Well, I’ll be damned—today marks the 8th anniversary since I got into Gunpla and Gundam. 2023 has been one hell of a year full of plastic kits—it’s probably the year where I built the most kits, the year I’ve built the most high grades, and the year I started getting into mecha musume—but this year, it’s kinda at the pace it was before, doing only 2 kits at most, and I’m fine with that as the burnout I’ve been having seems like it wants to stay for a good while.Â
This kit was commissioned by my mother, my sister snap built it, and I did the rest—some hand painting, panel lining, a quick matte topcoat job and taking a minimal amount of photos. I feel like I say this all the time when I deal with HG kits, but this kit has very strange problems. It’s an HG without polycaps and comes with really tight joints, but they’re mixed with a few loose joints that creates a problem when posing the kit up. I’m not sure if this was just an error on my sister’s part, but, the legs do not like to swivel away from the hips. They cannot naturally spread out when I’m making ground poses, I have to manually spread out the leg myself. To make things worse, the foot’s ball socket is made up with a sandwich of plastic, which OOB, the ankle joints are super flimsy for a kit that is already hard to balance due to its backpack. Also the feet don’t have any side swivels, which makes matters even worse. To top it all off, these shoulders are incredibly asinine. No matter how much coating I put on the ball joints, they are still flimsy af. For whatever reason, they are attached to the backpack instead of the actual shoulders, and because of this, it hampers arm articulation a LOT. It sucks, I really want to do cool poses with its lance, but because of this terrible design they put on the shoulder, that can’t happen. It’s strange—this has a lot of good engineering for articulation, but it’s backpedaled by some of the most cut corners that make the kit much worse than it has to be.
Anyway, other than that, at least the Aegis Knight looks super cool despite its questionable color scheme. You can probably tell I went all for it, adding bits of red (Vallejo Model Color Red) and green (Tamiya X15), some Vallejo Dark Gray and Steel like I usually do, and even hand painted the gold with Tamiya Gold Leaf (X12). You might notice a few blemishes here and there, this really wasn’t really my best work. Still, I just gave it a topcoat just so I can get rid of my dying topcoat cans (which I did finish off), and yeah, that’s about it. It’s a very whelming build, but at least I was able to finish something off in time of my Gunpla anniversary.