I wanted to make another robot kit, but rather than a weeks-long HG Gundam or Zoid (both of which are on ‘my stack’) I instead opted for an ‘easy’ 1/144 kit.
My thoughts first turned to the impressive Strike Freedom Gundam 1/144 RG kit, but Florence is going to make that one and I didn’t want to ‘copy’! Then an enjoyable search online led to me buying this guy for about $20:
It’s ‘Valrave’ from the anime Valrave The Liberator. I neither know or care to know anything about the anime but loved the design of the mecha 🙂
Here’s what I found inside:
I hadn’t bought a 1/144 kit in a long while and was surprised at the detail of this one. 7 different plastic colours along with metallic stickers is more than I expected from a budget kit.
Assembly was easy enough, with the whole shebang taking maybe 4 hours in a few sessions. The most complex part was easily the abundance of stickers:
Here’s a before-and-after of the right leg:
If you look along the bottom edges, half-way up the leg, and along the rims of the two curved hip pieces you can see where I (carefully!) have applied stickers. I needed tweezers and patience to get these perfect, and thankfully they were normal adhesive stickers and not the challenging water-applied decals.
Here’s all the body parts pre-assembly:
And here he is put together:
So much detail for such an inexpensive kit! He’s very poseable, extremely well balanced and looks great.
Next were the weapons and stand. I’d never had a kit with a stand before so even though he stands easily I put him up on the stand as if he were hovering:
There are many weapon options. I went understand, with just the one sword and shield. Here’s a shot from behind:
And here he is in his new home, sharing a shelf with a giant stuffed Peep:
Obviously I’m very pleased with everything about this $20 model. Good thing I bought another in the lie at the same time 😉