#eldran

HG 1/300 Nekketsu Gattai Go-Saurer

I may have finished building Mazinger-related model kits, but that doesn’t mean I’m done with Super Robots! While I don’t have any history with Go-Saurer or the Eldran series (being much more familiar with Brave), I had a hard time passing up a Gunpla-style model kit made up of tiny dinosaurs.

I don’t have any interest in Magna Saurer until I see a preorder go up for Gran Saurer. It looks cool, but the combination disinterests me.

The Good: This is a solid re-imagining of the original Go-Saurer design. They brought on one of the original designers to work on this kit, and it bears a lot of the raised panel detail oft associated with Gunpla. It’s very posable, with four separate joints in the shoulders alone, and added upward give in the chest plate to accommodate forward arm movement.

I love the Saurers. While they’re not that posable, they’re a fun little group of tiny dinosaurs that look good together. If I was going to get Magna Saurer, it would be so I could display it as a T-Rex with Land Stego, Mach Ptera, and Thunder Brachio. Thunder Brachio can even hold the Saurer Blade in its mouth, though I think it only really did that as a spirit dinosaur during the finishing move, rather than as a Saurer.

And as an added bonus, it includes a separate set of screen accurate side hip skirts if that’s your thing. If you check inside, it even has an elementary school roofing pattern to it, as if you know anything about this series, it’s made from an elementary school and piloted by its students. Anime is weird.

The Bad: Speaking of extra parts, this guy has a lot. No mode utilizes every part from every Saurer (though, to be fair, neither did the original). There is no mode that utilizes Thunder Brachio’s head, Go-Saurer doesn’t use the jet cockpit, Mach Ptera doesn’t use the fists, etc. There is at least a dedicated piece to store all the extra pieces, but it hurts that there’s so many of them.

The never-seen secret Saurer, Spare-Parts Plesio

There are a few issues with its posability. The hip skirt is mostly a solid piece, so you’re impeded if you go too far out in any direction but forward. The ankles also don’t have as much give as I’d like, so while it can do a great A-stance and get into a few decent poses below the waist, there’s certainly some limitations preventing you from doing anything extremely dynamic.

Saurer Jet is not a very solid combination. It ultimately comes down to the fact that the original release of this toy was built with ratchet joints, and everything here is friction joints. If there was some way to peg the forearms into the side of the torso it could mitigate the issue a bit, but the lack of solid connections hurts this particular mode.

I feel like a lot of the issues I have with this kit could have been solved if this was a Master Grade 1/144 kit, rather than a HG 1/300, but considering the already high price tag on this kit, and the fact that it has two other kits of a similar size it has to combine with, it would probably be too much for most people to front, even for a really big and articulate King Go-Saurer.

The Details: I replaced all the stickers with paint, like I usually do, which includes parts of the head, cockpit, and hip skirts. I added some panel lining to a few spots, and a few dashes of color where it felt appropriate. Mostly things like yellow on red and blue on white. I also added some toy-detail colors which is where the red on Thunder Brachio comes from.

Speaking of Thunder Brachio, the head piece is solid grey. I took cues from the original toy and added blue, black, and yellow to it in the correct places. I know it’s not a very important part in the long run, but I still want it to look nice.

Lastly, there is one sticker I used. There were two options for stickers underneath the chest gem: a metallic silver one and a techy one. I went with the techy one rather than the reflective, mostly because I ran out of silver so I couldn’t put it under the other cockpits...

Overall, it is a great fusion of Gunpla and Super Robot. Again, would have preferred it a little bigger and less spare parts, but the dedicated storage is a definite plus. Hoping we see a Gran Saurer soon so I can pull the trigger on the other kit.