EMIA ZGMF-X09A Justice

Height: Head height 12cm; Maximum height with Fatum-00 13cm; Fatum-00 Maximum wingspan 22.8cm

Articulation: 34 points total plus various points for Fatum-00: Double jointed neck; mid-torso joint; ball joint waist; 7 points each arm - triple jointed shoulder, pre-elbow swivel, double jointed elbow, ball joint wrist; 8 points each leg - ball joint hip, mid-thigh swivel, triple jointed knee, double jointed ankle, mid-foot joint.

Colors: Painted magenta, black, white, yellow, purple, grey, blue, green; Molded grey, purple, clear pink.

Accessories: Fatum-00 Subflight Lifter, beam rifle, beam sabres x2 with removeable blades, double beam sabre grip, open beam boomerangs with removeable blades, shield, extra hands x6.

Release Data: Released in Japan on June 10th, 2006 at a price of ¥2500.

Gallery: 41 images.

Author: ExVee


The Figure


The Justice has a special status as the first Extended MSiA to not have a direct normal MSiA predecessor. I'm hesitant to think of the Infinite Justice as an analog as it bears only the most basic resemblance. Instead, we're left with a new animal, made Extended from birth surely to match up better with its "younger brother", Freedom. Despite having only the most minimal connection to Infinite Justice, expect to see some comparisons regardless in whatever relevant common areas come up. At ¥2500, Justice is also the most expensive EMIA to date, a fact that will figure prominently into the review...


The Head

As is the usual case with EMIAs, the head sculpt is an excellent representation, a good blend of the lineart and general animated appearances. The double jointed neck provides a wide range of motion in all directions, with particular success forward and back. Well, so long as you make sure the upper part of the joint structure is facing the right way. It's easy enough to tell: If you push the head forward as far as you can and it springs back, the neck is backward and just needs to be popped off and turned around. It won't turn while still attached to the body. It's also worth noting here that the V-Fins are quite long and rather soft. I make note of this because to put the Fatum-00 in HiMAT mode, it is necessary each time to bend back the V-Fins while folding the lifter into the level position. If not you'll just end up mashing them down badly. Nor is there room to just turn the head to the side as can be done with the Infinite Justice.


The Torso

Despite the presence of the usual mid-torso joint, there's not actually any useful articulation from it. As with the Freedom and Gundam before it, the shape of the torso is much too complicated to allow this joint to really work at all, and does nothing except increase the number of joints Bandai-Namco can toss out in the solicitations. Though it is slightly ahead of Freedom in that the torso joint can move to start, it won't hold any pose without being held there. On the other hand, the waist ball joint is executed rather well, and offers a considerable range of tilt in any of the four primary directions, as well as clean rotation all the way around, provided the backpack is detached. The skirt armor does pretty well. First, the lower torso is pretty thin, which gives extra bending room at the connection point, then the hip joints are set a bit low relative to the skirt armor. This all works together so that the legs can go a pretty good way with only a small movement of the skirt panels. It doesn't eliminate the warping issue, but it reduces it greatly for many poses.

The Arms

Though it uses the same over-jointed shoulder set up as the Freedom, the joints are noticeably tighter in this application, reducing a good bit of the issues I had with the previous use and the whole stability problem. I don't know that it's a common problem, but the shoulder joints do tend to pop out of my Justice's torso a bit easier than I'd really like, sometimes doing so during regular posing. The shoulder armor also has a certain tendancy to snap off its hinges if you put stress on them the wrong way when trying to adjust the position of the shoulder joints. The folded beam boomerangs are stored in the shoulder armor, and are removeable, even though they don't unfold. That itself is a good thing, but the connection to the shoulder armor is less so. The connection is made by a somewhat loose fitting large tab backed up by two much smaller ones. While the three working together manage okay, the boomerangs are still much too easy to knock off. It would have been just as easy to make one large, shaped tab such as used to hold the blades in the open boomerangs or even the rifle to the rear skirt armor, and would have provided a much more secure connection. Beyond this, the arms are quite standard. Both forearms have hardpoints for attaching the shield, which works a bit differently than on Freedom and overall makes a much stronger hold.

