With one Battlelogue model down, let’s keep the momentum going and build another. This is actually the first one I bought, as it is by far my favorite custom design from Battleogue. It’s the Gundam Helios:
About the Mobile Suit
The Helios is the latest custom design of Ryusei Fudou, the playable protagonist of Gundam Breaker Mobile.
While all of the customs in the Battlelogue miniseries are portrayed as being powerful, Ryusei and his Helios are arguably portrayed as a cut above the rest. And when you consider what it’s based on, it’s easy to understand why. The handheld weapons (and some body parts) are based on the Destiny Gundam. It borrows the chest design and the twin satellite cannons from the Double X Gundam. It takes the Wings (including the wing mounted weapons) from the Freedom Gundam and turns them upside down. And on top of all that, it features the fin-like venting system of F91, and bits of Psychoframe from the Unicorn Gundam.
It’s basically the mobile suit equivalent of giving your opponent the middle finger.
To be fair, the fight scenes in Battlelogue make it clear that the Helios isn’t a one-man army. It will still struggle as much as anyone against multiple foes. But give it a chance to line up a shot with its many (many!!) guns, and it will absolutely end you:
About the Visual Design
Back when I built the Blazing Gundam, I outlined three rough categories that the custom designs from Build Fighters/Build Divers/Breaker/Battlelogue fall into. The Gundam Helios lies squarely in the third category - “Take a bunch of existing designs and combine them together in a way that no real life builder could possibly do with a humble kitbash“
In general, I think this category is the riskiest one. It’s difficult to come up with a design that doesn’t look too over the top, and there’s an argument to be made that any mashup that isn’t possible as a kitbash is cheating.
All things considered, I think Helios sidesteps these issues. I know that it sounds like the kind of design you’d expect from a hyper fifth grader, it looks much more subdued than that. I feel like this is the work of someone(s) who really knows their stuff. They were able to look at different Gundam designs from different artists, shows, and even different decades, and figure out how some of them might fit together and complement one another. It doesn’t look like a sloppy mishmash, and that, I think, is the main reason why it works so well.
That, and the color scheme. Seriously - why don’t we see these tones of blue and green used more often? It’s such a fresh and clean look.
About the Kit
Just like the Blazing Gundam, this kit has a suggested retail of $25. In fact, I think all of the Battlelogue kits do, despite having differing part counts, and some being more complex than others.
This isn’t actually that surprsing, at least not to me. One thing I’ve gleamed over the years about the way Bandai prices Gunpla is that they seem to prize consistency. If a kit came out twenty years ago for 1500 yen, a modern reprint is going to retail for the same (or very close to it). When you consider inflation, this is a very good thing for the consumer.
On the flip side, they may also choose to price an entire (small) line of kits the same, simply because it’s easier for their sake. Depending on which ones you like, this may not be good for your wallet1, but I guess that’s just the other side of the coin.
For what it’s worth, the Helios feels like a good deal at $25.
- The Wing Gundam Sky Zero is a great example. It’s another $25 Battlelogue kit that looks to be a recolor of the existing High Grade Wing Zero, which is a sub-$20 kit. [return]