MGUniversal Century

RX-0 Full Armor Unicorn Gundam "Ver.Ka" Shield Booster "Armed Armor DE"

The Unicorn buried under an armory, then handed one more gun.

MechaGrade Score

3.8/5

Unicorn Gundam · 1/100 · 2014

GradeMG

Scale1/100

Released2014

Runnersn/a

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The verdict

This is a kit that trades the base Unicorn's clean articulation for sheer arsenal, and if you go in knowing that trade is the whole point, it delivers.

The Shield Booster Armed Armor DE bundle stacks more ordnance onto an already loaded suit, and the payoff is a shelf piece that looks like it means business. It is not the kit to reach for if you want a Unicorn that poses freely, but as a display statement about a suit going to war, I do not think anything beats it.

Best for: Unicorn completionists and diorama builders who want maximum firepower on the shelf, not casual builders after a first Gunpla

The full review

What it is

This is the Full Armor Unicorn with the Shield Booster Armed Armor DE pack layered on top, which in practice means you are building a Ver.Ka Unicorn frame and then burying it under bazookas, gatling guns, missile pods and a beam halberd on top of the beam magnum and saber it already carries. I went in expecting another Unicorn build and came out having built something closer to a mobile weapons platform. The molded color work carries the whole thing, deep blues, grays and metallic accents with almost no reliance on stickers for the main color scheme, and the translucent green psycho-frame parts still catch light beautifully when the armor panels come off for Destroy Mode.

The catch

Over half the runners in this kit exist just for the Full Armor add-ons, and that means a long stretch of the build is repetitive gate cleanup on weapon housings and mounting hardware rather than the more varied inner-frame work earlier Unicorn kits are known for. Builders report the full session running around four hours just to get everything snapped together, and that is before panel lining or finishing the finicky Armed Armor DE unit specifically. The bigger issue is pose range. All that armor adds real weight, the hand pegs are small and were never built to support a fully-loaded beam magnum or the beam spear once everything is clipped on, so dynamic poses get genuinely difficult and some builders report the figure needs a stand to hold anything convincing.

Who it's for

If you already love the Unicorn storyline and want the version that looks like it is actually prepared for the Neo Zeon fleet, this is worth the shelf space and the extra cost over the standard Ver.Ka kit, since that price difference buys you close to another kit's worth of parts and hardware. Skip it if articulation and easy posing matter more to you than loadout, the standard MG Unicorn Ver.Ka or the RG version will pose far more freely and build faster. This is a display piece and a completionist's kit first, an action figure second.

The build story

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

The base Unicorn Ver.Ka frame goes together the way the standard kit does, snug pop-out joints and hydraulic-piston detailing that looks great once the armor panels come off. Where this kit changes character is the back half of the manual, runner after runner of Full Armor plating and then the Armed Armor DE hardware on top, and that stretch is where the gate placement and repeated small part cleanup start to wear on patience. None of it fits poorly, it is just a lot of similar work in a row.

The engineering payoff is real: the armor panels clip on securely for display but pop off cleanly to switch between Unicorn, Destroy and Full Armor modes without stressing the frame, and double-jointed elbows and knees plus ball-jointed hips and shoulders still work under all that extra mass, just with a smaller safe range than the unarmed kit. The accessory count alone, beam magnum, beam saber, hyper bazookas, beam gatling guns, triple missile pods, grenade launchers and the Armed Armor DE's own hardware, makes this one of the best value propositions in the whole Unicorn line if display over dynamism is what you are after.

Lore & trivia

01The Full Armor Unicorn's added weapon and armor package was designed by Hajime Katoki, which is why Bandai markets this line under the Ver.Ka (Katoki version) name rather than the standard anime-accurate line.
02The Shield Booster Armed Armor DE equipment was seen equipped on the Banshee Norn in episode 6 of the Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn OVA, and Bandai released it as a separate add-on so it could be mounted on multiple Ver.Ka kits including the Unicorn, Banshee and Sinanju Stein.
03The translucent green frame parts in this kit represent the psycho-frame material that lights up across the Unicorn's body when it shifts into Destroy Mode, a visual signature carried from the source anime into the plastic through clear-molded runners rather than paint.