Casio has made some expensive G-Shocks before, so seeing an MR-G push into luxury-watch pricing isn’t particularly shocking anymore. The new MRG-B2100HR-1A does present a different problem for me though, because after all of the work Casio has put into this thing, the first visual connection I made was to rainbow-finished watches I’ve seen from Invicta for considerably less money.
This is the 30th-anniversary MR-G, Casio is making just 800 of them worldwide, and the Japanese price is ¥1,100,000, which works out to roughly $7,000 at current exchange rates. It’s scheduled for release in November 2026. The watch measures 49.5mm long, 44.4mm wide, and 13.6mm thick, with a listed weight of 122 grams, so while this is still very much a G-Shock in terms of presence, Casio is clearly treating it as something much more special than another color variation.
There is a lot going on here that has nothing to do with simply making a G-Shock shiny. Casio collaborated with Kyoto metal-leaf artist Hiroto Rakusho, whose original artwork inspired the watch, and the dimensional latticework dial is finished with platinum leaf that Rakusho personally applies to each example. The bezel and bracelet are really where I started getting hung up on the whole thing though.
Casio isn’t just applying some kind of rainbow coating and calling it a day. An ultrashort-pulse laser creates microscopic structures in the surface itself, which then interact with light to produce different colors depending on the viewing angle. That’s obviously a much more complicated process than what I’m comparing it to, but once all of that engineering is finished, I still end up looking at a rainbow metal watch.
And rainbow watches aren’t exactly unfamiliar territory. Invicta has been playing with that visual language for years across cases, bezels, dials, bracelets, you name it. I’m not saying the manufacturing is remotely comparable because it isn’t, but does the person looking at your wrist know that? That’s the part I keep coming back to, because the visual reference hits before any explanation about lasers, microscopic structures, or Japanese decorative art ever has a chance to.
On a normal G-Shock I probably wouldn’t care nearly as much. Here though, the surface treatment is basically one of the reasons the watch exists. Casio describes the MRG-B2100HR as wearable art and says the shifting colors across the bezel and bracelet are intended to reproduce the constantly changing character of Rakusho’s metal-leaf work, which is a very cool idea and, in Casio’s studio photography at least, I can see it.
The color looks deep, different surfaces seem to separate from one another, and the whole thing has much more visual dimension than I expected when I first saw it. Then I watched Casio’s interview with Rakusho.
That was where I started questioning the effect a little more. Some of the less-produced imagery in the video gave me a noticeably different impression than the hero photography. The watch doesn’t suddenly look terrible or anything that dramatic, but without all of that control over the lighting the color seemed more subdued, some of the separation between surfaces seemed to disappear, and the depth I was responding to in the promotional shots was just harder for me to see.
Casio says the structural color changes with viewing angle, so some of that is quite literally the point. Maybe under natural light it looks insane. Maybe the effect is much stronger once the watch is moving around on your wrist. I haven’t handled one, and I don’t want to turn a reaction to Casio’s own video into some fake hands-on verdict about what the watch is like in person.
But when the whole pitch involves this much effort being put into a decorative technique, and the price is this high, I personally need the finished result to communicate some of that effort without someone first explaining to me why it’s special.
The hardware certainly gives Casio plenty to point to. The exterior uses titanium and COBARION, the bezel alone is assembled from 27 individually finished components, and the watch still has sapphire crystal, Tough Solar, Multiband 6, Bluetooth connectivity and 200 meters of water resistance. None of that sounds remotely cheap, and none of it is why I’m struggling with the watch.
I’m struggling with it because after learning how much thought, material science and actual craftsmanship went into creating this thing, I still look at the bracelet and think: rainbow G-Shock. And at $7,000, I don’t know if that’s enough.
Co-Founder and Senior Editor
Kaz has been collecting watches since 2015, but he’s been fascinated by product design, the Collector’s psychology, and brand marketing his whole life. While sharing the same strong fondness for all things horologically-affordable as Mike (his TBWS partner in crime), Kaz’s collection niche is also focused on vintage Soviet watches as well as watches that feature a unique, but well-designed quirk or visual hook.