Banpresto Gundam Series Genealogy of Zeta Figure Keyholder

It isn't often that I get to complete a Gundam keyring figure set so I figured we'd take a look at some of them. There are dozens of sets to discover out there, both normally proportioned and super-deformed. Most sets feature five to seven figures although there are some larger line-ups out there as well. Their common denominator is that they are all a bit of a pain to actually find. Most figures pop up one by one, presumably as people are clearing out old junk they picked up over the years. It is actually quite rare to come across full sets so you will be in for the long haul. It took me seven years to find and get my hands on these suckers for example.


The Genealogy of Zeta set from 2003 is comprised of five suits all belonging to the Zeta Gundam's technology tree. This is one of my favourite eras of Mobile Suit Gundam and there is so much great DNA in this family that we rarely get to see in figure form.


If you have ever been fortunate to visit a shop that specializes in collectible keyring junk you may have seen the sometimes massive walls littered with all sorts of figures dangling from an endless line of pegs. Mobile Suit Gundam will have to battle for space with countless other IPs in such stores and it is no wonder that customers walk away with one or two of their favourites rather than trying to get full line-ups. I guess this is why figures are often so scattered about.


Once I collect the entire set I get to have my little ritual of finally removing the figures from their cards. Keyring figures are sadly damaged by having a metal screwed deep into either their head or back and so ideally you would like to fill the gap and paint it over. It is only after you remove the figure from the card that you can finally unfold the thing and get access to important information such as the barcode and its shortform catalogue number. The figures from this set have the Banpresto short code 31515 which is the easiest way to identify them.


The folded sheet also contains a little development tree of some of the mobile suits in the Zeta family. It would have been cool to see a Part 2 to this series adding onto the line-up with familiar faces like the Methuss and the Zeta Plus but no such set exists that I am aware of.



MSZ-006 Z Gundam


I'll start with the Zeta since it is the least exciting figure here; we are drowning in Zeta Gundams already. As you can see the figure is very compact and has unusual proportions, we deformed figures are often wide but the figures in this sit are fairly slim. The paint applications are great both in front and back; keyring figures are usually painted to a high standard since they are designed to be seen from a multitude of angels as they dangle freely from your backpack or handbag. By the way, I never really understand what people do with their keyring figures - do they just buy one and use it everyday or is it a fashion statement that must be replaced every few weeks?


There is no standard to the size or proportions of Banpresto Gundam-theme keyring figures, you will come across various styles among the different ranges. here you can see the relative size and feel of the Genealogy of Zeta figures next to a basic SD Full Color Gundam figure on the left and a Gashapon Warrior figure on the right (covering the NEXT, DASH and Senshi Forte generations of figures). While there are individual differences between figures also within those other series these figures are generally a poor match with existing Gashapon figures.




MSR-00100S Hyaku Shiki Kai


The Hyaku Shiki has an interesting family tree including a mass-production type and the ridiculously overspeced FA-00100S Full Armor Hyaku Shiki-Kai. This is the base version of the Kai-configuration which features the elongated head, large shoulders and completely different backpack. The shoulders on the figure come with attachment points for the Beam Gatling Gun although no such weapon is included. In fact, none of the figures in this set come with any external weapons which is a little bit disappointing. Other than that, it looks great.




RMS-099B Schuzrum Diaz


While we are still waiting for the Rick Dias Mark II to see the light in figure form (has it even been made available as a model kit, I think not?) we at least have another chance to add the Schuzrum Dias to the A.E.U.G. line-up. We most recently saw this machine in Mobility Joint Volume 10 and there is also a fully proportioned 1/400 scale version in the Gundam Collection figure series but this makes a decent option .


The keyring Dias differs from its companions in that it does not have the same oversized head and so is the closest fit to other smaller SD-figures. It could be used as a half-decent stand-in for the RMS-099B next to the Gashapon Senshi Forte figure seen on the right. The SD Full Color figure on the left is actually quite large for a SDFC figure but is still too tiny to pair well with the keyring figure.




