HGUniversal Century

RX-78AN-01 Gundam AN-01 "Tristan"

A junkyard Gundam built from a 13 year old mold, and it shows in every joint.

MechaGrade Score

2.7/5

Gundam AN-01 "Tristan" · 1/144 · 2017

GradeHG

Scale1/144

Released2017

Runnersn/a

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The verdict

I like the idea of this kit a lot more than I like building it.

Tristan is a junk suit stitched together from an old NT-1 Alex frame, and Bandai leaned into that backstory by literally reusing the 2004 Alex tooling for the limbs and torso, so you get a brand new head and a decade-old skeleton underneath it. The head sculpt is genuinely great. The rest of the kit reminds you constantly that it was not designed in this decade.

Best for: Gunpla builders who want a cheap, characterful UC oddity to kitbash or paint, not a poseable display centerpiece

The full review

What it is

Tristan is the HGUC kit for the junk-parts Gundam from the Twilight AXIS side story, a suit explicitly built in its own fiction out of a salvaged NT-1 Alex with a new head, chest, waist, backpack, and foot thrusters bolted on. Bandai mirrored that concept in the plastic itself, recycling the Alex's 2004-era limb and joint tooling and giving you only the new head and torso shell as fresh parts. The head is the highlight, a genuinely mean, angular sculpt that looks nothing like a standard Gundam face, and it is the one part of the kit that feels like it belongs in 2017 rather than 2004.

The catch

The joints are the real problem. There are no double-jointed elbows or knees, the knee bend caps out around 45 degrees, and the shoulder armor blocks the arms before you get anywhere near a dynamic pose. Builders online report the plastic on the shoulder joints is weak enough to crack or pop off under normal posing stress, which lines up with a mold this old. The oversized beam rifle looks bulky in the hand and the grip is loose. Surface detail is thin and it relies on the old Alex's simpler panel lines rather than anything from Bandai's more recent HG standard.

Who it's for

Grab this one if you want an inexpensive, distinctive UC head sculpt to graft onto another build, or if you want a simple, low-pressure kit to practice paint and panel lining on without worrying about wrecking something articulation-heavy. Skip it if you want a kit that poses well on a shelf next to modern HGs, because the frame genuinely cannot keep up. If snap-tight articulation and clean joint engineering matter to you, this is a kit to buy for the parts and the story, not for the build itself.

The build story

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

The actual build goes together fast because there is not much new tooling here. Runners are simple, gate placement is unremarkable Alex-era stuff, and cleanup is easy since there is little fine detail to protect. Where it gets frustrating is posing after the fact, since the shoulder armor fights the arms and the knee simply will not bend far enough for a kneeling or dynamic action pose no matter how you angle it.

The one place the kit earns real credit is the head, a fresh sculpt with a sharper, more aggressive face than the standard Gundam look, and it reads well even at 1/144. The rest of the color separation and accessory loadout is thin for an HG at this point in the line's history, with a single oversized beam rifle as the main weapon and molded color doing most of the work rather than stickers, which at least keeps the finished look clean even if the frame underneath is limited.

Lore & trivia

01In its own fiction, Tristan is built by Buch Junk Inc. from a salvaged RX-78NT-1 Alex frame recovered after the One Year War, with only the head, chest, waist, backpack, and sole thrusters made new.
02Bandai mirrored that in-universe backstory in the actual kit engineering, reusing tooling from the 2004 HGUC Gundam NT-1 Alex for the limb and joint parts rather than designing a new frame.
03The suit is piloted by Quentin Fermo in Mobile Suit Gundam Twilight AXIS, a side story set six months after the events of Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn.
04The kit released in June 2017 as HGUC number 205 in Bandai's numbered High Grade Universal Century line.