I’m now back and comfortably ensconced at home, so let’s take a better look at the SD Astray Red Frame:
First things first, some housekeeping and additional context/comentary.
Touching Up the Sword
Here is the katana after I replaced the silver decals with metallic marker, and added some red paint:
I still think it looked remarkably good with just the stickers, but this still looks so much better.
Other EX Standard Kits
I mentioned before that I (well, really my kids) have two other EX Standard SD Gundams. I wanted to show you some photos so we can compare them to the Astray.
Keep in mind that these have minimal panel lining, little to no painting, and the stickers are in dire shape. That’s what happens when you buy them for a five year old who doesn’t want to wait before playing with them.
First up is the SD Nu Gundam:
I think this guy has two problems. The first is that, even with the stickers, it would still require a ton of panel lining and color correction to make it look right. Without just stickers, it looks entirely too plain.
The second problem is that the stickers themselves are applied to a number of complex, multi-faceted surfaces. Getting them to look smooth and flush is tricky even given enough time and patience (which I certainly didn’t have in this case!). The stickers are also very large, and thus are prone to ripping if you dare try to remove and reapply.
All in all, I think this one requires too much extra work to get it looking good.
Now here’s the SD Wing Zero:
This one requires much less in the way of panel lining and painting - at least in theory. That’s because it uses even more color correcting stickers than the Nu Gundam. It’s got them on its rifle, its shoulders, its shield, and even its entire rear skirt armor is covered up by one massive blue decal.
So if you could apply them cleanly, you wouldn’t have to do much additional work to get it up to snuff. But that’s a huge “if”. In my estimation, applying these correctly would be even more challenging than applying the decals on the Nu Gundam. In practice, I’d say that it’s just as hard, if not harder than with Nu Gundam to make this look right.
Back to the SD Astray
All of which is to say that, in comparison to these two, I think the SD Astray comes out looking much better, with much less effort:
It has fewer decals than Wing Zero, and most of them are easier to apply than either Wing Zero or Nu Gundam. That’s largely because most of the decals are applied to flat surfaces, so they simply don’t have a chance to get ripped and/or crinkly. But even the bigger ones - like the ones that go across the feet and the arms - only have to bend at right angles. It’s fairly easy to line them up and apply them without making too many mistakes.
I think it also helps that - with all the stickers applied - the model is reasonably color accurate from the front. Most of the missing color is on the backside which, as I stated before, isn’t too big of a deal.
Really, the only extra work you really ought to consider doing is some panel lining, which helps out a ton without requiring a lot of extra work.
So yeah. Overall I think this particular EX-Standard model gives you more bang for your buck.
Playing Around
The Astray’s katana proves to be a much more fun and versatile accessory than the simple beam rifles most SD’s come with. You can sheathe it, take it out for a one-handed pose, or even go with a two-handed pose:
Not to mention you can pose it with or without the shield. The sword opens up so many possibilities.
Accessory Mashups
Now let’s look at the various additional ways that you can play around with the accessories.
First, you can plug the sword into the sheath, to make a very long claw-type thing:
I hesitate to give Bandai too much credit for this gimmick. It feels like the kind of thing a kid would do on their own just messing around with the accessories. Also, it looks kind of silly. It’s a bit too long relative to the size of the Astray itself.
The other thing you can do is combine the sword, shield, and backpack to create a similar, albeit larger monstrosity:
This looks somewhat better, due to the fact that it looks a little more like a unique weapon, rather than two existing weapons stapled together (but only a little more). And I think it also looks somewhat better in hand, for the same reasons:
But overall, I’m not in love with either gimmick. They both feel more lazy than clever.
High Grade Compatibility
The instruction manual says that these two mashup weapons can be used with High Grade Gunpla, so let’s bring out Gramps to help us test it out:
The pegs for these SD accessories do, in fact, fit in a standard sized High Grade holding hand, though it’s a very tight fit.
The size of both of these mashup weapons is more in line with the size of a High Grade, so I guess they look better (for a certain definition of “better”). But they’re still too goofy for my tastes.
Oh, I almost forgot. The instructions point out that you can take it even further by attaching some beam saber blades, but I think it looks a little too ridiculous like that:
I mean, I guess it’s better to have more options than not, but these customizations aren’t blowing my mind.
Conclusion
I’ve seen a lot of folks online dunk on the EX Standard line, and honestly, I don’t have a strong counter argument. Two of the three kits I’ve built have been lousy, and it’s hard to accept their lower quality when you can spend a few more bucks and get a much better Cross Silhouette kit.
That being said, I think the Astray proves that not all the EX Standard kits are terrible. You just have to find a design that is able to work within the limits of the line. Whether or not it’s worth hunting down such kits down is up to you, but at the very least I’m glad this one turned out well.
Other Thoughts
This was an unintentional lesson in the importance of lighting. If you look at the shield under normal lighting, you can see some of the crinkles and wrinkles in the white decals:
But in the lightbox, they largely vanish.