So my final thoughts on the MG Quanta…  There’s a lot they do right, and there’s a few things that they don’t.

WARNING: Light Spoilers for A wakening of the Trailblazer Follow

Let’s start with the Quantum System…

Quanta actually had a very short appearance in the movie, which culminated in him activating the Quantum System, which causes 00 Quanta to purge a good chunk of its armor, the GN Drive in its shield connects to its back, and all of its GN Condensers pop out of its body (including the large one in the chest, which then has fins expand out of it).

Now here is my gripe.  The MG Quanta was VERY CLEARLY designed to do just this.  All of the armor that is purged is clearly made to be easily removable compared to the rest of the armor as it can all just slide off.  All of the GN Condensers can expand out of the body, with the exception of the chest.  The chest condenser is easily removable and is attached to one of the cockpit pieces which is purged, so it was clearly designed to just be replaced with an expanded part, but this part just isn’t included.

The amount of effort that was put into the kit to accommodate this mode is really clear, especially in the upper arm’s armor piece.  The armor is symmetrical, yet there is a tiny tab that is removable on one side because otherwise the tab of armor would get in the way of the GN Condenser expanding.

I find it really weird that there wasn’t a special edition of this kit released that could recreate the Quantum System.  From a marketing standpoint I’m sure they would do that even though all they would need is a few extra parts to include to make the kit fully compatible.  It seems almost inevitable that they will release a special edition of this kit, although now that the DVD and Bluray of Trailblazer has been released, I’m surprised nothing has been announced.

Another overall gripe is that the GN Sword V is really hard to pose with.  The piece that attaches to the forearm isn’t designed to actually secure itself in the forearm.  The slot on the forearm just sort of loosely holds the GN Sword, while the hand is the only place it actually snaps into that holds it.

Another flaw is that Quanta’s shield has a beam cannon on the top of it that it uses in the movie, and while the cannon is molded into the kit, it looks more like a small vent or something, and more importantly, the shield cannot rotate from side to side in such a way that the cannon can face forward.

So my final thoughts on the kit is that overall, it’s fairly nice, it has some nice gimmicks, and I’m really happy that for once there wasn’t a 1/100 released only to have a superior MG released a few years later.  Zabanya, Harute, and especially the Braves were so awesome in the movie that I really hope that they follow the Quanta and are released as MGs soon, although I know it is fairly unlikely (although no 1/100 kits of them have been announced yet).

However there will almost certainly be a new edition of the Quanta eventually that will include parts to make the full conversion to the Quantum System, perhaps a ring to hold the bits in Quantum mode, and very likely also include the LED units (although the Quanta comes with a mail order slip to order the LEDs separately, and I have been tipped off that Bandai will make the LEDs available as a separate product eventually), so if those are things that are important to you, it may be best to wait, otherwise, for just a plain 00 Quanta, this is probably the best kit that will be released.

Also, for those that are interested (myself included), this also paves the way for an MG 00 Raiser since the Quanta shares a very similar frame with the 00 Raiser, moreso than the Exia.

Thanks for reading my stupidly long and drawn out review, take care all!

Showing the basic joints along the connecting arm and then within the backpack itself.

The various sword bits can “spread out,” looking very cool.  When they’re all enclosed together it just looks like a really solid shield, when they spread out it looks cool and… I don’t want to say “wing-like,” but they can’t help but remind me of feathers.

A problem a ton of Japanese bloggers seem to be having is the joint connecting the smaller bits to the shield (shown at the left) has a tendency to snap off when putting on and taking off the bit.  To ease the strain on the plastic, I drilled a bit of a hole in it (shown right) to give it a bit more flex.  I’m going to try to make a replacement piece by laser etching one out of metal to completely fix the problem.

When the larger bits (which is actually two bits combined) aren’t docked on the shield, the white side pieces swivel up and cover where they attach.  This is just a look at having only the smaller bits attached.

On the left, the various bits are shown in “sword mode.”  The bits are called, from top to bottom, GN Sword Bit C, GN Sword Bit A, and GN Sword Bit B (sorry, didn’t occur to me at the time to arrange them in alphabetical order).  All of the sword bits have handles to allow them to be used as swords.  The combination of bits A and B also can work as one large sword.  They are all shown on the right alongside the Quanta’s GN Sword V.

One of the additional gimmicks is that all of the bits can combine with the GN Sword V to create the GN Buster Sword (left) and GN Buster Rifle (right).  The entire sword should be rotated 90 degrees for the GN Buster Rifle, unfortunately there was just no decent way for me to do this and get a good picture of it.  Woops.  I’ll try to get a nice action shot for it when I get around to do the final photoshoot of the Quanta for my conclusions.

And thus, she stands.

Like the arms, the legs are mostly based off of the design of 00 Gundam with some Exia aesthetics thrown in.  Unlike many Gundams, the Quanta doesn’t have any real front or rear skirt armor, however the large white piece on the front is connected by a ball joint in the middle, allowing it to pivot freely, and the white piece on the back can pivot in and out (in shown in the top left picture, out shown in the bottom left).  Like many recent MGs, the leg connection point in the crotch can swivel up and down.

