Gunpla Build - High Grade Turn A

I built this immediately after finishing the Master Grade Turn A, from about April 23rd to April 25th:

I’ve never done something like this before, building an MG and HG back to back, but I thought it would be fun to try.

FYI, we’re only going to cover the highlights of this build.

Beam Rifle

The model comes with color correcting stickers for the red bits. Visually they look okay, though they’re liable to start peeling off.

The surface detail is excellent, but the rifle’s gimmick is kinda busted. If you want to expose the grey handle in the back, you have to do a partsformation. That wouldn’t be a huge problem if not for the additional fact that the grip has no detail at all, and it has to be painted:

It’s probably not worth the effort.

Shield

We get all the major detail in the back, but the track no longer moves. Not a big deal; that’s exactly the kind of compromise I expect on a High Grade.

A bigger problem is that the little flappy wing things that mount to the arm have to be painted grey. And rather than attaching to the shield on a hinge, you have to plug and unplug them based on how you want to position them:

I’m less okay with this compromise. At the very least they could have made these out of grey plastic. It feels lazy.

At least it looks perfect from the front:

Feet

The construction is surprisingly similar to the MG:

But the level of detail isn’t. The bottoms of the feet are red and white when they’re supposed to be grey:

This is something that most people won’t ever need or want to fix, but it’s worth noting anyway.

Legs

The thruster vanes in the top of the leg are just one big hunk of plastic, though it looks alright to me:

But in the bottom of the leg, it does the same thing as the MG, where two parts interlock and interweave together:

There’s a seamline to take care of in the front of the leg, and all of the grey bits of exposed inner frame now have to be painted in:

Neither of these things are surprising for an HG, but I do feel like they could have included some stickers here. We’ve seen HG’s with massive sheets of color correcting stickers, so why not toss a few more for the Turn A?

(note that we do get a sticker for the little red dot in the front of the leg, which is something we didn’t get with the Master Grade)

The knee armor, I think, is an improvement over the MG. It has a color correcting red sticker, which is fine. More important is the fact that it’s now one solid part, which means there is no seamline, and it’s more structurally sound.

Core Fighter

The kit comes with a completely separate Core Fighter model, just like with the High Grade Victory Gundam models. But unlike those fighter models, this one is completely colorless:

I’m pretty sure I threw this in the trash after taking this photo. It’s not worth the effort when I have the Maser Grade sitting right over there.

It also comes with the parts to create the docked Core Fighter in the lower torso, and this fares a lot better. It’s got a clear cockpit, and a super tiny pilot molded into the plastic:

One more thing - the Master Grade had a color correcting sticker for the side skirts, but the HG doesn’t. It’s such a simple little thing they could have included, but instead you’ll have to paint it:

Upper Torso

The chest is no longer hollow. Now we have swappable plates for both the front and the back:

Though if you want to use the “open” plates, you’ll need some grey paint:

It’s another compromise that’s at once both unsurprising and annoying. If they’d have just used two layered parts instead of a single plate, they could have achieved perfect color separation.

Arms

This model does the same thing as the MG, where the back half of the shoulder armor is attached separately to the torso:

Clearly this is part of the Turn A’s structural design.

The arms themselves look pretty good. You’ve got black stickers for the stripey bits running alongside the forearm, though I think I just ended up painting that. I also painted the area around the shoulder from white to grey, which is how it’s supposed to look:

Head

We get the usual eye sticker this time around, so now they’re looking orange instead of yellow:

The model also comes with a sticker for the green symbol on the head, but I’d advise you not to use it. It’s got a huge white border that’s going to be insanely obvious to anyone. Better to find some green paint, even if it’s in the form of a Sharpie or something.

Time for Some Comparisons

And now that it’s done, let’s get on with the comparisons.

Out of the Box Comparison

There are High Grades where you can get away without doing any color correction or panel lining. The Turn A is not one of them. As an out of the box build, it just would’t look right.

But that doesn’t mean the MG is really any beter. It also needs some color correction (the red dots on its legs, the pilot figure, etc), and it definitely still needs panel lining. I guess technically it needs less work than the HG, but it’s a non-negligible amount of effort.

