MSiA RMS-106 Hi-Zack

MSiA RMS-106 Hi-Zack

Height: Head height 10cm; Overall height 12.5cm

Articulation: 28 points total: Ball jointed head; 6 points per arm - double jointed shoulder, pre-elbow swivel, double jointed elbow, ball joint wrist; Ball joint waist; 6 points per leg - Ball jointed hip, triple jointed knee, double jointed ankle; swiveling backpack binders.

Colors: Molded green, dark green, olive green, grey, dark grey, clear yellow; Painted red, green, yellow, grey, pink, black, olive green.

Accessories: Shield; Beam sabre with removeable blade; Missile pod; Heat Hawk; Beam gun with two ePacks; Zaku Machinegun Kai.

Release Data: Released in Japan on June 29th, 2005 at a price of ¥1500; This item is no longer in production as of Zeta Project II, and has been replaced by the Hi-Zack (Federal Forces Colors).

Gallery: 25 images.

Author: ExVee


The Figure

And so we have yet another mass production Titans mobile suit. The Hi-Zack of course is the mainstay of the Titans mobile forces for almost all of Zeta Gundam. While newer production machines are introduced, none can ever truly replace the Hi-Zack's position as Titan Army Builder Supreme.

Based closely on Zeon's good old Zaku II, the Hi-Zack is an easy to operate, reliable machine suitable for mass production. And since Zeta Gundam was long before it became the style to have the Gundams completely dominate everything else on a battle field, beam rifle equipped Hi-Zacks were a threat to even the AEUG's high end machines. These were no pushovers.


The Head

There's been something of a standing issue among Zaku types that the head sculpts have trouble really capturing the animation model's design. Seriously, compare a screencap or the Zaku's lineart to any of the Zaku MSiAs, and you'll see what I mean. This is why the Hi-Zack is surprising - the head is a very accurate rendering of the animation model. In fact, it's actually closer to the lineart of the regular old Zaku than the Zaku MSiAs.

Articulation is okay, considering this head shape had never lent itself to exceptional range of motion. You can't really have it look up, and down is a little restricted. On the other hand, you get easy, full rotation.

Arms and Torso

I think the arms may simultaneously be the best and worst part of the figure. The shoulder hinge is by far the best used so far. As an example, the right hand can be made to touch the left arm without remotely straining any of the joints or moving the left arm. The left arm is slightly limited because of the shoulder armor, but it still displays great range.

However, there is that pesky bad side. The conduction cables that go from the torso to the arms of course attach on the outside of the arms. So the upper arms are effectively wrapped in cable. Mind, there is not any abnormal restriction on the shoulder ball joint. There is what I think should be an obvious result here. If you go too far with the arms, the cables pop out of the body. While they can be reinserted, it's a bit of a pain, and it seems a sign of poor design that this even occurs to begin with. In this case, however, I have no suggestion for how this might be better or be repaired on the consumer level without bothering the poseability of the figure.

Oh, and the pre-elbow swivel is above the point where the cables attach to the arms, so if you turn the arm where the elbow can be bent usefully, you double the chances of the cable pulling out of the body. Uh, oops?

Bandai's doing a new style of wrist, or at least they are on this figure, and while they're still ball joints for ease of changing, they sit deeper into the arms, eliminating all of the play the ball joint wrists usually offer. It's small, but it kinda hurts to lose that little extra poseability.

The torso is mostly the normal block. The waist is ball jointed, though not nearly as well as some other figures. This is mostly the fault of the waist armor, which especially blocks the torso rocking backward. The large backpack plugs in with three pegs, two on the backpack and one on the torso. Surprisingly, the connection isn't as secure as you'd suspect. It's easily possible to rock the backpack out of alignment without even realizing it.

The thruster binders that stick up from the backpack are on swivel joints, and are free to rotate until some bit of the body blocks them. I actually wish they were a little restricted, or at least had the joints tighter, since it's equally easy to knock them out of alignment as it is the backpack as a whole.

The rear skirt armor has a small equipment rack, but the backpack prevents just about any proper use of it, but more on that later.


Legs and Feet

The rest of the skirt armor will get out of the way pretty much, but the usual warning about warped plastic still applies. The range is quite good regardless. The only thing is that for whatever reason, the legs always have to be slightly splayed. It's not possible to completely straighten them. The figure stands just fine, but it can look a little bit odd. The knees are technically triple jointed, but the shape of the lower leg nullifies all practical mobility of the ball joint at the base of the knee. The joint itself has cable detailing molded into the back, but despite this, the joint has complete range of motion, and the parts don't even scrape.

There's a bit of an oddity on the lower legs. The thruster pods on the sides have little slots cut into them, which just happen to exactly fit the leg units from one of the Ballute Systems released earlier in the year. This is odd since the Hi-Zack comes with no such accessories, and because the torso pieces have been shown as unable to correctly fit on the the Hi-Zack's torso. Presumably this indicates that Bandai intended to have the Hi-Zack come with the Ballute at some point and it was dropped in favor of other unique accessories or a lower price or something.

The ankles are double jointed, but given the lower leg shape, it's restricted to basically regular single ball joint articulation. Not to say it doesn't have good range, but I've seen plenty of double ankles that have greater articulation.


