M.S. data

M.S. full name: ZGMF-X23S Saviour Gundam              

Pilot: Athrun Zala

Operator: ZAFT (Zodiac Alliance of Freedom Treaty)

In the postwar era, ZAFT unveils its “Second Stage” of advanced new Gundam mobile suits. One of these designs is the high speed transforming ZGMF-X23S Saviour Gundam. As with other Gundam designs, the Saviour Gundam is equipped with Phase Shift armor that blocks conventional weapon attacks. Because the Junius Treaty bans the use of N-Jammer Cancelers in mobile suits, ZAFT develops the deuterion beam energy supply system to replenish the battery’s energy on the battlefield. When the Saviour Gundam’s energy runs low, it can receive the incoming energy beam from its mothership Minerva and recharge its battery. In its mobile armor mode, the Saviour Gundam is fast and highly maneuverable in both space and Earth’s atmosphere. The Saviour Gundam is equipped with a wide variety of armaments for use in its two modes. Its main armament is a pair of “Amfortas” plasma beam cannons which can be used in both configurations. The Saviour Gundam’s other armaments include two beam cannons, vulcan guns, a beam rifle and two beam sabers.
When a new war begins between the Earth Alliance and ZAFT in October C.E. 73, PLANT Supreme Council Chairman Gilbert Durandal assigns the Saviour Gundam to Athrun Zala after reinstating him to ZAFT as a member of FAITH (Fast Acting Integrated Tactical Headquarters). Durandal gives Athrun free reign to act as he sees fit with his authority as a member of FAITH, but he requests that Athrun join the crew of the Minerva and help it play a role similar to that of the Archangel in the previous war. After a brief encounter with the Orb Union’s military, Athrun rendezvous with the Minerva at ZAFT’s Carpentaria base and participates in battles in the Indian Ocean and Middle East. The Saviour Gundam is heavily damaged while engaging Kira Yamato’s ZGMF-X10A Freedom Gundam in a naval battle near the Greek island of Crete in the Mediterranean Sea. Following the battle, the damaged mobile suit is declared a total loss.

More mecha info on MAHQ

Plamo info

Scale: 1/100

Release Date: October 2006

Series: Mobile Suit Gundam Seed Destiny

Price: 2080¥ at HLJ and Rainbow Ten

Box art

Standard looking box art for Seed Destiny kits. Nothing special here.

Instruction manual

These long beam canons remind me of these from the F91 Gundam.

Quite a lot of nice line art.

Runners & decals

There are 10 runners and a sheet of foil stickers for white and yellow parts of the wings (yuck…) and ofc a sticker  for the eye sensors.

For the pics  I recommend visiting Dalong.net since I don’t have photos of them. All the parts of my Saviour have been looking some time ago just like bellow. All of them washed and ready for painting.

Plamo out of the box

And here we have the completed plamo. This is how it was looking few years ago, when it was still standing in my Detolf shelf. I only made panel lines and added decals from Seed Destiny decal set that you can buy separately.

If it goes about the overall look of this kit then I have to say that it’s good, the color scheme for the m.s. is nice choosen(it’s always better than the pinkish Justice XD)  proportions are not bad. The only few things that I don’t like about it is the color of the beam rifle, too short wings, stickers for yellow and white areas of the wings,yellow sticker for V like insignia on the chest and few loose parts in the arm section(typical for transforming gundam kits).

Like you can see the beam canons are not only weapons they can also  be used to maintain stability of the plamo ^^ Also on this pic you can see these areas of the wings that need to be painted yellow/white or you can use stickers that comes with the kit.

I like this aerodynamic design of the shield.

Standard weapon set:beam rifle,shield and a pair of  beam sabers( lack of them on the picture,sry).

W.I.P. coming soon…

Like you can see blog have new layout and banner. Few things have to be still completed (like “About” page…) but it’s not a big deal . The blog title “Project Otaku” was changed to “Paliodor’s Hobby Blog” . Frankly, I was thinking about some other title for this blog but for now I did not invent anything better. I also added “Completed Plamo” page where I will gather all my completed painted/unpainted models. It’s  divided into Macross kits, HG,1/100 and MG sections so everything will be good organized.

If it goes about new posts then I would like to make 2-3post per week and  hope that I’ll stick to this. Right now I’m working on my 1/100 Saviour Gundam and in this upcoming week I will make a post about my progress on this kit. An interesting fact may be that I started to work on it with breaks about 2 years ago. Progress on it is so slow because it will be my first full painted model,with probably few little modifications. I call this kit my “victim” for modelling experiments and for now everything is going according to plan.

So stay tuned for new stuff on this blog!

With regards,

Patrick aka Paliodor

Cya soon

Enjoy…

Fighter mode

Gerwalk mode

Batroid mode

Summary

It’s time to write my final thoughts about this plamo. Since now I only collected gundam kits especially those from MG scale and this VF-25F was my first non-gundam kit. I  have to say that it have beautiful design and  is looking good in all of the three modes. But as much as I like it I have to be honest with myself and have to say that it has a few things that I do not like.

First one are the hands, they are made like for some of the 1/100 gundam kits (3 Pairs of Hands, one open, one grasping and one flat palmed)  and if I pay 4,500¥ for a kit then I would like to have them made like for a MG kit…

Also decals provided with the kit aren’t the best, some of them  don’t cover the entire area  of the part what they should cover.  Overall decals for the VF-25 are looking   like we printed them ourselves on a colour copier. They really could done them better. Like all other decals for model kits , they are also quite fragile. That’s why the best would be to leave plamo in one mode since with every transformation the decals are little by little damaged by moving parts. You can of course apply top coat to protect them but still it’s quite risky that during trasformation something can be destroyed.

