As of the day of this post, Wonder Festival 2024 Winter came and went over the last weekend. It has the usual loadout of anime-related merch on display and isn’t really the show that mecha fans are closely following for new reveals. That being said, Good Smile Company and their Good Mecha Smile brand came out there and provided our first glimpse of figures and model kits from Bang Brave Bang Bravern. The currently-airing series helmed by industry legend Masami Obari has been sparking discussions over at socials for its take on the mecha genre, combining real and super robots in a crazy manner.
Model kits and a DX figure were revealed though I will just focus on the MODEROID kits, starting with Bravern itself.
While they only revealed a gray prototype for the show, it allowed us to see how the proportions of this model would look. And it looks great, balanced and not too over-the-top, but can definitely do a heroic neutral stance. What a gray prototype doesn’t show, especially for a model kit, is how color separation would be handled. As such, below is the colored lineart from the official website for context.
Super robot designs tend to be colorful for their purpose of selling toys back in they hey day, and this guy is no exception. But at least its color layout is more subdued than it’s older contemporaries. And now that I see it, I don’t think we should have that much issues in terms of color accuracy. It will still need paint, for sure, but we’ve seen worse so I’ll take this one any day.
The other feature not shown by the prototype is whether the model kit can transform from Bravern into its Brave Thunder form. But we only have this one gray prototype for now so we’ll have to wait for more detailed photos to confirm any transformation feature.
The other kit they have on display is the M2 Exceed Rhino, one of several humanoid armored weapon models used by the soldiers called Titanostrides. The M2 Exceed Rhino is notable for utilizing the High Mobility Armament Conversion System (or HiMACS) which provides combat flexibility via quick weapon conversion.
Compared to Bravern, the M2 Exceed Rhino kit appears to be much later in development as they’ve shown a colored sample. I also I noticed, especially when looking at some details, that the kit appears smaller. More show floor photos do confirm this and I assume this is to scale accurately with Bravern. If we look at the still from the opening below, most of the Titanostride units are indeed smaller than Bravern.
Given that I’m really enjoying Bravern so far, I would really like to get a hold of these kits. That said, the last MODEROID kits I’ve built were the Patlabor ones back in early 2022 so I will need to really push myself to take away time from building Gunpla to do MODEROID kits again. I’m hoping that watching Good Smile’s Bravern stage show from Wonder Festival would help do that, and I’m including it down below.
