Figure-Rise Standard Gunpla Battle Custom Nanami Diver Look "Diver Nami"
More girlpla! Sometime last year I build the spiritual precursor to this kit, the HGBF Mrs. Loheng-Rinko, which was from back when a lot of Bandai's girlpla was defined as part of the HG line rather than the rather new Figure-Rise Standard line.
I think that Diver Nami is one of the first kits to be defined as "Figure-Rise Standard", although the way that her kit is designed and laid out is still closer to other HG Build series kits than the modern unique design of Figure-Rise Standard.
Unlike Mrs. Loheng-Rinko and Mobile Doll May, Diver Nami is not part of the 1/144 line of "giant gunpla women", but rather is a sort of in-universe "user avatar" for the Diver system and could more accurately be described as 1/12 scale. Nanami Nanase is an employee at The Gundam Base Tokyo, and her Diver outfit calls back to a few different gunpla, with a visor reminiscent of the Guncannon, forearms and shoulders that recall the Unicorn line, and knee details, weapons, and a backpack that resemble the GM. There are also some very large pointy cat ears, which the instruction manual warns not to ask her about.
This kit, like Mrs. Loheng-Rinko, requires a fairly advanced level of colour correction. Diver Nami is primarily yellow and brown, with a few black and red accents, however, the kit only contains 3 parts in black and a couple in red, and all of the black, dark grey, and light grey weapon parts are instead moulded on the same brown runner as her hands, legs, and belt. This was super disappointing and felt completely unecessary, as it can't have been more difficult to shift the weapon parts to a different runner to be more colour accurate. To build Nami to my personal standard of colour correction I ended up having to break out my airbrush and completely repaint the weapons and a few detail parts on the backpack, as well as painting the black areas on the leg armour, the yellow stripe on the visor and yellow panels on the shoulders, and the red accents on her outfit with my regular brush, that are otherwise achieved with colour correction stickers. I kept the black colour correction stickers for her thighs and biceps, which in more modern kits would be a sort of washer/disc (as in the 30 Minutes Sisters line), but in this kit felt like a pain to paint.
I had also painted the shield's yellow section (after airbrushing the rest in the appropriate light grey), however it turned out super rough looking, so I ended up just using the included foil sticker, which I added a small cut-out Bandai logo to to emphasise the kitbashing and customisation theme of Nanami's Diver look.
On top of colour correction, I also added some additional colour detail of my own. I gave the nippers on the U-Nipper Javelin a metallic finish and black grip (to look like a real set of nippers), and was able to carefully paint on the eyelashes and eyes (rather than using the oversized and rather ugly looking foil stickers). I added a gloss clear coat to the eyes so they'd have a little more of a lifelike look.
I also added some older anime-style shading to her hair parts for a little more visual interest, and painted on a little blush to her cheeks. I think this blush is a little too dark and stands out a lot, but on the finished model it works well enough. Additionally, you have to paint the pink details for the mouth as well as the turquoise for the eyebrows. There are 3 face options - an open mouth, a wink, and a simple smile, so take care if painting to keep each face consistent with each other.
Diver Nami comes with a nice set of hand options, including two open hands, two closed fists, and two open fists for the weapons. There's also a runnerless stand in trans-clear red with an extender, just like the clear one with Mobile Doll May.
Nami's "weapon" loadout is a set of unique customisation-themed items from an in-game event. Her main gun, the P-Spray gun, is an airbrush with design elements from the GM beam spray gun, with a poseable lead wire that connects to the L-Compressor Backpack part, that resembles a large air compressor. I had initially painted the P-Spray gun in light grey as per the example images, but I redid it in silver and added a ton of messy paint splattter so it looked a little more like my own well-used airbrush.
There's a small beam saber mount made to resemble a gundam marker, with the mount looking like the marker's cap and the saber hilt itself resembling a standard marker. The kit displays this as pure black, but I redid the handle in blue to better resemble the label on actual gundam markers. There is no beam effect part, suggesting that it's just a regular gundam marker.
Also included is the small simple D-separator shield, which splits its design between an actual parts separator (even being thin enough to actually be used as a parts separator), the 08th MS Team Ground-Type shield design, and the simplified GM shield markings as seen on the GM Cold Districts Type. The main star of the show is the U-Nipper Javelin, a large polearm with a set of slightly oversized nippers mounted on the end. The nippers can open and closed, and are actually designed with the flat blades of the real Bandai Build Up nipper. A parts separator and nipper seem like formidable weapons when fighting plastic model kits rather than actual mobile suits.
Overall, this was a really fun project to do over the weekend. Diver Nami is a fairly simple and well articulated build with a really cute design and a ton of cool references experienced builders will recongize, but the effort required to replicate her colour-correct design adds a neat little challenge to the build that I definitely appreciated.
I really want to add more girlpla to my collection, but I'm unsure if I want to go through the effort that I put in to Nami for every kit. I'm tempted to get Avatar Fumina as she's a newer kit with tampo printing and better colour separation, but we'll see how things go.
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