Gundam Gsight Samson Trailer

The Bandai Mobile Suit Gundam Gsight collection is a short-lived Gashapon series well known for its quirky packaging, unique mobile suit colour variations and liberal inclusion of battleground scenery. The main series consists of six basic waves released between 2002-2004 and two special sets called Spektrum I and II released in 2004. Beyond these sets there are also two special sets featuring larger figures, one of which we are examining today. The Zeonic Samson mobile suit transport trailer was released in a set of its own in 2003 and consists of four different colour variants.


The Samson trailers come in hexagon-shaped cylinders similar to the basic Gsight figures except that they are a bit taller. I assume these figures would come in the same type of display boxes as the smaller figures but I have never seen such a case myself, not even on a photo. The smaller figures come in boxes of 12, usually containing two colour variants of six different and considering the four different variants in this set I would assume a display box to contain 8 or 12 items. If you happen to know more about this, I'd be curious to know.


Inside each box the figure will be stored in plastic bags within plastic bags, that classic Gashapon feeling. The figures had an MSRP of 300 yen 20 years ago, today the prices will vary depending on where you look. If they pop up on eBay, expect them to be heavily overpriced. The best solution is - as always - the local market in Japan.


Each package comes with a trailer and its cargo consisting of some crates and a powered down Zaku II and its Heat Hawk weapon. The colour combinations are always the same, the standard colour purple trailer always comes bundled with the standard green Zaku II and so on. The three other variants are the green forest battle specification, the gray urban warfare variant and the sand-coloured desert type. Besides the colouring, there are no differences between the figures. It would have been cool if there were alternate weapons available but practical concerns such as fitting everything inside the trailer means there is no place for larger weapons like the machine gun or Zaku bazooka.


The truck and trailer are made of softer plastic with some components made of harder material so you may find a little bit of warped shapes here and there but nothing too troublesome. Being a 1/350 scale figure series you need not worry about moving wheels or anything like that, the Zaku II figure itself is also a simple statue without articulation or functioning hands. The truck can be detached from the trailer and has two gun turrets that can (at least theoretically) swivel from side to side but the soft plastic material makes it difficult to move them. The best feature is that the crew compartment can be detached from the vehicle and the hover engines can be folded 90 degrees downward to create the flying vehicle variant. No stand or peg hole is included for this feature so you will have to improvise such a display.


As you can see the four variants are all very similar so I won't be covering each figure in great detail. Instead I have placed them in some mini-dioramas with other Gsight figures in different environments.




Conclusion

All in all this is a fantastic toy set that really offers a lot of display choices. It is a pity that these figures are really hard to find these days, I for one would love it if Bandai were to bring their old Gashapon figure collections back to life. Imagine if suddenly the old SD figures would come back to the vending machines coupled with some brand new mobile suit choices. Music lovers were successfully fooled to start buying vinyls again - surely the small and uncomplicated Gashapon figures could have a renaissance of their own?

Gashapon HG Mobile Suit Selection 19 : Game Edition 2nd

Volume 19 of the Gashapon HG Mobile Suit Selection carries the sub-title "Game Edition 2nd" and features mobile suits from the Playstation 2 title "Mobile Suit Gundam: Journey to Jaburo". The game launched in Japan in December 2000 and got an English translation in August the following year. This figure set was released in between in the summer of 2001, sporting seven different mobile weapons that were seen in the game. Based on the game footage I have reviewed on youtube I would say that the selection is a bit awkward seeing as how some of these figures are boss fights or available as bonus content only. To me personally a more focused release on common mobile suits seen in the game would have worked better but I can get why Bandai preferred to stick in some high profile machines into the mix and I cannot really fault them for it either.


While I have picked up several of these figure piecemeal over the years the foundation for this review is a complete set that I purchased as seen above on the secondary market for ¥1200 but you can also find individual figures cheaply here and there if you are lucky. As is typically the case when purchasing figures like these the capsules are not included but the plastic bags you see here are the same ones as used inside the balls. They do a good job of keeping components separated but don't give much protection when it comes to prevent parts from warping. If you are familiar with soft plastic Gashapon you know the deal here.




