Never would I think I’d ever own something from the PUNI☆MOFU line, yet here I am, reviewing custom Hatsune Miku painted Lang. It’s kinda wild that I even did this, considering A—I don’t even follow Hatsune Miku or Vocaloid in general, and B—the PUNI☆MOFU style just ain’t my thing. A total of 8 girls have been announced in this line, but this is the only kit I considered getting, because she at least has some cool factor with her cool Nerf guns, as the rest of the line’s cute and funny aesthetic really rubs me the wrong way. Anyway, I impulsively got her when I was in Canada during the summer where she was in stock in Suruga-ya for $70, and fearing she’ll never be back in stock like Stylet Swimsuit at the time, I decided to pull the trigger.
Months later, I finally tackled her and I must say, for most of the experience, I was… kinda underwhelmed (but don’t worry this story comes with a good ending). I’ve been out of it this week as I’ve been super lazy to get any of my school work done, and I was building this as a part of my procrastination, but building Lang wasn’t particularly new or exciting. I know it was prevalent with Tank, but juggling between a thousand small runners with like 2 or 3 pieces was quite annoying, and there was a considerable amount of partswapping to do between her Block2, costume and armored modes, which looked like I was going to be annoyed doing that as well once I got to posing. For the cherry on top, I was getting really weirded out by how Lang had like these cute faces and all, yet she was also just wearing barely anything, which I was starting to wonder why did I even get this kit in the first place?
This wasn’t helped by what came next—painting… oh no… It seems like with any Kotobukiya kit I spray paint, I’m always having some major troubles. As I was replicating Hatsune Miku, I replaced the white with Tamiya Mica Silver, the orange pieces on her head with Tamiya Cherry Red, and the rest of the orange with Tamiya Coral Blue. The first two paints were flawless, causing me no trouble at all. The coral blue however, oh, oh my fucking god. First of all, I tried to test the paint on the orange, and lo’ and behold the paint was very runny, so I decided to prime the orange with Tamiya Surfacer and… why the fuck is the primer leaving giant blobs of excess? I was too late to realize in time, which I was like, oh, well that’s that, but the coral blue still ended up being runny as well, thus leaving a shitton of blobs, bubbles, oh god it was a mess. I gave it a few hours for all the paint to dry and starting assembling Lang in her armored form, but never mind, the coral blue wasn’t completely dry -.-
Now comes to the bane of my existence—everything involving the coral blue is tight for shit, which is probably even worse since I apparently primed it too much. However, I faced the absolute hell of getting the handles fitting the paws properly. Most of Lang was pretty good in tolerance, if not loose in some areas, so I expected the handles to slide down the paws without a problem. BIG mistake, because the one of the gun handles got SOOOO stuck in the paw, the handle snapped and STILL took more brute force to get the peg outta there. Without having any metal rods readily available to fix the part, it was incredibly frustrating getting the piece fixed. Double sided tape? Band-aid fix. Hot glue? No. Super glue? You might as well glue the hand on the gun, which I did and worked on, but after a while it still disconnected, so I decided to tack some double sided tape again and called it a day. The handles and the paw holes had to be sanded down like there was no fucking tomorrow, which helped save the other one from breaking, but just having one broken was a big pain in the ass. Looking at her fully armored form for the first time, I was surprised how… empty she looked after all that effort, which again, it really made me think, why did I even get Lang in the first place???
I obviously ended my day with her at that point. The next day, I followed her up with panel lining and hand painting, which was fortunately very easy to do since there was not much going on with her anyway. For colors, I continued with the Miku color scheme with some very small yellow, red and blue accents and panel lined wherever I could. I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to decal her. I would probably just put like one or two, so I skipped custom decaling her entirely. Now it was time to coat her, and—what the hell the coating was actually seamless this time.
It was finally posing time and I was still feeling super lazy, that I didn’t see a point in posing in either her Block2 form or Costume form with the amount of partswapping I had to do and extra pictures I had to take. I went straight ahead to her armored mode, and considering that it was also impossible to attach the long staff in either paws, I discarded the staff and super glued her right hand and the broken gun, and for most of the part it was the best option yet. Getting her posed with her dual Nerf guns, I remembered why I liked Lang in the first place—she looks really cool with her guns, and to my utmost surprise, she is incredibly easy to pose with. After all the troubles I’ve been facing with my recent girlpla, Lang being able to pose off so many poses seamlessly and barely any effort was a nice change. She was just rocking with the dual guns, and posing with her other hand options I was thinking that, yeah, she is actually pretty cute. I didn’t have enough poses to reach Reddit’s 20 image limit, but I was well satisfied with what I came up with, and she was really photogenic in all of them. For what felt like being a tunnel for most of this build, I’m glad that I found light at the end of it.
Overall, I’m happy with my Hibike Lang, even if most of the journey was quite somber. I totally forgot that I have barely any shelf space left for my girlpla, but Lang, while being size M, is actually really small compared to my other gals that I somehow had an exact spot to put her without needing to shuffle everybody around. Unless like some heavily armored girl comes out in the line, this is still probably the only PUNI☆MOFU that’ll be in my collection. My girlpla backlog has been finally clearing out now that I just have Shuremi and Rydira left, so I’ll see you when the time comes!
