At great cost to my personal living space, I got back into Gundam plastic models (Gunpla) over 2020. Just like with everybody else, it seemed like the perfect time to get absorbed into a new time-consuming hobby and perhaps cover an unfortunate storage room in cardboard boxes of various sizes.
I ran into some walls, though. The kits are cheap, fun, and easy to build, but their bare plastic doesn’t look great out of the box (compare to any pre-made action figure) and the photos on the box are generally professional jobs that require serious skill and paint work. I wanted to try out painting, but I found out the hard way that I didn’t have the right living space for an airbrush setup. (And the fumes kinda worry me.)
So I’ve been looking for alternatives, and Bandai offers variants of its model kits that don’t call for paint. Exclusive to limited online sales or events at about double price, these kits might be transparent, made of uniquely colored plastic (the “Metallic Injection” or “Pearl White” series), or they might have a coating that looks like you painted it yourself. If you’re interested in one of these kits, you basically have to keep an eye out and wait until one appears that you like.
For me, that was the Titanium Finish Master Grade Gundam F91. This had been on my to-build list since I got back into Gunpla. The movie Gundam F91 is admittedly one strange mess, but the titular robot design is one of the all-timers, as far as I am concerned. Representing legendary mecha designer Kunio Ohkawara at the peak of his power, the F91 is sleek, unique, powerful, but not overdone: a perfect hero robot.
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