Paint and Detailing

No real problems here. Actually a bit lower than average paint errors. The painted parts of some hands came with chips in the package, but that can't be assumed to be production-wide. Otherwise paint coverage is basically smooth and even.

Sculpting is quite good, too. Details are well defined, panel lines are straight and sharply molded, though sadly still not inked.

Sculpt gets 9/10
Articulation gets 8/10
Paint gets 8/10


Accessories

-Zaku Machinegun Kai

This is really dumb. The rifle is the same size as the HGUC Hi-Zack's, and is actually even thicker than the kit's. Normally I don't mind MSiA weapons being made bigger than the lineart and animation, but it's pretty bad this time. The weapon is so thick that the hinged forward grip absolutely cannot fit in either regular open hand the Hi-Zack comes with. It's not even possible to pry the hand open far enough to fit that grip. It simply will not work. You can just manage to get the other trigger finger hand to work if you remove the grip and insert it in the hand and then pop it back onto the gun.

This also makes it almost impossible to get a satisfactory pose with the gun, which is especially a problem for me, as you'll see in the next section...

-Beam Gun

I hate this dumb little beam rifle design, and it seems to just be because it doesn't really fit the aesthetic established by most of the other weapons. It just sticks out to me.

The forward grip is small enough to fit one of the hands, but the gun is so short that you can't pose it very well with a two handed grip. It looks a bit better one handed than the machinegun, but it still looks like itself, which is ultimately harmful in my view.

It has a pair of ePacks, one of which needs to be attached to the gun, so you only have one extra. They hang onto the gun snugly enough, but don't do a thingfor its looks.

-Shield

This is one part of the design that I didn't realize was so awkward until I got the MSiA. For one, the shield only has a mounting peg, no hand grip, and it only plugs into the back of the Hi-Zack's arm. This is a basically fatal combination by itself.

The shield has a compartment to store extra ePacks, and can hold up to two. This would be great if only the hatch over this compartment locked into place somehow. As it is, if there's any cargo in there the hatch tends to open by itself and drop whatever is in there. Weak hinge plus no means to secure the hatch is a really bad combination too.

The overall shape looks like a vague evolution of the Gundam/GM shield, but it's of course much smaller and less useful looking. In an era of beam weapons where you die with a single shot, a large shield tends to be more a hinderance, but I'm of the mind that a small shield like this is so useless as to be even more of a hinderance than a larger shield that might actually offer protection against one or maybe two shots. On the subject of it looking like the distant descendant of the Gundam shield, the shield's peg can be easily wedged into a space in the backpack and then turned at an angle to kind of resemble the way the Gundam could stow its shield. Better than trying to make it look useful on the arm, that's for sure...

-Heat Hawk

Because it wouldn't be a Zaku without some kind of axe, here's a big old heat hawk. Due to technological shortcomings, the Hi-Zack is unable to maintain power to both a beam sabre and spare ePacks at the same time, so when equipped with a beam gun, the Hi-Zack trades its beam sabre for a heat hawk.

This is slightly more resemblant of the Giant Heat Hawk designs that came with Ramba Ral's Zaku I and Dozle's Zaku II than the standard model of the plain Zaku II. The blade doesn't display a glow like the old style, and basically just looks like a big hand axe. With a longer grip it'd make a great polearm.

-Beam Sabre

One of two items meant to be placed in the equipment rack on the skirt. This is more or less identical to the sabre from the Galbaldy Beta. The grip can wedge into the equipment rack, though it feels a little uncomfortable going in and coming out. A slight change to the plastic tolerances could fix this right up, so the Federal Forces Hi-Zack may find this to be working better.

-Missile Pod

Actually two pods, connected together. This plugs into the equipment rack and the missile launchers sits between the arms and torso. Of course, this also pushes out the arms and prevents use of the machinegun since it takes up space that would ordinarily see the stock of the rifle.

The missile pod has a rack to hold the heat hawk, but it's not really that easy. Between the position of the rack and the shape of the heat hawk, it's effectively impossible to store the heat hawk without displacing the backpack. Sadly this could have been avoided altogether if the equipment rack on the missile pods had simply been installed upside down.

-Extra Hands

Hi-Zack comes with the standard assortment. As I stated earlier, the wrist connection has been changed, eliminating the play in the joint, which I find to be a step backward. Not to mention that the hands are painted. While not painted on surfaces that will see a good deal of wear, this is still a problem for me, since the hands more than any other single piece are designed to flex, and this could well lead to damaged paint, as my Hi-Zack already has paint chipping on some hands, which seems to be caused by the thickness of the green paint. I think more care needed to be taken here.

Accessories get 5/10


Closing Remarks

Honestly, being the suit most fans think of when they hear "Mass-produced Titans suit", this is likely to be on the must have list for many people. And while there's not really any one big flaw, there's a number of smaller ones which kind of get together to take down the enjoyment of this figure.

It's still pretty solid, but I don't think you're going to feel especially good spending $20+ on it. The Hi-Zack is Good, but it really should have been better than it is.


-ExVeeBrawn, Zeta Project II