1/144 Alteisen Riese Review

The Old Iron Giant rise once again!

Certainly it takes a while but finally i post the review of my Alteisen Riese at last. I worked on this guy for almost 2 weeks and there some mixed feeling for it. I am satisfied that i could give better treatment but also there are some regret left because i couldn't make my Alteisen Riese looks as best as possible partly due to the kit's condition itself and my skill. Anyway for this review this time i am going to post plenty of pics compared to my previous reviews.

Alteisen Riese(Old Iron Giant in German) is the upgraded version of Alteisen in SRW Impact(maybe Compact too?) and OG2 which in OG2 it replaced Alteisen after heavily damaged in operation Plantagenet after Kyosuke was cornered by Axel in his Soulgain/Ashsaver. Kyosuke himself designed the blueprint of Alteisen Riese which is even more unbalanced in exchange of higher firepower. Due to its instability, Riese is supported with Tesla Drive which are the wing binders on Riese's shoulder and back in order to stand still on the ground but the wing binders certainly look impressive when it is expanded.

In SRW OG 2, Alteisen Riese is really monstrous unit when it is introduced and completely outperformed Alteisen. This guy basically able to mop the level by himself until the last 3 stages of course and probably the only weakness of Riese is it's short weapon range. In OGG, the performance of Riese depends on how much you train Kyosuke as he only starts with 2 skills when he joins the party and you got like about 15 stages to train him.

Since i have given information about Kyosuke back in previous Alteisen review, this time i might talk about some interesting trivia about him. It is highly likely that Kyosuke's character is mostly based on Chirico Cuvie from Votoms since he got several things in common with Chirico. First Kyosuke had really amazing survival ability since he managed to survive some deadly situations(though i doubt he can took a bullet to his chest like Chirico ). Second for some reason Kyosuke is also targeted by Greater beings(which is the Einsts) who try to tempt him with power in exchange to be its pawn (where Chirico's case is that he is offered by Wiseman to become a God).

I bought this kit more than 2 years ago and with some improper works that i  had done before making it harder to work on. For this kit i do a total repaint for the parts and i happen to use lots of primer for this kit. Alteisen Riese is also my second attempt for Seamlines removal in which the first kit is my entry for HLJ Sci-fi competition(try to guess (: ). However i actually find Alteisen Riese is too hard for my 2nd kit of seamline removal, this is because there are too many complicated parts which makes the seamlines trickier to remove. Even some parts have the seamlines back again due to too much stress exerted on the part like the arm. Probably the worst part of my Riese is the Revolver Bunker arm which had plenty of paints chipped.

In terms of Articulation, Riese is quite bad probably it is in the middle of Kotobukiya's SRW lineup but at least it got hips articulation unlike the old Alteisen. The arms have not bad articulation though the leg is pretty terrible.

The first armament of Alteisen Riese is the Chaingun which has the longest range of Riese's armament and also weakest at the same time. Probably the least used armament as well since it will be only used when Riese run out of other armament. For some reason i feel that Alteisen's autocannon look stronger than Chaingun probably because the Autocannon looks like using bigger caliber of bullets.

The iconic Alteisen's Revolving Stake is replaced with Revolving Bunker in Alteisen Riese which is one of the reason why Riese is instable. The bunker is definitely more powerful than the stake as the shell used by Bunker is twice as big as Stake. Though in SRW OG2/OGG i rarely used Bunker because it has really low accuracy compared to Plasma Horn or Claymore Avalanche. Apparently the kit has some kind of difficulty to pull the same move of Bunker in the game but at least the kit allows to extend the arm to replicate the move easier.

The strongest single armament of Riese would be Avalanche Claymore which replace Alteisen's Heavy/Square Claymore. Just like the name implies, Avalanche Claymore also have more Titanium Balls to throw around which just makes the enemy full of holes even easier. In the game, the weapon is quite impractical as it has really short range and not a post-movement attack, but it is guaranteed that most grunts will easily mopped up if it tries to swarm Alteisen Riese. Kyosuke's strongest attack use all of Alteisen Riese's armaments where the Avalanche Claymore is used as a finishing blow.

Alteisen Riese is really wonderful kit i would say but it really requires lots of work to make the kit looks perfect in which i couldn't really make it. But at least i managed to make it looks way better than it used to be and definitely the 1/100 R-1 will look better. I will also compile the WIP of Alteisen Riese into single post which makes the WIP easier to find.