(This review was posted on r/MegamiDevice)
Hi, this is my first post here—I’ve been building Gunpla for over 7 years now and I’ve been lurking around this subreddit ever since I dipped into the mecha musume hobby when I impulsively bought the 30MS Neverlia and built it. I thought building Neverlia was going to be a one-time thing, but just like getting into Gunpla, that wasn’t going to happen. Suddenly, I had the urge to build another mecha musume kit, and I went searching for what to get because there was so much to choose from, yet many of them were compromising (most I liked were really expensive, and the ones that were cheaper needed a lot of color correcting) That was until I found about Nuke Matrix, so once I saw the Lirly Bell, I was dead set to buy the kit, and found it for cheaper on $58 shipped on Gundam Model Center.
For someone who’s been building Gundam kits for years, especially with the fact that I’ve built at least 10 kits already this year, I haven’t had much fun building a kit since, uh… maybe the PG Unleashed RX-78-2. While this has only been my second ever mecha musume kit, this kit felt like the ultimate test as a Gunpla builder—there’s so many undergated parts, I had to sand almost every joint so that it wouldn’t break on me upon inserting them, there’s a mechanical frame separate from the main armor parts, giant blue clear pieces for the screens, and on top of everything that the kit comes with, it also comes with what I’m gonna call a robot dog. The experience building this kit has been like no other kit, the only ones I can think that are close to “WTF am I building” are the MG Eclipse Gundam and the HG Penelope. And building the kit straight out of the box wasn’t going to cut it for me. I panel-lined, painted and decaled Lirly Bell and her dog, which the end result looks like the best looking kit I’ve built this year.
Setting aside my amazing experience with this kit, I just wanna list what’s good and what’s not. I heard that Nuke Matrix kits have great color separation out of the box, and it’s true, Lirly looks almost exactly like she looks in the manual. There are a ton of accessories included in the box, faces look great, articulation is amazing, the waterslide decals are a great inclusion, and the kit being ABS plastic makes the kit feel very solid, it basically makes Neverlia feel like a cheap toy in comparison. However, Lirly being all ABS is also a downside. I wouldn’t say the plastic feels cheap, but the plastic has fitment issues. Like I said before, I had to sand down all the joints so that the kit wouldn’t be super tight, but even then some parts still snapped on me, nothing that glue couldn’t fix. The kit’s coolest factor, the mechanical spine, is also the kit’s biggest weakness, which I knew prior. It was actually fine when I first built it up, but not even a day or two later, it could barely hold up the upper half of the body. Now I see why nobody uses the spine in their final displays of Lirly.
Overall, this kit was a blast. I took a god awful amount of pictures, but it was worth it. That being said… I need more. Something I definitely need next is the FOX, she’s basically the sister unit of Lirly considering how Lirly has barely any weapons and how the dog’s main gimmick is to be the support unit for the FOX’s big ass cross gun. Well, thanks for reading if you made it to the end. I’ll be back reviewing the FOX… whenever I can.
