MGUniversal Century

RX-78-2 Gundam Ver.One Year War 0079 Cup Noodle Original Color Version

A noodle-cup giveaway kit that turned out to be one of the best-articulated RX-78-2 molds Bandai ever made.

MechaGrade Score

3.9/5

RX-78-2 Gundam · 1/100 · 2009

GradeMG

Scale1/100

Released2009

Runnersn/a

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The verdict

This is the Ver.

One Year War 0079 mold in its anime-accurate colorway, and I think it holds up far better than its origin story suggests. It started life as a 1,000-unit prize for a Nissin Cup Noodle campaign tied to Gundam's 30th anniversary in 2009, so if you own one you own a genuine oddity. Strip away the collector premium and what's left is a 2005-era MG with double-jointed elbows and knees and some of the best hand articulation of its generation. It's not the refined, easy build of a modern MG, but the engineering underneath is legitimately clever.

Best for: collectors chasing a specific piece of Gunpla promo history who also want a mold that poses well on the shelf

The full review

What it is

This kit is the same tooling as the standard MG RX-78-2 Ver. One Year War 0079, just recolored to match the animation palette instead of the slightly desaturated tones of the original release. That means a lighter blue, a warmer red, and a white with a faint grayish-green cast that reads as more screen-accurate than most RX-78-2 kits from this era. It was built to celebrate Gundam's 25th anniversary and the PS2 game The One Year War, then repurposed four years later as the Cup Noodle prize. Holding one, you feel that dual identity: it's a mid-2000s MG doing its best RX-78-2, wearing a color job made for a noodle cup box.

The catch

Builders on the standard release consistently flag two things and they carry over here. First, the panel lining is dense, more scribe lines than most RX-78-2 molds, which is either a gift or a chore depending on how much you enjoy detailing. Second, it leans on stickers and decals more than I'd like for an MG, especially for camera details and small color call-outs that a newer kit would mold in plastic. There's also no Core Fighter, which some RX-78-2 collectors expect and won't find here. None of this is a broken kit, it's just a kit from a specific point in MG design philosophy before Bandai fully moved color separation into the plastic itself.

Who it's for

If you're chasing this specific Cup Noodle variant, you already know what you want, a piece of Gundam anniversary history with a genuinely nice colorway, and I'd say go get it. If you just want a good-posing, anime-color RX-78-2 and don't care about the promo backstory, the regular animation-color release of this same mold gets you the same build and the same articulation for less premium. Skip it if you want a modern, low-sticker MG build experience, this one asks more patience at the cutting mat and decal sheet than current releases do.

The build story

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

This is an older MG build, so expect more cleanup at the nub and gate lines than you'd get from a current release, and the fit isn't as snug as Bandai's modern tolerances. The panel line count is genuinely high for the era, builders call it out again and again, so budget real time if you're going to scribe or ink all of it rather than leave it bare.

Where the mold earns its reputation is articulation. The double ball-joint neck, double-jointed elbows and knees, and a hip axis that slides forward for deeper leg poses were ahead of a lot of the competition in 2005. The separable 3+1+1 finger articulation was a first for MG at the time and it's still satisfying to pose today. The recolor here nails the animation palette, lighter blue and red and a subtly tinted white, which makes the finished kit look more like the TV Gundam than most RX-78-2 releases manage.

Lore & trivia

01This colorway was distributed as a limited prize kit, only 1,000 units, through a Nissin Cup Noodle campaign that ran from August to November 2009 to mark Gundam's 30th anniversary.
02The underlying Ver. One Year War 0079 mold originally released in 2005 to coincide with Gunpla's 25th anniversary and the PS2 game Mobile Suit Gundam: The One Year War.
03It was the first Master Grade kit with hand parts that could be separated into individual articulated fingers, letting builders replicate the RX-78-2's famous Final Shot pose.
04Unlike most MG RX-78-2 releases, this mold does not include a Core Fighter.