HG 1/144 Winning Fumina

This is the High Grade 1/144 Winning Fumina. 😊 I originally told myself that I wasn’t going to buy this kit because of the negative reviews I was seeing all over YouTube, but upon finding it at my local GameStop, I decided to hell with it and bought her. I couldn’t lie, deep down, I wanted to buy her despite the negative reviews, so I did. After all, it’s my money, right? After having built the kit, I think some of the YouTube reviews were a bit harsh. This isn’t a horrible kit.
Posing this kit can be a bit difficult because of the armor around the upper arms and around the waist. While those parts or the armor are on balljoints and can be moved, they can only move in any given direction a tiny bit, making achieving dynamic poses with this kit quite difficult. That being said, you do get double jointed elbow and knee sections, allowing for double bends at the arms and legs. With a little creativity, you can use those double joints for some unique poses. This kit definitely feels like it was designed with upward poses in mind, as the bend at the knees is great, but the skirt armor gets in the way of most forward or upward movement. You actually can remove the armor to make her regular Fumina to free up articulation. Also, her armor has a very cool gimmick. 🙂 By removing all of her armor, her armor can combine to create an SD Gundam! That’s actually really cool to me, because of how creative it is, and also because I’ve never seen a High Grade Gunpla with armor that could transform into an SD Gundam.,it’s just a really cool and original idea. There’s no articulation in the head of the SD Gundam because of the way the pieces of armor come together to form it, but the feet and arms are each on balljoints allowing each to move a little bit. It’s range of motion is limited, but it’s still a very cool gimmick. 🙂
This kit, while very cute, does have some problems. The biggest issue is the lack of polycaps. The only polycaps in this kit are used on the armor. Everything else is plastic on plastic, similar to the HG 1/144 Enact. All of the balljoints that connect everything together go into plastic sockets, causing them to be looser than if Bandai had used polycaps. The problem is especially evident in the hands. The hands tend to pop out very easily when you’re moving the upward or downward. Another issue (I mentioned this one earlier) is that the armor around the arms and waist gets in the way of a lot of the articulation of the arms and legs. Because most of the armor is on balljoints, you can adjust the armor a bit to open up more space for the arms and legs to move out, but not much. Plus those parts of the armor tend to pop often while you move them. They pop right back in, though. Same for the parts on Fumina that are on balljoints. It takes a little practice to learn how to pose her without having stuff pop out of place, but everything pops back in really easily, so it’s not a dealbreaker for me.
All in all, the HG 1/144 Winning Fumina is a lovely addition to the Fumina line of kits, and while the kit does have issues, I still like it. Based on the lack of polycaps, I would consider her to be more of a pick a pose and display kind of Gunpla than one that you handle and pose around a lot. If you’re a fan of Fumina’s character from Gundam Build Fighters Try series, or you’re a fan of the MS Girls line, then I recommend adding this kit to your collection.