Thursday, November 16, 2006

PG Jadg Doga... Conversion Only

It’s been awfully quiet these few days in terms of updates on any new Gundam models. It’s not uncommon actually, since it’s so close to New Year now, the Japanese market, which include Bandai is preparing for the end of the year shopping crowd, and plans for new stuff in 2007. You wouldn’t want your customers to spend before you got more to offer, would you? :-)

Anyway, I picked up a bit of updates from G System Shop, the very ‘adventurous’ resin kit company based in Hong Kong. The company is famous for producing resin kits, and conversion parts which made headlines in the industry, for example 1-35 Ex-S Gundam, which is as big as a average kid, and the recent 1-72 Sazabi Evolved Ver. Unfortunately, their offerings are extremely expensive, and they deals in US Dollar unless you travel to their Hong Kong store. Almost all their stuff are over $100 each, excluding the paint and tools you’ll need for those kits.

I find it interesting that G System Shop is working on a new PG conversion kit now, and the one to be rolled out is Jagd Doga from Char’s Counter Attack using PG Zaku II’s kit. For those of you with question marks flying around your head, conversion kits are special parts allowing you to build alternative models based on certain existing kits. Bandai’s subsidiary B-Club is pretty famous in offering conversion kits, but there are of course other players in the field as well. G System Shop’s previous conversion kits include Gundam Ver. Ka and Guncannon using PG RX-78-2’s frame. It seems like they are going for Zeon’s line of MS now, which is great, as Bandai, very market-oriented all the time, stopped producing big scale models of the one-eyed family after PG Char’s Zaku II, with the exception of 1-12 Zaku II one or two years ago.

Jadg Doga is one of my favorites in the anime (actually I’m fond of all the Zeon’s MSs :-P). The mecha is cool, the weaponries are awesome, but the two pilots are pretty laughable. A blue Jadg Doga, assigned to an artificially-enhanced Char-wannabe loser named Gyunei and another pink one was given to a freaky girl named Quess Paraya, who didn’t really use the MS to its fullest potential. One can say that Jadg Doga is the intermediate unit between Geara Doga and Sazabi, since it’s not as strong as the later, but features funnel system, which is lacking in Geara Doga. My favorite design of Jadg Doga is the head, which has eyes like those of Qubeley, but a short beak, more like a bird’s one.

I got myself an old HG kit of Quess’s Jadg Doga, which was manufactured in late 90’s, during the time Char’s Counter Attack was shown I think. The model emphasizes a hell lot on the color molding, and the injection snap-together technology used, which is a standard nowadays but was like finding oasis back then. Anyway, I learnt about Jadg Doga from that kit, and when MG Sazabi and Nu was out some years back, I was really looking forward to MG Jadg Doga. Too bad I’m still crossing my fingers until today, when Jadg Doga only becomes smaller via the HCM-Pro version, but still no word on MG or HGUC possibility. Thus, G System Shop’s progress, which is although extremely slow, based on my experience of visiting their website, is something I’m really looking forward to.

Too bad I’ll only be window-shopping, muahahaha :-D ~

Line art for Jadg Doga from G System Shop's website