1:72 Armored Core “Cherry Bomb”

Ever since the Kotobukiya Armored Core kit line came out, I have been trying to come up with good ideas for builds. For those who don’t play Armored Core, it’s an action game but with a heavy emphasis on customization. It’s basically the perfect game for mecha modelers, because you get to build and paint the machine and then take it on missions.

Of course, this also means that I find building Armored Cores “out of box” fairly distasteful: for the most part I feel like it runs against the spirit of the game, in which (excluding AC4, anyway) there’s no such thing as a “standard” configuration for a robot. So I’m always looking for ways to make my builds unique.

The original concept for Cherry Bomb was for an Armored Core story I’m working on – it was originally to be called “Cherry Breaker”. In its original configuration it carried a parry blade (a high-damage melee ramrod weapon). It was a light AC and had overboost and auxiliary boosters to help it close the range and hit targets. However, when experimenting with the design in the game, I would often swap out the parry blade for a rifle (I can’t hit a damn thing with the parry blade, honestly) – and I found that in this configuration, a light, fast AC with a single hard-hitting weapon, I could beat a lot of arena opponents that I couldn’t with my usual mission ACs. So I’ve mostly changed the concept… I thought the name change to “Cherry Bomb” was a better fit for the new configuration, and also just a better name overall…

My usual rule for trying to make my ACs distinct is to choose just one or two components of the AC and scratch build them, and take the rest of the parts from various kits. For Cherry Bomb I looked through the available lightweight bipedal legs and chose the ones I thought would be easiest to build. They’re called CR-LH99XS – they’re fairly boxy, but a bit funky too, with the way the lower leg sweeps back and the knee joint bulges out. They almost look like reverse-joint legs. But I liked ’em and thought they’d be easy to build – plus I had the One-Coin Figure with those legs as a convenient reference.

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