RX-79BD-1 Blue Destiny Unit 1


The set sports a brand new mobile suit as its main course, a suit only seen in the Journey to Jaburo game's secondary "Tactics Battle" mode which unlocks after you complete the main campaign. So, what to say about the figure? Well, it certainly lives up to its name - it is blue. I am not a great fan of awkward action poses such as this one since it really limits the diorama options; you can't park this figure in a hangar for example. While arms, torsos and heads often rotate and swivel on the HGMS figures the legs are stuck in that spread. They did a fine job with the additional EXAM markings though, Gashapon HG figures rarely have any markings on them at all so it is clear a bit of extra effort when into this one.


The Gashapon figure isn't looking half bad when compared to the 1:220 Shokugan figure from the old STANDart brand (volume 12, released January 2012). The mobile suit is also featured in the tiny 1:400 Gundam Collection range, as a really rare 1:350 Gsight figure as well as super-deformed in SD Gundam Full Color Stage 27 and Gashapon Senshi Forte 04.






RGM-79 GM


This set has a sturdy GM figure in a pose very different from the Blue Destiny, very suitable for example as a background item in a diorama. I really like the size of the tower shield used on this figure, it also sports excellent colour separation and sculpt detail). If you are looking to army build a GM force this figure is probably the easiest to find in this size (which isn't really saying much 20 years down the road, but...).


The Gashapon HG series also features a teal colour GM in a more action-like pose (from volume 7, released in 1998) and a floating GM paired up with the line's only RB-79 Ball, sold together in the HGMS DX2 figure series (released in 2005).






RX-75 Guntank


Alright, let's talk about the elephant in the room. Gashapon HG figures are often made from soft plastic but the mix they used for this wave is one of the worst, so many components are bent out of recognition. You'll see bent weapons and shields all over the place here, the thinner or flatter the component the more likely you will come across a bent one. This was partially corrected in later sets and some figures use harder plastic for their fins etc. but this is just what you will have to deal with in the wonderful world of Gashapon Gundam.


Size and style-comparison with a 1:300 Strategy of Gundam figure from the first SOG wave released in June 2006. The sizes are nearly the same so you could easily replace the Gashapon HG figure with the better looking SOG figure, provided you can find one of course.






RX-78-2 Gundam


The RX-78 is no stranger to the Gashapon HG line, this is its twelfth appearance so you know the designers have to resort to ever more unusual poses each time. Here they have gone for a kneeling figure with rifle and shield. There was another kneeling Gundam in volume 13 already, but that particular figure was holding a beam saber. As with the Blue Destiny figure this sculpt will limit the display options quite a bit but at least with the Gundam you have a lot of different sculpts to work with. Incidentally, the Gundam and Char's Zaku II from this volume were selected for the memorial 100 000 000 Gashapon units (for all Bandai Gashapon HG brands, not just Gundam) memorial release, probably only because it happened to be released around the same time and so the mould was reused. You can see a little notice about this special release at the last page in the booklet.






MS-06S Zaku II Commander Type (Char's Custom)


Oh my, that's a really sad bazooka you have there, Char. Fortunately there are a lot of medical options available for you, just look into the nearest email spam folder and order today! Jokes aside, the Zaku Bazooka accessory on one of the two figures seen here really shows off the worst aspect of the plastic material used in this release. While other HG MS figures also suffer from bent parts it fortunately rarely doesn't get this bad. The main culprit as usual is the idea of tossing up a lot of components into a ball-shaped container. If you can look beyond this problem (as well as the bendy commander antenna) you have a really great looking version of Char's Zaku II in this set, one of the better sculpts I would say.






MSM-10 Zock (Game ver.)


The most interesting figure in this set I think is the Zock in its overhauled design from this particular game title. While the original design was also two-faced this new sculpt looks more like an enormous hovering land battleship and it is a major improvement over the original TV series design (which is if we are being frank pretty abysmal). The figure is made up out of several components and armour plates and these do not always cooperate. The massive torso armour for example attaches with soft plastic pegs and these sometimes want to push themselves out of the sockets again, you can see the big gap between the head and the rear torso armour as well as on some of the feet.


The Zock appears near the end of the game campaign (appearing as an unknown enemy type to the Gundam's onboard computer) after the player has been chasing Char's Z'Gok through the underground tunnels in Jaburo. You'd be surprised at the agility of this thing yet the boss fight itself seems to be the two machines slinging potshots at each other from a distance.


Close-up of the thruster section hidden underneath all the armoured bulk. I really like this design but the soft plastic material doesn't necessarily agree and prefers to slowly twist the components out of the sockets and having them fall off at the slightest touch.


