Gunpla, Gunpla Everywhere

Built a few more kits recently, all of which are interesting in different ways.

First up, the Entry Grade Strike and Strike Rouge, the 2nd of Bandai’s EG range of 1/144 scaled kits that require no paint or colour correcting stickers to get an anime-accurate look alongside a build that is incredibly simple. And in this case I tried something a bit different – the Strike was literally built straight off the sprues with no clean up, whilst the Strike Rogue had nubs cleaned up where it was cut off the sprues and the v-fin nubs trimmed off. And I think they both look pretty good overall. I have a spare Strike I want to use for customs, and whilst these two were bare-bones for kit they are compatible with the range of Striker Packs that Bandai have released over the years with other 1/144 SEED kits, and wouldn’t you know it I do have several of those in the build queue 🙂

Now so far Bandai are two for two on Entry Grades being frankly superb little kits that represent great value for money, and just today I received a delivery that included 2 copies of the latest EG kit, the Nu Gundam. I think I might take a pop at that this weekend to see if the magic continues….

And this past weekend I sat down with the Gundam Perfect Strike Freedom from Gundam Breaker Battlelogue, a 6 episode web exclusive series that the suits are all Gunpla built by their “pilots” (either stock or as customs) that get scanned and uploaded into an online gameworld where they are piloted by their builders by way of physical cockpits (not dissimilar from the old Virtual World Battletech Battlepods that gamers of a certain vintage might remember). The Perfect Strike Freedom is (as the name suggests) a blending together of the Freedom, Strike Freedom, and the Strikes Striker Packs & colours. And my word is it a whole lot of nonsense! I mean I love it but the backpack wings & Dragoons (the red bits detach to become remote drones) are just daftly huge.