GFF Xi Gundam / Penelope

The GFF Xi Gundam… not much to tell you about it other than it’s #0025 in the line-up and that it’s definitely one of the more unique looking Gundams around.  I don’t know much about this Gundam except that it is from Hathaway’s Flash and piloted by him. Nonetheless, I picked up this GFF because it looks awesome and impressive.

Out of the box, the first thing I noticed was “damn… pieces are falling apart already”. Yes, just cutting off the wires and pulling the figure out and pieces on it will begin to come off. This is because the Xi Gundam is actually NOT the “base” Gundam for this GFF but rather another ugly thing (talk about it later). This GFF has a total of three layers of parts, one for the Xi, one for Penelope, and one for miscellaneous and the display base parts.

After setting the pieces on the figure, I noticed that most of the parts aren’t clipped on nor attached through pegs nor sockets; they are simply hub on or rest on top of each other. All the Xi parts on the lower half of the figure, the Xi shoulders, the backpack… Crap. That means this figure is waiting to fall apart the moment it has the chance. And fall apart it does. While I try get it to stand and I apply some pressure to twist the legs, the front leg piece falls off and while I try to pluck on the beam saber parts, the shoulder falls off. The front skirt plates and crotch piece all falls off if you touch or hold onto it. It was a nightmare setting the whole thing up and almost made me want to not play with it anymore… but that would be a waste of the features of this GFF. The head doesn’t stay on but snug enough to not fall off thanks to the silly shoulders that it’s stuck in between and don’t expect to turn its head also. The figure absolutely cannot pose because the area where the legs are connected to the hip is completed restricted so I can’t get any movement out of the legs and all the pieces on the shoulders limit the arms too. The best this GFF can do is… stand and look pretty.

Taking the Xi parts off was pretty easy; you can simply drop the figure a few times and it’ll be cleaned off but it can also be easily picked off. Even stripping it down to its basic Gundam form doesn’t do much for its (lack of) ability to pose even slightly. Penelope (PENEROPE?!) looks like it has more going on than the Xi so I slapped all the pieces together to check it out. The Penelope does look mighty with that wide body look and sharp lines and edges all over the place. This conversion is Spikey! How does it even move with all those fancy spike parts on? It can’t. I noticed on the completed Penelope that there’s a lot of conflicts with its own parts like how the shield on the arms would get caught in the shoulder. The design is impressive and a work of art with all the little details and whatnot but as a workable design, it looks completely impractical… even in Gundam standards xD.

A Penelope stripped of all its outer spikey armor would be the Odysseus Gundam. This thing is plain and sort of ugly… actually, very ugly. The cool thing you can do is take Penelope’s armor pieces and put them together into a flight unit that somewhat looks like a Pokemon and Cybuster but with more spikes and edges. I also immediately changed Odysseus back into the Xi Gundam after taking pictures but also left the flight unit since it looks cool and so the Penelope parts won’t be a waste.

Deciding on this GFF is strictly a matter of how much you like the Xi Gundam design since it is on the expensive side (~$50). There’s nothing particular outstanding about this GFF (see: Deep Striker, GP03D, God Gundam) and its articulation is worse than the average GFF so you’re basically paying for the abundance of conversion parts and a figure of a Gundam that doesn’t receive much/any love from Bandai (where’s the MG?!).