Gunpla Build - Master Grade GM Sniper II (White Dingo Custom)

The GM Sniper II White Dingo Custom is a bit of a weird one:

Warning: This post is long and a bit rambly, meaning it is exactly the kind of post I said I was going to try and stop writing. But I had a lot of things to say here, and it was actually a lot of fun to write, so hopefully you’ll give me a break this time

About Rise from the Ashes

Today’s mobile suit originally appeared in the video game Gundam Side Story 0079: Rise from the Ashes, released on the Sega Dreamcast:

Rise tells the story of the White Dingo Team, an elite OYW-era Earth Federation Unit fighting to push Zeon forces out of Australia some time around/after the Battle of Odessa.

The game is a first person shooter, though it’s perhaps more accurate to call it an attempt at a mobile suit combat simulator. The camera is placed within the view of the cockpit, mobile suit movement is fairly slow and janky, gravity keeps you from jumping too high, etc.

I could go on describing it, but you might be better off watching some playthroughs on Youtube. Suffice to say that it’s exactly the kind of game that Gundam fans want Bandai to make, but for some reason the company just … doesn’t.

Similarities to 08th MS Team

I think it’s abundantly clear that whoever wrote this game was heavily inspired by 08th MS Team. You’ve got:

• A story about a dedicated unit of EFF mobile suits
• Normal, professional soldiers. No Newtypes
• A heavy focus on grunt suits (the only units in the game you can pilot are GM variants and a Guncannon)
• A story about trying to push Zeon out of a part of Earth that we don’t get to see very often in UC fiction
• The story eventually ends with you stopping an experimental Zeon superweapon
• The mobile suits use much of the same gear as the Gundam Ground Type and EZ-8
• The squad makes use of a hovertank

08th Team wasn’t too old in 1999, and if it was popular enough in Japan, maybe someone thought that they could make some money recreating that vibe in videogame form. As a fan of the OVA, I’m certainly not going to complain.

But I’m still a little shocked they went this route. Maybe things were different with the Japanese fanbase back when the game came out, but if you look at Gundam fandom in the 2020’s, the most popular stories are usually about very special boys and girls piloting world-endingly powerful mecha, instead of adults doing grunt work.

What Odd Timing …

Rise from the Ashes is the first official Gundam video game released in the United States. It came out here in April 2000, which is a notable date. Not for the specific day itself, mind you, but for the month and the year.

Let me explain. Rise from the Ashes is set in the Universal Century. America wouldn’t get any UC anime on TV until 2001, so Rise - which, again, came out in 2000 - predates them all by at least a year.

That alone is pretty crazy, but it gets crazier. When the game came out, the only Gundam animation officially available on the US TV was Gundam Wing, which debuted on Toonami in March 2000.

Look very closely at all these dates. Gundam had been on English speaking TV for literally only a month before Rise came out. And yet someone decided that this would be the best time to give us a side story video game, set in a completely different setting than Wing - and that just so happened to be the franchise’s “preimere” timeline, which had twenty years worth of stories and context surrounding it.

Nothing about the timing here makes sense¹. The better option would have been to have the first western Gundam game be Gundam Battle Assault, since that actually has mobile suits from Wing in it. Then they could have saved Rise for 2001 to tie it in with the broadcast of 08th Team in April of that year.

Though in retrospect, that actually would have been a terrible idea. Sega officially killed the Dreamcast in March 2001, so if Bandai waited they probably would have canned the localization entirely.

Lost Media??

Technically speaking Rise from the Ashes got a second chance at life. It was one of many older games that was recreated and included in the PS3 game Gundam Side Stories.

However, I mean it when I say “recreated”. They turned it (and all the other games in the collection) into a third person shooter with much faster movement and flashier attacks.

This means that the original, 1st person/simulation version of Rise from the Ashes has been stuck on the Dreamcast for 26 years now, and I figure it’ll stay there forever. I just don’t see it being in high demand in these modern times.

About the Mobile Suit

As the name implies, this is a customized version of the GM Sniper II,

Aside from its new color scheme, there are only a few things that actually make it “custom”:

• It has a vulcan pod strapped to its head
• It has a new shield²

It’s not much, but I guess that’s enough to count.

There’s one other additional difference, namely in regards to its arsenal. In Rise from the Ashes, you can certainly play as the GM Sniper II, but you can’t actually equip it with a sniper rifle of any sort:

This changed when the mobile suit got an appearance in the PS2 game Journey to Jaburo, where it shows up as a playable mecha in a postgame bonus mode. Here it finally gets a sniper rifle, but it isn’t the standard ballistic used by the GM Sniper II. Instead it is equipped with the Long Range Beam Rifle:

This of course being the weapon used by the GM Sniper I in an extremely iconic moment from - you guessed it - 08th MS Team:

And the White Dingo Custom’s been depicted using that rifle ever since.

