small peg at the end of the piece which folds out which is attached to the sprue, I accidentally trimmed off one of them.
2. The booster pods' internal frame has a lot of thin sliding pieces - avoid using excessive force otherwise it may bend and break. Same goes with the Dober Gun's recoiling bolt.
3. The beam sabre holders are very delicate and flimsy. Very easy to break when removing the sabres, similar problem as the HGUC Unicorn's back pack beam sabre holders.
4. I didn't like the gundam-eye shaped look of the mouthpiece, hence I sliced off the tip of the centre part and sanded it. Now it looks like a horizontal slit in the anime.

Now TGII already has a kit coming out soon but it's only a recolor. Hopes for any future TGIII:
1. Fix the damn hands please.
2. Ankle joints need to be stiffer to support the weight. TGIII will be even more top heavy given a larger gun and shield.
3. Longer heat rod. It's probably going to use the MG Epyon's whip but I hope it will be thinner but longer and have more segments. If it comes in clear orange to portray the heated up whip that's even better.
4. Bigger and longer cannon !!

This post has been edited by StarGhazzer: Mar 18 2013, 03:56 AM

Different head, different colour scheme, different decals. Otherwise it's pretty much the same kit.
Now given the different scales (MG vs 1/100), the proportions of the 1/100 TGII head might not fit well with the MG body, as MGs are usually slimmer and smaller than 1/100s. And of course, you'll also need to paint the torso, thruster pods, and shield in blue.

Quick review of the HGUC Qubeley.

Pros
1. Massive wingspan makes this kit look menacing when posed beside typical sized HGUC MSes.

2. Nice details on the interior surface of the shoulder armours - can't compare to the MG version but with some paint for the cables and thrusters it should look pretty sweet.

3. The funnels attach very securely to the backpack despite being plastic-on-plastic. Beware of the funnels as they are very tiny and could easily be lost.

4. Nice to have a mobile chest piece to reveal the cockpit, even thought it's a pretty useless gimmick.

5. Huge feet means this kit will not topple easily. Despite having huge feet and bulky leg armours, the range of movement of the ankles is surprisingly pretty decent. This means you could spread the legs apart for the more dynamic pose, unlike the Doms/Rick Doms variants which can only stand straight like a plastic brick.

6. The neck is able to extend a long way backwards for the flying pose, hence the head looks forward rather than downwards. Maybe HGUC kits from this era have fixed neck joints.

7. Very, very evil look. Love it. Says more about its design than the engineering of the kit, but it is what it is.

Cons
1. Very limited movements of the elbow joints due to the bulky armour. The arm rotates at the elbows instead of the upper arms like other HGUCs, which makes

2. There should be 4 blue circles at the lateral surface of the thighs, but Bandai decided to skimp on these. There is a blue plate for the big blue parts on the shoulder armour, so why not give another 4 small pieces for the thigh armour? Bandai could have at least thrown in some blue stickers.

3. The beam sabres are attached to the forearms via friction and could easily detach and go missing.

4. Being an old HGUC kit, most of the armour pieces are assembled by clipping two big pieces together, which in turn means very obvious seam lines. E.g. forearms, thigh armour, the rear end of the pink feet.

5. The head has a very limited range of rotation which means the Qubeley can't look sideways. Fail.

6. Bandai gives you two types of eye stickers. The one which can be peeled off doesn't cover the entire eye piece (you need to paint the lower part of the eyes) whereas the one with the correct shape needs to be precisely cut off from the sticker sheet as it is not pre-cut.

7. The pink stickers are not exactly the correct shape for many of the areas where you need to apply them. The ones on the backpack are perfectly done, but everywhere else is flawed. If you're not careful you might damage or crumple the edges of the pink stripes. Bandai has improved so much over the years in terms of stickers - just see how accurate the gold emblems for the HGUC Sinanju are.

Overall, it is a fairly decent kit which looks amazing when displayed with its shoulder armour opened like a blooming flower. Reasonably cheap for its size too. I was expecting a quick build given the few amount of parts but in the end I still spent longer than expected to complete it.

This post has been edited by StarGhazzer: Apr 21 2013, 08:59 PM

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Borjanon.