WIP
Welp, I finished snapping together Susanowo Regalia, and at the time of writing this I also just finished painting, including hand painting all of the mustard gold parts with Tamiya Titanium Gold. This really was a quick build, but by no means disappointing.
Unfortunately, even though I’m building my first MD kit, it comes with no surprises. It is super obvious how Megami Device’s engineering… uh, ““inspired”” the assembly of Nuke Matrix kits, there’s a lot of sanding to be done for the joints and the seamlines, and you leave a lot of small parts behind to transform Susanowo from her base form to her armored form. Nonetheless, despite her quick build from her heads to her accessories, Susanowo Regalia really pops even out of the box and it is such a godsend how minimal color correcting is required versus the two Frame Arms Girls I’ve previously done.
Susanowo’s base form is nothing to write home about, though it is a seam line removal nightmare. The three faceplates that she comes with are just… adorable. Her joyful and embarrassed(?) faces are straight up diabetic, it’s a great contrast to OG Susanowo’s stoic look. I really like how she’s thick, like, actually wider in the chest and thighs than usual and I love the boob curtains, though, it was disappointing to tell my dad that no, they do not flap up. Her hair tails are gigantic, but do be wary about the joint that connects it to the head—mine unfortunately broke, which the kit luckily provides two more. The problem doesn’t lie with the joint itself, but the connections being hella tight and the impulse of trying to make her tails parallel to her body. Her balance sucks with her really long heels and her toe bend being quite loose, you can strengthen that joint up and use the included stand, but it’s still a hard time trying to get her to stand up because holy shit, the stand is atrocious. This stand design is somehow even worse than Kotobukiya’s usual ball and rod stand because it has one big flaw—there is no point of articulation where the arm and base meet, which means two things: 1-even if you get her standing with the base, there’s a high chance that the base will not be flat, and 2-the stand has a much harder time withstanding Susanowo’s weight. I’m really considering getting a Simple Stand pack because the included stand is that bad.
Getting into her armored form, there are two of them—her normal armored form and her Regalia form, which as you can tell, I mostly went for her Regalia form. I already liked her tails in the back and making them into huge twintails wasn’t really my cup of tea. Besides, making her shield into that crown is awesome. Her entire Regalia form is magical in a way. Add just half a layer of armor on top of her base form, she stands out with great presence. I love the Japanese mythological theme she goes for (yes, as she’s based on Susanoo) and the gold, purple and red color scheme, it’s perfect. Her GN sword looks great too, also adding great contrast, and still fits in place because of her heterochromia. I also just like how she’s depicted as a left-handed wielder, which she’ll pretty much be the outcast as everyone else uses their right hand.
Overall, shit I still had a lot to say while this was a smaller kit than usual. As I said before, I already finished painting, but I still have quite a bit to get through before I’ll be finished, and I’ll be busy with Thanksgiving around the corner. I’ll see you then!
Completed
Susanowo Regalia is complete!
And I just feel so done right now. I don’t know if it’s just the turkey in my stomach, but goddamn, I feel so… defeated. Don’t get me wrong, Susanowo is an absolute beauty, and hella adorable, but how I’m feeling right now is exactly the way I feel after finishing Yefuna Malkina, which is ironic considering how she had some… similarities to Susanowo, but my frustrations I had before is very similar to now.
Painting, while being the easy part as I finished it before even writing my OOB post, became my very enemy. I made a grave mistake by just putting blobs of paint on the gold joints and it caused a core joint that holds her big armor
to crack which took me a few hours to resolve. I pretty much had to sand down and remove the paint of every gold piece that joined together or else it would not fit, but then I sanded some joints too much it became loose, and just inserting double sided tape wouldn’t fix it as it would just become too tight again that it would crack some other joint. The color correcting painting on the other hand went pretty smooth and the only real addition I made was adding silver on the ticks of the black parts. Panel lining for the most part was really quick as most of the parts are black, and I’m thankful that the pen could draw on the painted gold parts.
Decals—there were only like six of them but holy shit were they tedious. The ones on her drapes flowed over the surface and it took a whole lot of mark setter for the decal to finally stick onto the part so I could curl the decal on the edges. The front drape created a terrible air bubble after application and the ones big armor pieces were alright until they suddenly peeled out halfway, which I dabbed some mark setter, and luckily that did the job. I finally topped everything up with a flat topcoat as usual, and it was time to pose.
Posing Susanowo on her base form was alright, but posing her in her Regalia form—which I didn’t even transform her into normal armored form—was just… it was just really annoying. Like Durga but to a bigger extent, there are some really tight joints, and then some really loose joints. Hell, there are just too many points of articulation that she’s just really finicky to handle. Trying to move her thigh, it moves the entire bottom half with it, or move her head and it moves everything else as the shoulder armor is in the way her head or her giant hairtails are in the way of her sword. On top of everything, her balance and the included stand are still fucking terrible, so I’m just ready to like scream on the top of my lungs, but I’m so bloated from all the food that I don’t even have the energy to let out my anger. Instead of building anger, I just got worn out. As soon as I finished posing, I was just ready to put Susanowo in my display room.
I kinda just hate how I feel this way. I was excited to try my very first Megami Device, as well as finally having a Susanowo, but I also heard this was a fun and simple build, so I approached this build very casually, which would shoot myself in the foot. I didn’t take time to sand all the joints when I should’ve as I cracked so many parts along the way. This is probably the most parts I broke in a kit recently and one of the few times I had to resort to super glue, multiple times. That, and blazing through this entire project in 5 days, I lost the very core thing about building plastic kits—having fun. I was not in the zone doing this, and I regret building Susanowo in a time where I’m feeling burnt out in all aspects.
So, it should be said that I’m taking a little break. I still have Amaterasu to go, but I’m gonna wait until I feel excited to do another kit again. Thanks for reading, sorry for this mundane rant, and I’ll see you again soon.
