Astraea

Generally speaking, this was not too hard to build. I like how the GN Cannon can mount on the front shoulder piece; now I understand why there was a quadruple-GN cannon setup with this kit. Too bad you’d have to spend money on four Astraea kits just to get it. For this kit, I had painted the eyes with metallic green Gundam Marker and black pen around it to get an effect not unlike the stickers. The Proto GN Sword’s outside lining was painted in metallic silver Gundam Marker; same goes for the inside lining of the GN Cannon.

Because of recycled parts from the “Astraea R2″, I also went and built the head with the visor on. The visor was handpainted in clear blue, and it looks great when it connects on the front of the head.

Avalanche Exia Dash

Quite a number of runners to build this beast. Very heavily armored, and unfortunately very reliant on stickers. I went with Gundam Marker instead, though you can see I’m not great at it. The GN Sword was painted metallic silver on the outside much like the Astraea.

Exia R2

Actually, this was more a reconversion. If you recall my earlier blog post, I had created an “Astraea R2″, but eventually I got a little tired of it and converted back to Exia. You’ll also notice in the gallery that I painted the flywheel metallic silver, and the insides of the GN Drives are painted metallic green. It may seem like the flywheel was painted green, but it’s actually a reflection caused by the lighting from the two. Neat effect.

00 Raiser Seven Sword/G

This one I enjoyed the most putting together. You see, I had initially built 00 Raiser a couple of years back, but it was a botched paintjob, and I had to buy an extra 0 Raiser kit because I had lost some missing parts. Even so, the paintjob was still miserable. This year I opted to buy a 00 Gundam Seven Sword/G kit, and while I was building it, I decided to recycle the old 0 Raiser parts with the good ones (I had plenty to go around). As a result, I ended up with the 00 Raiser Seven Sword/G; you don’t want to mess with this thing. It’s also quite heavy.

The insides of the GN Buster Sword are painted metallic green only on the GN Condenser sections. I was surprised at how easy it was to get it done; I even had time to use a black pen to go around the metallic green section on the white part of the sword. The GN Shields, though an afterthought, were also painted metallic green on the outer edge.

00 Qan[T]

Chronologically speaking, this was actually the first kit I built after the “Astraea R2″. The shield was painted white on the corner, and the headpiece was painted by hand with a brush; with some trial and error, I actually got some interesting practice and skills working on the 00 Qan[T], which carried over to the other model kits in some areas.

Overall

Across all of the units, the section under the GN Condenser was painted metallic green where applicable; this was not the case with the 00 Raiser 7s/G, as it had small details on the stickers I didn’t want lost. That said, the lens themselves were either handpainted or airbrushed in clear green. Only the 00 Raiser, Exia R2, and Astraea had their eyes painted rather than having stickers, as they came later chronologically during my work and I had some time to experiment with painting eyes.

Been a while since I last blogged. So I went ahead and built an Astraea unit, HG, 1/144. I used one of those magazine boxes with the Astraea HG conversion kits, not the actual Astraea HG box that’s out there. That said, I had only gotten it for $10 so at the time it was worth it. Sat on this for so long, so it was time to actually do something with this kit.

The Exia R2 comes with the GN Sword Kai, so I modified it a bit and painted the gray part of the blade white. Looks a little more like the GN Sword III, in my opinion. Back skirt was missing stickers, so I went with red Gundam Marker for that. Top headpiece was also missing a sticker, so I took a toothpick (believe it or not) and dabbed it with a Tamiya dark green.

The GN condensor clear pieces were painted with Tamiya clear green, similar to the method used by rrobbert184. Unlike his though, I don’t think I can see any brush strokes; maybe some very small dabs but almost impossible to notice. It looks great; even better than using stickers to create the same effect.

Legs were also from the R2 rather than regular Exia. GN Shield was painted white, though a bit shabby. I do plan on filling in that space with black if I get a panel lining marker somewhere; anyone got any bright ideas?

I’m also quite tempted to buy the Blu-ray now.

P.S. Non-mainstream Japanese theme song is a plus.
P.S.S. English and Japanese mixed in some places is lol. Does this mean the English voice acting is working alongside the Japanese versions too?

Again?! LOL

Almost makes you feel sorry for the people who bought MG Exia. ^^;

Source: Official PG 00 Raiser Website

Get lost, Harmony Gold.

I did a bit of investigation and checked out the Xbox Live Marketplace… what I found was that 248 Indie games were available on the Japan marketplace, while some 408 were available on the US/Europe marketplace. And of those numbers, only some games were shared but not all.

Needless to say, I think this is more a problem on the author’s part for not checking content restrictions and restricting it to the region it’s supposed to be limited to. Otherwise, all 408 games would have appeared on both marketplaces, rather than this not so mutually exclusive (or not exclusive at all) state of affairs.

Edit: Just found this:

Games are now evaluated for “one world” or worldwide approval.

…

Each game has to match the standards of all countries we support – that means the strictest standard will be applied for all countries. A game must pass all criteria before being allowed for sale in ANY Xbox LIVE marketplace.

Guess it’s the way the games are made then. If this was the policy, why on earth did the author decide to put a galge like this on Indie Games…?

Now they’re making a movie based off Unlimited Blade Works. If you think about it though, not long after the Fate/stay night TV series ended, Kara no Kyoukai’s movies came out, and they were a resounding success. What’s not to say that Studio Deen realizes that what they did was pretty stupid, and that they want to try this again for round 2? After all, people do learn after screwing things up… most of the time.

Of course, this is all just a very dim, but glimmering hope of light for the UBW movie, and I pray that it will actually work out well. If they had billed the Fate/stay night TV series as just being the Fate scenario back in the day, maybe it would have worked out better; all they’d have to do is follow the Realta Nua variation of the Fate scenario.

Better yet, they could have done it as a movie, and that would have worked out as well.