PR Production Project Kari Sazanami

WIP

Well, it looks like I’m the first one to post about her on the subreddit, so I ought to give you all an extensive look at this kit by a brand new Chinese company diving into the Girlpla market! Made by PR Production, calling their line of Girlpla “Project Kari,” behold Sazanami—which took me forever to find out what she was called!

I posted my story how and why I got her on my haul post last year, but if you just want the gist of it, I discovered Sazanami through Discord when someone posted this video, found in her stock on Gundamit for $55, had a $20 worth of points I haven’t used yet, so I got her for a whopping $37. However, during the time it took to get her delivered, I discovered that she comes with quite dated articulation, so when I finally had the chance to start building her, I kept my expectations low. Yet, just like my experience trying out a pair of $20 ChiFi IEMs for the first time last week, my expectations were blown away.

Like I expressed in my haul post, Sazanami comes with a very cool and compact box, but comes with a decent amount of plastic, which I shouldn’t be too surprised considering I got her for the dual body feature. Runners are oddly labeled with two letters, but you soon realize that the 2nd letter correlates to each color. For example, all blue runners all end in B, and all gray runners end in A; it’s pretty neat and easy to navigate through the kit’s high quantity of compact runners. The manual is barebones and some of the steps are pretty wack, telling you to build one leg, then a foot, then go back to the leg, which it’s actually trying to tell you that Sazanami’s armored form comes with a frame!

But the whole building experience is what caught me off-guard—it’s quite enjoyable! The majority of Sazanami is ABS very much like Nuke Matrix’s gals, but her joints may be POM, which was speculated by neko_rhea on Discord, which I can probably attest to as there is this awful creaking noise when moving the joints, very much akin to Neverlia that had a bunch of POM joints. There are quite a few undergated parts, the kit comes with two clear bases that they’re clearly ripping off from some other company, and the hands only come in ball joints instead of having articulated wrists.

I started with the base form first, which is actually the last thing the manual tells you to build, and wowie that is one big hair piece and is that upper torso… super basic. The faceplates definitely do not hold a candle against any other manufacturer, but you get used to them after a while, and they look better in person than in pictures. Outside of the piss poor upper torso, the base body builds as you expect, though it goes for a 30MS approach on the waist where it’s ball jointed into the core.

Although I was more interested in the base body than her armored form, there’s without a doubt that the armored form is much more interesting. While the upper torso is identical in terms of articulation, the actual body itself has some crazy color separation that feels very Nuke Matrix like in which you layer a bunch of pieces on top of each other and it somehow manages to fit all together without a hassle. As I mentioned previously, her arms and legs come with an inner frame that you do build on top of. And goddamn, she is wicked tall. After building her limbs up, you build this very strange backpack that I have no idea what it’s supposed to represent, but it’s one sharp minefield that I just sanded the sharp edges so I don’t find myself bleeding by accident, and then you have her scythe, which looks like a fucking pickaxe. The rod itself is metal, which is neat as the scythe body itself is packed with plastic, but connecting the rod into the plastic was outright terrible. To make matters worse, she cannot hold the pickaxe for shit. With the combination of the slippery metal that the hand cannot get a good grip of, the pickaxe being so heavy on its own and the fact that it’s being held by a ball jointed hand, it’s a nightmare that I didn’t bother dealing with at all. You can transform the scythe as a backpack or arm blades instead, and those work 100x better. Finally, before I talk about posing, Sazanami’s armored form also comes with human limbs as well, I don’t really have much use for them as her base body already exists, and her feet are wacky af, but it’s still cool regardless it comes with them.

Now, is Sazanami a poser, despite her hindered articulation? Surprisingly, you can make her one! Being hindered, I did become a little creative with her base body. If making intimate poses was not an option, making her an idol worked instead! While the shoulders can’t pop out and the head is basically static, there’s still a lot you can do. Her legs kinda make up the upper half, as they are really expressive, using a lot of “inspiration” from modern MD kits which they can pop out so you can cross the legs.

