I bought the new Vic Viper kit. It's at 1:144 scale, but while it is unfortunately smaller than Atelier Sai's crappy 1:100 Viper models, it is indeed made way better.
https://www.pmoa.co.jp/product/211.htmlIt arrived a few weeks ago. Plum made no incentive to buy directly from their site this time, so I went with an online retailer instead. Plum has ABS pilot figures for their Wings of Honneamise which come only from kits sold directly by their website or their retail stores in Tokyo and Suwa (in Nagano Prefecture where they are HQ'd). The Viper kit comes with a pilot figure already, so with no bonuses I didn't see the point of paying list price for the kit.
There are clear parts for the nav lights and such, which is nice. One of the myriad of problems with the old Atelier Sai kits is that the cockpit pins are huge and intrusive, and looks worse than a GI Joe toy. Not so with this new kit.
And get this... you'll love it. So the ship has a single engine can in the back. It has a hole through the middle, in which additional detail can be plugged in. But if you don't use that central plug,
the hole fits a 3mm LED perfectly. No drilling required! I imagine that this was deliberate.
A few years ago I had started lighting up Plum's R-Type kit. I kinda screwed up with the base and some wiring in the base. I have been meaning to get back to it. I'm also currently working on lighting their Darius Burst kit. These kits definitely required a bit of drilling for their engines. I'm tempted to get started on this new Viper kit, but I have to exercise some self-control since I keep starting so many projects and not finishing them.
I have only ever played Gradius IV on the Playstation 2 Gradius compilation (which contains III and IV). It's a port of the arcade, and IIRC there never was a home port. Gradius III on the SNES/SFC got plenty of play time with me, but the arcade version is way harder. I really do hope they have plans to do some variations, just as they did with their Twinbee kits.
Atelier Sai released versions of the Vic Viper from all the games. Those kits were really bad. They had gross-feeling plastic with a weird texture that requires sanding, a poor fit, ugly cockpit pins, hideous gaps and just so many other issues, like how they did not provide a good way to paint parts separately for later assembly. My friend who works in the industry told me that Atelier Sai couldn't recover from this big problem and it led to them going bankrupt. They should have stuck to figures, but I think maybe they had some issues and were looking to diversify. Instead of providing a straightforward model kit, they attempted to go the Gundam snap fit route, but their engineering ability was not up for it. The new Plum kit also has different-colored plastic, but there are no gaudy stickers like Atelier Sai did.
I included an unboxing of the kit in this video:
https://youtu.be/Htb9TrZ5P2s?t=2576 (It should start at the 42:56 timecode.)
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