When it comes to which one of these is the better out-of-the-box build, I’m going to say it’s a wash. Either way you’re going to need to put in some extra effort.

Comparison after Painting and Detailing

So how do they compare after painting, detailing, panel lining, etc? It’s still a wash!

But first, let’s be clear about something: these two models are intentionally trying to do different things. As I stated in the past, the MG is meant to look more like some of Syd Mead’s design sketches, so it has more panel lines than it’s normally supposed to (and also yellow eyes).

Meanwhile the High Grade is pretty much the spitting image of the lineart:

The HG’s got all the same details, and not only are the eyes the “right” color, but they’re also shaped to look a little more squished and narrow.

Personally, I don’t like those narrower eyes, especially on a ¹⁄₁₄₄ scale model. They’re a little too small and hard to see from certain angles (also, while that may be how they look in the official lineart, in the anime they’re often drawn to look bigger and more expressive)

But other than that, the HG looks stellar. Aside from not having the same amount of panel lines (which, again, is intentional), there’s really nothing on the MG that isn’t present on its smaller counterpart, and I think that’s really impressive.

Posing and Articulation

In regards to the articulation, it’s once again a wash. The arms on the HG have better lateral motion on the, allowing it to do a true dab:

But the elbow bend and cross body range is worse, making it harder to do these two handed beam rifle poses:

It also makes it harder for the model to reach for a beam saber:

But overall, the articulation on both modes is close enough that I was able to recreate many of the the same poses with the High Grade:

Unless you’re doing something really crazy (or if you’re doing a dab I guess), there’s not much you can do with one model that you can’t do with the other.

But articulation is not the same as posing. Articulation is just one component that goes into posing, along with things like gimmicks and ease of use.

In regards to ease of use, both models were once again weirdly similar (though not identical), in that they were kinda frustrating. With the MG, the legs often fell off due to them having an extremely shallow connection to the hip (I also recall that the arm sometimes came off at the shoulder joint).

With the HG, the legs also fell off a bunch, even though they use standard polycaps and polycap connectors. At one point they both fell off at the same time, even though I touched neither of them.

I also had problems with the right arm popping off, and a ton of issues with the hands coming out of their sockets. Both of these things happened a lot when trying to do two-handed beam rifle poses, but they happened other times as well.

What’s weird, though, is that I’m pretty sure the High Grade photoshoot was much shorter, yet I took roughly the same amount of photos as the MG. So was it really that much of a problem to work with? Maybe not.

For our final topic, let’s compare the gimmicks. The MG has more of them, no doubt about it, and some of them are also more mechanically impressive. But the question I have is whether either of those things matters.

Take the beam rifle for instance. Yes, the High Grade’s uses a partsformation, and yes the grey handle in the back has less detail. But once I was actually taking photos, neither of these things crossed my mind.

Or take the chest. Again, the High Grade uses a partsformation when you want to open the hatches. But this actually ended up being better, since the individual hatches on the MG are so finicky. It was so much easier to just pop this plate on, take some shots, and swap it back out:

Really, there’s only two things the HG is missing: the cow and the Gundam Hammer. In regards to the latter, if it’s something you really want, you can find other kits that come with a Gundam Hammer and repurpose it, which is exactly what I did:

So that just leaves us with the cow. And while I know it is the subject of so many memes and in-jokes online, I’m going to be the buzzkill and say that while it’s a cute inclusion, it is the least important gimmick of them all. If you buy the Master Grade over the High Grade just because of the cow, so be it, but forgive me if I say that it seems kind of silly.

Conclusion

To reiterate for emphasis, both of these kits are going to look rough as straight builds. I wish that weren’t the case, but it is what it is.

But once they’re done up, they are both great models, and I don’t think you’d go wrong with either of them. It’s really up to your own personal preferences regarding size and price, and whether you want to wait for the Master Grade to be in stock versus grabbing the relatively easier to find High Grade.

The Rest of the Shots

Here now are the rest of the shots I took.