by Tim Eldred

At the start of 2022, I finally worked up the courage to begin building Hachette’s 1/350 Yamato. A year later, I did the same with their Andromeda. At the start of 2024, the parts for Hyuga were almost all in hand, but I was still so disappointed with the Andromeda experience (I never got the damn lights to work) that I just didn’t have it in me to start a new build. At the start of 2025, however, the Patrol Ship was almost all in hand and office space was getting tight, so…here we go, Hyuga!

See Hachette’s Hyuga home page here

See the promo video on Youtube here

Like its predecessors, Hyuga was released a few parts at time in weekly volumes (with 4 box styles that would rotate continuously). Yamato launched June 2018 as 2202 was nearing its end and ran for 110 volumes. Andromeda took its place in March 2021 and ran for 60 volumes. Hyuga, first announced in April 2022, began that June with Vol. 171 of the overall series. It ran for 80 volumes, all following in the wake of Yamato 2205 and concluding with Vol. 250 in March 2024. The Patrol Ship took over from there to finish in March 2025.

If you were to buy these models in a store in Japan, you’d get one volume a week packaged by itself. If you subscribed (like I did), you’d get one box a month containing the parts and instruction booklets for four volumes at a time. This was no-frills packaging, but it cut down on waste and shipping costs. I just kept numbering the boxes as they arrived to keep track of how far along they were. When the last one showed up, the clock started ticking.

While the Yamato and Andromeda models were challenging in their complexity, I’d built them both as standard model kits plenty of times before, so I knew their geometry intimately. Not so with Hyuga; it was newly introduced on screen in October 2021. Other than the classic battleship bow, all of its parts were fresh, so I would have to learn its shapes and forms as it came together. It was a brave choice for Hachette to invest all that time and engineering into a design that didn’t yet have universal recognition, and I respect their choice.

Every once in a while some custom binders would show up to contain the instruction booklets. They look nice, but are just as impractical as their predecessors, which I never used. They can only hold 15 booklets and take up far more shelf space than a stock-standard magazine box (that can accomodate all 80 with ease). So that was kind of a waste. No idea what I’ll do with them. But…they look nice. And I have six of them…

Finally, the booklets themselves (which also cycled through 4 covers) were always a big part of the attraction for me. In addition to the instructions, most issues come with big, colorful, guidebook-style coverage of the anime. If you’ve read the Yamato 2202 Mechanic Encyclopedia, you’ve seen the results. The images and text details go beyond all other published materials and they’re worth the price of admission. The Hyuga booklets did for 2205 what the previous booklets did for 2202, so another Mechanic Encyclopedia will follow when time permits.