I guess it's neither here nor there... But this Bandai HG Macross line is kind of weird. #01 is the YF-19 from Macross Plus. Then we skip ahead to Alto's YF-29 from Frontier and Max's YF-29 from Delta... And, finally, we're back to Macross Plus with #04 - the YF-21.

I don't know if they were just knocking-out the most popular protagonist mechs first? But there doesn't seem to be a lot of rhyme or reason to these releases.

Once again we've got some of these weird, super-thin stickers.

You may recall from my YF-19 build that I wasn't very happy with how the color-correcting waterslide decals worked. So, this time around I resolved to try using these stickers. Unfortunately that didn't work great either.

They worked pretty well on the flat surfaces... But they really did not play nicely with anything curved. They didn't want to bend, stretch, or stick on any of the curves. You can see how wrinkly and ugly they look on those back engine sections.

So I wound up pulling those stickers off and hand-painting the bits instead. This actually wasn't too terrible... They're generally some fairly basic, solid-color lines. Usually surrounded by panel-lines so I could easily tell where to stop.

And, of course, I painted the pilot figure too. He looks pretty ugly this close up... But doesn't look too terrible in the cockpit. Especially since the canopy hides him almost completely.

I don't want to sound too nit-picky... But there's some weird scale/accuracy/consistency issues with this kit.

We've got a few "shortcut change" parts that get swapped-out when we transform the kit. And I think this works pretty well in general. I'd rather swap parts than try to do a real transformation at this scale. But some of these swapped parts don't look quite right.

The first picture up there shows some leg skirting bits that are basically supposed to be the transformed state of that whole bottom fuselage. They're very clearly not nearly large enough for that.

The second picture shows the nose/cockpit section that gets swapped in battroid mode. Again, it doesn't look right.

I guess this is maybe excusable with the YF-21 since we see it actually bending and morphing... It's clearly got some weird, high-tech materials going on... But it still kind of bugs me. I wish it looked more consistent. More accurate.

So, once again, I picked up some waterslide decals for this kit. The official Bandai ones. And I'm honestly not thrilled with these decals.

They're generally a bunch of super-small caution markings that feel more like what you'd see on a model airplane. More realistic/military... Less sci-fi... And also super, super tiny.

These things were very hard to work with. They didn't want to release from the backing paper. And then they felt super fragile and tore easily. And then they didn't want to stick to the plastic well. You'll see some wrinkling and silvering in the finished photos.

Also - I used my Stedi panel-liner on this kit and I probably shouldn't have. That stuff is water-based which makes it very safe for plastic... But it also reactivates very easily if it gets even a little wet. So I was constantly reactivating panel-liner when trying to apply these decals, which got kind of messy.

Grabbing a picture of one of these HG Macross kits before completion feels a little weird. It's more like a collection of parts than a robot-to-be.

In addition to all of the parts needed to build the YF-21 in its various modes... We also get some extra hands, a couple rifles, some placeholder rifles for fighter mode, and the pinpoint punch effect part.

There's a number of very nicely separated clear parts in this kit. There's some clear red bits in the nose, the canopy, and two different colors of clear parts in the head. I decided to partially disassemble the kit and remove those parts prior to topcoating - I figured that'd be easier than trying to mask them off. I think it worked pretty well.

The canopy is that neat polarized clear plastic that Bandai has been using lately... Unfortunately it doesn't do this kit any favors. There's so little canopy in the first place, and the polarized effect reduces the transparency, so you can barely see the pilot inside there.

Fighter mode looks pretty damn good even though I'm not generally a fan of aircraft models.

I think gerwalk mode is probably my favorite in these HG Macross kits. It's the really distinctive, iconic Valkyrie mode.

The transformation is easy enough. It's mostly just some part-swapping. There's precious little actual transformation. But, again, I think that's probably the better approach in a small kit like this.

And then, of course, there's the battroid mode. Unfortunately this thing's face is so deeply-hooded and darkly-shadowed that you can barely see the clear parts in there. I debated painting them or using the stickers... But when the lighting is decent they really do look pretty. So I left them as-is.

Oddly, there's a couple left-over parts on these runners... A couple extra bits of shoulder armor. It seems weird to have left-over parts in this box. It's just #04 in the line. And it's the first YF-21 kit. It's not a color-variant or a derivative. You'd think these runners would be purpose-build for this kit.

I guess I assume they were planning ahead for some of the YF-22S variants we're going to see later.

It feels kind of weird to be struggling, making mistakes, and learning from a simple HG kit again... I mean - I just built my first PG a few weeks ago.

But these HG Macross kits are just a bit different from the HG Gundam kits I'm typically building. A few little quirks, oddities, and differences. There's definitely a bit of a learning-curve with them.

This kit definitely turned out better than my first HG Macross build. Painting those parts worked much better than the decals or the stickers. I think I'll probably just start with paint on the next kit I build - that way I won't need to clean off any sticker residue.

I also want to see if I can find any third-party waterslide decals... Maybe something from DelpiDecal or G-Rework? I bet those would work better than Bandai's...

I also again found myself wishing this kit came with a stand. It feels borderline-necessary for a kit with a fighter mode like this. I mean - you can't really display the fighter mode without a stand. Sure, on its landing gear if you have to? But that's really a little disappointing... It would've been fantastic if it at least came with something like those runnerless stands.

At the end of the day - I really enjoyed this kit. It's a good, solid build that's just different enough to be interesting.

I'm definitely looking forward to building some more of these HG Macross kits. Especially some of the Delta and Frontier kits.