HGMobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans (season 2)

Pluma Set (Invasion of Chryse)

Six little drones that turn your shelf into the Chryse Defensive Battle.

MechaGrade Score

3.4/5

Pluma Set (Invasion of Chryse) · 1/144 · 2017

GradeHG

Scale1/144

Released2017

Runnersn/a

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The verdict

I'll say this straight away, this is not a kit you build for the build.

It's a kit you build for the diorama. Six Plumas out of one box, mono molded in dark blue with MG level panel detail packed onto tiny mobile worker sized frames, and almost none of it moves. If you know the episode 37 swarm attack on Chryse, seeing six of these lined up together is worth the price on its own.

Best for: IBO fans building the Chryse Defensive Battle as a swarm diorama, not builders wanting a poseable action figure

The full review

What it is

This is a P-Bandai exclusive HG set of six identical Plumas, the unmanned mobile armor drones that swarm Tekkadan and Gjallarhorn forces alongside Hashmal in the back half of Iron-Blooded Orphans season 2. Each one is small, built in a handful of steps, and the surface detail is genuinely better than the price tag suggests, panel lines and greebling that read as MG quality shrunk onto an HG frame. Building six in a row turns into a rhythm, snap the legs, snap the body, add the sticker panels, next. I liked that repetition. It's meditative in a way a single complex kit isn't, and by the fourth or fifth Pluma I had the sequence memorized.

The catch

Poseability is the real limiter here. Each Pluma gets two points of articulation per leg (a ball joint and a rotating joint), the arms move a little, the top hatch opens like it does on screen, and the tail nudges slightly, and that's the whole range. There are no polycaps in the joints, just friction fit plastic, and multiple builders report the joints loosening after repeated posing. Color separation leans on stickers for the gray panels rather than molded plastic, so if you want a clean look you're either committing to careful sticker work or breaking out paint. At around 60 dollars for six small units, it's also a P-Bandai exclusive, meaning aftermarket pricing once it's gone.

Who it's for

Buy this if you're an Iron-Blooded Orphans fan who wants the Chryse swarm on your shelf and you're building it as a group display piece rather than a poseable mech. Six units at once also make a nice weekend project if you want low stakes, high repetition practice on panel lining and sticker application before tackling a bigger kit. Skip it if you want strong articulation, want to display a single dynamic action pose, or you're not already invested in this specific arc of IBO, because outside that context these are small dark blue drones with almost no pose range and a premium P-Bandai price tag.

The build story

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

Assembly per Pluma is quick and simple, a handful of steps per unit with clean part fit, which matters since you're doing it six times. The dark blue plastic takes panel lining well and shows off the sculpted detail without any painting required, though the gray sticker panels are the one spot where a little paint would upgrade the look considerably.

Where the kit earns its keep is presence in numbers. A single Pluma is a curiosity, six of them staged together with Action Base 2 stands (sold separately, one per unit) reads as an actual swarm attack. The hatch-opening gimmick and the light leg articulation are enough to vary the poses across six units so they don't look identical on a shelf, and the value case is really about getting a squad's worth of screen accurate detail for the price of one mid tier HG.

Lore & trivia

01The Plumas are unmanned sub units controlled by and drawing power from a parent mobile armor rather than their own Ahab Reactor, so they go inert if that parent unit is destroyed.
02In the anime they swarm Tekkadan and Gjallarhorn forces during the Chryse Defensive Battle (episode 37) alongside the mobile armor Hashmal.
03Beyond combat, the Plumas also perform scavenging duties in the story, gathering fuel, propellant, and materials to resupply and repair their parent unit.
04The set was a Bandai Hobby Online Shop (P-Bandai) exclusive, packaging six identical units together rather than selling a single Pluma.