Christmas Garbage Time is cancelled!!
But seriously, I’m giving up on it. After building both the Barbatos Lupus and the Lupus Rex, I tried working on the last two Garbage Time kits (the High Grade Astaroth Rinascimento and the IBO Option Set #7). But the two Barbatos’es combined were such a miserable experience that I found myself disillusioned with the entire High Grade IBO line.
I didn’t build enough of the Rinascimento to show you anything, but I did at least assemble all the accessories from the Option Set.
Option Set 7
I didn’t buy this specific kit because I was particularly enamored with it. I simply wanted to augment the extremely sparse number of weapons and accessories that came with the Lupus and Lupus Rex, and this was the only Option Set in stock at the time.
In theory it’s a great little collection. You’ve got two big handheld guns, some melee weapons, and some cannons that (probably) attach to hardpoints on a number of different IBO models. There’s also a pair of blue open palm hands for Gundam Vidar (Interestingly enough, the blue area of the hands are not made of blue plastic, but rather a sticker. I’ve never seen anything like that before on a High Grade):
The problem with this Option Set is the same problem that plagues most of Bandai’s accessory packs - it overcharges and under delivers.
The accessories themselves are fine, but they’re not color accurate out of the box (which seems to be a general rule with these kinds of accessory packs), and all in all it’s not that much plastic:
And yet if you wanted to buy this Option Set, it would cost you about $10 from most stores.
You know what else you could get for that same amount of money?
This:
Or this:
Or if you spend just two dollars more, you could get this:
My point here isn’t just that you can buy a full blown Gunpla for the price of an accessory pack (though that point also stands). All three of these kits are very nice little (the Revive Gundam in particular has some of the best articulation on any High Grade, and is probably unmatched at its price point).
If Bandai insists on charging so much for their accessory packs, they could at least splurge a little bit to provide some better color separation (or simply put more accessories in the box). Instead it feels a bit like the Razor and Razor Blade business model, where the base IBO kits are cheap, but you’re going to have to pay a premium to get all the accessories they need.
It all just feels so skeevy. Between that and the fact that I have no interest in posing either of the two Barbatos’es, I’m going to just put these in storage. Maybe one day I’ll paint them up and use them for some other Gunpla, but for now I’m just not in the mood.
One More Post
I have one more post tonight before we wrap up Garbage Time 2023. See you then.