Rayleonard 04-ALICIA

To date my one and only Armored Core kit, and also my one and only Kotobukiya kit. While I didn't play much of the PS3 era games that this design is from, I did play some of the PS2 era ones while in middle school so I had some nostalgia for the games. This kit was a random impulse buy from a comic book store in San Francisco and is the "White" boxing of the kit, which from what I can tell, the only difference is the plastic color and the shoulder weapons.

The kit is impressively statured (about the size and heft of a 1/100 Gunpla), but I absolutely hated the way the parts layout was designed. The weapons are all entirely 2-part clamshells, but the limbs are divided into tons of small subassemblies that oftentimes just feel fiddly and delicate for no clear reason. The very large and lanky limbs are also on small HG sized ball joints which makes posing stability an issue as well, especially with the large weapons equipped.

The kit itself does build to a relatively cool looking final product and once all the ball joints are slightly reinforced, it is fairly stable when displayed. However the headaches during construction definitely made me hesitant to try anything too adventurous during painting.

The design is extremely detailed and there are lots of intense mechanical details inherent to the design. Thus, a simple color scheme was utilized comprising mostly of Alclad II lacquers - an overall metallic tone was sprayed and then tinted with red and yellow. Smaller details were picked out with copper and gold titanium tones.

The decals were 3rd party and not being pre-cut, were very time consuming when it came to the small stencil details. For some reason, the white parts of the decals would also often melt when exposed to decal setter, so a lot of second tries had to be attempted when applying the decals.

The higher cost of this kit (approx $50USD at time of purchase), combined with the puzzling design choices, lack of waterslide decals, and a surprising amount of filler and seam welding needed for a modern snap fit kit has since put me off of Kotobukiya kits. This completed kit was traded away for a SF3D kit from someone's stash... something that proved to be much more enjoyable to build!