Gunpla, Gunpla Everywhere

Bit of an update from the last few months of GunPla builds:

First up, staying in the world of Gundam SEED, it was another crop of older kits, the 105Dagger + Gunbarrel and the Gundam Strike Noir. Now I’d brought these mainly for the Gunbarrel and Noir Striker Packs to potentially mess around with sticking them on other SEED kits with the same compatibility with the Striker packs, but honestly these two kinda impressed me. Sure they are older engineering, need a few stickers for colour accuracy and some of their scale is not as good, but they have a real presence. No doubt the fact both come with flight bases that let you get dynamic with the posing from the off (shout out to the Gunbarrels base that has slots to store the pieces you swap out to represent the gunpods in deployed mode) helps a lot, but honestly they were just fun builds.

What’s this? Why it’s my niece Sophie and her very first completely solo build, the Entry Grade Gundam Strike Rouge. Very proud nerdy uncle vibes!

And the final bit of roundup is my second experience with a KO GunPla kit – I’d been trying to get ahold of the Astray Green Frame for years with no luck but came across a range of KO kits on AliExpress for decent prices so figured what the hell and took a punt. And it wasn’t too bad – plastic didn’t have quite the same feel as official kits, it’s a bit simplified compared to the other Astray kits, there was a bit of swearing as ill-fitting posts meant having to pry panels apart and trim posts down, and the green is a much darker more military shade but it really does a decent job.