When I was in 8th grade, I asked for a new and intriguing video game for my birthday: Xenosaga Episode I. It was a space odyssey anime full of intriguing characters, vicious aliens, mysterious artifacts, and, you know, the fate of humanity. But it was also full of really sweet mechs. I was hooked.
I had hoarded Legos as a kid, so I was amazed one day when I stumbled upon the Foundry DX, a website created by a guy named Sun Yun who had built many classic “giant anime robots” out of Legos. He revealed some of his techniques on the website, and I immediately started putting my Lego collection to the test as I tried to build the VX-7000, VX-10000, and the AG-02. When Xenosaga Episode II was released, a whole new line of more powerful mechs was revealed: the E.S. series.
For the first and really only time in my life, I became entrepreneurial. Getting the form factor for Lego minifigures had been difficult, but I had built a mech I called the Aleph, belonging to the “Achan series”, loosely designed after the AG series from Xenosaga. The VX series was just awful to build and had way too many sharp corners for 90s Lego pieces to handle. It’s too bad. The color scheme for Aleph was questionable, but it was a very solid unit. Over the course of about a year, I bought all the pieces to make 10 of these units, and used a sort of Lego CAD program called LDraw to build the instructions. I’m not shitting you. My hope was to sell the units for $100 each, and I had to put $250 into the pieces, not counting the labor of building those instructions. They were on market for a few months, but none ever sold. Eventually I pulled the plug on the whole thing and gave up, but I’m still proud I pulled it off up until that point. I was in 10th grade. I think your mechs have to be from a franchise that has a solid fan base, while mine were just obscure hybrids. There is a market for user-built instructions these days, but I’ve not felt too inclined in that direction yet.
I experimented with other designs:
My favorite mech was the E.S. Asher. The opening sequence for Xenosaga Episode II is still one of the most pivotal story experiences that has shaped my life, if you can get past the cheesy dialog. Two of the characters, on assignment, take the E.S. Asher from a ship in the upper atmosphere into the clouds and then down into the war happening below.
When I let go of my old video games in my mid/early 20s, I took apart what I had of the Asher legs. But I kept them in a plastic bag…just in case. I let go of a lot back then, but unfortunately I let go of the fun I used to have, too. I wouldn’t build another mech until 2015, when a friend at work kept referring to one of our contractors sounding like a robot. So I went home and built Selectron, a mech heavily influenced by Armored Core. It is probably the best mech I’ve ever built, and departs from the standard of having an anthropomorphic head.
Anyway, I’d like to get back into it. I just received a huge box of Legos from a friend who is moving to misty isles, and some of those pieces may actually help me build the scale that I need for the E.S. series. Long story short, I feel God is opening the doors to dream again. It’s easy to get caught up in career and money and friendships and all that. I’m also starting to give myself the freedom to be an anime fan. For whatever reason I’ve long thought of that as an undesirable thing, but that doesn’t make any sense. I really enjoy anime in general, and it’s often a great place to look for amazing mech designs. I’d like to broaden my horizons.