Robot Damashii Cherudim Gundam

Height: 12cm to top of head, 13cm overall.

Articulation: 28 points total- double-jointed neck; 6 points each arm: double-jointed shoulder, upper-arm swivel, double-jointed elbow, ball-joint wrist; Mid-torso ball-joint; ball-jointed waist; 6 points each leg: ball-jointed hip, thigh swivel, double-jointed knee, double-jointed ankle.

Colors: Molded white, dark green, black, and transparent blue. Painted gray, metallic blue, red, white, silver, yellow, and metallic green.

Accessories: Visor, option parts for head, GN Sniper Rifle II, GN Pistol II x2, Shield Bits x9 with shoulder mount x2 and stand.

Author: RAC

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Here we are again at another Last Gundam Review Ever. Well, maybe. After fighting with Cherudim Gundam's Shield Bit storage, I sure want it to be. But let's not count anything out, as nostalgia, mood swings and short-term memory loss are all powerful motivators!

The Figure

The Cherudim is the successor to the sniperrific Gundam Dynames, and like that Mobile Suit is centered around guns. Lots of guns. Well, three, but they're all strange, fancy guns. It also trades in Dynames' shield-thing for a series of Shield Bits, which are a neat idea but not always implemented so well on Gundam figures...


The Head

The head's pretty conventionally Gundammy, with a gray V-fin and a yellow Heavyarms-esque antenna off to the side, both soft plastic. The red plate in the center of the V-fin is large, because there's a scope underneath for Cherudim's Sniper Mode. Rather than risk a tiny hinged piece, Bandai simply gives you a separate top for the head with the flap raised, which is probably wise. The neck is double ball-jointed, and has a great front-to-back range, though side-to-side is signifcantly less expressive. Swivel's unrestricted.


The Arms

The shoulders are a combination ball-joint(in the torso) and hinge(in the shoulder) -not sure I've seen that specific combination before. It's one that works well- even with the thick shoulder armor you can swing Cherudim's arms almost straight up. There's a fair front-to-back range to the shoulders, but not great- a figure that has to hold a long rifle might do with slightly better range there, especially with the sticky-out armor plate things over the torso. The hinges on both the main shoulder armor and the side-plates can pretty easily be moved out of the way of the arms. The blocks that the Shield Bit adapters plug into are a softer plastic- smart move! -and as such are ever so slightly lighter green than most of the rest of the figure. The upper-arm swivels are possibly a little too tight, but I'm likely not going to be having any arms-falling-off problems as I did with Arios. The elbows are single hinge joints again due to the requirements of the GN Condenser shape, but they get a bit more than 90 degrees, which isn't bad. There's a ball-joint directly below the hinge which helps it a tiny bit, but also tries to turn the forearm, which doesn't work well at all with disc-shaped elbows. The wrists have fair range, but they look as though they're designed to swivel up and down in some way. This isn't the first time I've seen implied articulation in a 00 design that the figure designers didn't or couldn't pick up on.


The Torso

The torso would look like a pretty standard Gundam torso if it weren't for the two angled armor plates over the chest vents. They look to me like they ought to be removable, but aren't. There is a mid-torso joint here, but compared to the nifty armature in the Unicorn Gundam it's not so hot- not surprising since this was a much earlier figure. Most EMIAs with this torso shape didn't do a lot with this joint either, so I'd say it's about on par with those: it can lean ever so slightly in any of the cardinal directions, but you'll probably have to squint to notice. But the waist functions very nicely, allowing for a 360 degree turn, and that is rare among Gundams of this basic shape!

The front skirt armor... well, it still terrifies me. It's still those hard-plastic plates on really tiny ball-joints going into a hard-plastic socket. Eventually one of these is gonna break on me on one of these figures. But I can't deny that it works very well, getting out of the legs' way better than any MSiA except the ZAKU and GOUF series. The side panels are socketed onto ball-joints on the hips- they don't get out of the way of the legs anywhere near as well, but if you turn them sideways the legs are essentially free to do as they please. The rear skirt is a hard plastic piece glued onto a soft-plastic flap- an interesting hybrid of Damashii and MSiA skirt styles I think I'd like to see explored again. It seems like it'd solve the warping problem and the fragile ball-joint problem. But here, it's done this way so that the rear skirt doesn't get in the way of the GN Drive and the Shield Bit rack. This is a big piece mounted on a hinge on the back of the figure- Cherudim's not going to be sitting down anytime soon. Well, maybe- the piece has a great range of motion, and can swing up until it points nearly straight up. Now if I could just get the Shield Bits to stay on.

The backpack is somewhat complex for its size: the two blocks are ball-jointed and contain a pair of thrusters each with a flap behind them- the soft plastic flaps look like they should close over the thrusters, but don't. There's a mount for a GN Pistol on each side, which stay on the backpack well. There are also a pair of hinged blocks for the holographic targeting system Cherudim uses in Trans-Am mode: you slide the clear blue visor into the blocks and then swing them in front of Cherudim's face. You'll have to manage the soft V-fin very carefully or you'll end up mangling it, but it otherwise works as advertised.


