Today we are dragging out an old Ensemble special into the light. You may remember the old Gundam Cafés which ceased all operations back in 2022, the Tokyo branch often featured special goods including the occasional Shokugan figure as well. I recall picking up the first Converge EX figure in such an establishment many moons ago, and noticed that most of the stuff they were selling back then was the usual trinkets and porcelain stuff with various prints on them but from time to time they would feature a repainted figure or two. The two liveries we will see here have been used elsewhere as well but I don't know the mythology behind them.
Anyway, this special 2-figure set was released in the summer of 2020 and appears to have coincided with a separate Ensemble Café set featuring reissues of four U.C. era figures (Gundam, Guncannon, Guntank and Zaku II, review here) but each set has its own booklet although this one is just black and white.
Parts-wise there is nothing new under the hood here. These are bog-standard RX-78-2 figures in alternate colours. You can see it has the old type of shoulder joint which doesn't swing up and down. I don't know for certain but I am pretty sure this set was only available in the physical Gundam Café storefront, perhaps only in the Tokyo branch as well. I have never seen these figures in cardboard boxes, I believe they were only sold in capsule form. I also don't know if you had to buy them lottery style in an actual Gashapon machine or if they were sold as a set of two at the counter. If anyone has details to fill in it would be good to know.
I'll just run through this set rather quickly. The two machines carry completely unique colour schemes as you can see, with the brownish-black machine sporting some Gundam Café printing on top. I do like the colour schemes of these things but much like the green 7-Eleven specials that crop up over time they are really catering to collectors only. The white figure could be a decent starting point for your own in-universe custom conversion project as the colours are rather neutral to begin with.
Well, you don't need to convert the white Gundam café machine into the Rollout Color version because we already have it in the Ensemble line, released in December 2016 as an eye-catcher when Ensemble premiered. The Rollout Color figure is of course very hard to find these days so you might have better luck with the Gundam Café machine, although it is certainly not common either (but somewhat easier to find than the black variant).
In the interest of comparing things I guess you can say that the black machine most closely resembles the Prototype Gundam figure from Part 18 (release in June 2021) but to be fair these are quite different sculpts and I think neither would be a suitable replacement for the other.
All in all this is a neat little set of figures that I think would normally sit quite far down on the priority list. While they can be tricky to find these days the prices shouldn't be too off-putting, I've paid ¥800 each for mine in the years 2021 and 2023 which is cheaper than most contemporary Converge figures these days.
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