The blue armor piece on the back barely gets in the way of the leg articulation, allowing it to still do a nice 180 degree bend.  There’s something about the knee design that I really like how the parts separate and bend.  It reminds me a lot of the PG Strike Gundam.

The foot design is pretty much identical to 00 Gundam’s, and allows for pretty much limitless side to side movement.  The Quanta can just BARELY not do the splits simply because if you spread the legs any further than the top pic, the side skirts would pop off.

POW.  Long overdo, but I’m taking a break from studying for finals to finish up this review.

The arms are fairly simple in construction, and are heavily derived from the design of 00 Gundam’s arms, making an MG 00 Raiser even more inevitable than it already was.

The shoulder armor has a bit of articulation to it, but it really doesn’t interfere with the motion of the arm.  Although the should armor is asymmetrical, the large white piece on the right shoulder can swing out of the way fairly easily so as not to inhibit articulation anymore as compared to the left arm.

The fairly simple nature of the arms design allows for a large range of motion.  In addition to the most obvious circle joint, there is another joint located roughly halfway into the forearm.

The wrist also has a circular joint as well as several joints in the hand itself.

That is a nice face.  Note the 00Q in the clear green forehead piece.

The head has excellent part separation and detail that I’ve come to expect from a Master Grade but am still fairly impressed by from a technical standpoint.

The part I’m focusing on in the last picture above is just one of those tiny-ass details in MGs that I love.  Rather than make the whole part solid, there was a gap on those “fins” on the head, which then had a separate piece altogether to fill in the gap.  I’m a big fan of natural panel lines caused by part separation rather than inscribed ones.  Kudos Bandai.

ANYHOW.  Welcome to another one of my obnoxiously long reviews.  As I mentioned in my Omegamon review, I’m not at home with access to my lovely lightbox so I’m just making due with what I have, so I apologize in advance for the photos not being as nice as they might normally be.

The 00 Qan[T] is Setsuna’s new Gundam in the Gundam 00 movie A Wakening of the Trailblazer (A Mazing Use of Spaces).  As such, there will be some relatively minor movie spoilers in here limited to technical functions of the Quanta and its GN Drives.

As for the Quanta itself, I thought the design looked very nice in the trailers and eventual lineart.  It was a bit of a mix between the more stripped down look of Exia with only a small dash of the oversized armor of the 00 Raiser.

So let’s slap her together, shall we?

The Quanta has 16 runners in total, which is actually quite a bit when you consider that it’s a fairly “lightweight” unit in the sense that it doesn’t have a large backpack, is fairly minimal in terms of armor, etc.  This does include an Action Base 2, which is packed in and designed to help the Quanta hold its sword in alternate modes.

I was thinking of just building the frame and slapping things onto it, but I decided to follow the directions like a normal person and do it body part by body part like my previous MG Exia review (Oh how the time flies!).

First thing is first, we assemble the GN Drive.

Half of it is similar to Exia’s GN Drive, the other one is not so much since it has to connect to the second GN Drive (located in the shoulder) to activate the Quantum System.  The MG 00 Quanta did NOT come with LED units, although it is compatible with the LED units from the MG Exia and other 1/100 00 kits.  The MG Quanta comes with a slip to mail order the LEDs.  I unfortunately don’t have my MG Exia with me so I can’t slip them in to see what it’d look like so we’ll have to use our imagination.

The torso all snapped together!  Like the Exia, nearly all of the transparent green parts feature etched markings which are a really nice touch.  The torso just feels very slim and solid.

As far as articulation goes, there is a fair bit of play in both shoulders as far as back and forth goes as well as the side armor, which is attached very similarly to the MG Exia.  The upper torso also rotates around the main circular part, and can rock back and forth along the bottom.

The cockpit on this MG is the coolest one I’ve encountered in my opinion.  The top blue piece opens along a double joint, the bottom red piece swings down, and then there is a gray piece that opens as well before you can peek in and see Setsuna F Seiei.

There is one detail that I wondered about while building the torso was this small gray piece that was hinged on the back of the torso.  I now realize it is to let in and then lock in the GN Drive.  Love tiny details like that.

Back to snapping I go!

So let me talk about this for just a bit first.  Digimon is an insta-nostalgia thing for me.  I loved it years and years ago and have always appreciated some of the designs still simply because they’re fucking awesome.  A group of Digimon called the Royal Knights all had designs that would make excellent mecha, especially the X variations of some of them, shown below.

Omegamon, known as Omnimon in the US version, was the combination of the two main characters’ Digimon at their highest evolved forms.  To this date. I don’t think I have ever cheered in a movie theater like I did at the age of 11 when Omegamonm showed up in the Digimon movie.  For those who watched the bastardized (obviously I thought the 90s music at the time was good because I was young and stupid) American version of the movie but haven’t seen the subbed version of Our War Game, I would really recommend it.  An angelic chorus at the revealing of the sweetest Digimon ever works a lot better than LETS KICK IT UUUUUUP or whatever the music was.  I take the music in my children’s shows VERY SERIOUSLY.

