HG 1/144 Gundam 00 Diver Arc

This is the High Grade 1/144 Gundam 00 Diver Arc. This kit comes to us from Gundam Build Metaverse, and is built and piloted by Riku Mikami. created with the concept of revisiting the Gundam 00 Diver, Riku's first Gunpla, with the skills Riku had gained up till now. Suppression abilities during close and mid-range combat have been improved thanks to the Arc Bracers mounted on the forearms and Arc Drive units located off the shoulders, and they both incorporated the new "GN Burst" mechanism inspired by the Gundam AGE-FX. The GN Burst is a mechanism whereby GN Particles are released and then hardened to form special clear parts for offense, defense, and mobility purposes.

This kit was honestly a joy to work on. 😄 The build process is a lot of fun, and I found the engineering to be very well balanced considering that the base of the kit is an older kit. This kit uses something called “light absorbing plastic” to make certain clear parts look lit up, but personally, it just seems like regular clear plastic to me (*shrugs*). That said, the clear neon green parts do still look pretty nice in the light. Another neat thing this kit has are GN Drives that actually open. This is a gimmick I’ve never seen in any High Grade variant of the 00, which makes it that much cooler to me.
As far as issues go, the only real issue I’ve found is that little similar to the High Grade 00 Gundam and 00 Diver, the side skirt bits are a bit loose. I definitely wish they could have fixed that by now.

All in all, this is a really cool kit, and I really like all the stuff it can do. You definitely get a lot of extra pieces with this one (for various versions of the 00 Gundam I think), but you could always use those for custom builds or as spare parts. Definitely a kit worth having, though. 😄