WIP
It’s been a long time since I’ve done a WIP post but I thought I’d share my thoughts on building Ninja Kaname S.E.F.P. especially with the ball jointed hips that replace MD’s usual peg-jointed hips that DO NOT come in the box in case you wanted to opt for them instead. I have my fair share of things to say about those ball joints, but let me go over some other things about this Ninja before I get to them.
First, there’s not as much plastic out of the box. It does feel a bit lackluster considering OG Tama retailed at same price for 9000 yen, but you also gotta consider that the Asra 1.5L kits are also around 5000 yen each, but the armored limbs and weapons from OG Ninja aren’t worth an extra 4000 yen, so there’s definitely some ‘premium’ tax applied to the color change, I guess.
That being said, having never built a Kaname/Kizuna, let alone a Ninja, this one’s full of style. The 1.5L core is a nice upgrade from the original Asra line and I like the light armor pieces they give, the ninja-styled shoes and the triangular shooting star which looks neat, but can barely hold the daggers in. Speaking of things barely fitting, the pig tail connections need glue or putty on both sides, and the manual literally suggests to glue these two pieces together as they pretty much disconnect all the time as Ninja’s main weapons are connected on that hardpoint. Ninja with her original armored limbs looks astounding, it’s been a good while seeing an actual mechanical gal from Megami Device and the added thigh and ankle parts surprisingly adapt the limbs well to 1.5L proportions. Ninja’s indeed tall, towering pretty much every MD besides Tama Utage and possibly Susanowo Guren, and is pretty much the same height as most FA:Girl kits.
Anyway, let’s get to the main concern for this Ninja—the hips. They suck. Now, for ball joints, they’re really good with articulation, I’d say they’re on par with most MD kits besides doing full split. But as you’d expect with ball jointed hips, they dislocate all the time, but I’d argue they’re even worse than FA:Girl hips because of the way the hips are designed in this kit. How the hips work is that there is this socket joint that slides into the hip like so, and you’re supposed to get the ball to fit into the socket. Problem is, the socket is too deep into the leg that it makes it very difficult to fit the ball and socket together. OOB, you really have to jam the leg into the joint which sometimes works, but sometimes doesn’t, which I put too much force and almost snapped the pelvis part, which would’ve been really bad. Luckily it didn’t, but it did leave a huge stress mark behind.
This is seriously annoying especially as the hips pretty much fall off constantly, so I spent a few hours trying to come up with something that could alleviate the issues and came up with a solution that solves one. Using the tab that you cut off from the faceplates, I stuck it behind the socket (see image ##), making it easier to connect the ball and socket together and somehow strengthening the stability by A LOT now that the joint is more snug. Now, it’s going to create a tiny gap, but I’ll take that if it means the legs can stay put through a shake test. However, when moving the joint around, it’s still going to be very prone to dislocating, but at least once you get it into position and have the joint snug, it will stay there. Still really wished that the kit just came with peg joints that worked entirely fine.
Anyway, despite these hip joint problems, Ninja is still plentiful posable, and due to her angular silhouette and accessories, it’s really easy to pull off good looking poses. That being said, the reason why you see her with all these noticeable gaps and her being half built in the later photos is because I’ll be painting that light purple as right now it blends way too much with the duller purple, as well as the gold and silver as they’re quite disgusting from OOB. I’ll also have her detail painted, decaled, coated, yada yada. See you with the finished build!
Completed
I hate this kit.
Hate is a strong word, but I don’t really know how else to describe my feelings with my experience of this gal. Whether that be having to mask every joint while painting, the terrible fucking decals, nothing wanting to stay on, and this certain quirk of this kit alone that has essentially made this Ninja a brick. Had it not been for this quirk, I think I would’ve found light at the end of the journey, but because of this one single, MAJOR problem, this is one of the worst kits I’ve ever dealt with.
