HGUniversal Century

RX-77-2 Guncannon Takuya Kai Model

A baseball catcher's throwing arm turned into a Gunpla pun, built on genuinely good bones.

MechaGrade Score

3.4/5

Guncannon Takuya Kai Model · 1/144 · 2019

GradeHG

Scale1/144

Released2019

Runnersn/a

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The verdict

I like this kit more for what it's hiding than for what it's selling.

Strip away the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks branding and the Takuya Kai tie-in and you're building the HGUC Guncannon Revive, which is one of the better-engineered early Revive releases HG line has. The novelty is the whole reason to buy it, but the frame underneath earns its keep on its own.

Best for: NPB baseball collectors and Hawks fans who want a conversation piece, plus Guncannon completionists chasing every variant

The full review

What it is

This is the HGUC Guncannon Revive mold dressed up as a 2019 Gundam 40th anniversary crossover, tying the RX-77-2 to Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks catcher Takuya Kai, whose big throwing arm earned him the nickname that plays right off the mobile suit's own name. The molded plastic leans into the team's yellow and black, and the whole thing was sold as event exclusive merchandise, not a mainline retail kit. Once you get past the novelty angle, you're building a legitimately solid Revive-line HG, and I found that half the fun was seeing a proper mecha kit reworked into a stadium giveaway.

The catch

The honesty here is that you are paying a premium for scarcity and branding, not for extra parts or engineering over the standard Guncannon Revive. It was sold at a specific event window in 2019 with no wide reprint, so tracking one down now means secondhand markets, inflated prices, and no guarantee of complete decals or an undamaged box. If the team-color plastic doesn't do anything for you, or you don't follow NPB baseball, there is genuinely nothing here that the standard Guncannon Revive doesn't already do for less money and much easier availability.

Who it's for

Buy this one if the Hawks connection actually means something to you, if you collect Gundam's stranger cross-brand exclusives, or if you specifically want a Guncannon in team colors instead of the standard scheme. Skip it if you just want a good HG Guncannon to build and pose, because the Revive version in its normal colorway gets you the same frame, the same articulation, and the same accessories without the collector tax. I would not recommend hunting this one down as a first Guncannon.

The build story

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

Because this shares tooling with the HGUC Guncannon Revive, the build feel is the same one plenty of builders already praise: clean gate placement, tight but not brittle part fit, and shell over frame construction that goes together fast without fighting you. Cleanup is straightforward and there's no sticker sheet required for the main color scheme, just small clear decals for pilot or team marking options.

The articulation is where the Revive line shows its age well. Ball-jointed shoulders that swing forward, double-jointed elbows and knees, a waist that rotates, and skirt armor that lifts out of the way all add up to a Guncannon that can actually hold a kneeling or running pose, not just the stiff stand-and-point look older Guncannon kits were stuck with. The cannon backpack and beam rifle carry over from the base kit, so the loadout is familiar Guncannon business dressed in new colors.

Lore & trivia

01Takuya Kai is a real NPB catcher who played for the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks, and his nickname riffs directly on Guncannon's name because of his powerful throwing arm.
02The kit was released as part of a 2019 collaboration tying all twelve Japanese professional baseball teams to Gundam's 40th anniversary, with several teams getting their own RX-78-2 Gundam variants alongside this Hawks-specific Guncannon.
03It was sold as limited event merchandise rather than a standard retail HG release, which is why it never got the wide distribution the mainline Guncannon Revive did.
04The kit is built on the HGUC Guncannon Revive tooling from 2015, itself part of the Revive initiative that reworked several early Universal Century HG kits with more modern engineering.