RGRebuild of Evangelion

Evangelion Unit-01 (Test Type)

The kit that opened Bandai's Real Grade line to a whole new kind of mecha, and mostly nailed it.

MechaGrade Score

3.8/5

Evangelion Unit-01 · non-scale · 2020

GradeRG

Scalenon-scale

Released2020

Runnersn/a

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The verdict

This is the debut Real Grade Evangelion, and it earns its place as a launch kit rather than feeling like an experiment.

Bandai took the RG format built for boxy Gundam frames and adapted it to Eva's spindly, muscular anatomy, and the spine and shoulder joints do real work getting that unnervingly organic silhouette to hold a pose. It ships with a smaller accessory loadout than the RG Eva kits that followed it, which is the honest tradeoff of being first.

Best for: RG builders who want the original Rebuild of Evangelion Unit-01 in a compact, mostly sticker-free build

The full review

What it is

This is Bandai's first Real Grade take on Evangelion Unit-01, the purple and green EVA at the center of Rebuild of Evangelion, and it is also the kit that opened the RG line to a franchise built on organic curves instead of Gundam's mechanical panel lines. The abdomen, chest, and back sections link together like overlapping armor plates, and the knee joints are shaped to bend the way real muscle would rather than the way a machine hinge would. A neck that interlocks with the internal frame when posed is a small touch that pays off every time you tilt the head, since Eva's expressiveness lives in that motion.

The catch

Coming in as the RG line's very first Evangelion kit, this one carries a leaner accessory set than the Eva RG kits Bandai released afterward, six interchangeable hand parts against the fifteen that later kits like Unit-02 shipped with, and a single Pallet rifle rather than the wider loadouts later releases picked up. Non-scale like every RG Eva besides the Perfect Grade, so it sits smaller on the shelf than its Gundam RG cousins might suggest, and like most small-scale kits with thin, organic proportions, the frame parts reward a light hand rather than rough posing.

Who it's for

If you want the Rebuild timeline's central Evangelion in Real Grade form, or you are building out the RG Eva lineup and want to start where Bandai did, this is the natural pick and it still holds up as a genuinely engineered kit rather than a rough first draft. If you specifically want the biggest accessory loadout or the most refined hand articulation in the RG Eva line, look at a later release like Unit-02 instead and treat this one as the foundational, slightly leaner original.

The build story

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

As the line's debut kit, the build establishes the format the rest of the RG Eva releases would build on, overlapping armor sections rather than flat panels, and a frame built to bend at the spine and shoulders instead of relying on typical ball joints alone. Cleanup is straightforward since the color separation across the runners does most of the work, and the two Progressive Knives, posed extended and stored, are a nice included detail rather than an afterthought.

The standout engineering is that interlocking neck-to-frame connection, which keeps Unit-01's head tracking believably with the rest of the torso instead of floating independently the way some kits handle heads. It is a lighter accessory kit than what came later in the line, a Pallet rifle and the twin knives are the loadout, but what is there is well integrated rather than bolted on.

Lore & trivia

01RG Unit-01 (Test Type) was the kit that launched Bandai's Real Grade line into the Evangelion franchise in 2020, extending a format originally built for Gundam's mechanical frames.
02Unit-01 is the central Evangelion of the story, traditionally piloted by Shinji Ikari across both the original series and the Rebuild films.
03The kit's Progressive Knife is included in both its stored and extended forms, matching the compact combat blade seen throughout the Rebuild films.