About the Name

There’s something else I want to point out, and I admit it’s the stupidest, nerdiest, nitpickiest thing imaginable, but just let me have it.

In Rise, the unit is referred to as the “GM Sniper Custom II”, rather than a “GM Sniper II Custom”. A minor switch of words that is completely forgiveable in the very first ever localization of a Gundam game.

But due to Sunrise’s habit of coming up with constant mobile suit variants (and then having to figure out how to name them), this switcheroo is actually potentially confusing. If you call it the GM Sniper Custom II, it sounds like a followup to this guy, the GM Sniper Custom:

Rather than what it actually is, a custom version of the GM Sniper II.

To be clear, none of this matters, and I doubt anyone would actually be confused. I just find this a funny accident.

Rise from the Ashes to the Top

Like I said, you can play as this thing in Rise from the Ashes, but what I didn’t tell you is that you can only actually use it in the final mission. It’s nothing more than a lagniappe you get at the end for seeing the game through.

This raises a fair question; if that’s how the mobile suit originally appeared, how the hell did it get popular enough to warrant a Master Grade, and a High Grade, and a Robot Spirits figurine?

I don’t have an actual answer, but my gut tells me that it’s simply the ultimate invocation of the Rule of Cool. The basic version of the GM Sniper II is already known as one of the coolest looking mobile suits of all time, and the crisp color scheme and special gear of the White Dingo Custom arguably make it even cooler.

And this is where a little known property of physics comes into play. If something reaches a critical mass of coolness, it creates it’s own special gravitational force that pulls people toward it.

Consider the following. Rise comes out in 1999 in Japan. The White Dingo makes its debut, but only in a single mission.

Journey to Jaburo comes out in Japan the very next year in 2000. Let’s take a look at the special animated cutscene you can unlock by beating the game. It starts off on White Base, showing us Guntank and original Gundam:

What is the very next thing you see after that?

So not only does it show up in this cutscene immediately after Gramps, but it also appears before the Alex, before Blue Destiny Unit 1, and before the Ground Type, all cool mobile suits in their own right.

And it’s not done! It comes back later in the cutscene, and well …

And then again for the final posing shot with all the rest:

To borrow a phrase from the kids these days, the damn thing showed up on the scene and immediately started mogging everyone else. It’s gravitational Cool Waves were so strong that creative teams couldn’t help but find an excuse to not only put it into Journey to Jaburo, but to put it front and center as much as possible. Then came the model kits, other game appearances (including Gundam Battle Operation 2 as well as Gundam Versus), and so on.

The White Dingo Custom ladies and gents. It’s been aura farming since 1999.

But Does it DESERVE It?

I’m going to punt on answering that. If you asked me any time in the last 20 years I would have said “yes, absolutely”, but I started to have some doubts during this build. We’ll talk about that more in a later post.

About the Model Kit

You’ve noticed already that the monochrome box means this is a Premium Bandai kit.

Beyond that, what we have here is the standard Master Grade GM Sniper II with a few new parts for its head and shield, plus a whole bunch of additional runners from the Master Grade Ground Type and EZ-8 so that it can have all of its weapons from the original game.

It also comes with waterslide decals, which does happen occasionally with P-Bandai releases (though not as much as it should)

That being said, I still got some GRework decals. I actually got them before I knew the kit came with its own waterslides, but it was still worth not having to deal with Bandai decals (to say nothing about the quality of the decal designs, but more on that later)

My White Whale

Regardless of whether or not my feelings have changed about the design of this mobile suit, it remains extremely special to me.

The Dreamcast remains my favorite gaming console of all time, and back in the day I collected a decent number of rare(ish) games for it. But there are a few that I’m missing, including Rise from the Ashes³.

What kills me is that I saw it on a store shelf at least once. It might have been in 2001, when I just started my first part time job. I recall there being other games I wanted to spend my limited paychecks on, and without knowing it was an 08th MS Team expy, I brushed it off.

I believe I may have seen it again in 2004 or ‘05, when there were still a handful of shops selling used Dreamcast games. But that was was when I was in college, and specifically at a time when I hadn’t yet begun my work-study program. Since I didn’t have a job, I didn’t have much in the way of funds, so I had to pick and choose which games to buy, and then hope the others remained on the shelf until I had more money.

Spoiler Alert - they didn’t all stay on the shelf, including Rise, so I missed my chance at it.

I still looked up everything I could about the game so I could live vicariously through it (back then 08th MS Team was my favorite Gundam story, so naturally Rise had a lot of appeal). That’s how I learned about the White Dingo Custom (and really the GM Sniper II in general), and I immediately fell in love with it.

Many years later, when I started building Gunpla, I thought about how cool it would be to have it as a model. Sure enough, I discovered the High Grade version (which came out in 2012). But being so new to the hobby, I had no idea how to obtain it, so like the Dreamcast game itself, the kit became a white whale for me.

And now, after all these years, I have the Master Grade. I’d still like to have the game if I could, but for now this still feels like closure.