Release date: September, 2001 (per Dalong)
Print date on my runners: August '24
Price: ~$25 as of April 2025
Series: Not featured in an anime, comes from the Gundam Sentinel novel which can be found in English here.
The photos of my kit are finished with various leftover decals from other sheets which are not included with the model.
Sometimes you're just poking around looking at models and you find something that immediately grabs your attention and you say "I gotta have that guy." Basically, the "wow, cool robot" meme plays out in real life. I've noticed that usually I'm more drawn to grunt suits from series that I haven't seen, and I need to warm up to the main character suit designs before I really like them, but I found this design immediately striking. It may possibly have to do with the designer havng the freedom to truly go "wow, cool robot" themself since they didn't have to worry about it being animated, as it comes from a novel.
The thing that really sealed the deal for me was the fact that it's a big boy. The top of the head of most of your typical high grades ends at around the top of the chest on the S-Gundam, but the huge shoulders and giant backpack give the S-Gundam a very imposing presence.
Aside from being imposing next to your other high grade kits, it also has a wonderfully dramatic late 80s/early 90s design. Truly, this comes from the era when giant robots just had shit all over them to look as cool as possible. No one's brain was rotted with minimalism. This is giant robot maximalism. This is from the era of "Wing Zero has angel wings now and we will not explain." Why red spikes coming out of the shoulders? Because cool. Why such a huge cockpit from the jet mode sticking out of the back and looking like a rocket? Becase cool. Anaheim Electronics was cooking. Naturally, there's also a fucking huge gun, because this era of elaborate mech design was also the era of fucking huge guns.
Gundam Sentinel takes place in UC0088 shortly after the Gryps war of Zeta, so of course the S-Gundam is a transforming mobile suit! This kit... does not transform, though. The kit is probably much better off for it, though.
This is where things get a little bit shaky. The first thing that will probably throw you off is the size of the box itself. Generally, it doesn't take much in terms of additional size/parts for a kit to get a bigger than standard box. I purchased this online and was surprised to find a box that's just about the size of your typical HG box. Things get a bit weirder once you start building the kit.
I really dove into the Gunpla hobby in November of '23 and I still very much consider myself a beginner/newbie to the whole thing. I am also old and remember when Bandai started sending over no grade 1/144 kits to Wal-Mart and Target when Gundam Wing took off. Almost everyone who was into Wing or G Gundam (I really don't remember anyone who got into 0079 or 08th MS Team at the time) had at least one of these kits and were pretty horrified by the straight out of the box build after the packaging advertised no paint needed! These kits were generally extremely simple, all of the parts were just in half directly down the middle, had miserable gaps, and needed a lot of stickers to look vaguely color accurate.
A 90s no grade 1/144 Gundam Maxter was my only experience with Gunpla prior to actually getting into the hobby, so I found the HGUC kits extremely impressive. Even very old HGUC kits (like this one) denote a certain level of quality/color separation... that the S-Gundam weirdly misses the mark on. This is an extremely no grade feeling kit in the build; almost all of the pieces are just in two halves straight down the middle, color separation isn't great and the articulation is pretty poor. It is most certainly better than the old no grade kits (there are no gaps here where you can see right through the model), but it feels like Bandai just cheaped out or got lazy here. If you thought the larger size would mean better separation... well,
You will not be putting the S-Gundam into any extremely dynamic poses, and you're probably going to be knocking parts off left and right while you are trying to pose it. This isn't the worst thing in the world, because I don't find the design and size to be particularly conducive to....I don't know, the desire to get it into some crazy pose. It looks cool enough just being.
Remember I mentioned this is the era of big fucking guns? This big fucking gun is sort of a pain in the ass, and Bandai knew it too. Look at the weird angle they show the gun being held on the manual:
It's because it can't really hold the gun very well at all. It has a support to hold the gun up on the hip that you can use if you remove one of the skirt armor cannons and it looks extremely unnatural using it:
My move is to just have it one hand the gun with a beam saber in the other hand. It looks less awkward at the end of the day and the S-Gundam doesn't have a shield or anything, so the beam saber puts something in the off hand, at least.
One very odd thing I noticed is that this kit is extremely fragile. When it came time to paint, it was more convenient to disassemble everything. If this was a no grade, I probably would have gone ahead and cut the pegs diagonally to make it easier to take apart, but usually HGUC kits are sturdy enough that I don't find this to be too crucial and I have never broken any pegs before. Not this guy. I broke a peg on each of the ankle armors and the main backpack peg also broke the first time I removed it. If you're going to build this, be careful with it.
Every sticker is a challenge from god to learn how to paint, right? Good news, there's no stickers here! Well, that's not entirely true - there's one for the eyes of course, a large reflective sticker for... apparently what the model kit making division decided was a camera on the chest of the S-Gundam?? I couldn't find any indication that this is supposed to be a camera in any artwork and even the...model model kit? that Bandai used on the instruction manual didn't treat this area as a camera. There's no other color correcting stickers except for...get this, ones for vents in the shoulders. Not the large visible vents either, no, the ones on the sides of the shoulder.
The bad news is that even if god didn't challenge you to learn how to paint is that buddy, you better paint this kit or it's gonna look like fucking garbage. Despite fully knowing that I was going to write a review while building this kit...do you think I would actually take pictures in the unpainted state? Of couse not. So, I'm stealing this image from Dalong as they did a before/after (at least I'm crediting it and not hotlinking it).
Personally, I sort of like kits that need some paint instead of everything being parts separated. Part separation usually looks a bit chunky, where as a single piece with some paint on it looks very uniform. If you never want to touch a brush, this guy probably isn't for you. If you don't mind - then this is a pretty prime example of a kit that really turns a corner once you get some work done on it. That being said, even if you don't mind painting the fins on the side of the face are pretty nightmare level stuff. You could probably get away with using a yellow Gundam marker (the paint type ones) and just hitting the edges if you don't have an extremely small brush. Aside from the fins, everything else is very easy to paint, there's not really any tricky edges to worry about.
I almost forgot, this kit has a core lander. Yeah, I don't really give a shit about this. It needs quite a bit of paint work to look right and... it's just an extremely standard looking core lander. It would be one thing if it had a hole to mount to a stand or something, but this is before the era of Bandai realizing selling bases is good money. This will just live in the box. Maybe I'll paint it in a year or two after I burn through my backlog and a bog standard HGUC kit costs $150 since we're doing tariffs.
It's not super posable, it was a lot of paint work, it's kind of designed like a 90s kit... doesn't sound very recommendable, does it? Well, I like it anyway. I usually end up liking kits more that need a lot of work put into them. I guess it's a bonding experience.
I just think it's cool! It's a larger than usual Gundam design and it's not decked out in way too huge armor or anything like that. It looks naturally big, or something. It wasn't trying to be big, it just ended up that way. I don't think this kit gets a lot of love from anyone, I was fairly surprised that no one had made a decal sheet for it, but it was a good excuse to use some of my many leftovers and get to freestyle a bit. I usually follow the decal guides pretty slavishly, so this was new for me. I think it turned out well!
This is recommended...if you love the aesthetics of the S-Gundam and don't mind painting. If you don't have the gut "wow, cool robot" reaction, then building this and putting the work into it is not going to get you there. If you want all of your kits to be fairly dynamic and poseable, this isn't it. If you go into it understanding it's just going to stand there and look large and cool, you'll be a happy camper.