Griffon

Have you ever been so excited to get something and somehow you forget about it in some dark corner? That’s sort of what happened with this Griffon kit. I didn’t necessarily forget about it, I just didn’t really have the time to give it the proper attention until recently and I’m glad I did. Once again, Kotobukiya has made model kit building easy. How? Well these D-Style kits come with pre-painted details so that you can literally just put it together. It allows you to build the winged Griffon or aqua version. For this review, I’ve chosen the winged version.

We get a real nice box with a CG rendered super deformed Griffon on the cover. The box is nice and glossy and gives the kit a high end feel.

Once you pull off the top box, you are hit square in the face with the reality of having to build and/or paint the kit. Since I haven’t built a kit in a while before I hit up the D-Style kits, I felt a bit overwhelmed and almost put the kit away again. But then I remembered, wait, this is a Kotobukiya kit and it will be a snap…literally.

It even comes with a nice full color gloss instruction sheet which gives you color keyed photographs should you choose to break out your airbrush and paint brushes. The actual instructions are black and white line drawings. Very clear and informative. No need to be able to read Japanese.

Here is one of the trees that has the painted detail. Don’t expect a huge amount of prepainted details. It is the bare minimum required to have a decent looking figure without having to paint.

The cloth joints on this kit are obviously not cloth but they are painted a matte bluish-gray. You will find this detail on the legs and arms.

There is also a baggy with caps and ball joints similar to what you would find in Gunpla and of the same material. It also has a baggy with the translucent red visor.

After about an hour of cutting snapping and weathering, I was left with this. Not bad for a fairly small investment in time.

From the back he is as crisply detailed as you would expect in a Kotobukiya release.

Here is a shot of more red painted details.

Up close you can see the single eye behind the red visor. I used a silver paint marker to detail the eye before covering it with the visor to give it a bit more depth. The eye comes in silver but I used a different shade to weather it a bit. It really looks like there a bunch of stuff going on behind that visor.

So once you’re done you don’t have to just leave it alone. Go ahead and pose it! Although it’s articulation is somewhat limited, go ahead and have fun with it. I do recommend using some modeling glue on the wing bases since they LOVE to fall apart. Other than that, it takes to posing well.

Kotobukiya has released three Patlabor kits so far and unfortunately I missed out on #2, so in this picture Griffon is accompanied by D-Style 01 Ingram.

It’s a nice kit, very simple and the final product comes out real nice. I would like to note that I did a very simple weathering metallizing paint job to it to give it more detail. My only complaint is that the aqua packs should have had the yellow detail painted on. This is the biggest reason I didn’t choose to build it with the aqua packs to match the Brave Gokin Griffon in my display case. Not shown in the review are the weapon holding hands and the tiny gun that comes with it as they were not available during the photo shoot. However you can check it out in the video here where I also show how I weathered it. It’s relatively inexpensive and a curious piece for all you Griffon fans.