MGUniversal Century

MSA-0011[Bst] Plan303E Deep Striker

A siege gun with a mobile suit bolted to the front of it.

MechaGrade Score

3.0/5

[Bst] Plan303E Deep Striker · 1/100 · 2018

GradeMG

Scale1/100

Released2018

Runnersn/a

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The verdict

This kit is a monument, not a toy.

I bought it knowing full well I would never really pose it, and that is exactly the deal Bandai is offering here: a huge, gun-heavy tribute to the Gundam Sentinel design with almost none of the play value you expect from an MG. If you love the silhouette, that trade is worth making. If you want an MG that moves like an MG, it will let you down.

Best for: Gundam Sentinel loyalists and shelf-display collectors who want the S Gundam's ultimate boosted form, not people chasing MG-grade poseability

The full review

What it is

The Deep Striker is the fully tricked-out booster configuration of the S Gundam from Gundam Sentinel, and this MG treats it as what it is in the fiction: an oversized weapons platform that happens to have a mobile suit riding inside it. The moment I got the mega particle cannon and radome mounted on the back, the thing stopped looking like a Gundam and started looking like a piece of siege artillery, which is the whole point. I liked how honest the kit is about that. It leans into the boosters, the tanks, the giant gun, and lets the actual suit underneath feel almost incidental, which is a strange and kind of fun way to build a Master Grade.

The catch

I will not pretend this is an exciting build. It goes together over a couple of relaxed sessions with standard MG steps and no real surprises, and once it is done there is next to nothing to do with it. Reviewers who have built it report zero effective articulation once the backpack is loaded up, and I believe it, the sheer bulk of the boosters and the cannon locks the pose before you even start. It also needs a real shelf, this is a wide, heavy kit that eats space, and at around 20,000 yen it costs more than plenty of Perfect Grades while offering far less to play with. A couple of stickers (green on the front crotch piece, red on the rifle) are needed for full color separation, and the cloth-look cord running to the rifle looks cheap next to everything else.

Who it's for

Buy this if the Gundam Sentinel design language gets you, if you want the definitive display version of the S Gundam's booster form, or if you collect the weirder, more experimental corners of UC mobile suit design. Skip it if you want an MG you can actually pose through a fight scene, or if display space and price are tight, because this kit demands both and rewards neither with flexibility. I would point a first-time MG builder somewhere else entirely and save this one for someone who already has a Sentinel soft spot.

The build story

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

The actual assembly is unremarkable in the best sense of standard MG engineering, clip the parts, follow the steps, and you are done in two or three easy sessions. Nothing about the runners or the gate placement gave me trouble, and the chrome-finished parts are the one place the kit shows real craft, since Bandai clearly thought about where the nub marks would land and buried them in areas that stay hidden on the finished model.

Where the kit earns its price is bulk and hardware, not poseability. You are building four huge booster packs, a long-range radome, a mega particle cannon sculpted to roughly 540mm at this scale, two beam cannons, a beam smartgun, and a sensor pod standing in for the left arm, all riding on a frame held together by screws that actually behave. Once assembled the whole thing reads as a single massive weapon system rather than a poseable figure, which some builders will love and others will find is missing the point of an MG.

Lore & trivia

01The Deep Striker was released in March 2018 to mark the 30th anniversary of the Gundam Sentinel project, decades after the original story first appeared.
02In the Gundam Sentinel fiction, the Plan303E Deep Striker equipment was never actually built, it exists only as a theoretical maximum loadout for the S Gundam.
03Because of all the extra hardware, the Deep Striker weighs roughly twice as much as the standard [Bst] booster version of the S Gundam, and its acceleration drops by about 30 percent as a result.
04The kit's mega particle cannon uses the same weapon type mounted on Argama and Nahel Argama class ships, scaled down to a mobile suit's shoulder.