Legs and Feet

For whatever reason, the mid-thigh swivels are quite a bit more loose than any other joint in the legs. The unfortunate result of this is that if you try to turn the feet at the ankles, or even adjust the lower legs at the third knee joint - even if just to make everything straight - you're going to end up turning the mid-thigh swivel instead. In any case, the hip joints have a very wide range of articulation, really only limited at all by the skirt armor. Popping the side skirt panels off opens range up to even practically pull off a split. Numerically, it's all normal articulation for EMIA, but some variances occur. The shape of the calves, including the thruster unit, limit the range of the knee joint, but not critically so. A similar issue occured with the Infinite Justice as well. The design of the knee joint itself seems to be reworked slightly from the norm, too. Where with most of these multi-joint knees it was possible to reverse-flex the joint a bit - that is to say having the ankle and thigh at opposing angles - for better balance in some situations, Justice's knees rather firmly stop at more or less straight-legged. This is actually a bit of trouble since the Justice specifically is supposed to be carrying around a good deal of weight on its back under normal conditions, so it seems an odd time to introduce such a change to eliminate the little bit of room the joints usually have to take care of such things. The ankles are of course double jointed, and you can actually tell pretty easily that this is so, even though the upper joint is really only good for contributing to pointing the "toe" down, and really no side-to-side because of the ankle armor. I can appreciate this in at least one way, which is that it provides some extra strength and stability that is surely needed to hold up the lifter backpack, hit to some poses not withstanding. The mid-toe joint for once is almost imperceptible, so much so that I've wondered why it was even included. There's hardly any range to it either up or down, just a slight wiggle. Like the ankle, this undoubtedly helps to keep things standing, but wouldn't it have just been easier to use a single piece, solid foot to begin with?

Sculpt and Deco

As expected with any Extended MSiA, the sculpting work is top notch. Edges are sharp, panel lines well defined, though only a few are inked, and fine details stand out beautifully. The paint work is equally excellent with only minor exception. Some areas of white have slight bleed-through of the magenta beneath, most notably on the shoulder armor where the boomerangs connect, where there is a definite pinkish tint. A bit of the same on the white parts of the face, though it's more difficult to see because there aren't any pure white parts to compare to. The face itself is painted incredibly well, with only a slight unevenness in the eyes to detract from the truly excellent paint job. It's rare to see such a detailed face painted this well. In general, all edges are clean and stay within the lines, so to speak, and the pinked up white areas are a truly minor complaint in the face of so many wonderful paint apps.

Articulation gets 8/10
Sculpt and Deco gets 8/10


Accessories

-Fatum-00 Subflight Lifter

The main accessory, and one of the frustrating aspects of this figure. Let us begin references to the Infinite Justice! You see, the Fatum-01 included with the Infinite Justice, for one thing, was lighter than the Fatum-00, so the figure could stand easily with it in either backpack or flight mode. Even so, it came with a stand to support the figure in flight mode. A completely unnecessary inclusion that really amounted to icing on an already well-balanced cake. Fast forward to the Justice. Its Fatum-00 is heavy, even though made of light, rigid plastic like the -01. The Justice has difficulty standing up just with the Fatum folded down without any extra support. The legs have to be placed in a mildly unnatural looking position to balance the weight. When raised to HiMAT mode, the Fatum-00's weight makes it absolutely impossible to have the figure stand on its own, and external support is required. The Fatum-00 even has a small slot cut into the bottom that just happens to perfectly fit the stand that came with the Infinite Justice. And yet, the EMIA Justice which is considerably more expensive than Infinite Justice was, does not include a stand of any kind. It's a baffling move, especially since the tooling for the stand already exists, and it should have been easy and fairly cheap to turn out a run of them to include with this release, even if it had raised the price by a couple hundred Yen. To have a functionally complete figure I think that would have been worth it. As it is, you're left to either arrange for your own stand of some sort, or to pay over $25 for an Infinite Justice and stand to borrow. Having the Fatum-00 compatible with the existing stand and not including it may seem to Infinite Justice owners like a favorable nod from the design team, but I really have trouble seeing it as anything but prompting to go out and buy another figure in order to get the most out of the overly expensive one you just got.

