So! It is out! I visited Hobby Search as I often do, and I found the scans to the MG Strike Freedom sitting there, waiting for me. There are so many cool things in this kit! First of all it has some really sweet gimmicks built into it. As I have mentioned, the entire internal frame is molded in gold plastic. There's a bit of concern for me in terms of the Special Edition though. First of all, the gold plating. I understood that the gold plating on the SE Ver was supposed to be a gold chrome. This picture shows parts that are clearly gold chromed, whereas this picture shows parts that could have somewhat of a metallic sheen to them, but by far are not chromey. I supposed it could be a scanner issue, but as this picture shows, there is clearly no plating on the SE Ver gold runner, it looks the same as this frame in the regular kit. I know someone out there is looking at this and thinking that I am a freak for analyzing this so much, but analyzing is what I do. Anyhow, if I am gonna end up getting three types of gold in a kit, I would just as soon get the regular release and spray some gold paint on it. But enough of that.
The MG Strike Freedom has some cool torso flex. One of the things I liked about the MG Wing Zero Ver Ka was the torso flex, though I was kinda bummed that it could only flex forward, not backward. I knew at the time that it would be remolded into the Endless Waltz version, and knew that it was built to facilitate it's wings-spread-firing-straight-down pose it had when attacking that bunker. Anyhow, the MG Strike Freedom flexes backwards, to make it's flying poses look wicked cool!
I really love the attention to detail on this. When the Strike Freedom combines it's two gun together to make a more powerful rifle, the butt of the forward gun needs to rotate out of the way to accomodate the second gun. This part now has a cool sticker on it that shows it to be a secondary sensor scope. Also cool is the way the rear skirt armors move out of the way to allow the hip guns to move to the back. Oh, and I really like that the hip guns have a cool extendy feature on them too!
The wings are cool, they have all the internals, including the actual DRAGOON mounts, molded in gold. Something cool that I have never realized until I read the instructions, (probably just because I don't understand Japanese) is that the wings, which move to widen the distance between the DRAGOONS, move automatically when the wings are rotated.
One thing that has me interested, though I haven't gotten to the bottom of it yet, is the beam shield. On one of the previous posts I had about the MG Strike Freedom, I mentioned that the shield had a variated look to it, though I decided that it could have been painted that way. Then, on another post, I saw pictures of those two kits in the case, and one of them had a shield, and it looked the same as the "painted" one, even though the kit itself appeared to have no paint on it. Now, thanks to Hobby Search, I have seen images of the shield straight out of the box. The Special Edition Ver. looks to be completely blue, wheras the regular Ver. looks distinctly varied. Now, I have two theories on this. I discussed this issue with my brother Benjamin, and we decided that it was possible that Bandai had molded it with two colors of plastic, injecting them both into the mold at the same time, which would allow them to mix and streak and make the distinctive shading. The fact that one shield seems to be done right and the other seems to be too blue actually is in line with this theory, assuming that it was a new and imperfect technique. Arguments against this theory would be that, for example, the shield is not on a runner or molding frame of any type. Even the big Strike Freedom Lightning Edition shield, or the massive base for the MG Ex-S had frame parts on them. The second theory is that the shield is somehow printed to painted to have that look. The fact that it is not on a frame supports this. Furthermore, if it was done by hand, there would be a certain degree of variance to them, like the differences between the SE Ver and the Reg Ver. However, there is the issue of too much variance for it to be a printed thing, but it would be too expensive for a person to paint all the shields. Who knows? *shrug*
Anyhow, this kit looks to be totally cool, and I am totally thinking about getting one. You can find them at most online stores that import Gundam models.
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