Omegamon’s First Appearance

So when I heard Bandai was starting a model kit line for Digimon and the first one was Omegamon, I was pumped.  I would get to build a sweetass Omegamon.  This Omegamon:

Right?

Wrong.

They redesigned Omegamon to be altogether more mecha-like.  When I saw the design I was left with a feeling of “not sure if want.”  I obviously ended up wanting it, with the feeling that it would be an excellent base for modification if nothing else.  So let us begin…

Some very nice looking box art that gives you a good look at the reviewed design.  Let me apologize in advance for the pictures in this review since I am at college and don’t have access to my lightbox and a number of other things, but I tried to get at least some good photos.

Since this was the first model in a new line I didn’t really know what to expect, but I would say this solidly falls into the HG realm of quality.  Definitely nowhere near an MG in detail, poseability, and part separation.

In terms of missing part separation, the decal sheet should give you a good idea of what’s missing.  Most glaringly is the purple stripes on the chest.  The rest of the stickers cover the yellow points on the waist, some parts of the shield, the entire sword, and the “eyes” of both head-arms.

So in terms of an HG quality kit, some of these are reasonable, some aren’t.  However I’d like to take this moment to remind you that the kit costs roughly $45.  It’s roughly the size of a 1/100 Gundam, so it’s in an MG price range with an MG size.  Perhaps the lack of MG quality is the price of having a lower production volume?

So let’s talk articulation.  The arms both can do a 90 degree bend.  While more would be nicer, to be honest they don’t really need it since it would bump into the massive shoulder pieces very quickly.

The legs can do a 180 degree bend and have a nice MG-like shifting of the armor mechanism.

Now here’s one of my biggest problems… The cape.  They turned it into this techno…wing…thing.  That said, I do acknowledge that having a solid piece for a cloth cape would have restricted movement and having a cloth piece would have looked tacky, so there was really no “good” solution, so if nothing else this looks alright.  Later down the line I’ll probably sculpt a cloth cape for mine.

POW.  Stickers help quite a bit.  I’ll paint and panel my baby eventually but I these will do in the meantime.  Chest looks drastically better with the stripes back on there.  I would also like to take this moment to point out something that I found odd…  The transparent red piece on the shield.  It DOES create a certain effect, but I don’t understand why the effect was needed here.  It just seemed like a bizarre choice when time would be better spent somewhere else like the sword.  The sword is molded in all white despite the “correct” coloring having no white in it at all.  Why not just mold it in a gray at least?

The weapons all have a little plug to stick into the mouths of the head-arms.  The Metalgarurumon (purple) side comes with a smaller piece to keep in when the larger one isn’t in use (even though its out of sight when the mouth is closed).  The Wargreymon (orange) side only comes with the one sword piece.

By readjusting all of the light in my room I was able to get at least a few halfway decent shots.  Omegamon comes with a piece to specifically attach it to Bandai’s Action Bases.

So my final conclusions about this…  Without taking price into consideration it’s a nice little kit.  When taking price into consideration, and especially the fact that it’s from Bandai, it is really really sad that the level of quality wasn’t higher.  But sadly, this is the best most of us will get without splurging into several-hundred-dollar resin kits.

The design changes were nice for the most part.  I feel like the lack of a cape is ultimately unavoidable, but some of them bother me more than others.  The single thing I dislike the most is how INCREDIBLY blocky the Metalgarurumon head is.

So at the end of the day, I’m disappointed because I really wanted to love this kit.  I liked it and really enjoyed building it, and will definitely like working on it too, but it just falls short of the MGified Omegamon of my dreams.  My work will mostly consist of undoing some poor design choices that I’ve mentioned, and I will of course post any progress I might have.

The next item in the Digimon Reboot line is Dukemon, which I’m really unsure whether or not I’ll get, but we’ll see…

After that they have teased images of a redesigned Angemon and Devimon which just make me ask… why?  There are SO many good mecha-based Digimon, why go to humanoid designs so quickly?  I don’t think they have confirmed their production yet so here’s hoping they don’t stick with them.  In the meantime, I’ll tweak my Omegamon and hope for a nice kit of Omegamon X:

My apologies to the authors/photographers/artists of the images I used that weren’t mine, I had all of them stashed in folders on my computer and couldn’t find the sources.

I built up Omegamon, since it was the simpler of the two kits, and will be doing a review of it later tonight (after I buy a battery charger).  The Qan[T] review will be in standard Knolly fare with a buildup review for each section that I’ll be starting tonight and finishing either tonight or tomorrow if I get a good rhythm going.

See you all soon!

Anyhow, just wanted to pop in and make sure this was still working…  In a week or so I should get my MG 00 Quanta as well as my Digimon Reboot Omegamon kit (SO MUCH NOSTALGIA), and I’ll be doing reviews of both of them on my blog.  The pictures might not be as good as my last few reviews since I’m at college and don’t have my lightbox, but you can probably make due, haha.