Update 11/08/2009: Finished model pictures can be found here.

I went back to the mall and bought a bootleg GN-002 Gundam Dynames to review in this site from a stack of bootleg gundams that I had seen. It cost me about 1078 yen. At Hobby Link Japan (HLJ) this was selling for about 2300 yen. I’ll probably buy this from HLJ in a couple of months in order to better differentiate the quality of the pirated versus the original.

Judging from the box shots you can see that they had copied everything down to a T except for the pilot which was visible in the original Bandai product. Instead of the red Bandai mark, it was replaced with a “TT Hong Li” tag. Also they missed out on the “Gundam” tag. I am shooting at the dark here, but assuming that Bandai has already trademarked the term “Gundam” in China. This could be some sort of a defensive tactic by the Chinese bootleggers to circumvent it since when they get caught they could always say that its not a “Gundam”. This way Bandai will have to start suing in the individual product level for copyright infringement.

Went back to the mall again and found this in the stack of Bootleg Gundams I had seen previously. I guess if you have no conscience to prevent you from pirating Bandai’s Gundams, what’s to stop you from counterfeiting its other accessories? They are actually copying now the Action Base Stands sold by Bandai to help display Gunpla’s. This particular one was molded with the color red, it costs about 350 yen . Once again it is branded as “Hong Li” and definitely looks ugly because the plastic looks cheap. It was also renamed to “All-Purpose Bracket”, instead of branding it as an Action-Base.

Update: 10/18/2009 HW Japan also has it up for pre-order, here and here. And its cheaper too at only 15040 yen.
Update: 10/14/2009 Hobby Search has these two up for pre-order already here and here and its going for Y17,860.

Yamato toys just posted on their site pictures and product page of the VF-22S of Maximilian Jenius and Milia Jenius from the Macross 7 series. Guess this means that Yamato Toys finally obtained the Macross 7 license to produce toys based on that series. Earlier this year, Yamato Toys released a 1/60 scale version of Gamlin Kizaki’s VF-22S seen in the Macross 7: Dynamite OVA.

Update 10/12/2009: Thanks to new restrictions at the Japanese postal office, most online sellers will no longer ship modelling paints and solvents overseas. That includes Gundam markers….blehhh!

Found a place in my area where they sell Gundam paints. Woohoo! too bad that there wasn’t much in terms of selection but at least they had what I needed for the 1/72 VF-25G Messiah that I was building. I bought Blue, White and Gundam Marker Grey, its not what the VF-25G Color Guide calls for but it’ll do for me. Its a tad bit expensive too though, but heck, might as well spend.

Continuing where we left off on this 1/72 VF-25G Messiah Construction manual translation project. Once again, use at your own risk, and yep, it sure does sound funny since I did a literal dictionary translation without attempting to transpose it to a more suitable english sentence structure. Now I realize why Google Translate sounds so funny.

Was surprised to see this in a Mall, a whole rack of counterfeit (Bootleg) Gundams. I found this when I went scrounging for some modelling paint for the 1/72 VF-25G I was planning to assemble.

It was announced last week at the Macross Frontier Blog that Macross Chronicle Magazine No. 31 was already on sale.

Macross Chronicle 31 will feature the Quadluun Row from the Macross SDF1 series in its Mechanic Sheet portion. I’m actually confused with the Quadluun series of mecha with regards to what the last three letters of its name are. Some articles refer to it as Quadluun Rau (used by female Zentradi in Macross SDF1) while others Quadluun Rea (Macross Frontier’s Clan Clan’s mecha). Now in the very Official Macross Chronicle that gives further explanation to the series, they refer to it as Quadluun Row… weird. I’m inclined to think that its just a typo and that it should really be spelled as Rau.

Found this on the Yamato website. Its a little tutorial on how to disengage the metal hip joint from its housing in the nose of the Macross 1/60 VF-1 series made by Yamato Toys. Be sure to check out the video on the page as well for a real live demo. One should also take note of the position of the cockpit since it can be moved up or down and also limits the movement of the hip joint.

This tutorial starts from page 22 frame 6 of the manual and is taken from a different angle