The classic U.C.0079 Zock is a behemoth and the PS2 version is not smaller but due to the limits of Gashapon capsule magic the figure is considerably downsized from its full scale. Compare this with a Zaku II and a classic Zock (if we nitpick it looks like the design from the Battle Operation 2 game) in "true" 1:300 scale from the Strategy of Gundam figure line, this should give you an idea of what we are missing out on. Still, I think the Gashapon HG figure could be an interesting rival for smaller Gundam figures of the 1/350 Gsight line. It is probably a bit large for the traditional SD Full Color figures but might also be an option to go with the larger SD figures of the Gashapon NEXT, DASH and Senshi Forte families.






MS-06 Zaku II


The set closes off with the good old mass-production type Zaku II in a very attractive and basic pose. The exact version of the machine is not given in the game but it would be safe to assume that the same 3D-model was used for both standard MS-06F and ground type MS-06J variants and so the figure is quite flexible in this fashion. Apart from the traditional Zaku Machine Gun the figure also wields a secondary shoulder shield as an improvised shield on its left arm (although it lacks the spikes seen on the more combat-oriented knuckle shield).


In spite of being very bendy (soft plastic is not kind to thin and flat components like those shields) this is a very useful army builder figure. It would have been really cool if the figure came in an alternate version with the bazooka and commander antenna used on the Char figure but the HG MS figure series rarely if ever worked with the alternate figure concept.






Conclusion

While the soft plastic utilized in this wave must be seen as a bit of a failure the set is made up of a really useful selection of classic U.C.0079 designs. I for one would have liked to see a second wave with additional figures such as the Guncannon and the Gelgoog but when volume 20 came around Bandai had already shifted the focus to Stardust Memory and Mobile Suit ZZ Gundam.

Mobile Suit Ensemble Gundam Café Special Color ver.

Today we are dragging out an old Ensemble special into the light. You may remember the old Gundam Cafés which ceased all operations back in 2022, the Tokyo branch often featured special goods including the occasional Shokugan figure as well. I recall picking up the first Converge EX figure in such an establishment many moons ago, and noticed that most of the stuff they were selling back then was the usual trinkets and porcelain stuff with various prints on them but from time to time they would feature a repainted figure or two. The two liveries we will see here have been used elsewhere as well but I don't know the mythology behind them.


Anyway, this special 2-figure set was released in the summer of 2020 and appears to have coincided with a separate Ensemble Café set featuring reissues of four U.C. era figures (Gundam, Guncannon, Guntank and Zaku II, review here) but each set has its own booklet although this one is just black and white.


Parts-wise there is nothing new under the hood here. These are bog-standard RX-78-2 figures in alternate colours. You can see it has the old type of shoulder joint which doesn't swing up and down. I don't know for certain but I am pretty sure this set was only available in the physical Gundam Café storefront, perhaps only in the Tokyo branch as well. I have never seen these figures in cardboard boxes, I believe they were only sold in capsule form. I also don't know if you had to buy them lottery style in an actual Gashapon machine or if they were sold as a set of two at the counter. If anyone has details to fill in it would be good to know.


I'll just run through this set rather quickly. The two machines carry completely unique colour schemes as you can see, with the brownish-black machine sporting some Gundam Café printing on top. I do like the colour schemes of these things but much like the green 7-Eleven specials that crop up over time they are really catering to collectors only. The white figure could be a decent starting point for your own in-universe custom conversion project as the colours are rather neutral to begin with.


Well, you don't need to convert the white Gundam café machine into the Rollout Color version because we already have it in the Ensemble line, released in December 2016 as an eye-catcher when Ensemble premiered. The Rollout Color figure is of course very hard to find these days so you might have better luck with the Gundam Café machine, although it is certainly not common either (but somewhat easier to find than the black variant).





In the interest of comparing things I guess you can say that the black machine most closely resembles the Prototype Gundam figure from Part 18 (release in June 2021) but to be fair these are quite different sculpts and I think neither would be a suitable replacement for the other.




All in all this is a neat little set of figures that I think would normally sit quite far down on the priority list. While they can be tricky to find these days the prices shouldn't be too off-putting, I've paid ¥800 each for mine in the years 2021 and 2023 which is cheaper than most contemporary Converge figures these days.