ARF Raizen - Completed May 2013

MG ARF Kai 

ARF, what a great kit to work with; after having built 2 MG frame kits (ABF include) I must say that this is definitely on top of my favourite list, 2^nd only to Sinanju Ver Ka; everything about this kit is just so cool, from the armour, articulation, design and all the way to its armaments. I fail to see on how anyone would dislike this kit. With that said, my design only involves the 2 Katana's; it completely got rid of the Tactical Arms II L. As the name would imply, the project was largely inspired by Raizen from Yuu Yuu Hakusho; he is one of my favourite antagonist in the whole Yuu Yuu universe and the name "Raizen" had a samurai feel to it.

After having stock built the kit, the first area that I found lacking was the shoulders. To me they were just plain, squared and lacked armour detail; this was the part that I started to mod first. The whole theme for this project is "Aero dynamism" ; I really wanted my ARF to be unique, fast and very very agile in practicality. So I designed the shoulder part to be just that, I created a wing like attachment using pla's with a rigid leading edge; I did not want it to be too large as the key word is obviously "agility" and placing large parts would render the theme useless. The head was also completely remodeled; I already love the head design for ARF but to go along with my theme, I wanted to add mini canards on the back and also remod the whole V Fin. If you've noticed, my ARF has quad V Fins with a custom V Fin base; I achieved this by using redundant parts combined with cement and a little bit of basic putty. The torso Unit has been remodeled; I added armor plating, under vents on the sides, air intakes and also 2 front canards; this gave the unit a more aerodynamic look.

The next major armour remodification was the frontal skirts; The astrays frontal skits are minimal, by doing this, ultimate articulation is achieve. However, I felt that as a gundam and a sword type MS, it needed a significant frontal skirt for extra armour; my build is close combat and with the upper leg joint exposed, practically it wasn’t sound. So, I wanted to build my own skirt, going with the aerodynamic theme, I made sure that the skirts will resemble a wing type part with enough armour to deflect low to medium body attacks. Since both ARF and ABF does not have Phase Shift Armour, I felt that a little extra amour would go a long way.

To give my build the extra boost, I also gave it back leg boosters and stabilisers so to speak; this gave the kit an extra edge aesthetically IMO. Since were on the topic of boosters, the back unit was fully customised. I decided not to use the Tactical Arms as I felt that this was too heavy and would not go well with my light and speedy design. With that said, I built the back unit casing and drilled holes for the mounts; the verniers were again redundant parts from another kit and I modded it for the fitting and drilled holes for the mounts. The weaponry for this build is mainly the katana's; I absolutely love them, one of the best weapons a gundam could have. To supplement this, I wanted my ARF to have a mid-range capability, meaning guns. Since the kit is very articulate, I figured I could do a lot of cool poses when it's done, a bit DMC'ish if you get my drift. For this, I used the koto weapon MSG, it had the gun ammo barrels to go with it which was perfect for my weapon mounts. I think that this worked very well with the close range main weapon and it gave balance armaments wise; since the guns are not heavy, I achieved my light and speedy theme and the kit as you can see with the pictures has wide range of movements.

Moving on the paint scheme; as the name is ARF, the paint scheme will have to incorporate a lot of red on the kit. However, my scheme involves 2  tones of red; concept wise it was sound but when I mixed the paint together, somehow its quite difficult to see the red colour separation; you can see it on the inner frame photos though; I really wanted it to stand out more but maybe I didn’t darken it enough. As for the armour, I wanted to stick to white but with grey separations; I love separating colours as this gives the build a bit more depth; nothing much to say to it really apart from this involved a lot of masking annoying curves.

To summarise the build itself, I really enjoyed it; from the stock build all the way to the customisation, it was nothing but pure joy. The kit has a very solid design and the weaponry is just very very unique. I can say that my version of ARF is also very unique in its own way; when I posted it on MG; it reached weakly number one and is currently rank 2 in the Seed MSV category; I also received quite a few positive feedbacks; for all the support, I can't thank you enough; Since this build and design is now quite dated, I am currently upgrading this so to speak so please look forward to it. Again,  thanks for taking your time to read.