The latest Gundam Converge news...

Bandai revaled some more information regarding the Gundam Converge 10 Year Anniversary items they have been working on. Not to rain on somebody's parade but there isn't a whole lot to see here if you are a Converge veteran. First up we have two new figure sets, each with six figures grouped by Universal Century and "Another Century" respectively. Each set features rehashes of Converge #Sharp figures with gold trim paint apps. The figures will also come on special white bases wit their names printed on them to make sure they stand out like a sore thumb if you display them together with the other figures of your collection. Each set is scheduled for March and will set you back ¥5400 per set. Who is excited for this?

 

Next up we have the much touted "3D-vote" for your favourite mobile suits to be turned into retal figures. Bandai have supposedly put together a list of about 400 candidate suits for you to choose from and you get to vote for ONE suit per day while the survey runs. I have rather enjoyed Bandai's suit selection as of late with their focus on one series at a time in little clusters and hope they will continue with that. Still, customers are encouraged to give their daily vote starting today until the end of January, so yeah, have fun with that...

 

We also have the return of the ol' Converge Revive project. Customers are here encouraged to vote online for mobile suits from the last 20 volumes that they would like to see reissued again. There are very few figures that are not readily available on the secondary market today so I wonder if there will be any big interest in this section. Sure, there are a few with inflated prices such as the EW Heavyarms but I'd much rather Bandai continue the focus on developing something new.

The original Operation Revive project from 2014 featured six mobile suits and was available in two versions. Once set contained the original six figures and cost ¥3000, then there was a Premium Edition for ¥3500 which included one new accessory for each suit. I wouldn't mind a new Revive set if it came with mobile suits whose gear options were interesting enough to entice me to buy them, say a Gaplant with a Beam Saber or a Den'an Gei with deployed Beam Shield for example.

If you have followed Converge for a while you will also remember the Revival Selection era of the original Converge series. This saw a couple of the early releases being reissued and released as part of the regular retail waves (marked with "R" on the boxes), so you'd end up with sets where you already owned one or two figures. Hard to think of this as anything other than cost reduction by keeping development spending down if you can reissue old junk in new packaging again. I'll try not to be too cynical about it but expectations are low. :)

 

Perhaps the most novel thing to come out of this whole thing is a new display box designed to be compatible with Converge. These stackable 20cm cubes will allow for the displaying of nine regular size Converge figures and could be useful to those who wish to put on a little display without investing in shelving. I could see these boxes work really well in shops too (but perhaps not in many used Gashapon marketplaces because those are always stuffed to the brim with toys, kind of like my own collection I guess).