MSiA Gundam Exia

Height: 11 cm to top of head.

Articulation: 38 points total: Double jointed neck; Mid-torso joint; Ball joint waist; 8 points each arm - triple jointed shoulder, pre-elbow swivel, triple jointed elbow, ball jointed wrist; 8 points each leg - ball joint hip, mid-thigh swivel, triple jointed knee, triple jointed ankle.

Colors: Molded white, gray and transparent pink. Painted blue, yellow, red, white, lavender, black, gray, and green (main cameras).

Accessories: GN Sword (convertible to Rifle Mode), GN Short and Long Blades, GN Blade Mounts, GN Beam Saber x2, GN Beam Dagger x2, Shield, Extra Hands x4.

Release Data: Released in Japan in October 2007 at a price of ¥2000.

Gallery: 19 images.

Author: RAC

The Figure

There are parts of things that can kill your enthusiasm for the whole, and Gundam SEED: Destiny went a long way towards dulling my Gundam fixation.

Halfway through the show, SEED protagonist Kira Yamato somehow was further elevated from "Ultimate Coordinator" to "automatically right about everything and some kind of Newtype too." Destiny is a perfect example of why Yoshiyuki Tomino was utterly brilliant in his choice to Nerf Amuro and use the entire White Base crew sparingly on Zeta Gundam: because of what his capabilities would be were he not weighed down by seven years of confinement and regret, Amuro Ray could not have helped but steal the narrative and derail the show. Which is exactly what Kira did, reducing Destiny's intended main character Shinn Asuka to essentially a third-string villain. Worse still, a villain who is almost literally knocked aside by Athrun Zala as Kira and company swoop in and resolve the main plot. Shinn's catharsis never arrives, and Kira's arrived a series ago, leading to one of the most forced and unsatisfying endings ever tacked onto a show.

Ah, it's good to have that off my chest. But now we come to the tragedy: Gundam 00 is, by most accounts, quite good, and I just could not care less. It didn't help that Celestial Being's very raison d'etre is exactly what started to gall me about Kira and his little friends midway through Destiny: butting into other people's wars and screwing them the hell up with superior technology. Beyond that basic point of comparison it's apples and oranges all the way, but it was too late for me.

Which, two and a half paragraphs later, brings me to the point: between the state of both our enthusiasm for Gundam and the state of the MSiA line, (which despite assurances to the contrary is poised to metamorphose into Robot Damashii) this is It Figures!' final MSiA review for the foreseeable future. Today, we look at the main Gundam for the first half of 00, the Gundam Exia!

The Head

One thing Gundam 00 has done very right relative to SEED Destiny is not hand all MS-design duties over to Kunio Okawara. And while Exia has most of the features you expect from a Gundam head, the new take on those standards is refreshing. The head is very streamlined and rounded, with deep cutouts on top to give the mostly-round head the appearance of the traditional Gundam "mohawk" sensor. The two fins on the rear of the head look both wingish and Wingish, if you get my drift. Which isn't too surprising since the show's main cast seems intentionally reminiscent of Gundam Wing.

Exia's head never looks quite right on mine, as the face was seemingly glued in at an angle that causes it to always look to the left. But as always there's no deductions for that because it's probably a one-off accident. (And the face is amazing tiny besides.) The neck is double ball-jointed in the EMIA style- a lot of the joints on Exia seem intended to bring some of the EMIA advances back into the main MSiA line, a long-overdue move. Thing is, the neck is so incredibly deepset that the Extended jointing is barely better than a swivel in its execution.

The Arms

The trends we saw in the Head carry into the arms: streamlined styling, Gundam Wing influences (seen strongly in the shoulder armor) and EMIA joints carried over to less-than-full effect. The shoulder armor is a hinged piece connecting between the arm and shoulder, and doesn't have any trouble staying out of the shoulder's way. The Beam Saber/Dagger storage is on the back of the shoulder pointing down, and holds the accompanying Saber hilt well enough, for now. As always, it's a soft-plastic on soft-plastic connection, which I fear could weaken with time and use.

