PGUniversal Century

MS-06F Zaku II + Weapons (Animation Color Ver.)

The grunt suit gets the grand treatment, and it still feels like a grunt suit underneath, in the best way.

MechaGrade Score

3.7/5

Zaku II · 1/60 · 2008

GradePG

Scale1/60

Released2008

Runnersn/a

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The verdict

This is a PG that asks you to respect its age and rewards you anyway.

It's built on a design that predates the newer, tighter-tolerance PG engineering, so you get real heft and real gimmicks (a wired, lighting monoeye, hatches that pop open all over the body) alongside real 2001-era looseness in places. I still had a great time with it. The animation color molding is the reason to pick this release over the standard version, it means far less painting to get the show-accurate look.

Best for: PG collectors and Zaku loyalists who want the definitive big-scale grunt suit and don't mind babying a couple of older joints

The full review

What it is

This is the mass production Zaku II blown up to 1/60 and given the full Perfect Grade inner-frame treatment, molded this time in the animation color palette instead of the usual manual green and khaki. The frame under the armor is dense with detail, there are twenty-odd hatches across the body that flip open to show internals, and the monoeye actually lights up and swivels on a hand-wired rig you build yourself. Opening the box and finding chrome runners, screws, and a battery-powered eye in a Zaku kit still feels a little absurd in a good way. Assembling it is a real evening-after-evening project, not a weekend one.

The catch

This is an older PG platform (the mold dates back to the early 2000s) and it shows. Builders consistently flag joints that are looser than you'd expect from a kit this size, seams on the shoulders and skirt that don't always close flush, and small parts that can pop off if you're not careful during posing. The monoeye wiring is the one genuinely fiddly step in an otherwise straightforward build, and if you cross a wire or seat a battery contact wrong the light won't fire. At the going rate for a PG, you're also paying flagship money for a suit that, unlike the Gundam or Strike Freedom PGs, doesn't have flashy gimmicks to match the price beyond the eye and the hatches.

Who it's for

Grab this if you already love the Zaku, you want a PG that isn't another Gundam, or you specifically want the anime-accurate colors without a paint booth. It rewards patience during the wiring step and a light hand during posing. Skip it if this would be your first PG ever, the looseness and seam issues will read as bigger flaws to someone who hasn't built an older kit before, and there are newer PG platforms that are more forgiving. Skip it too if you just want the cheapest way to a big Zaku on a shelf, an MG Zaku II Ver 2.0 gets you most of the presence for a fraction of the money and build time.

The build story

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

The runners are dense but the gate placement is reasonable for a kit this vintage, most nub scars land on hidden inner-frame faces rather than the visible armor. The one step that actually slows you down is threading and seating the monoeye wiring, it's not conceptually hard but it's the kind of thing you want to do slowly with the instructions open twice. Everything else clips together in long, satisfying frame-then-armor stages, and at 548 pieces you're looking at a multi-session build rather than an afternoon one.

Where it earns the PG name is the inner frame and the hatch gimmick, popping open the chest, shoulders, and leg panels to show mechanical guts underneath the armor never stops being fun, and the finished suit stands around 30cm and has real weight in the hand. Articulation is generous for a suit this bulky, the shoulders, hips, and monoeye turret all move well, though some builders find the ankles and waist don't hold a dramatic pose as confidently as a newer PG would. The weapon loadout covers the classics, a 120mm Zaku machine gun and a heat hawk, which is exactly what this suit needs and nothing it doesn't.

Lore & trivia

01The mass production Zaku II (MS-06F) was the first mobile suit shown on screen in the original 1979 Mobile Suit Gundam, and its silhouette became shorthand for 'grunt mecha' across the entire genre.
02This Animation Color Ver. release swapped the kit's plastic to match how the Zaku actually looked on screen, since the standard PG release used a more muted, magazine-accurate manual color scheme instead of the brighter anime hues.
03The PG Zaku II's monoeye is functional, not decorative, it lights up and can be posed swiveling within its sensor housing, a feature Bandai carried the mold's wiring harness specifically to support.