HGUniversal Century

MS-06S Char's Zaku II

The Origin line finally gives the Red Comet's ride the frame it always deserved.

MechaGrade Score

4.2/5

Zaku II · 1/144 · 2015

GradeHG

Scale1/144

Released2015

Runnersn/a

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The verdict

This is the Zaku II kit I point people to when they ask which one to buy first.

Bandai rebuilt the joints from scratch for the Gundam The Origin line, and it shows the moment you start posing it, the hip swing and ankle work let this thing actually crouch and lunge instead of standing there stiffly. For an HG at this price it punches well above its grade, and I say that as someone who has built more than a few Zakus.

Best for: builders who want the best-articulated affordable Char's Zaku on the market, not just a shelf-sitter

The full review

What it is

This is the 2015 Gundam The Origin retool of Char Aznable's personal Zaku II, and I went in expecting another serviceable HG rehash. I did not get that. The frame underneath the arms and legs is genuinely new engineering, not the old ball-joint HGUC skeleton with a fresh paint job, and Bandai loaded it with the character's full arsenal: the drum-fed and belt-fed machine guns, both heat hawk styles, the bazooka, the anti-ship rifle, and the leg-mounted missile launchers. Snapping the runners together I kept noticing details, the flip-up front skirts, the mono-eye sensor block, that I did not expect from a kit in this price band.

The catch

The panel lines on the spiked shoulder pauldron are shallow enough that I had to go over them with a scriber before a panel-line wash would take properly, and the same is true in a couple of spots on the torso. You still get a small sheet of stickers for the mono-eye and sensor markings plus a dry-transfer decal sheet, so if you hate stickers on principle you will be doing some of that work yourself with paint. It is also still an HG in scale and heft, so if you want MG-level surface detail or a locking inner frame you will want to look one grade up. None of this is a dealbreaker, it is just what you should walk in knowing.

Who it's for

Buy this if you want a genuinely fun, dynamic-posing Zaku II without spending MG money, or if you are building out a UC-era Zeon shelf and want the commander variant done right. It is also a good pickup for builders who like accessory-heavy kits, because you get essentially every weapon this suit is known for in one box. Skip it only if you specifically want the older HGUC tooling for nostalgia reasons, or if you are dead set on molded-color perfection with zero stickers anywhere. For nearly everyone else building a Char's Zaku for the first time, this is the one to grab.

The build story

What the build is actually like, and the engineering worth knowing about.

Runner cleanup is straightforward and nub placement stays mostly out of sight once assembled, which matters on a kit with this much visible surface detail. The polycap joints in the hips and shoulders feel snug rather than loose out of the box, and I did not run into the floppy-joint problem that plagues some older Zaku HGs.

The standout here is the articulation upgrade: this frame lets the legs kick forward and the waist twist in a way the earlier HGUC Zaku tooling never allowed, so classic Char's Zaku poses, the crouching draw, the lunging heat hawk swing, actually work. Between the two machine gun variants, both heat hawks, the bazooka, and the anti-ship rifle, the accessory count alone makes this feel like real value for an HG price point.

Lore & trivia

01Char Aznable's red MS-06S earned him the nickname Red Comet after he used it to take down five Federation battleships during the Battle of Loum.
02The suit's legendary 'three times faster' reputation was mostly rumor. It had only about 30 percent more thrust than a standard Zaku II, but Char removed its output limiters and flew it far more aggressively than typical pilots dared.
03This kit is part of Bandai's Gundam The Origin HG line, which rebuilt Zeon suits like the Zaku I and Zaku II with all-new frames rather than reusing the older HGUC molds.