Thank you to my local model shop for selling me this kit. For the love of all that is sacred, please stock more mech kits. Preferably from more than just Aoshima, or at the very least, please stock kits that are slightly easier on the wallet than, say, those Full Metal Panic kits.
Dipping back into the underexplored realm of Aoshima's line of mech kits with this one. I quite enjoyed the last kit I made from them, even being fully aware that it isn't what they usually do. But now it's time for another Aoshima mech kit - and what better mech than the mech that put Hideaki Anno and Gainax on the map, and is probably the best use of a baseball bat besides a certain wackier Gainax anime? Genuinely, I have no idea what to expect from this kit outside of some hastily-glimpsed speed-builds on Youtube, so let's no longer stall for time and bust this thing open.
It comes off as a rather uniform colour scheme at first glance, but there are different shades of the darker colour in there, and some smaller runners of red and orange. So unlike Aoshima's car kits, this one doesn't 100% require painting. Obviously you can if you want, particularly if you prefer doing that instead of using the colour-correcting stickers that come with this kit.
Head Unit
Glad it starts with this one, saves me having to hold onto the two really small runners used for the head crest and the mono-eye.
Would have preferred that the monoeye use a foil sticker so that it catches the light easier, but that's more an issue of the colour itself than anything else. That said, looking back on it in the completed head later on, it does stand out from the rest of the colour scheme, so maybe just the basic design was enough. In general, the bigger issue is that you really have to cut it cleanly off the runner or be ready to clean up a really precise nub mark. Fitting the eye on wasn't impossible, but it wasn't as simple as it looked.
Body Unit
I'm already intrigued by how large this completed kit is going to be, going off of how chunky this torso is.
Arm Units
Around here, I really started to notice that there's some under-gating that the manual doesn't point out. If parts don't fit together entirely, be careful about this. Honestly, given that the join on this part isn't visible on the outside, I'm not sure why Aoshima did this.
Here's something else that tripped me up a little - the yellow ring that secures the four large arm hatches in place doesn't fit flush by design. The only thing to pay attention to is a curved dip on the ring where the front of the arm is, and that's it. It's a tight fit, but it doesn't go on all the way, judging by the photos and sticker sketches in the manual.
This shoulder part with the fins at the bottom was really awkward. Particularly the fins on the bottom which stay in position through a really tenuous amount of friction, to say nothing of how perfectly-aligned everything has to be to fit both halves together. It's some booster unit-level nonsense right there. The cherry on top (or rather the side) is that the flat cover on the inside (A6) either pushes the two halves apart or barely fits in but falls out from a slight tap. Absolutely pathetic. And I have to do two of these. GROAN.
It was then that I decided to take a break from assembling the mech itself and de-stress a little by applying some of the colour correcting stickers. And boy, was that a mistake.
See, rather than having the stickers included in the instructions like any other mech kit out there, it's all included in the back of the kit, meaning that the orange pieces on the back of the arms had to be pried off with my craft knife beforehand, while the orange part that goes behind the yellow crest on the head was several times harder to attach since the crest doesn't come off easily (if at all). Honest to God, if Aoshima couldn't just make the orange runner bigger, then I don't see why they'd even bother, 'cause some of those stickers are insufferably ugly when attached.
This whole time, I was thinking this had the air of an early 2000s Bandai kit about it with the amateurish manual layout, the stiff-feeling wrist accents, the baffling choice of colour-correcting stickers and the flimsy shoulder fins. But a few Google searches revealed to me that this kit actually came out a year after the same company's Mechagodzilla kit. The very same Mechagodzilla kit that included water slide decals and told you when to attach them during the assembly segment of the manual rather than keeping it in the back with no regard for parts that cover the decals. Aoshima should know better than this! What in the hell happened here?
Leg Units
The instructions don't make this part clear, but you're supposed to put the K part into the bucket-like E part first, then slot the polycap into the K part while it's in there so it fits securely. Why the manual's step order doesn't include where the K part goes is a complete mystery.
The segment underneath the treads in the feet is angled at one end so you can push the treads in the feet out and get a grip on it with tweezers or something. Just in case you want to swap these out with the spiked treads for the Inazuma Kick.
As loose as the ankle covering feels during assembly, it's cool how it's secured in place once the whole leg is assembled.
The manual then says to put the upper body together - torso, head, arms and shoulders. But I don't trust the integrity of those shoulders' flimsy weapon covers, so I'm assembling the waist next.
Lower Body Unit
We have a typo! D8 and D9 are swapped in the manual, when both have different ways of sitting flush on the front and back of the waist. So apparently the nonsense with Mechagodzilla is common for Aoshima. Who's proofreading these?
It was around the time I started putting the mech itself together that I noticed I was supposed to rotate the sides of the torso up so that the arms sticking out for the shoulders to slot into were facing upwards. I'm sure glad the manual definitely remembered to tell me this. Especially since it meant the left hand side of the torso had its polycap worn out as a result, necessitating some strategic plastic glue and several attempts to get it back on.
And that's not even getting into how the polycaps for the shoulders are so flimsy, I had to PVA one of the ball joints to give it even a CHANCE of holding on without exploding everywhere!
Yeah, let's not beat about the bush here - I hate this kit.
Sure, it's a nice design and makes for an imposing size. But between the flimsy joints, brittle-feeling plastic, pathetic polycaps, overreliace on colour correcting stickers and badly-written instructions, this is one I can't recommend to casual builders looking for a chill evening of gunpla. But what's really tragic is that this came off the heels of the Mechagodzilla kit. Yeah, that one wasn't perfect either, but my issues with that were with the unreliable decals on the backpack and the repetitive tail assembly. And those were minor in the grand scheme of things. What in God's name happened here?
More to the point, who the hell is this kit for? Casual builders will hate the kit being overdesigned in some areas and underdesigned in others. Hardcore builders will scoff at the oversized stickers. People who like to pose their kits will be put off by some of the joints feeling too flimsy and others feeling too stiff. Aoshima fans won't be too familiar since they don't normally do mech kits despite having done a perfectly good one before this...this kit is an enigma, simply put.
Alright, I'm aware that no kit these days is truly awful if you're willing to put some work into it. But when a kit has comparatively little information about it online, then the least I can do is warn anyone who may be tempted to get this kit - you are not in for a relaxed casual build with this thing. No joke, I have never until now come across a kit that gave me so much grief, I've actually considered throwing it in storage this soon after finishing it. At least the Real Grade Wing EW looked nice enough to keep me from doing that. Proceed with severe caution.
Stay safe and keep clipping, folks!
The Good
+ Imposing presence
+ Some pleasing mechanical details, maybe
+ Umm...the box art was pretty cool.
The Bad
- Plastic feels cheap (and that's not good, because this kit isn't cheap)
- Instructions are poorly-formatted on top of a few misprints
- Hatch gimmicks in the arms and legs don't feel secure or lined up properly
- Way too reliant on colour-correcting stickers instead of just having a larger orange runner
- Joints feel too stiff
- Polycaps wear out too easily
- Shoulder assembly is a balancing act with the articulated fins dangling loosely
- Shoulder hatches come off too easily
- Too many K runners
- God, this is such a hand grenade
- How does a kit this bad come out a year after the same manufacturer put out such a great kit?
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