RGZ-91 Re-GZ


The Re-GZ is easily the least impressive figure in this set. The body seems really thin and anaemic - the Zeta Gundam figure didn't feel this thin and I'd argue they are of similar body types. In fact, compare the actual figure to how it looks on the collector card where it looks much better. My figure also has feet that aren't entirely straight and so it doesn't really stand up properly. It is not uncommon for keyring figures to come with dangling feet as they supposed to be keyrings after all, but here it is down to material deformation. I don't know what it is but many figure sets have done the Re-GZ dirty in my opinion.




MSZ-008 ZII


The Zeta Two is another rare bird that failed to crop up in any of the popular figure series. We have a premier-looking 1/220 figure in the STANDart range that is well worth seeking out (there are several excellent figures from the Zeta family in that catalogue) and Banpresto has also done a full-proportion keyring figure but other than that it is nothing but static. Our compact figure here is a decent looking entry which goes all-in on the paint applications but I really wish that it had its elegant beam rifle alongside. You'll notice a couple of annoying deformations on this one, especially the wonky fin on the back.




Conclusion

There isn't a whole lot to say about these figures, really. Being keyring figures without any articulation or options you either like them or you don't. The main selling point I think is getting access to a number of rarely seen mobile suits in figure form. Keyring figures also are not expensive on the Japanese secondary market, expect to pay between ¥500 and ¥1500 depending on how popular that particular mobile suit might be. The main problem as always is actually finding them, I recommend being very casual about it.

Gundam Collection 7-Eleven Color Set

In 2009 there wasn't much gas left in the tank of the Gundam Collection figure series. All of the major sets had been released at this point (save for DX9 which was a special feature for Unicorn) but 7-Eleven still managed to dig up the corpse and give it one last go. The chain is known for its many cross-promotional releases and Mobile Suit Gundam specials are a recurring sight on their shelves even in 2026.


The Gundam Collection series is all about blind-boxes and the 7-Eleven set maintains the tradition. Although there are only four figures to collect - a set that could easily have been sold complete - they of course chose to spread the contents out in as many random configurations. There are three mobile suits and the large Gunperry transport to collect. I don't know how much they sold for back then or if there are any larger distribution-style cases containing multiple boxes that feature special artwork.


Here you can see the contents of the four different types of figure configurations. Three our of four boxes contain a Gunperry and one of the other three figures while the last box gets you a nice little squad of three 7-Eleven themed mobile suits. As you can imagine, the weight difference for the last box is noticeable and it would have made it very easy to identify among the others. In my experience the box with three figures is the rarest on the secondary market, I could well see them getting picked up by squad builders.


Each box comes with this two-sided information and assembly instruction sheet. There are a couple of ways you can screw up with the Gunperry if you are not paying attention so it pays to be a bit careful. I have assembled many of these and still continue to make silly mistakes because I don't pay enough attention. :)


The top image shows each of the four bags while the parts-spread below shows three of them, I didn't bother to repeat the components for the two Gundam figures since they are identical in this regard.


There are no new figures in this set; all have been repurposed from much older releases. The two Gundam figures are based on the RX-78 from Gundam Collection Volume 10 from 2004, the GM is based on the very first set of Gundam Collection figures from 2002 and the Gunperry hails from the first DX-set which is also from 2004. Let's look at them in a bit more detail.



RX-78-2 Gundam (E.F.S.F.)


The basic RX-78 figure is just that, an incredibly vanilla experience of the Gundam. It has the basic beam rifle and shield configuration and stands at rest. I didn't have my original 2004 "E10"-figure at hand for a comparison image but I would imagine the appearance is very similar if not exactly the same. Even though the figure is only about 4 centimetres tall it has very detailed and frankly impressive painted details all over its body. Just look closer at that head and count the little vents on its sides then ask yourself whenever you saw a contemporary Gundam-figure with this much detail. The other thing that the 1/400-collection is known for is its soft PVC-plastic which sometimes leads to comically bent beam sabers and rifles - you can see the shield on this figure is a bit bent out of shape for example.

