With daylight in short supply this season I have resorted to digging in the archives so here comes another Gashapon SD set back from the good ol' days of ¥100 figurines. Stage 14 focuses exclusively on
Mobile Suit ZZ Gundam and was originally released in February 2000.
This is one of those really straightforward sets where you can count assembly in seconds after having forced your way through the plastic bags that is. None of the figures in this set are terribly rare, the Gundam seems to be harder to find than the others which is not surprising. I actually had all the other figures already when I decided to pick up a full set from Mandarake, the price was only ¥1000 after all. The downside to order from there is that the Gashapon SD sets rarely show up in their webshop, presumably because they aren't worth that much in Japan.
074 : FA-010S Full Armor ZZ Gundam
The Full Armor ZZ Gundam figure is a little bit surprising in that it is the only super deformed Gashapon representation available of this mobile suit. You'd think it was fairly common like the MSZ-010 ZZ Gundam which has at least half a dozen versions out there (the last one seen in Senshi Forte in 2018). There is of course no FAZZ available at all.
Excellent detail on this figure, as you can see. It comes armed with the Double Zeta's twin beam rifle rather than the ginormous launcher we usually see it equip but I guess technology and economy just wasn't there so I'll give it a pass.
Posing together with the regular ZZ Gundam as seen in Stage 34 (left) and Stage 13 (right) respectively. There were no further versions of the ZZ's in the original Full Color series.
075 : AMX-004G Qubeley Mass Production Type
The Gashapon figure range is really huge yet for some reason Bandai skipped over two really obvious suit choices. I am talking of course about the Mk-II Qubeleys from ZZ piloted by the Ple clones. However, they did go ahead and offer a Mass Production Type instead, and since it is my favourite Qubeley variant I am happy to find it included here.
The Mass Production Type machine has a colour very similar to the Ple Custom Mk-II but they have a number of differences in the body. The most easy to recognize differences are found in the head sculpt (which now looks more like a mosquito) as well as the two Beam Cannons stowed on the back. It would be fun to source a couple more of this figure and repaint them in gray for the early production colours.
The AMX-004G is quite small compared to the base Qubeley figures. The Qubeley with the beam saber comes from Stage 44 (released October 2003) and a green-eyed machine from Stage 8 (April 1999).
076 : AMA-01X Jamru Fin
The Jamru Fin is an odd mobile armor-type machine pretty much built around a huge Hyper Mega Cannon. The machine was rushed out in a half-completed form in the latest stage of the ZZ storyline much like the Zeong in the original Mobile Suit Gundam series. Since there were three prototypes a total of three machines were built and decked out with pilots whose names all begin with a D (as in dumb...) and I guess they are a humorous nod to the original Black Tri-Stars which does the suit no favours but such was the ZZ storyline.
As usual with the Gashapon Full Color figures they aren't really full color at all, normally on the side facing forward. Not that it matters a great deal with this particular figure. I wish Bandai would have made it a bit larger. This is supposed to be a huge and intimidating machine yet it is actually smaller than the other mobile suits in this set.
077 : AMX-011S Zaku III Custom
The Zaku III is another enormous machine that stands several meters taller than the average mobile suit, yet here the figure is rather short when compared to your average SD Gashapon. I guess it has something to do with the fact that these machines are bulky and Bandai were somehow unable to make them both tall and wide at the same time, so something had to go. Still, the Qubeley in this set obviously had no problems so not sure what the root cause for this is.
Still the Zaku III in general is a rare figure and the Custom perhaps even more so. These two mobile suits would make perfect candidates for the new Converge #plus size figures, let's hope Bandai and FusionWorks agree with that sentiment. :)
The regular AMX-011 Zaku III finally made it into the SD Full Color series at Stage 51 in August 2004 and is a considerable larger figure and armed with both a beam rifle and a saber.
078 : AMX-014 Döven Wolf
Stage 14 is interesting in that all the machines selected for this set are considerably larger than your average mobile suit, yet at the same time several of them are disappointingly tiny. I'm afraid that the powerful Döven Wolf is double afflicted since it is not only tiny but flat as a pancake.
This figure just makes me disappointed. It is really tiny, has a strange overall flat appearance and colour applications are really limited. It doesn't help that this particular figure is kind of bent out of shape on top of it all. A shameful display, as the old saying goes...
079 : NZ-000 Queen Mansa
The last figure in this wave is a gargantuan mobile armor, a figure that is surprisingly common and has representations in several Gashapon and Shokugan figure series. Ironically I don't mind its diminutive size that much as I do the mobile suits we saw above, those at least had a chance to look intimidating while a figure like the Queen Mansa is pretty much doomed from the get go.
This figure is also a little bland in the colouring department, but the sculpt is great and even includes a little Neo Zeonic logo on the back skirt. If you want a more intimidating Queen Mansa for the SD display consider picking up the Senshi Forte iteration although it is a bit large to pose comfortably next to SD Full Color figures, especially the tiny Neo Zeon ones.
Conclusion
Stage 14 is par for the course when it comes to the early SD figure sets. It contains a really nice unit mix which makes it especially collectable from that point of view, although most of them could have benefitted from a slight size increase, say 25 to 50 percent or so.
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