Gunpla

For the longest time I’ve wanted a 1/350 scale Space Battleship Yamato from Bandai. For those who hadn’t heard of it before, think Perfect Grade quality gimmicks to the max of 2007 model technology - lights, sounds, and best of all, motorized turrets. I remember seeing one in a local hobby shop many years ago, back before Bluefin became the de facto US distributor for Bandai, and on sale for what must have been a crazy cheap price. These days they regularly go for over $700 - which is a key reason I never got one.

That is until recently, when friend and fellow r/Gundam mod, Jaguar let me know about an online listing for a used kit out of Japan. It was still a bit pricey, and there was no guarantee that it still functioned, but from the photos it looked like everything was there. Apparently it was built back in 2007 then promptly put back in the box and forgotten for over a decade.

I wanted to take a quick minute to write about the new Ace Combat 1/144 scale models from Kotobukiya. There’s not too much to say, and depending on how you look at it, that’s a good thing.

For those out of the know, Kotobukiya recently released two 1/144 aircraft kits from Ace Combat. There are two fighters, the XFA-27 from Ace Combat: Infinity and the X-02S Strike Wyvern from Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown. There are two versions of each release, the first is painted, and the second is a gray “For Modelers Edition” ready or paint. Each kit comes with decals, different sheets for each aircraft, but thankfully the same both in the painted and unpainted releases. 

Look at me, I finished something from my backlog!

Welcome to my short review of the 1/35 scale Zeta Gundam bust from BSC. This is the third kit from BSC I've built and reviewed, starting with the 1/35 Unicorn Bust and the 1/35 Sinanju. The latter being one of the best third party kits out there and easily the best bust kit available.

The Steel Legend Metal Build Kshatriya is a third party/bootleg figure. At 1/100 scale it’ll look fantastic with all your MG kits (MG or RE Kshatriya when?!). Who would’ve known that a Metal Build kit out of China would be, not only the best third party piece of Gundam merchandise, but better than any Unicorn official merchandise from Bandai/Banpresto?

Welcome to my dry fit review of the Max Factory minimum factory 1/20 PLAMAX MF-25 VF-1 Super/Strike Gerwalk Valkyrie. Just rolls off the tongue doesn't it?

Allow me cut to the chase. The Hi-Resolution Model Astray is an astounding "meh."

I'm going to start off this review by saying I don't know who exactly made this kit. I got this kit from Samuel Decal (I don't always buy third party kits, but when I do it's usually through him). He's referred to it as being from E-Model and Model Principle. The product itself says it's the result of a collaboration between Dimension Studio and Eastern Model. There's also "Kokoro Link" mentioned all over the place... based on context maybe that's something to do with this version of Ultraman specifically? I'm also unsure whether this is official or not. I've seen sites selling them as officially licensed, and there's copyright marks for Eiichi Shimizu, Tomohiro Shimoguchi, and Tsubaraya Productions all over the place... but that the same time this came out of China, the manual is in English and Chinese, and isn't one any of the 100% legit sites (eg HLJ, AmiAmi). Assuming it is unofficial, it's one hell of a nice original kit.

What I do know is that this a 1/6 scale Ultraman model based on the new Ultraman manga that came out a few years ago written by Eiichi Shimizu and drawn by Tomohiro Shimoguchi. There are two releases of this kit, apparently, one with plated chrome silver and red, and one lacks the coating. When I placed my pre-order way back when I went with the regular because I didn't know the quality of the coating and whether or not they were going to undergate the parts. Good news for anyone seeking the plated version, yes, pretty much everything is under-gated. It's not always perfect though. There will be visible nub marks but I feel like they did a lot of smart design to hide most of them. Quite a few of the undergated parts but up against connection pegs or are on curved surfaces so it's one of those "bring your hobby knife" builds. From a complexity standpoint, if you can handle that, you can handle this build.

While I'm fairly opinionated about many things, including Gunpla, I always wondered what the general consensus was about the best and worst kits of the line. I can answer pretty easily for MG and PG kits, but because I've decided to focus my collection with those grades I can't say much about HG while most of my RG thoughts are all second hand. Thus became the impetus behind the Great Gunpla Census of 2018. While planning things out I decided to add a few more questions to get a general idea of what the franchise fan base was thinking. After a few weeks of being called out on r/Gunpla and r/Gundam the census was completed as best possible by 839 fans. While parsing numbers and fixed answer questions is easy, trying to produce simple takeaways from open ended questions not so much, so I didn't want to go crazy and find myself with a 15,000 collection of answers to sort through. 

I’m a sucker for all things Unicorn, so when Bandai announced a RG version with light up features I had to have one. A limited release from Gundam Base, this TWC Lighting Model is stupid expensive. Like $200 after shipping expensive. For a RG. To some extent I get that, gotta have a high price to subsidize the development cost for a limited run, highly specialized kit.