Following up my snap build post, Ninja’s been painted slightly painted up, hand painted, decaled and coated. Like I’ve said many times at this point, I was not pleased with how the light purple looked out of the box, so I painted it to a vibrant Tamiya Metallic Purple as well as the silver getting some Mica Silver and the gold with handbrushed Gold Leaf. Metallic Purple wasn’t my first choice though, as I wanted to use Tamiya’s TS-24 Purple instead as I’ve been using Metallic Purple so often and wanted a non-sparkly color for this build, only to find out that Tamiya Purple is 95% the same as the light purple out of the box. Nonetheless, the metallic purple did indeed make a difference, which Asra was starting to look good.
I did quite a bit of hand painting with Metallic Grey and Red thanks to Ninja’s plentiful amount of surface detail, did the little panel lining that was possible, and set myself up for the water slide decals, where there were a bunch of them and I knew I was going in for a challenge. This is where the fun basically ends and never picks up again.
The decals are abysmally dogshit. Any joy I had with Ninja basically diminished as I basically had trouble applying 95% of the decals. For whatever fucking reason the decals want to stick anywhere but the plastic, they’re insanely small, and you have to place in the toughest spots imaginable—a shitton of them passing through a >45 degree angle. No matter what I did, whether that was using warm water, drowning the decal with mark setter, letting the mark setter sit for MINUTES before drying them, rolling up the decal with any Q-tip—whether that be super shitty or small hobby ones—it WOULD PEEL OUT OF THE PLASTIC AND STICK TO THE Q-TIP INSTEAD. There are no fucking supplemental decals to save you, if you fuck up and can’t salvage it, well then you’re just fucked. I guess I’m a masochist as I applied as much as I could possibly can, and well, at least it stays on once it’s completely dry.
The passion or faith I had left in this kit was… just near zero. I don’t know what got into me, but I had a bunch of near-empty flat topcoat cans that instead of just throwing out, I decided to use all of them for Ninja, and yeah you can probably guess how that went. Some areas were really matte, some areas were basically semi-gloss, and a lot of bubbling was happening. This would usually rile me up, but I knew what I was doing, but I had little shits left in me to care. Waiting a few hours to get everything dried up, it was time to pose.
But you’re probably wondering, where are all the poses? There aren’t any. Taking a gamble whether or not coating the ball jointed hips would improve their stability, it did not, not one fucking bit. From coating the joints, the hips cannot even stay in place anymore. THEY CANNOT EVEN ALLOW NINJA TO STAND. No fix was working—whether that be lightly gluing the joints, using the strongest double-sided tape I had, carving the ball and sockets—NOTHING, NOTHING WORKED. I couldn’t even get a single pose before I had to fix the solution permanently, which was gluing the fucking hips. Now they weren’t ever gonna move ever again, but, they would also never be a problem ever again. While the rest of the kit is functional, the hips being fixed for the one single pose I wanted basically meant that no other pose I wanted to do would be possible. Whether it be user error on my end or just the horrendous design of these ball joints, this kit is basically a brick. A statue, who can’t even hold her own goddamn weapon because the hands, even though they come with POM joints now, are too fucking slippery for the hands to hold anything heavier than a feather. I. Hate. This. Kit.
Now there’s only one thing that Ninja has going for, and its her looks. But that’s usually the best part for most girlpla kits—they look good as fuck, so while it may be eye candy for you, the viewer, I can only look at this Ninja with scorn. I wish I never made that pre-order on Suruga-ya had I known about the ball joints beforehand. Fuck you to whoever designed and made sure that these ball joints were the ONLY hip joints available in the box. If you wanna get this kit for its aesthetics, I wouldn’t blame you, she looks really nice, but those ball joints will be the fucking devil.
I don’t know how I get so unlucky with Megami Device kits. The Regalia sisters had a bunch of problems, heightened by making rookie mistakes, Tamamonomae can barely shoulder the heavy weight that burdens her, Utage had that one annoying piece always falling out, and I had giant painting pains with Lang. I’m surprised how FA:Girls, which are not as advanced as MD kits, end up being better experiences.
Anyway, I’m gonna be moving on. I’m gonna just block this experience out of my mind, and look at the good things that have happened this week, namely this very special haul consisting of two giant, incredibly expensive kits that ended up arriving the same day. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you later…
