So, whatever happened to the MicroWars line? Well, like many new upstarts it seems to have been allowed to gracefully wither away into nothing since the fifth and so far last volume appeared in late summer of 2020. Granted, the viral phenomenon of 2020 may have helped to smother it into nonexistence following the general upheaval seen in manufacturing and distribution during much of that maligned year. And here I am half a year later deciding that fine, I will not find any more figures for the review in the foreseeable time so I may well just get on with it.
MicroWars five is the last of the short lived series which survived for about one and a half years and is the first to extend the line-up from five figures to six. The supply of these sets has been really scarce so I haven't been able to confirm the exact distribution but I would guess that Bandai sold these in the regular 10-boxes and perhaps put in one each of the Full Armor Gundam figures and two each of the others. If so, that would make the Gundams slightly rarer than the other figures and Bandai generally prefers to do it the other way around so it is not something I can confirm.
01 : FA-78-1 Full Armor Gundam
The MicroWars series has been heavily slanted towards figures from the One Year War and so you will of course soon run out of Federation mobile suits. The fact that we failed to see neither the Guncannon nor the Guntank in this series - and instead get an green MSV Gundam variant - probably has more to do with recycling figure technology from the old Gundam sculpts than anything else. Still, I am liking what I am seeing here.
The all green Full Armor Gundam is a unique looking figure that injects some pleasant variety into the MicroWars Federation force. It has a fair bit of colour apps in white and orange although overall it is a bit lacking. The continued use of hollow plastic means that apart from the funky holes in the back of the legs you also get hollowed out weapons which seems unnecessarily cheap. I guess it has something to do with the molding technology for these figures and keeping the number of components down.
I was a bit concerned that the Full Armor figures would suffer from heavy sticker syndrome but it isn't too bad. You get a red sticker for the front camera, black squares for the chest (which are easy to paint with a marker pen instead) and horrible three dimensional orange stickers to wrap around the leg thrusters. I should probably try to paint this area orange instead but for now I just applied the flat sticker on the outward facing sides. I am steering well clear of the wrap around parts on the sides because I know they will just peel off. Bandai did bother to paint up the white sections of the feet at least so there is that.
The FA Gundam also recycles the old white pilot figurine (which I assume was supposed to be Amuro Ray when it was first released) and the cockpit is pretty much the same thing as in the original figure. Plenty of room for the figure to sit in so that's nice.
02 : FA-78-1 Full Armor Gundam (blue version)
The blue color version of the Full Armor Gundam is a variation on a variation, and it itself has some variants itself. One version is an evolution of the Perfect Gundam from the Plamo-Kyoshiro manga which predates the first Build Fighters series by about 30 years(!). We also sometimes see the blue FA variant touted as the E.F.S.F. Space Version type. Whatever the case here, MicroWars recycles the mold to get out a new figure on the cheap. I actually don't mind this at all, considering the scarce line-up I wish we got more colour variation SP sets and perhaps I will commission some customs myself when it is confirmed that the series has died.
The blue version of the Gundam makes even more use of white accents and I was really concerned that the figure would require painting or dreadful white stickers. This actually held back the review for quite a number of months as I didn't want to bother with it. Well here we are, and I focused so much on the whites that I forgot to attach the red sticker for the head camera. I only just noticed this after uploading these review photos but it has since been remedied IRL so apologies for missing that on the pictures.
If you look carefully you will notice that the two full armor figures have different sticker sheets. The blue figure makes use of two extra wrap-around stickers for the shoulders and since painting white is a bit of a pain I used these stickers for the review. Of course they have the exact same tendency to want to come off as the wrap-arounds on the legs and so are of the same cursed type as those used for the old Universal Unit figures. Surely Bandai could have added some white paint on the shoulder pieces as well (considering the way the sprues are aligned they would have had some really ugly blue spots though).
If you look at the box art you are actually supposed to use one of the two generic orange pilot figures for the blue Full Armor Gundam. I guess the idea is that Amuro only piloted the green one.
03 : Fan Fan
When MicroWars five was announced this was the figure that I really wanted to have. As luck would have it, it is also the only figure I ave managed to purchase singles of. Apart from picking up two complete sets from Mandarake there have been very few appearances of MicroWars 5 on the secondary market. This leads me to believe that production may have been quite small in comparison to the early sets that are still somewhat easy to find (especially set 2 is dirt cheap right now, stock up on it like I do...).
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The figure in these photos uses as Bandai Assault Kingdom figure base, no base is included with MicroWars vehicles.
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The Fan Fan hovercraft has a small appearance in the Jaburo arc of the White Base's adventure and is really tiny when compared to a mobile suit. In keeping with the MicroWars tradition however all vehicles are substantially larger to enable moving parts and cockpits to function without too much hassle. Basically like the Dopp, it is a big cockpit with a tiny body attached to it but I think it looks really cute. Notice the peg hole in the bottom which enables it to work with the old Assault Kingdom bases for some better display. The bases from AK are just so versatile (and extremely modular) that you should pick up a few figures from that line just to have a couple to work with.
As is traditional with MicroWars, the vehicle figure also comes with three pilots. As you have already seen we have recycled E.F.S.F. pilot figures in white and orange included here; orange works really well as maintenance crews for either faction too in my opinion.
Someone really didn't like his Fan Fans because I was able to find four of them in a Mandarake shop. This also expanded the pool of the very useful pilot figures so I am not sure why people would want to get rid of them. Finding doubles of the Zeon figures is very difficult however.
04 : MS-09 Dom
On the Zeon side of the set we get two different mobile suits and a new vehicle. The first of the suits is the cornerstone Dom which we just knew had to come sooner or later. This fills out one of the fundamental gaps for the Zeon side in MicroWars. Too bad I just wasn't able to pick up three of them for this review...
