HG GAT-04 Windam

Here is High-Grade GAT-04 Windam, a grunt suit from the Gundam Seed series that I finished building. 

Not a bad kit, but a little disappointing. 

I am not a big fan of the HG line of Gundam Seed kits. I have built the original ones and they have been disappointing. The mecha design from Gundam Seed has very specific design language and I feel like original HG kits have missed those completely. 

When this kit, the Windam, rather unloved mecha suit that's more of a cannon fodder than anything else was announced, I was not really interested and skipped. 

Until I saw the reviews. A lot of reviewers gave high praise for this kit so I decided to pick it up. 

Starting from the box art. 

It has a beautifully drawn Windam in flight with a bunch of other units on the background. Bandai has been building these kits and complained as 'build the army' which started from the HG Leo kits and this is a continuation of it. I think box art portrays this well. 

This kit includes a large sheet of foil stickers for color correction. Usually, this is a sign that I will be disappointed with the kit. 

The kit includes a pair of regular beam saber effect parts. 

The instruction has a picture of a simple pre-built of Windam with few specs written on the side. The backside has few actions poses with color charts. These few pictures were enough for a color guide. 

The main focal point of this kit, the V-Fin is large and very bright, It is one piece and it's protected well inside the box. 

Here is what the kit looks like built straight out of the box with its included stickers. 

The kit was easy to build somewhat, but I felt a little disappointed with this kit. I understand that they wanted to build this as a fast army builder kits but it has a lot of missed opportunities.

The building was somewhat easy but disappointing for a modern Bandai kit. Some parts were hard to clean the nub mark due to its locations and there were a lot of parts that I had flesh marks and it took some time to clean them. There were also a lot of noticeable gaps here and there. 

While I was building this kit, I felt like I was building a re-tooled old kit instead of a new kit. Some parts were overly simplified to the point it was comical. The color correcting stickers on some parts feel like that they were just being lazy like the yellow piece on the shield. At least they are cut properly so that if you applied right, you won't notice it unless you zoom in. 

While building this kit, I felt that the main mecha and the backpack feel like two different kits built from two different eras.  I am guessing they did this because this kit needs to be built fast for fast army building but because of some of the stuff I mentioned above, it took me longer to build this kit. 

I also had a one as the plastics were very brittle and broke apart with little force. I did notice that some Bandai kits, this happens and I can't really blame this kit as it was a bad batch. Fortunately, on mine, it was just 'A' runner, and as long as I was careful, it wasn't a big deal. I only broke 3 pieces while building this. 

The proportion is right. In fact, it's awesome and it followed the design language of the Gundam Seed mechas, unlike original HG line kits. It's sleek and lean and I love it. 

This kit articulates well. It uses the joint that I first saw on 30MM kits from Bandai which doesn't use poly-caps. For poly-capless design, it is strong and holds well. It's also easy to disassemble for painting. The leg does have two many points of articulation so sometimes, it's hard to make a static pose. For the dynamic pose, it works well. 

Here is the kit after I painted it. 

Here is with its backpack attached. 

And with its weapons. 

I used the paints that are leftover paints that were sitting on my storage. I was really unmotivated thanks to my disappointment while building it. 

The paints are mostly Tamiya Acrylic.

The thing is, after I painted it, with its red and dull white color, I really liked the look of it. So I went a little further. I found some leftover water slide decals and applied them, bringing out the kit more and weathered it using Tamiya Weathering Master.  The result came out great. I kept the V-Fin as a bright yellow since its the main highlight of this kit. 

Please enjoy the gallery. 

The kit ended up being disappointing due to its build. It had a lot of flesh marks that needed clean up, and for modern HG kit, it had color-correcting stickers and some parts that I feel like it came from 90's kits. I think most of the issue is because they designed this as fast build the army kit. Windam by design has a lot of stuff going on on its design and as a fast builder, they had to cut a lot of corners. With technology that Bandai has, they shouldn't have to make a new kit with that many color correcting stickers. 

This kit is a heaven for people who like to customize. The simplistic design leaves a lot of room for customization and for guys like me who like grunts suit because I can make it as my own kit, it's nice. 

If you want, you can skip this kit. You are not missing much by not building this kit. If you are building one, I recommend customizing it.

Here is the 'Let's build!' video which shows the build process.