The shoulder joint proper is a triple-jointed affair similar to the one pioneered by the MSiA Gabthley and carried over into the EMIA line, but there are some problems where design clashes with function. See, the Celestial Being Gundams all carry a Solar Furnace in their torsos, a powerful reactor which makes the Gundams far more powerful than conventional Mobile Suits. So all the Gundams have this large cylindrical thing in the middle of their torsos, with the Mobile Suit essentially built around them. The MSiA designers took advantage of this and built the sides of Exia's torso, chest vents and all, into the shoulder joint- kind of like the Qubeleys. The problem is that to preserve the look of the torso, the joints don't do all that much. They move around some, but you're never going to get the kind of articulation that the EMIA RX-78 or the CCA-EMIA have. You're going to get little more than could be accomplished with Second Version-style joints, particularly the perfected version from the GOUF Ignited. Compounding this is the fact that the shape of the final ball-joint on the shoulder prevents anything greater than roughly 45 degrees of movement. Far as I'm concerned, 90 degrees is the bare minimum, and the hinged shoulder armor certainly would have allowed for it.

Below the shoulder, the arm is fairly standard. The pre-elbow swivel is fine, the elbow itself has the underutilized EMIA triple-joint, two hinges and a ball-joint in the forearm which doubles as a post-elbow swivel. Not that there's much call for a post-elbow swivel, as the shape of the forearm kills one of the two elbow hinges entirely when turned sideways. Despite the ball-joint, the elbow stops just short of doubling up, instead having approximately the same range as a real elbow on a human being. Boring! The wrists are MSiA standard ball-wrist/socket hand affairs, and work as well as most, though the shape of the forearm makes it hard to turn the wrist to the sides. Stiff wrists don't strike me as a good quality in a swordsman. Speaking of which, the hardpoints for the Shield and GN Sword are on top of the arms, a rather clever and unusual place for them.

The Torso

Like the outer parts that I consider part of the shoulder, the upper torso also shoots higher than it can actually acheive. Between the Solar Furnace and the red part of the torso is a midsection-joint in the EMiA style, but the shapes involved mean that you can only wring a few degrees flex out of it- not even enough to be noticeable. While that's a flaw shared by a fair number of EMiA attempting to use such a joint, it's still a shame since Bandai Namco had been making some notable advances in this department in recent years. On the other hand, the waist is perfect, with unrestricted swivel. This is due in large part to the minimal skirt armor, which is very thin in the front (looking almost like a crotch-mounted V-fin) and slightly thicker but no less flexible in back to accomodate the Beam Saber/Dagger storage. As I mentioned above, these hold well enough for now, but I do fear what time could do to them. Also, the four Beam Sabers pointing downward combined with the tapered GN Drive make it kind of hard to hold onto the figure without knocking some or all of the Saber hilts off. Add the GN Blades' storage bits, and you have a figure that's hard to move.

The Legs and Feet

The ball joints at the hips are too loose- fortunately most of Exia's gear is pretty light, or it could have some serious balance problems instead of minor ones. The white discs over the gray hip joints are removable, and can be replaced with the storage racks for the GN Blades, completing Exia's sword collection. The sword racks stay in place okay, but the figure's right disc is slightly mismolded and keeps wanting to fall off. Since this is likely an error unique to my figure, I won't hold it against the Exia in the final figuring. Below that we have the thigh swivels, which function as well or better than their EMIA counterparts in managing a full 360 degrees of rotation.

The thighs are specially shaped to butt up against the leg when the knee is fully flexed. It works as planned, and the tiny skirt makes Exia able to kneel despite its extremely long shins. One small gripe here: The calf is designed as a large, round block that seems to be intended as a massive knee joint. But instead of trying to incorporate this into the figure design in some way, the MSiA-standard knee joint is directly above the calf, just as it would always be, and there's a bar along the back of the leg you can swivel to various positions to emulate movement of this block. The leg is about the best part of the whole toy, working precisely as intended, but it would've been nice to see the designers take a risk and have the knee joint move as the design indicates.

The ankles are triple-jointed, and are best used to point the toes or tilt the ankles side to side, both of which it does very well. Leaning forward isn't quite as good due to the interference of the armor flaps covering the feet, which is a pity- otherwise it'd be up there with the less elegant-looking (but neat!) "slipper" joints on the EMIAs. As it is, the ankles still allow for a variety of poses.

Paint and Deco

While not sporting a full-body paint job like EMIAs, it's a good-looking standard MSiA. The main trouble spots are the right chest vent, which is a treacherous yellow-on-blue paint application, and the hardpoints on the arms and shoulders, where you can clearly see white down where there should be blue or gray. Otherwise the paint is very clean, and the panel-inking on the circles on the inner calves is super-clean.

Sculpt and Engineering get 8/10
Paint and Deco get 9/10

Accessories

-GN Sword

Superheated tendrils, Beam Boomerangs, giant guns with goofy names... it's just not a Gundam series without bizarre trademark weapons. This time it's the GN Sword, a huge and unwieldy one-handed sword that inexplicably converts into a Beam Rifle, which then connects to Exia's forearm via a shield. Every bit as weird as it sounds, and every bit as practical.

