{Plamo Freaks}
SST Koyomi Takanashi - Ryobu High School Summer Clothes
This is a kit I’ve wanted to build for a long time now. I was drawn to her because I have a soft spot for meganekko, and I love seeing glasses girls represented in model kits. I’m a bit embarrassed to say, but I actually got this kit as a gift 11 months ago. I was so afraid to touch her in fear that I would irreversibly damage her. But what is a model kit for besides being put together? Some level of destruction is necessary for it to serve its purpose. So I finally took the plunge and cut the first runner of Koyomi Takanashi!
I get the impression that Kotobukiya is marketing the SST line towards people who like dolls. On Twitter/X you see a lot of crossover between doll collectors and SST collectors. I mention this because the first thing I noticed when putting this kit together was that it has a lot of extras! Like dolls, where you have lots of options to customize them how you like, Koto offers lots of options to make your own version of a specific kit/character. I really like it!
You get four face pieces with a print already put on, and four more blank ones to customize with a water slide sheet. Four books, two being hardcovers and two being softcovers. Three open pairs of glasses and one closed pair. Three skirts and two torsos for different poses. And TONS of hair pieces. You get three distinct hairstyles, six bangs (three that have a spot for the included glasses and three that don’t), and multiple adapters for parts in other Koto model lines.
The hair pieces go together (mostly) clean. With only the top of the heads having noticeable gaps between parts. Even then, the pieces are shaped to look like natural parts on a human head of hair. If you’re only interested in doing a straight build, they can look good with no extra work. The hands are made of a soft bendy kind of plastic. I suppose they’re less likely to break that way, but it made smoothing them down much harder than hands made of other plastics. The articulation is good. The neck has a wide range of motion and you can pull out the joints pretty far, which I was surprised by.
For a Koto kit, it’s a very straightforward build. There's not nearly as many parts you need to keep track of, compared to the bigger Koto kits. The only thing that caused friction for me was putting the hand joints together. But it was nothing that I considered too bad. All in all, it’s a good kit. If you have $40-$50 USD to spare, I think it’s worth picking up.
