Pretty Armor V.1

 Kotobukiya began making big money thanks to their success with the Frame Arms Girl series. 

It wasn't long before Chinese copy began arriving soon. 

This is Pretty Armor V.1, one of the early kits that came out from China. It is a copy of Kotobukiya's Innocentia, and it is a horrible kit. 

I got this back in 2018 because I was interested in the design. It was cheap so I didn't think much when I ordered it. 

When I first got this kit, I was surprised by the size of the box. It was simple but large, and the pre-built kit pictured in the front and on the side, really got me interested. Blonde hair, with cool-looking armor and that shield. The color scheme was great, making me think of Saber from Fate Stay Knight.

The instruction manual was printed on thick paper with high-quality pictures. 

Several pages show the finished kit in several poses

The instruction was bad though. The parts number was written in a weird way that was really confusing, and some instructions were either confusing, or lazy, or both. Like the picture below. the assembly guide is all the pictures together with arrows pointing. You have to figure out the position. 

The kit comes with water slide decals. It looks like a cheap water slide decals but the print still looks good. 

The kit also has this clear part. 

The kit comes with 4 sets of the pre-painted faceplate and 4 other none painted faceplates. 

One thing that made me laugh was that there was a skin tone pelvic part that has a slot in the middle. The sculpting was bad, and honestly, it looks like someone just scratched it with a scribing tool. 

The idea is that you put water slide decals over it for a skin-tight underwear look. 

I think they forget that the leg moves around, which will peel off the decals. 

The problem with this kit began as soon as I opened the box. It was full of chemical smells. The parts were oily full of fingerprints and running your finger over it made you itchy. This is actually molded release, and higher quality kits come pre-washed to get rid of some of them. This kit doesn't. 

Due to a large number of parts, I put all the parts inside the bathtub and washed them with warm water and laundry detergent, and it turned the water into yellow water and it stank up the whole bathroom. 

Not a good sign to start the kit. 

I have built model kits from China before. They were airplane and military equipment and while its quality wasn't as good as other kits, it wasn't bad that I couldn't build it. 

Pretty Amor was different. 

Almost every part needed some kind of fiddling to make it fit. Some pegs were either too large or too long, and some parts of the pegs didn't align. 

This was really weird because, in the end, the kit was a direct copy of Kotobukya's kit. 

They did add some difference in the kit and I found the parts were under-gated. This would be a good thing, but in this one, it wasn't, as the under-gates were located in a weird location and made parts hard to clean. 

Here in the picture, you can see some parts gap that was created due to ill-fitting parts. 

It took a long time to properly clean the parts, and modify the parts so they fit together. The joints need to be carefully adjusted so they work too. It was really annoying and  I actually gave up halfway because it was really annoying. 

This kit was mentioned few times on social media sites by others and I decided to go ahead and finished this kit. The plan was to finish the build and paint it, but after fully building it as an out-of-box build, I gave up and decided to take few pictures and throw them in the spare parts box. 

Anyways, here are the pictures of the kit-built straight out of the box without the decals. 

This kit requires a lot of skills from a modeler, not to mention patience, and I am not it. 

I build model kits for fun as a hobby. This kit gave me nothing but headaches and there was nothing fun about this kit, even the parts that are a direct copy from Kotobukiya were a headache to build. 

I DO NOT recommend this kit despite its cheap price.