This figure is easily the most uninteresting of this set and I don't really understand why it was included at all; the other three figures are all in 7-Eleven markings. Perhaps the designers wanted a fourth figure but I can think of much better candidates than a plain-colour RX-78. The figure is even relegated to the background on the box cover - perhaps the marketing team felt that its colours would draw the eyes of people who would otherwise fail to notice the Gundam connection? While I can think of many sexy figures that would look good in a 7-Eleven livery the most logical choice for this set would probably have been the RB-79 Ball.





RX-78-2 Gundam (7-Eleven Color)


With the boring figure out of the way, let's get cooking with the 7-Eleven special figures! Up first is the same RX-78 figure but now redone in colours typical for 7-Eleven crossover releases. Much of the Gundam's basic colour scheme is maintained but blue has been turned into green and yellow into orange. The grey joints are also painted in a darker almost black style. And as icing on the cake, we have two tiny 7-Eleven insignias on the right shoulder and on the shield. The most outstanding feature of the 1/400-collection is in my opinion the heavy featuring of corps insignias and unit numbers and so this technology could easily be reused for 7-Eleven. While I am not generally into cross-promotion stuff I have to say this looks great.





RGM-79 GM (7-Eleven Color)


Well, if the previous figure looked spectacular take a look at this - a lime green GM! Man, I just love it. Unlike the Gundam figure this figure comes with a right arm that has a shaped peg - meaning there is only one way to pose it unless you modify it. Many of the Gundam Collection-figures have these shaped pegs although round pegs that allow different poses are also very common. You will usually only get one moving arm however, but it differs a bit from figure to figure.


The original figure from 2002 actually has some of its leg joints painted in black, perhaps the designers felt it necessary to make it look less toylike back then. While this detail is missing on the 7-Eleven version it would be fairly simple to add this detail with a thin marker pen yourself - the same experience that you would have with Mobile Suit Ensemble or Mobility Joint for that matter...





Gunperry (7-Eleven Color)


As nice as the previous figures are it is the Gunperry that is the star of this show and how can it not be? Just look at this thing, what a magnificent collector piece. The best thing about it is that it is made from rigid ABS-style plastic and so functions more like a miniature model kit than your average Gundam Collection figure. There are a lot of interlocking parts that help keep the construction stable and so it is important that you assemble them in the correct order for a smooth experience. It is not difficult however you will at times encounter the occasional peg hole that does not want to co-operate.

I have one figure where I had to do some extensive digging with a knife to get the part to fit and I was really worried that the whole thing might just break apart. If you encounter friction, be careful not to try to push pieces in, there may be imperfections that have to be cleaned up first.


All three rotors sit on arms that can be extended for flight mode and the side walls of the cargo compartment can also be folded downwards to allow easy loading access. You have the option of attaching two racks of cruise missiles on the insides of the cargo compartment although I suspect 7-Eleven would be unlikely to have a license granting their use. :) There is no particular feature to load the Gundam inside; you'll just have to chuck it in there.


The original Gunperry from the Gundam Collection DX-set comes in the classic U.C. 0079 colour scheme and is available in five different variants. One unit is completely unmarked while the other four have unit numbers 01 through 04 on the nose section. One nitpick I have with the Gundam Collection figures is that too many of them were numbered 01-03 and similar but many others got it right with completely different numbers out of sequence. Oh, how I long for this series to return and fill in the many gaps among missing mobile suits and also add new units from shows that have come later. Alas, some dedicated 3-d printers out there are doing a stellar job of adding some of the missing faces but I just want my PVC-fix. :)


Someone in the design team was really inspired and came up with an idea to add cargo to the Gunperry. You can find these stowed containers on the little flaps of the box so be careful not to destroy them. You have to cut them out with a scissor and then carefully fold the edges on three of its sides. We are talking a few millimetres here and so you best use a ruler or something similar to assist or you'll never get it right.