First up I'll tackle the shield/mount: it attaches by an ABS peg and ball-joint to the top of the arm, which is a pretty neat place for a hardpoint. It also creates a few problems since the tiny L-shaped peg is hard to get plugged in properly, and at ths size the only way to tell if you've gotten it right or not is to let go and see if it falls out of the arm. The actual weapon then pegs into the shield with one of the loosest peg fits I've seen in a long time. If the hand lets go of the handgrip, the weapon will probably fall off. The shield piece is also half a hair too long and doesn't really seem to line up very well in either mode, but is especially prone to detaching in Rifle Mode. Definitely the most problematic part of a weapon seemingly designed to frustrate and confound real-world designers.

The Sword is pretty impressive, being taller than the figure. It's also surprisingly light, even for modern rigid-plastic MSiA accessories, though Exia's shoulder joints are still not quite up to the challenge. It's still kind of odd that this would be a one-handed sword at this size, but the handgrip fits equally well in the "gun" and "sword" open hands, so there's no real need to switch when the weapon converts from one mode to the next. The gun at the core of Rifle Mode is reminiscent of the GM's Beam Spray Gun, if said Gun were strapped to a shield and had a huge sword running up the GM's arm. It's an awfully unwieldy looking weapon, and one has to wonder how far to the right Setsuna F. Seiei can aim without shearing his own Mobile Suit in half. Overall, the weapon's not broken by any means, but it's more fidgety than I'd really prefer.

-GN Blades and Mounts

Optional equipment intended to complete Exia's Seven Swords configuration, the GN Long and Short Blades look like the smaller, more sensible versions of the GN Sword. They're simple, appropriately-sized rigid plastic swords with no special features. Amusingly, the handgrips are large enough that here you can manage a two-handed grip. Yes, on the glorified knife and the longsword, but not the greatsword. Somebody at Celestial Being is thinkin'.

The sword mounts are really a dumb design- there's no better or kinder way to put it. Tiny square sockets on the Blades attach to soft-plastic pegs on cylindrical pieces that then attach to pegs on the hip joints. That gives you two points of leverage where something can go wrong- thankfully, the mounts stay attached to the hips, but the swords don't want to stay on the mounts. One of the pair has a misshapen peg and is almost totally useless. You have to exert too much pressure to get the sword on, and it doesn't want to stay- you'll knock the sword off the mount if you put it on first, and the mount off the hip if you put the sword on second. It's the most frustrating piece on the entire figure.

-Beam Sabers and Daggers

Four square, tapered hilts; they remind me of electric carving knives. They fit the appropriate hands oddly- Exia is barely grabbing the hilt by the very end if you keep it in the narrow notch in the palm that you use for the Sword and Blade grips. So you have to kind of angle it in between the thumb and fingers in a way that doesn't feel quite as secure as fitting weapons in that palm-notch, but is a much more natural way for a hand to hold something. The blades all fit well and are completely interchangeable, and the hilts fit their storage spots securely, at least for now.

-Shield

A simple shield that fits to the arm-hardpoint the same way the GN Sword does. The mount's a little better-shaped, though, so it's not as difficult to get a correct fit. No handgrip, and the slide sculpted on the underside of the shield is wholly decorative. Basic, but does its job without error.

-Extra Hands

The Big Six- I'm gonna miss those. On Exia the "gun" and "sword" hands are practically interchangeable to the point where both were scarcely necessary, but it's my understanding that most or all of the 00 MSiA share a hand mold. If so, it doesn't cause any problems here- they all work as advertised.

Accessories get 8/10

Closing Remarks

Not the most amazing MSiA to go out on, huh? Not amazing like the EMIA Hyaku Shiki but not broken to the degree that the GP01-Jp was either. In the good years you could expect the star MS from a new Gundam series to break serious new ground- Strike did, Impulse went leaps and bounds beyond that, and Exia tries a few new things- the ankles especially are top-flight -but is otherwise pretty conservative in its approach. (Which is a shame since the design itself breaks with the established Gundam look in many ways the Strike and Impulse didn't.) Worse still, it doesn't use EMiA jointing to very great effect, and is only slightly superior to the best of the Destiny and Zeta standard-MSiA.

Yes, my complaint really is "it's not as much better than its predecessors as it could have been." From a line that has made as much progress over the years as MSiA, that is a completely valid perspective, far as I'm concerned. Exia is Very Good compared to practically anything else you can buy, but judged against its peers, it is merely Good.

-RAC, 12/31/08