Fafnir

Broken Blade is a medieval-ish sorcery-themed mecha series. I’ve been eying the Kotobukiya kits for awhile, so I welcomed the opportunity to review one of them.

The Fafnir’s box is nicely illustrated, but feels a little rushed, particularly the graphic design. That title looks like maybe five minutes of thought went into it.

The model consists of 11 runners of standard quality styrene and a few runners of rubber joints. I am impressed by the inclusion of fabric accessories and a few pre-painted parts. The part count is a little low for a model which is sold at a similar price point as a MG kit

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The build is straightforward. I spent around five hours on the initial construction. The Fafnir is roughly analogous to a High Grade Bandai kit. There’s no skeletal framework or cockpit. The joints are sometimes clumsy, with a few loose plastic-on-plastic connections. Kotobukiya typically excels at laminating crisp layers of details, but the Fafnir’s design is too blocky to integrate any of that. The molding is sharp, though. And sprue placement is mostly thoughtful.

The Fafnir is a good-looking bot, though its dark colors muddy up its overall look. His proportions and styling are solid. I like the vaguely steam-punk aesthetic.

You may notice that I’ve placed a gun and shield in his hands. Do you like them? Good, because you don’t have a choice. You have to glue the hands around the accessories. No swapping out weapons here. And no extra hands. The hands will forever hold a specific accessory, or forever hold none. And there are two significant, signature weapons in addition to that gun and shield! Weapons which mount on his back, presumably with a hand attached? But for forty dollars, you get exactly two glue-on hands. What a maddening, stupid mistake.

I was fully prepared to like this thing. Sure, the build was little touchy. There were indications that the Fafnir was poorly engineered, but I soldiered through, confident that everything would come together. And come together it did, before coming completely apart. As I attempted to pose the figure, it crumbled. The lower legs came off. The upper legs came off. A hip exploded. The skirt armor fell off. The lower arms fell off. The cod-piece came apart. The hand, which of course was glued around the gun, fell apart.

All very frustrating, certainly. I then spent an additional hour painstakingly re-attaching all of these pieces, gluing them into place for added stability. Surely now this damned thing would hold together long enough for a few pictures. Nope.

After now investing six hours in the Fafnir, I am officially done. Here’s some poses before it completely disintegrates, I guess.

I’d tell you more about the model’s features, but I don’t want to. A rare dud for Koto.