I don’t usually buy Gunpla from Amazon, but sometimes you get a gift card and have nothing else to spend it on, so …
This here is the Gundam Astaroth Origin, from the Iron Blooded Orphans spinoff manga Iron Blooded Orphans Gekko.
About the Mobile Suit
The Astaroth has a complicated history, but I’m going to keep it quick.
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It was the 29th of the 72 Gundams built during the Calamity War. Back then it looked like this:
This version is known as the “Astaroth Origin”, and it’s what today’s model kit is based on.
- After the war it fell into the hands of a prominent member family of Gjallarhorn
- The family fell on hard times and had to sell off most of Astaroth’s armor, leaving only the frame
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The frame somehow falls into the hands of a mob family, who equipped it with a bunch of salvaged armor to make it functional. That version looks like this:
This is the form colloquially known as just “Gundam Astaroth”, and I built it many many years ago.
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This new form of Astaroth went on a bunch of adventures, which are the actual events chronicled in the Iron Blooded Orphans Gekko manga. During these adventures the mobile suit once again lost its armor and had to be refitted. This led to its next form, the Astaroth Rinascimento:
I have this kit, but for now it’s still on the backlog.
- I’m not 100% sure, but I think that Astaroth gets all of its original armor back by the end of Gekko, and once again becomes the Astaroth Origin. But I could be wrong!
So there you have it. The history of Astaroth in a few bullet points.
Weapons and Stuff
Astaroth Origin has three main weapons. First we have it’s firearm, a shotgun. I guess that implies that it was originally intended for close range combat, though to be honest it seems like most Gundam frames are designed for close range combat. Still, it’s rare for mobile suits to carry a shotgun-type weapon, so it’s always a welcome sight.
Next we have the melee weapons. Every version of this mobile suit wields some sort of giant melee weapon, and in the case of the Astaroth Origin, that weapon would be a giant sledgehammer. I like this; the other two versions ostensibly use giant swords, but since they’re so large they don’t really look like slicing weapons, but rather like big blunt instruments. The sledgehammer simply drops the pretense and goes straight for the smashy smashy.
Now, underneath the sledgehammer is a secret weapon - the Nanolaminate Sword. According to the Gundam Wiki, this blade can collect compressed Ahab Particles into its blade, which allows it to easily cut through the Nanolaminate armor that most Gundam Frames are equipped with. It’s also an extremely unstable feature, so I guess you can’t use it all the time.
Finally, while not technically a weapon, it should be noted that the Astaroth Origin has a flight mode. There are hidden wings in its shoulder armor, and its backpack doubles as a “booster tail”. With these deployed, it allegedly has “independent long distance cruising capability several times that of normal MS, and can fly at high altitude in the atmosphere as well as glide for an extended period.”
It’s a great idea. What better way to allow a close range fighter to, well, get in close, than by giving it a way to move fast and close the gap.
In fact, at the risk of sounding spicy, the whole concept of the Astaroth Origin is so much better than some of the other Gundams we see in the mainline IBO story. Bael is a figurehead mobile suit that looks pretty, but has no defining combat traits. And yes, even precious Barbatos, in all of its forms, is basically a crappier form of Astaroth minus the speed.
About the Build
This is a very red mobile suit. Maybe too red.
In all seriousness, this kind of bright red plastic can be tricky to work with. Surface details are usually hard to see, but on the flip side, in my experience black panel lines on red plastic can sometimes look too harsh. The “solution” is to instead use a brown panel lining marker (or brown paint), but sometimes that too can throw off the vibe of the design.
In this particular case, I think it will look okay if I use black, but that could turn out to be entirely the wrong decision.
The other problem with this kind of bright red plastic is that it can look very toylike without a good, thorough matte coat.
And then there’s the fact that, well, this is a High Grade IBO kit. That means it’s going to need some amount of color correction. The questions I have are “how much?”, and “where?”
When we add it all up, the numbers don’t lie, and they spell disaster for you at Sacrifice it means this model is going to need a lot of TLC in order to make it look great.
Other Thoughts
There’s something else interesting about the Astaroth Origin, which can best be explained in meme form:
Yes, this mobile suit reminds me of another one of my favorites. Perhaps that’s why I like it so much?
And you know what else they remind me of?
Seriously, is there some unwritten rule that all red mobile suits need to use a shotgun?