Well, here is something unusual. Sometimes you come across a concept so weird that you have to wonder, what was it that drove the designer's mind into a certain place? In this particular instance we are talking about one of the billions of Banpresto display figure series that are often pumped out in stand-alone sets and quickly forgotten about. I only stumbled on this figure the other month and had never seen or heard about them before.
This 2005 Banpresto Phase Shift figure set apparently consists of three different mobile suits from the SEED Destiny television series. Since I have no idea if I will even come across the other two figures I decided to do the review based on the Destiny Gundam figure alone. The other two suits in the set are the Impulse Gundam and Strike Freedom. I picked up a rather battered box from Mandarake for only ¥200, like many figures of this type the problem isn't the price but actually finding them.
As a reader of this blog you are probably familiar with the concept of Phase Shift Armor already, still, a quick introduction is in order. In short, it is a type of electrical energy barrier emitted by and encircling the entire mobile suit like a force field. This shield dampens or cancels impact from physical objects such as bullets or close-combat weapons. The system is much less effective at stopping energy-based weapons such as beam rifles or beam-coated impact weapons (although most of the time it functions like plot armor, it works when the story needs it to...).
Phase Shift Armor consumes a great deal of energy and the first generation suits like the Strike Gundam would only benefit from its protection for so long before its battery dried up. The Phase Shift Armor produces vivid and attractive colour schemes and when deactivated the suit typically returns to its basic gray colour pattern. Exactly how this works is a question for the sages, but this clearly explains what Banpresto were aiming for with this figure. However, all suits in this set use Variable Phase Shift Armor which is an improved dual layer technology that can be applied at the point of impact to conserve energy use (so how exactly would this affect the suit's colour pattern..?).
So how does this thing work then? Well, the Destiny Gundam is encased in this rectangular box with two large windows. When you look at the mobile suit's right side it is seen in its full colour mode wit active Phase Shift Armor, while looking at it from the other side will show it with its Phase Shift Armor deactivated. There have been "Phase Shift Down" variant figures of various mobile suits before but this is the first time I have actually seen a transforming figure and it is a really cool gimmick.
At first I figured that Banpresto had come up with some clever type of polarizing or otherwise filtering coating on the "Phase Shift Down"-side of the container but the reality wasn't quite as spectacular. When you look closer you can see that you simply have two differently painted halves of the mobile suit glued to a double-sided mirror in the centre. When viewed up close you get this seem running through the entire torso but I still want to say a bravo and give credit for this ingenious design. The figure must of course stand in a completely symmetrical position or the illusion would be broken.
The paint applications are quite nice although not up to STANDart level. Here is a size comparison with a Gashapon HG size Force Impulse Gundam (ca 1:285) and a 1:220 size STANDart Sword Strike Gundam. The display box is roughly 14 centimeters tall. The figure might potentially look quite nice if displayed inside a hangar diorama with slightly larger figures such as the Gframe or HCM Pro-series. All in all it is a cute little novelty series but not exactly something I feel the need to hunt down to complete.
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