RE100Universal Century

MS-08TX[EXAM] Efreet Custom

A stocky one-off Zeon oddity that Bandai engineered beautifully and then forgot to give a real arsenal.

MechaGrade Score

3.6/5

[EXAM] Efreet Custom · 1/100 · 2016

GradeRE100

Scale1/100

Released2016

Runnersn/a

Check price on Amazon

Affiliate link. We may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

The verdict

This is one of the best-engineered obscure suits Bandai has ever put out, and I mean that with real admiration.

RE/100 exists to bring side-story machines like this one to shelves without the R&D budget of a Master Grade, and the Efreet Custom shows exactly why that idea works. The molding is clean, the proportions are chunky in a way that suits the design, and I barely touched a panel liner. Where it stumbles is everywhere the suit itself was never built to move.

Best for: Blue Destiny and obscure UC side-story fans who want a shelf-quality kit and don't mind a suit that poses better standing still

The full review

What it is

Out of the box this thing looks fantastic. The bold Zeon blue is molded in, not painted, and the parts breakdown is sharp enough that I never went hunting for seam lines to hide. Bandai used the same small, close-cropped gates the RE/100 line is known for, so cleanup marks stay tiny once you actually manage to nip them cleanly. The head sits on a double ball joint, the heat sabers come molded in translucent plastic that catches light nicely on a shelf, and the missile pod mounts on a polycap shaft so you can angle it instead of leaving it locked in one spot. Building it felt less like assembling a toy and more like putting together a well-cast statue that happens to have joints.

The catch

The articulation is where the design works against the engineering. Those stiff, polycap-like cables running from the front codpiece to the backpack are there to sell the EXAM System look, but they choke off torso rotation almost entirely, and the tall head fins mean it can't tilt back to look up no matter how good that double ball joint is on paper. Push a dynamic pose too hard and I've had small connector parts pop loose rather than hold. Accessories are thin too, just the heat sabers and a missile pod, for a kit that street prices close to an MG Zaku II 2.0.

Who it's for

Buy this if you care about the Blue Destiny storyline, want a distinctive Zeon silhouette nobody else on your shelf has, or you're chasing RE/100's reputation for clean, low-seam engineering on a suit MG never touched. Skip it if you want a poser first, this kit rewards patient, careful assembly and a display stand more than aggressive action shots. It's a display piece wearing an action-figure's price tag, and once I stopped fighting the torso and just let it stand proud, I was happy with what I built.

The build story

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

The gates on this kit are RE/100 standard, small and set close against the part, which means they tear more often than they cut cleanly. I got the best results cutting well above the taper and trimming the leftover nub with a hobby knife rather than fighting the sprue cutter down to the surface. Once past that habit, the parts fit went together snugly with no glue and no visible seams anywhere on the main body, which is genuinely impressive for a kit this cheap to engineer.

The double ball-jointed head and the ball-jointed limbs give you a decent working range on the arms and legs, and the polycap shaft on the missile pod lets you rotate and angle it instead of it sitting frozen. Where the engineering runs out of road is the torso, where those stiff cross-body cables meant to represent the EXAM System's bulk choke rotation down to almost nothing. Push past that limit and small joint parts can pop rather than hold the pose, so I built toward stable, grounded stances instead of anything acrobatic.

Lore & trivia

01The Efreet Custom is one of eight MS-08TX Efreet units built, modified to carry the experimental EXAM System because no other Zeon frame in the program could survive the strain of it.
02The EXAM System artificially boosts a mobile suit's combat performance to something close to Newtype-level reaction and output, at the cost of stressing the frame carrying it.
03The Efreet Custom's head was enlarged and stripped of its vulcan guns specifically to make room for the EXAM System's cooling units, giving the suit its distinctive oversized crown silhouette.
04It was piloted by Nimbus Schterzen in Mobile Suit Gundam Side Story: The Blue Destiny, and reportedly still fell short of what its developer, Chlust Moses, wanted, pushing Moses to defect to the Earth Federation to chase a better machine.