Well, ain’t this a pleasant surprise.
Say hello to my very first Megalomaria kit—the Valiant! And I gotta say, this has been one of the most delightful experiences I’ve had in a good while. Recently, I took another pilgrimage to Gundam Planet, and while I wasn’t in dire need for anything, I thought there’d be a surprise or two of their in-store stock as they sometimes have kits there that are labeled Out of Stock on their website. Last time I was there, I was lucky to get their last Shuremi in stock, so when I was there, I was hoping I would find a wild Kagutsuchi or even Gii on the shelves, but they weren’t there. However, this Valiant was in stock, and in the back of my mind I always wanted to try a Megalomaria kit, so I thought I’d get it, but damn, is the $65 I paid for her quite steep.
Having been an entire month without building a gal, I pretty much started her right away. Megalomaria advertises itself as being super articulate, and sure enough there are a LOT of joints packed in this slim package, but to my disappointment, you still gotta sand the joints quite a bit. I thought that since this was a new line experimenting on articulation would Koto learn to make their tolerances better, but no, a lot of the joints are still questionably tight out of the box. Also as cool as the moving eyes are, they are quite annoying to align properly, so as you will see, I never move them in my poses.
At first, I thought I was just going to build her as is. Her RoboCop design and her uniformly colored legs acting as tights and having heels already made her fine as hell, but midway through getting her built, I noticed how the box art made the uniform more… blue. So, quick tangent about why I am looking for Kagutsuchi Kou—as you may know, she’s thicc af, and you know who else is thicc af? Kagutsuchi Otsu. You know what these big pair of women remind me of? The Gutterman and Guttertank from the hit indie game Ultrakill, which yes, I’ve had thought about customizing both of them like so. IF I HAD THEM! Little did I know, did I have the perfect candidate for a V1 custom right in front of me.
It’s crazy to think I wanted to paint this despite my troubles painting Kotobukiya joints, so I took the extra precaution of taping every joint imaginable, and worked out pretty flippin’ well. Valiant’s part separation worked wonders dividing the colors to V1, which I used Tamiya Metallic Blue and Rubber Black to replace the purple and brownish purple respectively, and made whatever was dark gray into shiny black. Painting went surprisingly smooth for once and reassembling everything together I realized, Valiant’s really quick to assemble. Sure, some parts may be small, but you’re essentially slapping big, sharp, curvy pieces together and end up with a tall, slim figure that can do a shitton of posing.
With the major painting done, I was kinda dreading the hand painting as I knew there were a lot of areas I spotted that I wanted to hand paint with all the mechanical detail Valiant has. Turns out I only needed a single sitting to paint everything I wanted as most of the mechanical details are dots, some lines… and that’s about it. I did the bit of panel lining that would probably show and I opted to not use custom decals as I wanted to keep her free from more visual detail that V1 doesn’t have. To top everything off, I flat coated Valiant’s face and her and went nuts using the last of my gloss coat can to make everything else as shiny as possible.
It was time to test the limits of Valiant’s poseability, and I’m gonna be honest… I think I just barely scratched the surface of her possibilities. There’s really something about robogirls—thanks to their slim nature and being unnecessary to have natural looking joints, it really allows engineers to kinda just go all out on articulation. Playing around with Valiant is like my experience with 30MM Acerby on steroids. Valiant’s range of motion is boundless, her joints basically never fall off (you may need to tighten the torso joint though), and there’s so much you can do with her included accessories. She also stands impossibly well on heels, but that’s probably due to the fact that she’s also very light relative to other girlpla out there. Oh, and it should go without saying that she indeed rocks any pose you give her, and my D610 really captured the detail like craaAAAzzzYYYY. As a big Ultrakill fan, it was incredibly fun trying to make Valiant be like V1 as possible, which was pretty easy to do as she has a revolver. She’s also a lady cop, so I also did enjoy just making her a dominatrix in a way, but also have her do regular cop duties. It is a bit of a shame that she only comes with one human faceplate, but again, she does have movable eyes which I did not take advantage of at all. There is just so much to do with Valiant, and moving her around is a lot less painless than I thought. She looks hella fine, and poses hella fine. I’m truly enamored how much of a surprise this kit was. $65 was still a steep price considering I thought she would be $55, but I’ve made my money’s worth pretty easily (and I had all the supplies available, fortunately).
That leaves me with my biggest concern—I have absolutely no space to fit her anywhere. Sloth takes up like 6 kits worth of space, and it’s gotten terribly crowded in the upper 2 shelves. There’s a high chance that I’ll be moving my WFM collection somewhere else so that I can have another shelf’s worth of space entirely. More girls are definitely coming in anyway. I did find a Garm Ripper for $65 on Gundamit and I may want to paint her like the Doom Slayer… well, I’ll figure it out. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next time!
