HGUniversal Century

RX-78-2 Gundam FIGHTERS Ver.

The best HG RX-78-2 engineering ever made, dyed in Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters green and turned into a ticket stub.

MechaGrade Score

3.7/5

RX-78-2 Gundam · 1/144 · 2019

GradeHG

Scale1/144

Released2019

Runnersn/a

Check price on Amazon

Affiliate link. We may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

The verdict

I'll say it straight, the kit underneath this thing is genuinely one of the best HG Gundams Bandai has ever put out, it's just wearing a baseball uniform.

This is a molded-in-green recolor of the excellent 2015 HGUC RX-78-2 Revive Ver., built for the 2019 Gundam 40th anniversary collaboration with all 12 Nippon Professional Baseball teams. Strip away the team branding and you get modern HG articulation in a compact package. Keep the branding in mind and you get a collector's oddity, not a shelf-standard Gundam.

Best for: collectors chasing the 12-team baseball crossover set or fans who want the excellent Revive engineering in an unusual green colorway

The full review

What it is

Underneath the team colors this is the HGUC RX-78-2 Gundam Revive Ver., the mold Bandai redesigned in 2015 to push HG articulation further than any prior RX-78-2 kit. This release just swaps the classic white, blue, and red for Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters green, dark green, and gray, sold in 2019 alongside game tickets to celebrate Gundam's 40th anniversary and a crossover with all 12 Japanese pro baseball teams. Building it feels exactly like building the well-loved Revive kit, snug part fit, no glue needed, a shield and beam rifle that click into the hands cleanly, and a head that can actually tilt up thanks to the double-jointed neck ball joint. The novelty is real, this just doesn't look like any RX-78-2 you've built before.

The catch

The molded plastic is Fighters green and gray rather than the Gundam's signature tri-color scheme, so if you want a display-accurate RX-78-2 this is not it, the team crest and number decals lean on stickers rather than molded color to carry the branding. This was a promotional item bundled with baseball tickets and capped at a limited run, so finding one now means secondary market prices, not a retail shelf pickup, and pricing swings a lot depending on which of the 12 team versions you're chasing. It's still a small 1/144 HG, so detail payoff and part count sit where you'd expect for the grade, this isn't a display centerpiece on its own merits.

Who it's for

This is for two kinds of builders, people specifically collecting the 12-team Gundam 40th anniversary baseball set, and RX-78-2 completionists who want every colorway variant on the shelf. If you just want the best-looking, most accurate RX-78-2 HG to build once, skip this and grab the standard HGUC Revive Ver. in its normal colors, you'll get identical engineering without hunting a limited promotional run or paying collector markup. If the novelty of a Gundam in baseball team green appeals to you, or you're a Nippon-Ham Fighters fan, this scratches an itch nothing else does.

The build story

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

If you've built the HGUC Revive Ver. RX-78-2 before, this build will feel completely familiar, snap-fit assembly with clean gate placement, tight enough joints that nothing sags, and a shield peg and beam rifle grip that seat properly on the first try. The one adjustment is cosmetic, the runners come molded in Fighters green and dark gray instead of the usual white, blue, red, and yellow, so panel lines and joint colors read differently than you'd expect from muscle memory on this suit.

The engineering is the real selling point here. The Revive-era redesign gave this HG more than fifty percent more articulation points than the HG it replaced without ballooning the part count, so the shoulders raise well past horizontal, the elbows and knees are double-jointed for deep bends, and the waist and torso twist enough to hold dynamic action poses. For a sub-$20-class HG chassis, that's a lot of pose range, and it's the same reason the standard Revive Ver. gets recommended constantly as a beginner-friendly kit that still rewards experienced builders.

Lore & trivia

01This kit is a colorway of the HGUC RX-78-2 Gundam Revive Ver., first released in 2015 as Bandai's modern redesign of the original HG RX-78-2 mold.
02It was produced for a 2019 collaboration celebrating Gundam's 40th anniversary that paired all 12 Nippon Professional Baseball teams with their own RX-78-2 colorway, this one representing the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters.
03The kit released on April 27, 2019, and was distributed together with game tickets in a run limited to 3,000 units.