WIP
Wow. I’m yet another person posting Yefuna Malkina on the subreddit, but, hear me out. This kit is absolute insanity. Right from the get-go, I get her $66 shipped from Gundam Central, the same price I got the Fox for, and when it arrives at my doorstep, she comes in this gigantic box bigger than any of the previous NM kits and basically dwarfs the size of Kongo’s box, so much so that the height of her box is almost the same as the width of Kongo’s box. Yefuna comes with a plethora of runners that half of the runners can’t even fit on my table. I knew I was getting into something daunting, and man, after just finishing snapping everything together, I’m exhausted.
As many know, Yefuna comes with two bodies—sadly gone is the mechanical frame entirely in place with Arcanadea-style limbs, which overall I find… okay. I’m building something new for once and it fits better with her design, but the build is really basic, the balance sucks, the leg joints like to pop off a LOT, and oh god, the knee bend… Surprisingly though, getting the first body took me the entire day because there’s a lot of options to choose just for her human body. I kept swapping around which color I wanted for love handl—I mean side torso, since you can either go for skin, inner-frame gray, or black, which is what I ultimately ended up going. I built the bare limbs to see if I would like it… I did not, even with her included lace stockings, which I couldn’t believe that they were part of the first run bonus. Instead of using her stockings with her bare limbs, you might find me strange for this, but I used them over her black legs instead, which I like immensely more. Sure, her balance sucks even more now, but her legs actually look like human legs and it hides the terrible knee bend somewhat.
Now, for her armored form: first of all, you’re able to build an inner frame! She’s really tall and the amount of pieces it takes to complete her before building her bike… it’s a lot. And this is where things get frustrating. Trying to fit the head gear on her PVC hair is annoying, which I ended up gluing in so I could get the visor to stay snug. The armor right above her chest likes to pop off a lot… I also had to glue that. The hip joints have some really awkward articulation, the subarms like to pop off a lot—especially when holding the accessories—which the weak spot can luckily be glued together, her balance also sucks like hell and holy shit, the lance and the shield are heavy AF. I’m lucky that the wrist joints haven’t broken yet, because she only comes with 4 in total—then again there are the bare wrist joints, and the extras from my other NM kits. With Yefuna’s armored form without the bike, it’s hard to make cool poses, her balance sucks, her weapon is too heavy for both her arm and subarm to support, I was beginning to have a hard time with this kit.
Finally, the bike, which also transforms Yefuna to her centaur form: it’s literally another entire kit packaged with the two others that come in the box. Building both of Yefuna’s forms felt like two kits, but this, goddamn this got me hella exhausted. There is so much into building the bike. You got the base, two centaur legs that are even longer than Yefuna’s front legs, two smaller, support legs, her giant shield that acts as the top of the motorcycle, and even more giant parts exclusive to assembling the bike. I got really frustrated at first because I read the directions wrong and thought the wheel was held by the curl of the centaur’s hooves, destroying the stability of the rest of the bike. Later on, I discovered you had to take out the gold pieces, and viola the bike is rock solid. It’s finally when I transformed her into the centaur, which worked super well. Her shield is ultra heavy, but I managed to get it to stay put while not even having her hand actually hold the handle. There’s not much she can do in centaur mode, but she can do her box pose real easily with the stand.
With everything complete, I was quite happy, cuz after the exhaustion of building her together, her end result is really solid. I transformed her back to her bike mode knowing my mistakes, and I’m even in more awe with her capabilities. With my excitement, I really took advantage of the dual bodies she comes with, so while you know what I’m gonna do—painting, panel-lining, decaling, maybe topcoating—enjoy these sagas of pictures with Yefuna Malkina… and well… Yefuna Malkina. This has been one long post oop
Completed
Yefuna Malkina is finally complete, and fellas, lemme tell ya—I’m beat. Decorating up Yefuna was not as exhausting as building everything together, but jeez, trying to pose her for pictures again was a giant pain in the ass I almost lost my shit entirely when something went wrong in my last shots.
Before I talk about that excruciating journey, detailing Yefuna felt like taking gambles as I felt like what I wanted to do was going to cause problems, but I’m glad to say that I felt like I won all of them. Painting wise, with both Yefunas being all black armor, I went with the usual steel highlights that I put on dark armor, but I knew that I wanted to break up the black/red/gold scheme using other, poppier colors. Since the red and that tiny bit of green worked for the Fox, I thought about adding very small blue and green highlights for contrast. At first, the blue felt too out of place from the other colors, but once I added a few bits of green, it turned out pretty slick. Cleaning up the excess paint this time around was… bothersome, especially because the majority of this kit is black, and upon further inspection of my photos, my attempts of cleaning the paint were not great.
I then panel-lined: wow there is barely anything because the only color I had to panel line were the red pieces, which don’t even come with a lot of places to panel in the first place. I then thought of the bright idea of using a thicker pen to hide some of the excess paint that was hard to clean up, namely on Yefuna’s human body, and it hid the paint pretty well! Good job, me.
The decals: I used the gold decals, which replace all the significant decals on the black pieces. To my surprise, they’re actually holographic decals, which proved my gamble on the blue and green paint worthy, until I sadly ruin the holographic effect later on… There are a lot of decals, and unfortunately, the decal fitment issue returns, but unlike the Siren, it’s only a few decals that have this issue, like her shoulders, but it wasn’t a pain in the butt like how most of the Siren’s were.
The last gamble I faced in the detailing department was topcoating: Now, I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to matte topcoat her because of all the translucent red and gold parts and the holographic decals that could be affected by the coat, so I tested a few areas that weren’t super visible and as a result, this is what happened: the translucent red frosted up, but not too much to a point it looked bad, and the gold actually stayed shiny, but the color shifted to near orange. I was alright with this, and the matte black look did a lot to appearance, so, I sprayed away and oh shit the holographic decal effect is basically gone. Though, looking through my pictures, I do dig the flat look of the gold decals, I wouldn’t know how they look like with the holographic effect because I didn’t take pictures of them beforehand, but somehow, the flat kinda just works. Overall, detailing wasn’t as bad as I thought it might have been. For such a big kit she is, there was still a lot more effort put into detailing Kongo than Yefuna.
So, after waiting for the top coat to dry, she was ready to take pictures, which I did the next day because I knew taking pics was gonna take a while. And oh my god, while she wasn’t as bad to decorate, trying to pose Yefuna was the complete opposite of how I felt when posing Kongo. Yefuna, in both forms are not fun to pose. Both bodies, sometimes includes the bike, have terrible balance; it’s a fucking nightmare just to get them stand at all in my lightbox. To make matters worse, it’s gotten even worse to get Yefuna to hold her accessories. Her holding hands are hella worn out and even the subarms have gotten weak (probably due to the fact they’re connected to her torso and/or the accessories just got heavier with all the detailing). I wanted Yefuna to be in her centaur form as the final pose I would showcase as, but with her holding her accessories so awkwardly, I went with the bike form instead, also the bike looks flipping amazing with all the decals on anyway. On top of everything, parts just kept popping off and flew to the ground every time I was adjusting the poses. It took me 4 hours to do this photoshoot today, and with how frustrating it was, I’m just so goddamn done. I don’t want to touch another kit for a while.
With all that said, while the posing was an absolute nightmare, the pictures I captured made it worth it. Both Yefunas and her bike look absolutely stunning, and it’s still unbelievable how much this kit packs while being the same price as the other Nuke Matrix kits. She is finicky af, but she is worth the hype that everybody has been giving her recently.
