So, a while ago, I discovered the Japanese youtuber Crafty Transformer, who makes cool mechanical weapons and machinery (mostly recreated from videogames and anime) out of cardboard. Coupled with my ever-increasing love of tokusatsu, it's made me think "I want to make cool things too". At some point, I also became aware of the subject of today's post, a Japanese children's book entitled Saikyo Kosaku Craft Wars.
The book contains instructions on how to make various toys out of household objects, a long-standing tradition of kids' media the world over, of course. The gimmick here though is that all the items are tied into various stories that are told alongside the instructions. Of course, I can't read the stories, but they're accompanied by some really awesome artwork, and the instructions on how to make the things are mostly diagram-based anyway.
There's two basic types of thing to be made from the instructions in the book: weapons and armour for kids to use themselves, and smaller-scale spaceships and monsters and things. I'm really just interested in the weapons and armour, to be honest, to learn the bare basics, then figure out ways of making them bigger, better, and more mechanically complex. There's swords, shields, guns, claw-gauntlets, and so on. Regarding the guns, there's non-firing guns that just look cool, a bazooka that fires a missile made from paper cups, and a magic blaster that shoots a puff of air. I haven't even started to attempt making anything from the book yet, and I've already been thinking of ways to make the last two more powerful than the book's blueprints.
As, like I said, I haven't made anything from the book yet, there's not much more to say. It's a cool little book with some really amazing artwork in it (which was actually the main initial thing that caught my attention). And, you know, it's been pretty hard to get stuff for these monthly posts what with the ongoing boring apocalypse.
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