MGPost Disaster

ASW-G-08 Gundam Barbatos

A jury-rigged relic that somehow out-poses kits twice its price.

MechaGrade Score

4.2/5

Barbatos · 1/100 · 2019

GradeMG

Scale1/100

Released2019

Runnersn/a

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The verdict

This is one of the best-engineered MG kits I have put together, full stop.

The frame does things I did not expect from a suit whose whole design language is beat-up, scavenged, and held together with spite. Every joint pulls its weight, the armor never gets in the way of a pose, and it stands rock solid even loaded down with its full weapon set. For an MG at this price point the amount of working mechanism packed in here is genuinely impressive.

Best for: Iron-Blooded Orphans fans and MG builders who want a frame-first kit that rewards careful gate cleanup with real articulation payoff

The full review

What it is

Barbatos is Iron-Blooded Orphans' scrappy, unglamorous protagonist suit, and Bandai leaned into that by building an MG whose whole appeal is the skeleton underneath the beat-up armor. Snapping the inner frame together first and watching it already hold dynamic poses before a single armor panel goes on is a genuinely good feeling. The shoulders use piston-and-hinge combos that give a butterfly-style range of motion, the torso tilts and crunches at the abdomen with real travel, and none of it feels like it is fighting the plastic. Once the armor is on, that range barely shrinks. For a suit built around the idea of jury-rigged salvage, this kit's engineering is anything but improvised.

The catch

The manual earns your attention. Several inner-frame parts use a snap-lock design that looks correct from more than one angle, and builders who rush a step can end up with a joint mounted backward or a piston seated wrong, which is annoying to backtrack once armor panels are clipped over it. It is also not a beginner kit; the part count and the layered frame-then-armor assembly reward MG experience rather than a first build. Weathering or a wash is basically expected here too, since the molded colors are already muted and the design is meant to look scavenged, so a fully stock build can read a little flat on a shelf next to something bright.

Who it's for

If you have built at least one or two MGs and want to see what a frame-centric design can actually do with articulation, this is a rewarding next kit, and it is close to essential if you have any attachment to Iron-Blooded Orphans and Mikazuki Augus. Builders who want a flashy, colorful hero-Gundam silhouette out of the box should look elsewhere in the MG line, since Barbatos is deliberately drab and mechanical rather than heroic. But if you like the idea of a kit that hides nearly all its seam lines and rewards a slow, careful build with real poseability, this one is worth the shelf space.

The build story

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

Gate placement is considerate and most nubs clean up fast with a side cutter and a light sand, so the actual cutting and trimming portion of the build moves quickly. The part that slows people down is the inner frame sequencing, where several sub-assemblies use a snap-fit that only seats correctly one way. Skim the manual's callouts before committing plastic to plastic and this build is smooth from start to finish.

The frame-first design is the standout here. Shoulders get a piston plus hinge combo for extended reach, the waist and abdomen have genuine crunch and side-tilt, and the legs hold a wide stance without the ankles giving out. Weapon loadout covers the mace, shield, and sword from the show, and color separation on the armor is handled almost entirely through molded plastic rather than stickers, which keeps the finished kit looking clean without any painting required.

Lore & trivia

01Barbatos is one of the 72 Gundam-frame mobile suits built during the Calamity War, distinguished from ordinary mobile workers by its twin reactors.
02In the show, Barbatos is a salvaged, barely-functional unit that gets jury-rigged with a Mobile Worker's Alaya-Vijnana interface so protagonist Mikazuki Augus can pilot it with human-like reflexes.
03Bandai released this MG in December 2019, well after the anime's 2015-2017 run, giving the frame-heavy engineering seen in later Iron-Blooded Orphans MG releases like the Gundam Vidar and Gundam Flauros.