The paper cargo can then be used to cover up the empty side of the open Gunperry storage bay. This works reasonably well for one side but if you intend to cover up both sides you will have to glue the pieces in place while you are assembling the model because there is no way you will be able to apply these from the outside later. In my example I just put the paper in here temporally, the three side flaps press outwards against the edges of the cargo bay walls and holds it place reasonably well. However, you will not be able to close the sides of the cargo bay as the paper now takes up the place where the door would usually rest. It works best as a temporary detail for diorama images rather than a permanent addition I think.





Conclusion

What a great little set we have here. I guess the main criticism is that the figures are sold in blind boxes when it would have been easy to sell the figures as a complete one-off thing but we all know that is not how these things go. Besides, you can never have too many Gunperries on your flightline. In my head-canon I can well see some of the large corporations in the Zeta-era having access to obsolete military equipment for their security needs. I imagine someone like Anaheim Electronics doing a production run of Gundams and GMs with lower class armour and weaponry entering the civilian market.

As usual with these things, you will not encounter these figures very often but they aren't as rare as you might suspect. You will see individual boxes pop up on the secondary Japanese market from time to time. A couple of years ago I used to pick these up for about ¥400 each but in later years prices on all Gashapon are climbing. I recently saw a full set of four being sold for ¥5000 which is still not a bad deal for nine figures methinks.

Gundam Converge CORE 052 : Crossbone Gundam Steel 7 Dictus Set

I will never get my head around what makes a successful figure release. The Gundam Converge line-up has seen a lot of different mobile suits over the years but I feel that the producers tend to go back to the evergreens with a very predictable frequency. We are swimming in variants of some mobile suits while others that seem like easy cash-grabs fail to ever materialize. Then, there is the P-Bandai thing of doing something completely unexpected out of left-field - taking a chance on something incredibly wild. I don't think that the Jupiter Empire Dictus-pair was on anybody's Converge radar and I would love to know how many votes they got in the Bandai Gundam Converge "which MS should we do next?" survey.


I know I have brought it up before but why does the artwork for these Steel 7 boxes have to be so busy? This probably looked much better in full colour and I'm not really getting a good idea about what I am going to find inside the box. Thankfully the flip-side does a good job of detailing the contents but this is not exactly grabbing your attention. The cover may as well just have been black like on the old premium Gashapon NEXT and DASH sets.


I really like how each mobile suit is presented with a little blurb on the back cover, credit to the Steel 7 releases for doing that. I would caution against reading it if you intend to engage with the Steel 7 storyline because there are a couple of major spoilers in there which perhaps they could have left out.


This box is part of a set of releases that commemorate the 30th Anniversary of Crossbone Gundam. In essence however, the releases are all Steel 7-story centric and that manga is itself also coming up on a 20th Anniversary since it was published in 2006. These are all Premium Bandai products not intended for retail but each set could be ordered separately. The first two boxes of Steel 7 units came out in February while the Jupiter Empire forces followed in March. The preorder price for this box was set at ¥5995 including tax. No, not six-thousand; special price for you only five-thousand nine-hundred and ninety-five.


Much like the other Steel 7-boxes they are crammed so full of bags that the sides are bulging in all directions. There is no way I would be able to squeeze them all back inside without tearing a side off. At first glance it seems pretty straightforward; there are four large bags for each figure and four accompanying smaller bags with additional components. Assembly should be a walk in the park! Well, or so I thought.

Actually, the components in the smaller bags are not earmarked to specific figure - some bags contain parts for two different figures and some parts are even used interchangeably. Even with the online build instructions at hand this was way more complicated than I wanted it to be and I think this could have been handled a bit better.


Since I initially couldn't figure out exactly which parts belonged to which figure before starting assembly I'll just post two examples of a figure in mobile suit form and in mobile armour form. Please note that some of the components are not exclusively used by one or the other. Here you see the right-hand Dictus in mobile suit mode with some of its options over on the left side.


And here we have the other Dictus but in mobile armour mode. The beam effect parts are option bits and some of them also go on the figure in mobile suit mode. The peg types differ from the arm components on the MS and MA mode figures but even then I had trouble understanding which side was front or back, or at which angle the arm was intended to attach to the body. I had expected this build to be much easier than the Steel 7 B-team but I ended up having a bit of a frustrating experience with these instead. Go figure.