The Legs

The leg is almost on par with Unicorn Gundam's, except without the odd sliding joints. The hip can manage almost a full 180-degrees of movement front-to-back, and if the rear skirt didn't have to account for the Shield Bit rack, it'd do it. Lateral movement is about equal. Interestingly, the thigh swivel reminds me of the shape of the elbows: you're swiveling a block around a disc-shaped joint. But there's a cutout so that the disc clears the thigh, and though there are some mild sticking points you can turn the leg in a full circle. The knee gets almost a full u-bend but the shape of the upper half of the joint prevents it.

The lower leg is oddly shaped- it looks like a misrendered figure made of random polygons, and the broad, flat Shield Bit attached to the knee on a pivot doesn't dissuade me from that opinion. The Bits stay attached somewhere between "reasonably well" and "when they feel like it." It's the perfect location for a not-strong-enough mounting piece to cause them to fall off during normal handling. As they just loved to do while I got the back rack assembled properly. The feet, like most of the rest of the feet in this line, are very strange. They start as tall white blocks that connect to the leg via ball-joint, and then there's a flat green slipper with a hinged bar on the back that connects to the ankle block. They work well front to back and extremely well side-to-side- you can swing the legs out to the sides as far as they allow, and Cherudim will still stand. The bars swing down to stabilize Cherudim when firing its big gun, and though the hinges are fairly tight here I'm not sure if they'll provide any additional stability to Cherudim in toy form.


Accessories

I'm tackling the accessories that didn't come up naturally in the Figure section; check out the Head and the Torso for all of Cherudim's cranial accessories.

-GN Sniper Rifle II

For a Big Gun, it's pretty functional-looking. Except for the silly thing on top that looks like a wedge of broken glass embedded in the gun, it wouldn't look out of place in, say, Zeta Gundam. As befits a sniper rifle, it's a long-barreled rifle with a trademark Gundam foregrip attached to the side. However you can also slide the barrel out- more than half of the gun's length worth of it -and fold it under to turn the rifle into a submachinegun for close-range fighting. It's really kind of unfeasible-looking to me, but most of the 00 weapons are. It fits both hands snugly enough, and it's light enough that it doesn't drag the arms down. I've seen some art that suggests the Rifle should be able to mount to the right shoulder, but you can't do that here, despite there being a handy socket where the optional Shield Bits can reside.

-GN Pistol II

These are a little more reasonable as a weapon, in that they don't involve folding more than half of the weapon's bulk uselessly under the arm. The Pistols store on the backpack in their straightened-out form- they seem to be intended to have a dual purpose as GN hatchets or Heat Hawk-like weapons or something in the hand-axe range. They're nice and compact and fit the hands nicely, and store on the backpack securely. They pop apart at the hinge sometimes.

-Shield Bits and Stand

And this is the main reason why this review is Unfinished Business: I hate these things. Mounting Bits and Funnels on a Gundam figure is often an exercise in frustration, and this one is no exception. They're a neat idea, but the execution is quite often severely lacking. Let's start from the top, yes?

The Shield Bits are controlled by Lockon Stratos' personal Haro, and true to their name function primarily as defensive remote weapons. They do apparently have their own guns, but defense is their strength and in Trans-Am mode they can block shots from a battleship. Neat idea! They mount all over Cherudim's body: two on the left shoulder (tough to get the adapter on but they stay put otherwise) one on each kneecap (they stay on okayish but like to pop off a lot) and five surrounding the GN Drive hanging off of Cherudim's backside.

And that's where the problem, uh, sits. All nine Bits have connectors to sit on any of the mounts, theoretically. The two on the sides use the same connector as the kneecap-Bits, and they sit on there pretty firmly. There's one that sits underneath the others on the very bottom of the rack, and it sometimes stays. The two on the top can very occasionally be made to stay. On a good day. When the moon is in the right position. And you have sacrificed a prized goat to the toy gods. What seems to hold them on once all those prerequisites have been met is friction against one another. That's all. Touch one and both fall. What's really startling and frustrating is watching them push right back off the pegs for some reason. I guess the pegs are just a little too wide or something- something is obviously mismolded here.

Fortunately, you have another option, that being a second shoulder-mount that I don't know if Cherudim ever uses in the animation. It has the side-benefit of making the design more symmetrical, if that's your thing. But that other one on the back center will still fall off a lot.

So if you don't want to bother with that, what are your Shield Bit options? Well, the figure comes with a lovely little stand and mount piece. The stand can hold a single Bit, or it can mount all but one in a shield/rifle-mount configuration with the help of the larger stand attachment. It looks neat, and it holds the Bits still a whole hell of a lot better than the ass-rack.

-Extra Hands

Two pairs in all, trigger-finger-extended and fists. They do okay, and since there are no Beam Sabers it makes some sense that you wouldn't have two sets of open hands. Personally I'm glad Bandai quit cheaping out on hands in later Damashii releases.


Closing Remarks

There's really very little that goes wrong with this figure except for the Bits but they're a big part of the figure. The last figure I reviewed that was basically well-done like this but had an accessory problem was probably the Destiny Gundam, which I rated Very Good. Since its other assets are not as groundbreaking as Destiny's, I'll go with Good here.

I largely managed to hold off on my Cranky Old Fan commentary until now, but I may as well say it: if those Bits had been soft MSiA plastic they would've very likely been able to plug onto the figure much more securely.

-RAC