LBCS : The Emperor Sophia Katakura

 She is LBCS: The Emperor Sophia Katakura, a character from Soukou Musume. 

She is a feminized version of the famous LBX The Emperor, and with collaboration with Kobobukiya, they made this model kit. 

And she is a prick. 

The first kit of this line was LBCS: Achilles Karina Mikazuki. I have built her before and she was a disappointment considering this is a mecha musume kit from Kotobukiya. I saw the release photo of this kit and was impressed, seemingly fixing the weird proportion issue, but having built this kit, It was a major disappointment. It's too bad considering I really love her design. 

Starting from the box art, there is a beautifully drawn picture of Sophia, capturing your eyes, especially on her exposed, well-toned stomach. 

Looking that the side of the box, there are few pictures of her in several poses, which appears that, unlike Karina, they fixed the weird cartoonish look. 

The instruction manual has the same picture on the front. weirdly they seem to use the same picture over and over again. I am not familiar with the game, but maybe this is the only picture?

Inside the manual, is the same picture again with the built model in different poses. 

The back of the manual has a color guide. 

This kit includes a small sheet of water slide decals for her eyes. 

As usual, this kit has several pre-painted parts as well, making straight build a lot easier. 

One unique part of these LBCS kits are the capes. It has a pre-printed design with metal wire on the edge. This was designed so that you can form the came into a shape when you pose the kit. I will go more into this later. 

Going through runners, I noticed that it has a lot of large parts, which are unusual for Kotobukya kits.

Here is the runner that includes the skin tone. The picture came out bit lighter than it is, but the skin tone was beautiful and the main point of this kit, the stomach was beautifully sculpted. 

Also, a single rubber-like runner includes 4 pairs of hands. I was expecting more to be honest. 

This runner includes the white part. The underwear was sculpted well, but that large fur part was interesting. It was full of pointy parts and it was a pain to put it together. It made me wonder if they really thought about this kit. 

Building the kit was easy thanks to the more simplified parts and large parts. Platic was high quality so sanding was easy, however, some parts of the nubs were located in hard-to-reach places, which causes some headaches when cleaning. Still, the overall experience was easy and fun. 

And here is the kit built straight out of the box. 

As you can see, it is a beautiful kit

Her well-endowed bosom and well-toned stomach really stand out. 

The cape hooks up in the back and it looks weird. It's as if whoever designed this never wore a cape before. This causes the kit to look weird. The wire on the trim makes the cape form a shape, but it comes out in a weird way and no matter what I do, it looked unnatural. It was a great idea, but the execution was horrible. 

The large part made the kit easier to build backfires when posing this kit. The design of the kit is complex so making it simple build causes all the parts to get in the way when posing. It was also a hand grenade since the connection joints can't handle the weight of the large part. Also, all the pointy part pricks you when you try to pose this kit.  

The only 3mm hole for the stand is inside the upper portion of her back cape. This causes some issues when posing as I can only have the stand connect in one way. And this kit needs the stand as the back heavy design make her unable to stand on her own. 

And that hair... The single-piece hair looks nice, but it's heavy so the head won't stay down and she will always look up. It was a disaster trying to take some pictures. 

You can remove some of the armor on her skirt to make the posing weird, but it leaves all the connection points on the skirt exposes, making it look weird. 

Also while building this kit, I noticed some parts were put together in a weird way that makes it harder to paint. Part separation is nice, but the way it's put together really makes you say 'why?'

Overall it caused some disappointment.

I painted this kit with lacquer paint. The skin tone was with Kaiyodo X Mr. Color fresh color set. I lost one part on the ankle due to its size, which is funny because most of the parts are large. 

The painting was painful because of how it's put together. Since I cleaned up the seam line on her torso and on her underwear, I had to paint the whole lower torso as one piece, using a lot of masking for color separation. it is also hard to tell due to her skirt, but without her skirt, it looks like her spinal column was broken near her hip. It's really weird. 

Anyways here is how she looks like after she was painted. 

The kit came out beautifully with a simple painting. I like her design. I think she is beautiful, and Kotobukiya did a great job capturing her beauty. However, I think they half-assed it when building her into a model kit. She can't pose, everything gets in the way or falls apart. she is hard to paint and every time I touch her to either move her or pose her, something pricks me. Overall she was a big disappointment. 

I don't recommend this kit.