The manual is entirely in Japanese, however there are English translations that you can find online, which describe what screws, cables and springs to use where.
The 30cm tall Zaku II is the second Perfect Grade kit to be released, in Marc of 1999 and the fifth PG kit that I've built - This is the most difficult one so far, in large part due to the wiring, battery springs and the tightly wound metal springs inside of the power cables on its head, torso and waist, which all gave me some trouble. This is also a screw-kit.
Aesthetics:
This is the MS-06F Zaku II, the first Mobile Suit that you see in the Gundam franchise. It has a two-green (dark) color scheme, with a variety of greys and blacks, which is largely anime accurate (contrary to the first PG RX-78-2 which is *not* anime accurate).
Despite its age there are no color corrective stickers, only a pink one used on the inside of the lens (oddly enough) - I'd recommend a transparent pink marker to paint the outside of the lens.
The kit comes with a sticker decal sheet that isn't worth using due to their huge square borders - Find waterslide decals instead.
The inner frame is the 'true' intricacy of this kit with a ton of parts forming an intricate inner frame with lots of pistons and moving parts. Sadly almost all of it is just in black and dark grays, but there is plenty of opportunity to detail it up yourself with metal paints.
Mechanics:
You build in a light-up feature in the head that takes a couple of LR43 coin batteries and uses a simple switch to turn on the LED behind the eye, which can move side to side.
It has ~14 hatches that opens, depending on what you count as a "hatch" - The knees, elbows and front foot panels opening is maybe a bit on the tame side, but the backpack, rear calves, crotch, head and especially the three chest hatches, all show interior detail. Additionally the cockpit hatch also opens, but is hard to close without opening up the main chest hatch.
As old a kit as it is, this thing can move and has a surprising range of solid and stable movement, however it does also use around 120 polycaps, so expect it to loosen up some over the years. Some of the movement is also artificially restricted, such as by a strange linkage in the front of the foot, which you can simply detach, for much greater movement.
Surprisingly, it has a split double elbow joint, for the upper and lower arm, enabling it to swivel between them and bend in two directions, which is *very* cool. Sadly the wrist is much less agile, while the fingers are pre-molded and have three knuckles each (thumb has two) for natural finger posts.
The thing is, that despite all this movement, I don't want to pull on anything, because while most of it is pretty darn solid, the shoulders internally are not and while I glued the connections in place, I don't trust them. To no one's surprise, model kit tech has progressed a lot in 26 years.
Equipment:
1 Machine Gun
1 Heat Hawk
1 ...single 1/60 120mm bullet.
Spare screws.
That's all there is. You can't store the rifle or the detachable magazine anywhere and the heat hawk despite its transparent part, does not light up. It's also in a highly saturated purple, supposedly as an homage to the original designs, but it kind of clashes with the model.
The tabs in both weapons meant to lock them into the palms, do not work and it struggles to hold onto the rifle with one hand, securely. You can definitely pose with either weapon, it's just a little annoying.
There is also an "instruction manual" in addition to the "construction manual", the latter being the actual assembly instruction, while the "instruction manual" is a full color booklet on the Zaku II, in Japanese.
Conclusion:
I have to talk about the power cable springs - It's difficult to screw into the ends of them, especially because you have to make sure that the ends still fit and don't stick out, where you push them into the model. If you don't do it properly, they "explode" and scatter all the links all over the place, because they're all under tension. This happened three times to me, for different reasons. I used super glue to secure the screws in place.
Besides that, this kit is easily the model kit (out of ~115) that has taken me the longest time to build and I've built the PG Banshee with LED kit and the PG Strike Freedom which has that giant backpack with all the dragoons - Both were annoying in their own way, but were much quicker to finish. It's mainly because of the wiring and the springs, as well as finding translations.
It has something that I've only experienced with one other PG kit, the Mk-II, which is a sense of real satisfaction once I was finished. Both kits ooze with creativity and enthusiasm from the people who designed them. I've built the Perfect Grade Unleashed RX-78-2 and while it's a very competent and highly detailed and mechanically superior kit, it's also very *easy* and smooth to build. The Zaku II is a proj...