Jurisdis Sinistra Dictus (Mobile Suit Mode)


I'm not going to go into the weird backstory of why these two mobile suits exist and why they are more or less mirror images of each other, I can't take much of Crossbone seriously anyway. Talking about the figure itself, the paint quality is good, so far most of the Steel 7 figures I have looked at have been on point. Due to this figure's strange comic book-style anatomy some of the components have unusual peg types and a couple of them are really weak and don't really attach all that well. case in point is that black gun pod on the outside of the left arm, it attaches with an H-shaped peg and because the whole arm will bend as you try to push it in the connection is a bit weak. The small feet also do not allow for big sturdy pegs so the base likes to come off if you try to lift it (par for the course for Converge #Sharp really).


Both mobile suits have option parts for both of their arms. You can remove the Heat Ha... I'm sorry the beam axe and instead replace it with a closed fist. Next you can remove the golden claw-like things sticking out from both wrists and replace them with ones that have green beam blades sticking out of them. On the images above I only did this for the white arm because the golden thing on the black arm actually has a swivel-joint near its base that allows the longer claw to swing open. When I tried to pull this component out of its socket to replace it with the beam effect part it resisted fiercely and I didn't want to risk damaging the swivelling-joint by pulling harder. I had the exact same problem on the Dextra Dictus by the way.




Libertas Dextra Dictus (Mobile Suit Mode)


The Right Hand of Freedom is truly a mirror image of the Left Hand of Justice (how ironic then that it is swinging its beam axe with the left hand). I don't know what they have in their food there in the Jupiter-sphere because the mobile suit designs that come out of its orbit are truly wild. But where Paptimus Scirocco was churning out one hit after another Callisto here isn't really doing anything for me. It is obvious that they do not have circus shows in the Empire because then he wouldn't have designed the bestest and most evilest mobile suit in the solar system with clown shoes.

Anyway; these designs are pretty wild and do not really fit in with the established business practices of how a mobile suit looks in the Universal Century-era but they are at least very unique.





Jurisdis Sinistra Dictus (Mobile Armour Mode)


When I purchased these figures I wasn't entirely sure if you actually got two or four figures in the box and if some nightmarish parts-conversion was going to be involved. Thankfully though, the mobile armour mode figures are indeed separate, but as I mentioned before not every component is exclusive to the respective figure. The most glaring issue here is that you only get one closed fist for each mobile suit, so you have to decide which figure will be using it. The same goes for those beam blades that shoot out from the wrists, there is enough to equip these on one of the two figures. This will restrict your freedom a bit, I think at least a second closed fist could have been included without affecting the cost of producing this set.

This is the first Converge figure that is intended to be posed upside-down and I think it works great. The stand is also sturdy and feels reliable and won't be coming off any time soon. Less sturdy however is the elongated neck of the suit that will fall off very easily when you touch it, this goes for both of the MA figures. I have chosen here to show off the Sinistra Dictus without any of its beam blades extended but it can be made to look in the same was as the Dextra Dictus below.




Libertas Dextra Dictus (Mobile Armour Mode)


And speaking of the Dextra, here it is with all its beam claws extended from the wrists and toes. You can always count on Crossbone Gundam to have the wildest and most deranged designs from pretty much any Gundam franchise. Even GQuuuuuuX or G seem normal when looking into the crazy gallery that makes up Steel 7.






Conclusion

I don't think I need to make any particular recommendations for this particular set, I have a feeling that you either love or hate them. There may be some fence-sitters out there who plan on getting all the other Steel 7-sets and now fret over what to do when they realize that the figures they have their eyes on are only sold as a complete set. I haven't seen that many Steel 7-figures on the secondary market yet, and most of them have indeed been sold as a complete set so I don't know how good the odds are of cherry-picking individual releases, maybe after some time passes the individual boxes will become more frequent.

From a technical point of view however, there is nothing in here that would make me recommend against a purchase. Sure, some components are a bit fiddly to work with but it is nothing major really and I look forward to seeing all four sets next to each other.