After about two months I have completed my PG Exia build with mini hanger diorama and detached GN drive!
One of these days I really need to go back and re-read all of my post-build mission reports. I have a sneaking suspicion that with all of my big builds I complain and say how terribly I screwed up the build. This is another one of those examples. For everything that went well, at least one other aspect didn’t quite go as planned for got messed up along the way.
Before I start commiserating about my build I want to take a minute to talk about the PG Exia. Without a doubt, it is easily a top tier Perfect Grade from Bandai. As someone who’s build a metric shitload of Perfect Grade Unicorns I feel like Bandai listened to all most of the criticism from that release. The LED wiring is a thousand times simpler this time around. Instead of building out a section of the kit and carefully feeding wires through tight joints you actually build the kit around the wires as you go along. The risk of breaking a cable along the way is greatly reduced. There’s also a lot more detail on the inner frame than previous kits. Okay, not a lot like you’d find on the MKII, but considerably more than the 00 Raiser & Unicorn, and completely in line with what you’d expect from a 00 era kit. Most impressively to me, Bandai addressed one of my biggest issues – the lack of fexability on the stand. With the PG Unicorn the torso was locked in an upright position, really limiting the posability of the kit. The connection point on Exia’s base actually adjusts forward and back for a much greater range when making dynamic poses (of course I end up leaving it in the default position for my build – shame on me). Unfortunately there’s no side-to-side action but I’ll take what I can get. I still want to say the detail and flexability of the PG Strike is makes it #1, but the PG Exia is right on its heels.