I was also having problems with stability of the Valkyrie in the gerwalk mode with the reached hands . It easily lose stability in this mode and I had to work  a bit  on the model so it could stand on his own legs. Maybe if the joints could be better then  probably plamo  would have no problems with stability in the gerwalk mode.

But the worst of thing is the problem with the gaps between shoulder plates, you can read about it at the end of the [WIP part2] .

Overall  for 4500¥  I have expected to see a plamo that will be on the level of gundam MG kits and  instead of that we get a VF-25 that  have some elements on a level of  MG kit and some on the level of 1\100  kits… Just look at the latest MG Zaku ver. 2.0 or other new MG kits, they are almost perfect  and sometimes even cheaper then this Messiah Valkyrie. I know that I complain to much about this kit but it was released by Bandai, company that  knows how to made great looking kits and this time I’m a bit disappointed about some aspects of the kit…

So, this is a good model  (that will look even better after painting and the modification of certain parts) but it’s not without drawbacks…

So here we are, the last   “WIP” post of the VF-25.  I’m still not so good if it goes about this part of the plamo review but with every post like this one I improves my skill if it goes about writting “WIP” posts ^^.

Here are the parts for the front part of the main body.

In the left corner you can see the hatches for the landing gear. By the way, landing gear is still in the proces of painting so I will probably show it in the “Completed model” post…

The rest of the parts for the front body of the Valkyrie.

Like you can see above, I have already painted the frame of the conopy with Tamiya acrylic black paint.  I have used Italeri synthetic round brush “000″ , it’s good for painting very small parts and pilot figures.

This  part in the center of the pic is where the head will be added.

Last thing to do is to add pilot and conopy and the front part of the main body will be completed.

There’s not so many parts for the wings and stabilizers.

Wing and stabilizer  assembled.

Now I only need to add legs and arms and Valkyrie will be almost completed.

This is  the last part that have to be added.  It’s used also as a shield in batroid mode.

Things that need to be done are:  apply rest of the decals, paint the pilot and to improve some of the panel lines. I will not apply any top coat since when I will have airbrush and compressor I plan to paint it. The only thing that I don’t like about this kit is that some of the decals are quite hard to apply and not so good quality, also I have some problems with this parts:

since it not adheres perfectly to the rest of the fuselage.   I have learned from the Macross world forum that I’m not the only one who have this problem.

wm cheng (one of the members from this forum) said:

Unfortunately, nope, you did nothing wrong, its just a really poor fit and Bandai didn’t bother with any good pins or attachment mechanisms. Once you transform it a few times and the joints loosen up, you get the knack of tweaking the legs and upper thighs underneath a bit to get a better fit. You can play with it a bit to get all the shoulder plates to lie a bit more flat, and the gaps will even out a bit, but that IS the problematic area which we all have. I think their solution is the super packs that has an entirely new piece that covers it.

So then,  Bandai make so many great looking gunpla kits  and when it comes about Macross F plamos they made them like some 1/100 kits. It’s a shame, really Hasegawa should do those VF-25 from Macross Frontier and not Bandai. It’s better if they remain at gundam kits…

[Completed model] post coming soon…

Well, this post should be called1/72 VF-25F Messiah Valkyrie Alto Custom: super slow wip XD . Lately I don’t have too much time to work on this plamo so my progress on it is very slow.  I can say that it is almost finished but still have few things  to do…

Head

There is not much parts for the head. There was also sticker for the “eye” sensor but it was looking so ugly that I decided to paint this part with  Tamiya clear green.

Those parts that have been selected with red lines have been also painted because they should be in grey color.

And that’s how the head is looking after assembling and painting. I have to say that maybe design of the head is quite simple but still it’s looking  very nice.  It was good decision to paint  the parts that require this. As a result, the final appearance looks a lot better than if I used stickers and left some of the parts unpainted.

Arms and hands

Front and back of the arm

Together with the model we obtain three pairs of hands. One pair  for valkyrie in figther mode (this  at the very bottom) and two pairs for use in the gerwalk and batroid mode.

Legs

I have to say that feets have been nicely detailed. They also have two functions,one very easy to guess as a feets and second as a exhaust nozzle.

Preview of the inner frame of the legs.

Legs are made very good, with nice details,  proportions and pretty good articulation. The bad things are white and red decals for the vertical stabilizer (fins), after applying the decals the black color of the parts passes the decals (photo below)  and because of that they don’t have ideal colors. That’s why I also have to paint this part of the vertical stabilizer.

There are also decals that don’t cover the entire part and they should do that, just look at the photo below:

I will have to use black gundam marker to cover the white lines  around the decal.  Bandai should be ashamed for making such a bad decals…

Gun pod & assault knife

This part of the gun pod that is selected  with red lines must be painted in red color, or if you do not want to paint it, you can use the decal for this part of the gun pod. I have used it but after few sec it have fall off so I decided to paint it…

Like you can see, the gun pod have very simple design and it’s construction was very easy. It took me only few minutes to assembly it.

If it goes about assault knife, then well it’s looking just like all the normal knifes so nothing special about it.  You will probably notice that in some areas you will see paint, it’s becacuse I was testing if the paint that I have in my house would look good on it but the final effect wasn’t good so I removed the paint and will use silver gundam marker for the edge of the knife. It will probably look much better then the paint that I have used …

[WIP 2] coming soon…

The only thing that is left are lights,beam rifle and shield but like you can see, it’s already looking great. I only hope that when I visit Japan in next year, this statue will be still standing in Tokio so I will have oportunity to take some nice photos of it ^^

Pics from: Punynari blog and Ngee Khiong