Whereas the Tora kit was roughly an amalgam of Yoji Shinkawa's career, being equal parts Metal Gear and Zone of the Enders in design with a neat dash of IBO inspiration, the Mingwu is just straight up a Zaku interbred with Warhammer 40k, so much so that the first iteration was predominantly green:
Kind of funny when you consider the first Tora design was white. A white robot and a green robot... Hrm...
In any case, the Genbu's olive drab color is pretty weak compared to its greener promo shots. No idea what happened there:
But the Mingwu gives you what you buy into, just without the obvious use of miraculous matte. Unlike with my Tora kit, my matte really didn't make the tons of etching details on this kit stand out. Should have used a brown Gundam panel liner marker. Still, I decided to paint it in two kinds of Tamiya gunmetal and recolor a few bits to better fit the darker aesthetic. I was worried the matte layer would ruin everything but it really didn't.
As you can see it also has a gas mask aesthetic for its face, but it doesn't have a mono eye so it's not a total rip-off of the Zaku. Does look cool though.
The eyes are masterfully pre-painted and look great with panel lining, but they aren't on a separate piece like with the Tora kit, so I ended up only able to gunmetal spray the top portion which is separate. Just...ignore that it looks kind of like a robot toupee.
Anyway, this Not-Zaku comes with a
Black Blade Axe energy weapon similar to the Zaku's heat axe but made unweildy in its design by having a tiny hilt, a long useless shaft (with solid tubing) and a short beam blade at the tip. It looks more like a handheld lancing tool than an axe or blade. Or like some kind of giant scalpel. Also comes with a poorly thought-out
panzerfaust which you're better off remodeling into a giant canon by cutting a hole at the thin end and retooling or leaving out the fat end. Lastly it has a very cool looking
beam rifle (which needs painting badly because it's solid gray) and
a dozen fuel tanks, which we'll get to. The things you see on its back in the picture above are
weapon holsters and it has the same hand options as the Tora, but I bought some M.S.G hands with hinges for it and painted those, too--however the M.S.G hands are slightly smaller than the original hands and not the same design.
Overall it feels really lacking compared to the Tora's accessories. At least they got the beam saber part better this time, giving the black plastic a bit of a gradient in the light (which I ruined by scrubbing).
As pictured above and below, the Mingwu model has a helmet that you can pop off and on easily with a detachable spike in its head (which pops off too easily). The head itself has great pre-painted eyes which look even better with panel lining and is on a ball joint that's pegged into the chest. It has a decent range of motion for something so small and limited, with otherwise no neck and a hunchback. Honestly this thing should be crying out for Esmeralda rather than fighting space wars.
It comes in a MASSIVE box, bigger than the Wing Zero ver. Ka, yet it doesn't contain anything other than the kit and its meager accessories. The kit itself is overall a big boy but barely taller than the Wing Zero. I'd say it's a head taller but the thing has a pinhead so it's more the armored hump on its back. Still, as I said it's a stocky big boy and what it lacks in height it makes up for in THICC, especially with its elephant feet. The feet are not only sturdy but also have a neat gimmick I'll get to in a bit. It still has that IBO abdomen from the Tora design, though, which just makes it look weird, like a shark bit off its torso or like it was never finished. Reminds me of the
Narrative Gundam and how unfinished it's supposed to look.
The legs are definitely where most of the engineering went and it pays off, especially since the tubing you see above on the torso, despite being relatively flexible, prevent any of the more outlandish crunches we saw in the Tora model. Also, of course, since it's Frame Arms it uses the GoToHellKoto™ Frame Arms inner hip, so although you could
theoretically twist the model at its waist you never will
(especially not at it's price--that I'll save for last).
You can also tell that there's an illusion of spherical joints where there weren't in the Tora. I don't know why. It only adds to the awkward and semi-finished look which I don't think they were going for. There's nothing about it in the concept art (I recolored it to fit my model):
No character art for this either, sadly, but they stayed true with the detailing. The kit even comes with pretty great waterslide decals for writing/scribbling details--all white, though. They show up nice on the kit but I didn't use them. They're a mix of usual nonsense scribbles, Japanese characters and random CAUTION English. Koto also stayed true to the design by making this thing's back riddled with big jet boosters.
This mecha has some serious GOTTA GO FAST, and if that wasn't enough we have the surprising reason for the elephant feet being so big:
That makes for a total of seven equally bulbous jet boosters (thrusters?). Now we know why this thing has a dozen fuel tanks! Can't imagine this bulky mecha going slower than a Sinanju, at least disregarding spess magic. Those multicolored bits you see at the back of the feet are also hidden fuel tanks. Doesn't seem wise to keep eight fuel tanks at your feet, let alone right next to jets like that, but whatever. For a semi-realismfag like me this whole aspect is just beyond cool.
Each booster has two points of articulation and all of them, except for the feet, are detachable, so if you wanted to pretend they were some kind of eye-like funnel weapons you could. However, with all these boosters riddling its backside there's really nowhere to safely put any additional weaponry without it being conceivably burned by the boosters, but now I'm just being autistic.
You can peg in stuff into the side skirts and the two 3mm pegs on each arm and the top of its giant hunchback, or remove the main two fuel tanks at the back and some boosters for more holes. Not as modular as the Tora but it's a trade-off. It's also not as humanoid or gangly as the Tora, too, which really made that design stand out. Much as I like aspects of this kit I like the Tora much more.
The back half of the Mingwu's skirting armor is on a small ball joint and both sides are pegged into the top of the legs to pivot easily. The legs, like the arms, fit into a faux spherical joint which attaches to a ball joint in the hips. The arms do the same inside the chest--yeah, the shoulders attach into sockets INSIDE the chest cavity. Considering the enclosed nature of the massive chest, you can imagine the fun times when they easily pop out
time to sand down a few pegs)
The knee can do a great double-bend
but with the back leg armor on it can only manage a decent enough 90 degrees. The back leg armor is detachable, though. The knee itself can extend somewhat by parting the armor, tilting the leg outward and shifting it back a bit, almost like the Tora's semi-reverse leg joints, but it looks retarded by making huge gaps in the thick shell-like armor. I prefer to just bend and move them as they are instead of trying to reverse-joint them.
The arms can do a good double-bend to touch their own shoulders. No arm-crossing with a chest like this, though. The hands' ball joints fit into a piece which fits into the forearm like with the Tora, but here they snap in with force and land deep, really bringing the arm armor over the wrist and rather inhibiting movement. The armor does not shift and there's no forearm swivel like with the Tora, either, which gives it a sort of old UC kit design where the arms are naturally inward. You know what I mean if you look at the Zeta or something.
And lastly we have the posing potential. Aside from what's already been mentioned, the feet have a toe bend (seriously?), an ankle bend (really??) and the heel boosters rotate and lift up and down. Arms go just under 90 degrees up on either side, full rotation front-back. You of course have the inner ball joints I mentioned earlier about the chest cavity. The torso can very faintly hunch forward and back but any more than that and you'll likely break something. NO hip swivel, but the legs also have an upper thigh swivel and they can do a pretty good split--even better if you unpeg the skirting armor. Otherwise what you see in promo shots is what you get.
Also, like with the Tora, there's a hole under the groin you can use to peg it into a Gunpla stand of some kind for aerial poses and pull off some
stuff you wouldn't expect, but you won't find the absolute freedom of posing like the Tora.