Anyway, the Fatum-00 connects to Justice's back by way of a single, large tab, mounted on a hinge with a metal pin. The motion is stiff, which is good since the tab has considerable weight to support. This is simpler than the connection used by the Infinite Justice which employed four moving parts to make the connection. It's much quicker to connect the Fatum-00, and of course there's much less to do wrong. See the Infinite Justice review for more details on that. The wings are also hard plastic, so no warping danger. They're mounted on a somewhat involved hinge and swivel system, so they can fold down in backpack mode and out for flight. The Fortis beam cannons are hinged and can move a good 135 degrees. Not far enought o flip all the way backward, but I'm pretty sure they were never meant to do that in the first place. The two turrets on the front corners can swivel all the way around, and all the upright stabilizers are soft plastic, so be careful not to warp them. The Fatum also has spaces on top to theoretically allow another figure to stand/ride on it in its role as a subflight device. However, the foot spaces are smaller than the foot of any figure I've tried to fit on it, so it's mostly a balancing act to get the figure's weight in just the right spot so it'll stand and look decent. It is possible to place Freedom in HiMAT Full Burst Mode atop the lifter when it's mounted on the Infinite Justice stand and optionally attached to Justice. Finally, unlike Infinite Justice and the Fatum-01, Justice and the Fatum-00 do not have a system of tabs and slots on either side of the collar to lock the unit down securely in HiMAT mode. While the hinge is quite solid, it still doesn't hold it snugly down against the shoulders as I'd like. I suspect this was omitted because it would be difficult to implement with the shoulder articulation as it is. Speaking of which, the extra shoulder joints are rendered useless in HiMAT mode.

-MA-M20 "Lupus" Beam Rifle

The exact same rifle sculpt as was included with Freedom, except trimmed in purple rather than blue. It still mounts on the back of the skirt, though perhaps a bit less securely, but that's Justice's problem, not the rifle's.

-MA-M01 "Lacerta" Beam Sabres

Once more, just like included with Freedom, not even a change of paint color. Instead, it actually loses a bit, in that the lines above and below the thick black band are not inked in as they were on Freedom. This carries over to the combined grip, and is not the only problem with the double sabre grip. The painted bands are done quite poorly. Done as two paint operations, one on either side, they do not even come close to lining up. Maybe mine came with an especially poorly painted grip, but honestly something this glaring never should have left the factory like this. And that's not the end of it. Justice in general very much seems to have a problem with warped or at least quite bent double grips. Freedom had a less severe case of this, but Justice makes it just unreasonable. I'm actually reminded of Count Dooku's custom light sabre when I look at the angle of the blade here relative to the grip. It does seem like it can be fixed by adding some weight to it. Just be sure to place it under the weight where it's bowing up for best effect.

-Shield

The same shield Freedom came with, but with purple and yellow instead of black and red. The differences don't end there, as the arm connector is changed to accomodate Justice's thicker, squarer forearms, but the handgrip is the same. As noted above, the new mounting bracket holds on much more securely than Freedom's did.

-Extra Hands

The same assortment as Freedom, purple instead of white, blah blah. Kind of boring how everything's the same, huh? I find these to change easier than Freedom's, though, which is either to do with the plastic tolerances being slightly different, or a slightly different size ball joint on Justice's wrists.

-RQM51 "Bassel" Beam Boomerangs

Besides the Fatum, this is the only actually unique accessory Justice comes with. Since Bandai-Namco aren't complete fools, Justice does not have any unfolding boomerangs, instead having a set of folded, which are packaged attached to the shoulder armor, and a set of unfolded, packaged with the beams connected. The blades are removeable, of course, and fit snugly in the boomerangs. The boomerangs themselves fit well in the regular open hands, since the smaller end is meant to just wedge down into the opening until it won't fall out. It really is a good move making these separate pieces, since a single set of folding boomerangs, no matter how they did it would have been a fragile mess or otherwise just asking for trouble.

Accessories get 6/10, mostly dragged down by the issues with the Fatum-00.


Closing Remarks

What it comes down to is that this is an expensive figure that is basically missing a part it was clearly designed to use. That it's up to the consumer to provide for an absolutely necessary stand is a very bad showing on the part of Bandai-Namco, especially in such an expensive figure. My Justice cost me over $30 shipped, and I'd be feeling rather ripped off if I didn't have the Infinite Justice stand anyway. I am happy to finally have this specific design in normal MSiA scale rather than the 1/144 of the old AMIA, but objectively I can't help but have a problem with this. The real shame of this is that the Justice is otherwise a really nice figure, and pretty much eliminates the problems I had with Freedom's use of the same articulation. Tolerances in just the right places are different, and it makes things more stable. For the expense alone this should be a well considered purchase, but beyond that I'd really suggest giving it extra thought if you don't already have or weren't planning to buy an Infinite Justice from which to borrow the stand. With a stand to use, I feel good about rating Justice as Excellent, but in any other situation, I have to objectively rate it as Could Have Been Better. That's how important it is, and how much difference it makes.

-ExVeeBrawn, 06/20/2006