It’s the same story on the armored form. The upper torso is still fucked, but the head can rotate a bit more, the arms come with additional forearm rotation, and I swear to god, PR Production must have a thing for legs as you can get so much movement out of Sazanami’s long legs! The noticeable gap you see in the hips allows for the great articulation, and they go out of the way making the knees bend at a 135° angle! Did I even mention how she can just stand on her own despite her giant heels? Anyway, while she can’t pose with her scythe without frustrations, her arm blades work flawlessly and you can get really cool poses with them, she also looks cool with the scythe as a backpack, but sadly doesn’t have any other accessories to hold.

To top everything off—while I thought she looked generic at first—I must say, Sazanami rocks in looks, she’s just a plain ‘ol mecha girl, and I don’t really have something like that. The color scheme screams mecha. Her blade arms compliment her long legs. She also manages to have nice curves somewhat :) For $37, I’m mighty impressed. At her usual price at $50-$60? She still ain’t bad. Either way, I’m not done with Sazanami just yet. There’s still painting, panel lining and decaling (custom; she doesn’t come with any besides eyes) I have to do, so stay tuned! This was a very long post, but I figured I’d talk about her as much as there’s not much known of her, but if there’s anything you want to ask that I didn’t mention already, please feel free to ask!

Compeleted

Sazanami is complete, and had a pleasurable experience with the rest of the build!

Believe it or not, but I only used 3 colors for detail painting—Vallejo Red, Steel and US Dark Gray. Unlike Nuke Matrix kits which color separation is on point OOB, Sazanami apparently isn’t as color accurate to her concept art (Here’s a direct comparison). Sazanami OOB is already quite detailed on her torso, but I decided to take a stab at color correcting her anyway, wondering if the dark gray/steel matched the gray/white plastic, and while it’s off just a smidgen, can you really notice it from afar? I know the blue she uses is super common, but because she’s already so blue anyway, I left the color alone and made the blue on her belly steel instead. Then I just plastered more gray and steel on both of her bodies, and for the cherry on top, I added red accents to spice up the color scheme. Paneled her up, and it was time to decal to her.

I don’t know why applying the decals was so annoying this time around. Something I forgot to mention in my last post is that she comes with a small sheet of water slides and 4 blank faces (she came with 3 pre-painted ones), but if you can tell from my photos, I did not use those at all. Instead, I used these generic 1/44 caution decals from Delpi Decal for the 20th time, but for some reason they were kinda just a pain in the ass to use. They’re extremely small, the sheets looked like bagged spaghetti because I used them so much, and quite a few of them folded on me which was impossible to recover. I feel like I would’ve been better off using 1/100 decals for her, but it is what it is, and she really sparkles with them. Lastly, I gave a flat topcoat as you’d expect, and she was ready to pose!

This time around, I completely went against using her scythe, so posing Sazanami up with both of her bodies was a breeze! Well, the stand for her armored form started to get finicky on her, but it’s nothing like tape and a screwdriver can’t fix! I got Sazanami for her base body, but ended up loving her armored form much more! Detailing her up really adds a lot to her appearance; she looks fucking great! The overall sharpness and mechanical look she has makes her hella stylish, but adding the red onto her color scheme, sometimes I wonder if she does actually have a theme outside of general mecha. Sometimes I think she looks like a shark, yes, very much MS General Greed. Sazanami means ripple in Japanese, and was also the name of a WWII destroyer. Considering her blue and white scheme, was Sazanami actually sea themed all along? Damn. 

So, is Sazanami worth it? Easy yes.>!.. with a big caveat.!< She comes with dual bodies, a very cool weapon, and beautiful long legs. I’ve come to really like her faces as well. I started to use her smiling faceplate, which actually makes her look cute, but the pictures really don’t do faces justice. I did get her at an insanely low price of $37, but even at $50-$60 she’s still worth it. However, she is selling crazy expensive right now ranging at the $100 range, which no, she’s not as worth as much as a big box FA:Girl or MD kit. I guess supply was low for her if she’s being sold at scalper prices now. But if you find her at a good price, you should go for it.

What awaits me next in my backlog is an exciting one—my third Megami Device kit, and the one I thought I never wanted but somehow changed my mind, passing on getting Nine Tails once again and getting her instead—Asra Tamamonomae! god her box art’s so hot Until then, peace!