hisashiburi!

I found this bootleg in a local store and for a cheap price bought it thinking it’s a good kit to practice with and a source of extra caps. I’m no experienced builder so it still took me several hours to build the thing. After snipping and attaching the last piece, I was really surprised that, for a china-made product, the model really looks like a serpent custom.

The box comes with the usual sprues, stickers, and a brochure/building guide. The front of the brochure contains the story of the serpent as it appeared in the anime and some cool pictures of the original serpent. The guide is found at the back with the usual image guide as in the original Bandai. The brochure, however, is written in Chinese and English. I had fun reading the story captions below several anime screenshots. The model comes with two weapons: a double gatling gun and a beam cannon (my favorite). There are also two pairs of hands: one open palm for holding the barrel of the cannon (see pix) and another to hold the gatling gun (forgot to shoot it).

 

 

 

 

It’s obviously different from the original Bandai kits as it lacks detail and the plastic and paint are of lower quality. It’s pretty stable, however. It even survived my fall-from-the-table test without shattering into pieces. The joints are tight and the limbs are very articulate. I didn’t have a hard time making different poses with it. For some reason I lost the stickers (there should be red stickers on the shoulders) and a butt piece; but it still looks complete. As long as it can stand, I guess I succeeded in making myself a gundam.

For a bootleg and for the price, I really think that it looks ok. I’m now building another bootleg; this time a 1/100 Astray Blue Frame 2ndL. This seems to be interesting. I’ll post some pics when it’s done.