By Christopher Troy
Fun facts kids: Bandai makes kits for other mecha franchises that don’t contain the word “Gundam”. Macross Frontier, Dragon Ball Z, Escaflowne, and of course, Gainax’s Neon Genesis Evangelion have all received the Gunpla treatment, and today, we’ll be looking at the EVA o-1 from the 2nd Eva movie “Evangelion 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance. Spoiler alert: It’s awesome, yet complex as hell.
Series Origin: The Eva 0-1 originates from Gainax’s 1997 mega-hit “Neon Genesis Evangelion”, a 26 episode series which spawned 2 movies, another 4 movies which retell the series (or at least we think they 2. So far only 2 of them have been released and things aren’t exactly the same. Remember the Mari review from a few weeks back), and a ton of merchandise, including countless manga, video games, figurines, and stuff I can’t mention here.
Legacy: The Eva 0-1 is probably the most popular of the mecha from the series, although Asuka and Rei have gotten a lot more of merchandise as fan service has made Gainax a lot of money. Aside from the various merchandise, movies and manga (aka the Gainax tri-fect of money) , the 0-1 has cameo-ed/been re imagined for the Japan-only Super Robot Wars game, has appeared on postage stamps, and recently, had a amusement park built at the base of a Japanese mountain with a 1:1 scale bust of the Eva 0-1 as well as a to scale entry plug. That’s all kinds of awesome in my opinion.
Appearances, Equipment and Build log: Like I said earlier, this kit is great. But for a 1/100th (?) scale kit, it is super complex.
These are just some of the parts you have to work with. I literally could not fit everything into frame. And it makes sense, as there’s a lot of work to be done. First off, there’s an internal frame/engine to built, which includes a number of small pieces. Some gluing was involved, as there were some connecting issues, but man, the fact you have a functional entry plug/plug port, plus casing. From there, the other bit of armor can be constructed, which is a lot more humanoid looking than your standard’s Gundam. There’s actually several layers to build, but it’s fairly simple: you just have to snap together some pieces as you would with any standard Gundam kit.
The head itself is a unique piece. It requires being plugged into 2 separate neck slots, which means you really can’t move the head. However, you can open and close the jaw, to reenact beserker mode. The eye stickers also come in calm and beserk mode as well, which is a very cool feature. Either way, as you can see from the photos, it’s a fairly detailed kit, although the detail comes at the expense of articulation at times. At least for the torso.
The arm as you can see, has an invisible joint, which is awesome and gives a sense of realism visually. The elbow/forearm is actually a soft plastic which make slipping in the green forearm armor easy. As for the decals, they’re rub-ons, versus the average stickers, which are also included for other parts of the body.
That’s all for this entry. I’ll focus on the lower half and the weapons next week.
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