1/48 ARX-7 Albalest Armslave Booster Limited Ver. by Aoshima

 

This is the first time I build an Aoshima model kit, a lot of my friend remind me of the poor quality of the Aoshima plastic model kit compare to the Bandai plastic model kit
The rumor said that the Aoshima plastic model kits are not snapfit well enough, and the joints are terrible.

So I take this 1/48 ARX-7 Albalest Armslave Booster Limited Ver. as my first try on the Aoshima series of the Full Metal Panic 1/48 scale plastic model kits.

The mold of this kit is not that bad, they are well made, eventhough you still can find many flashes in this kit.
The plastic quality is similar to the Kotobukiya plastic model kit.

They snapfit perfectly, although few of them are designed to snapfit in loose condition, so that they can move freely, but again the term they use to snapfit the kit sometimes very hard to do.
like when I try to snapfit the shoulder part where a lot off tiny part must be locked inside it at the same time, and they were very loose. so the part keep on falling or change position. but when it's already done, they locked perfectly :)

And for the head part, it's also hard to snapfit perfectly, because the polycap part is making the snapfit part bounce back and make a gap between the front head parts and the back head parts

The joints are also not as bad as they all say, they are not in loose condition, but extra care are must be done to achieve this condition, you must cut the polycap part perfectly, to avoid it to loosen up.

Here you can see, when you done it right, the joint can withstand the weight of the booster backpack without any additional part to hold it. 

By the way this kit is a Booster Limited  Ver. which include a booster backpack for the Albalest, that not include in the original Albalest model kit, and also got this extra 76mm sniper riffle. 

 

But the best part of this ARX-7 Albalest Armslave Booster Limited Ver. is that the parts for the Lambda Driver are not in clear green parts, but they make the parts glow in the dark, and that is including the eyes part.

 

The Albalest Armslave looks very amazing in the dark :)

In conclusion, the Aoshima plastic model kit are not as bad as they said,
They were good enough but we must be extra carefull to build it.