Kit Review

Straight build

Nadesico Black Sarena - Size comparison of Akito's custom Aestevalis — the inner frame for the Black Sarena — next to a cigar

Size comparison of Akito's custom Aestevalis — the inner frame for the Black Sarena — next to a cigarette pack.
It's incredibly... small;; Even smaller than most 1/144 kits, roughly the same size as a cigarette pack.
Sure, it's just the inner frame, but the size for the price...;

Upper body front shot

Head section

Leg section. Volume and parts breakdown are decent.

Nadesico Black Sarena - There's not really much in the way of weapons; just the swap-out hands. The elongated thing fitted on

There's not really much in the way of weapons; just the swap-out hands.
That elongated thing fitted onto the hand is a piece of equipment called the "Hand Cannon".

Nadesico Black Sarena - Articulation is so-so... Since there's no front skirt, the legs can swing up pretty high, but in prac

Articulation is so-so...
Since there's no front skirt, the legs can swing up pretty high,
but in practice it doesn't seem all that useful. (The squatting pose works fine though)

Movement of the wings called the 'Gravity Wave Antenna'

Nadesico Black Sarena - Action poses using the swap-out hands. The body is so stiff that this is pretty much the limit for ac

Action poses using the swap-out hands.
The body is so stiff that this is pretty much the limit for action poses.

Action pose with the Hand Cannon equipped.

Next to the 1/144 scale HGUC First.
Pretty tiny, right???

Nadesico Black Sarena - It's noticeably smaller even compared to other Kotobukiya kits like the Super Robot Wars kit and Armo

It's noticeably smaller even compared to other Kotobukiya kits like the Super Robot Wars kit and Armored Core.

Nadesico Black Sarena - First up... here are the parts needed to recreate the movie ending. Just remove the ankles and swap i

First up... here are the parts needed to recreate the movie ending.
Just remove the ankles and swap in the Black Sarena's feet. (Super simple!)

Nadesico Black Sarena - Recreating the final scene from the Nadesico movie... (1/3)

Recreating the final scene from the Nadesico movie...

The Aestevalis inner frame and the Black Sarena parts that attach to it.

To put on the Black Sarena armor, you first need to disassemble the body like this. (Hard gore...;)

Fitting the Black Sarena armor over the body.

Attach the legs...

Then add the shoulders, large wings, small wings, and tail — and you're done!

Nadesico Black Sarena - There is a dedicated stand included for the Black Sarena, but... it's not all that useful. It just ra

There is a dedicated stand included for the Black Sarena, but... it's not all that useful.
It just raises the display height a little?

Assembly complete — the Aestevalis head, shoulders, legs, wings, etc. are left over.

Once it's in Black Sarena mode, the kit suddenly gets a whole lot bigger.

Black Sarena mode. It's got a certain charisma to it.

Upper body front shot

The head section doesn't really stand out much...

A low-angle shot looking up from below

The color separation on the shoulders is pretty impressive.

Leg section. The red stripe areas are all color-separated too.

Sole of the foot.

The round shoulder armor can swing up quite a bit.

The rear wings can be raised vertically.

Fully extended, the tail is about 30cm long...

Fortunately the tail segment joints aren't too loose,
so you can get most poses out of it.

Some action poses. Not much different from just standing, really;

Some action poses making use of the stand

Size comparison with the other Kotobukiya kits again.
In Black Sarena mode, it's quite a hefty kit.

Kotobukiya, always putting out quirky mecha model kits, has released the Black Sarena this time around. The Black Sarena is a mech from the theatrical film "The Prince of Darkness," based on the anime "Martian Successor Nadesico." In Japanese, the name means a black lily — a flower whose meaning is... "curse." Yikes.

It seems to have gotten that name because it's the machine pilot Akito rides while swearing revenge... It's essentially an Aestevalis — the main mech of Nadesico — fitted with black external armor. In the actual anime, it doesn't really have the flashy image of a machine packed with cutting-edge tech for some grand final battle. It's more like a scrappy, cobbled-together machine driven by the protagonist's obsession, so it's hard to call it a particularly high-class-looking unit;; Either way, it does give off a certain dark charisma, though quite a few people are probably more familiar with it through the Super Robot Wars games than the anime itself.

Whatever the backstory, it seems like this kit was developed to capture that dark charisma in plastic form... Since it can recreate both the Aestevalis mode and the Black Sarena mode, the parts count is enormous, the box is huge, and the price has gone up accordingly. In terms of complexity, this is easily up there among the most involved kits in the Kotobukiya lineup.

As a kit, the quality is just "normal" by Kotobukiya standards. As always with Koto kits, once you're done building you're left wondering where all those parts even went — that familiar sense of anticlimax is still very much present, and the color separation is similarly a bit forced in places. They went to great lengths to color-separate the complex patterns on the shoulders and the red stripes on the legs, yet casually skipped over plenty of other spots on the body that would've been easy to separate — a very unbalanced approach. In short, it's classic Kotobukiya craftsmanship: pour all the effort into the parts that look hard to separate, and boldly skip the ones that would've been easy ^^;

The intricate parts breakdown for the shoulder patterns in particular feels like it's almost laughing in the face of Bandai's recent MG Shin Musha Gundam color separation — as if to say, "This is what it takes to properly separate a pattern." This kind of jaw-dropping parts breakdown is arguably Kotobukiya's greatest appeal, and it almost feels like they wanted to stake out a territory that Bandai, for all its technical prowess, shouldn't casually wander into.

The Aestevalis inside is just normal quality — decent parts breakdown, and the molded colors still look a little cheap (;) as usual. Arm and leg articulation isn't bad, but it's strangely hard to get any decent action poses out of it — that's a classic Kotobukiya mech trait, and it's still here. Think of it as a static display piece and it's not bad at all. More than anything though, even accounting for the non-scale nature of the kit, the Aestevalis is tiny. About 10cm or so? It's a cute little thing that fits neatly in the palm of your hand, but when you consider the price of the kit, it's the kind of size that might make the back of your head throb a little.

Once you've got all the Black Sarena armor on, it finally reaches roughly MG-sized bulk... but the tail is so long that displaying it can be a bit of a hassle. Aside from the shoulder armor and rear wings, there aren't really any other meaningful points of articulation, so it's essentially a standing display model at heart — though thankfully the tail is made up of multiple segments, so you can fold it up neatly.

The significance of this kit seems to lie in the fact that a fairly prominent mech from the theatrical film of the well-known anime Nadesico has finally been made into a plastic model. The kit quality is neither bad nor particularly great (by Kotobukiya standards), so for fans of Nadesico and the Black Sarena, just having it exist as a kit at all is probably gift enough. That said, for general mecha fans with no particular interest in Nadesico, the ¥7,800 price tag is pretty steep and will likely make it a tough sell.

Opening that big box and seeing all those parts spill out — it's a mix of awe and despair... and when it comes to firing up that urge to take on a challenge, Kotobukiya kits are the best. I'm not personally much of a Nadesico fan, but, well, how do I put it — after going through that long build process and finishing one interesting mech, the hands-on satisfaction was actually not too bad. It feels like overkill as a cure for Gunpla burnout, but for people used to Bandai kits, it's still a kit that delivers a culture shock (in more ways than one). :-)

Nadesico Black Sarena | 2008. 6 | ¥7,800

AIThis page was translated by Claude Sonnet.