With a basic violet and black colour scheme you don't have to mess as much with stickers for the Dom. It is easy to work it over with a black marker pen to add some extra detail and avoiding those horrid wrap around stickers that are supposed to go around the feet. The yellow sticker for the chest is a bit of a concern though since the surface underneath it is not flat and so I pretty much expect these to fall out and disappear into a carpet or such.
The Dom is the only figure in this set to feature two different weapons. The Heat Rod is really intended to be stored on the back but will fit into the hand.
Yeah, there really should be three of them.... I know. Notice that the Heat Rod held by figure two fit so tightly into its grip that I didn't manage to push it all the way down or even rotate it quite the way I wanted to make the peg less visible for fear of breaking the plastic. It is now firmly stuck. I suppose you can always cut the peg off if you know you don't want to store it on the back anymore. I think I will paint it yellow somewhere down the line too.
The Dom figure comes with a menacing Black Tri-Stars pilot with a nice and shiny helmet visor. I can only assume that this figurine is the reason why the secondary market is not overflowing with Wappa figures.
05 : MSM-04 Acguy
The Acguy is perhaps not the figure I thought was next in line for the MicroWars treatment but its bulky proportions and stubby arms make it ideal for conversion. Still, the relatively tiny torso could present a challenge for the designers.
As you can see, the figure turned out really well. The figure uses quite large pegs for the arms and legs and mobility is pretty limited. The overall two tone brown colour scheme is pretty much perfect; you only need to place black stickers on the sides of its feet (and those are easy to replace with marker pen anyway).
The Acguy of course has no traditional hands and so no need for accessories. If you own a few you can still vary them up by sticking different weapon hands on them however.
The Acguy figure comes with a unique pilot figure of Akahana or "red nose", one of the worst designs to ever come out of the original
Mobile Suit Gundam series. What on Earth where they smoking? Luckily the figure itself leaves it up to you to give him the Rudolph treatment if you feel like it. Here you see him going over final preparations with Char and Ramba Ral who somehow survived his ordeal in the desert...
"Alright, let's get this Jaburo invasion going". The Z'Gok sure looks tiny in comparson to the Acguys. While the Acguy has almost a meter on the Z'Gok I kind of wish that the latter was a little bit larger.
06 : PVN.4/3 Wappa
The biggest surprise for me in this set is the curious Zeon recon hover bike known as the wappa. Perhaps not as sexy as the Speeder Bike from Star Wars it is a really funky and oddball design. My favourite part is sticking the huge machine gun in the middle of the pilot's field of vision; I'm sure that's not going to be grating at all.
I think the MicroWars adaptation of the Wappa craft is quite spot on. Its size presents something of a problem though as it becomes even harder to ignore the massive scale difference compared to the mobile suits. It is not exactly the first choice on my own "missing Zeon vehicles list".
Well, it is pretty much what you see is what you get here. The only moving part on the Wappa is the balljoint-mounted machine gun. Due to its design there is of course no opening hatch mechanism for this figure which is a little bit sad when that is the whole concept of the MicroWars line to begin with. The main draw for me in this pack is the three different pilot suits. The green one is the recycled baseline Zeonic pilot suit while the other two are new and introduce ace pilot uniforms in stylish black colour. I'd like to get my hands on some more for those pilots alone and I suspect this is why the figure is a bit rare.
Unlike the Fan Fan the Wappa figure has no support for action bases so you will have to improvise. It is also worth to point out that the pilot does not sit very safely in his seat and he is delighted to fall out of it at the slightest provocation.
Here is a close up of the very useful mix of pilot figures that come with the figures in this set. We now have a really good mix of pilot and even soldier figurines in the MicroWars pool.
Where we stand
While I wouldn't completely write off the chance that Bandai may want to cram some more money out of the MicroWars molds I think this is pretty much all she wrote. With only a few more additions the line could be pretty close to cover all the important machines from the One Year War era especially, so it is a bit unfortunate if the game is now up.
To date the MicroWars series has produced five retail sets and one premium "SP" set which featured four recoloured figures for a total of 30 different designs. Out of these we find 11 Federation machines suitable for the U.C. 0079 era. The obvious missing figures here are the Guncannon and the Guntank and the Core Fighter or a Sabrefish fighter would have really sealed the deal. From there it would have been fairly easy to expand into similar machines like the GP01 Zephyranthes or some of the GM designs (we almost have all the parts needed for a custom Ground Type GM even now) like a Sniper or Cannon. Curiously missing is also the G3 Gundam which would be really cheap to make. As it stands I think we are a bit short on grunt suits for the E.F.F.
The Principality of Zeon is the largest MicroWars block with 13 of the 30 figures on their side. This set is very well rounded with plenty of army builders although there are a couple of really annoying gaps. Adding the Zaku I and the Gelgoog would open up a lot of possibilities for expansion. From there on it should be relatively easy to expand on these designs into Zaku Sniper, Gelgoog Cannon, High Mobility Zaku and so on. The Gyan and the Gogg are also really suitable for MicroWars with their relatively simplistic 1970's designs.
MicroWars also quickly dabbed its feet in U.C.0093 with four machines from
Char's Counterattack and a pair of eyesores from
Unicorn that I don't really think belong with the line at all (but sure, if they would add a Jesta, Zeta Plus or Geara Zulu I wouldn't mind...). These figures are alright even though I think Bandai were on to something when they stuck to the One Year War era for the most part.
Conclusion
If this is indeed the final outing from MicroWars I will be really sad to see them go, but at least this set is a send-off with dignity. Like several other figures that were due for release in mid-2020 these are already proving hard to find. Either few sets made it to the collectors or they have just proved to be unusually popular (and if that were the case MicroWars 6 would surely already have been announced by now...).
