Zoids HMM-006 Saber Tiger 1/72 Scale

I have been a Zoids fan for nearly 25 years. The thought of animal-shaped mecha armies is awesome, and plastic models that can walk around your apartment floor with a simple battery-powered motor is genius. I've owned a bunch of them, through childhood and again in college. After all the life events, the Saber Tiger (original TOMY version) remained on my bookshelf.When I saw this "Highend Master Model" version by Kotobukiya, I knew instantly that I had to get one. Life was given to this robotic beast when the details were designed to allow movements and poses in a "natural" and "realistic" way. It's not to say that the TOMY version, with joints designed to walk and bite at a flip of a switch, was any inferior. It's just that the intended purposes of the two are drastically different. While TOMY made toys for the younger crowd to play with, the HMM version is more like the sophisticated Gundam models for collection and display.The experience in building this plastic model also differed from what I was used to. This version is more refined and more complex. For example, the TOMY version had just one part to each paw, and the Kotobukiya version has 15. Constructing this version of the Saber Tiger took a lot more time and patience. Some of the steps were not very easy to follow and glue was necessary to keep some small parts from falling apart. But when you're done with each section and look at the details that you just put together, it's really rewarding.It's been great to re-live my childhood experience in a more grown-up way, to the more grown-up standards. I look forward to building more of these HMM Zoids models.

Perfect Saturday night project. I only wish there were more models and that zoids was still going on

Requires some extra detail work to look like it did in the picture. Very cool piece. A little frustrated a couple of times at the placements of the injection kit plaques (when they happened to land on pivotal sections like the lip of the tiger, which left a white residue from the cutting off of the plastic.Very nice in every other regard, though.