Optimus Prime & Co.: A Newbies attempt at Gunpla

I’ve been keeping an eye on eBay for a while and this guy went by at a reasonable price so I snapped him up.  He’s from the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion which is a must see (The original English dub is terrible, but I hear the Netflix dub is better.  I’ve seen it twice with subs and I’ll definitely be watching it again).  it might look like a typical kids fighting kaiju in giant robots show, but this show has extra layers that’ll mess with your brain for years to come.  It’s the gold standard all other kids fighting kaiju’s in giant robots shows try to emulate.

It’s a High Grade model kit.  Bandai model grading is a little confusing so I keep having to look it up.  High Grade is confusingly their lowest grade model kit.  High Grades are the smallest and simplest kits.  Next up is Real Grade which are High Grade size but with some of the more advanced innards and tech from the next grading, Master Grade.  Master Grade is bigger and more articulated and is the standard, and best most people will get.  Then there’s Perfect Grade.  PG’s can be bigger than small children, can have optional extra electric components and all kinds of fancy stuff, but you’ve got to chose if you’re gonna buy a PG model, or buy food that month.  They also don’t make PG for most designs.

I’d say that Optimus Prime and I assume the whole Furai line are above HG in terms of quality, but maybe not by a whole lot?  I’d have to try a MG or RG, which I hope to some day.  Finding a kit that interests me is tricky as I’ve never watched Gundam and without the show those models don’t interest me yet.

I wasn’t timing myself this time around, but I think he took 3-4 hours to build.  The instructions were in Japanese, which mostly wasn’t a problem as all the sprue parts were labelled in English.  The only issue was the stickers.  They were labelled with individual Japanese characters.  Once I worked out which way up to hold the stickers it wasn’t too difficult to match them up though.

Some parts of this kit needed to be painted.  I didn’t realise that until I started to build it.  There is a colour guide in the manual, but it’s entirely in Japanese.  I could try using Google Lens to translate it, but it didn’t seem necessary.  This guy is black and white.  The pin lining was done with a marker pen, and the inside of the wings and blade were painted with black primer.  That’s all that needed doing.  Maybe 2 hours worth of painting, and the black lining was done during construction.

a Bandai HG kit appears a bit bigger than my Furai kit.  Some of that is definitely the wings making him look bigger, but even once you factor that in, he’s still notably taller.  Bear in mind he’s hunched over in this photo.  He also doesn’t like to balance as well as Prime does.  A lot of that is those wings throwing off the centre of gravity.  They are removable, but they really make the model and that’s how he was shown in the show.

He comes with different hand options, and a less derpy head (I like the derpy head.  In the show it really makes them look more “other” and unwelcome), and the wings can be removed and replaced with plugs that blend in to the armour.  There were also a lot of leftover parts.  I assume this means some of the parts are common across multiple kits and they just share some sprues.  He also came with 2 bonus single piece models for painting later.  The plastic feels a little bit rubbery and the detail seems a tiny bit soft/soapy, but we will see how they look once they’ve been zenithally primed and that shine is gone.  That’s not happening any time soon though.  I’ll add them to my box of stuff to be painted when all game related plastics are done.  They don’t excite me, but they’re a nice extra I suppose.  They didn’t need to be in there.

I hear Wayland have started selling some kits.  I may have to have a nose.  Not that I should buy anything.  If anyone knows a cheap place to get stuff like this, or knows of similar kits that aren’t based on Gundam please let me know.  I’d be interested in getting more Transformers, Evangelion, Zoids (Chaotic Century was actually really good), but I don’t really know what else is out there.  I want to try my hand at some higher grades at some point, but money is always tight and time is limited and needed elsewhere.