The Converge Space Battleship-subseries is nearing its 4th anniversary later this summer and has since its inception in 2021 seen a total of seven released so far. However, when you take a closer look you will see that several hulls have already been revisited and slightly changed. Today's item is one such release, and easily the least inspired to date. On the plus-side, it makes the White Base available again since its original release in August 2021, but as well shall see, there is not much to be explored here for series veterans.
You probably remember last year's Movie Visual Selection figure set. It reintroduced several of the classic U.C. 0079 mobile suits in slight colour variations referred to as movie poster colour editions. Basically, when an official poster didn't use the exact same colour palette as the animation itself, that was enough justification to produce a figure! SB 05 came out on the side of that set and used the same excuse to reissue the White Base too. This was a Premium Bandai release that shipped in September and had an official price tag of ¥4500 (or ¥4950 with VAT).
The biggest impact of the new release is probably this larger full-colour box that looks really great. There is no practical reason for upping the box-size; the old box is perfectly functional also for storing the figure when not on display. There are no standardized box-sizes for the different ships, there are many different sizes in use already.
The figure is protected by an extra layer of bubble packaging, complete with a safety warning that you shouldn't climb into the bag and suffocate but dispose of it safely. Inside you find the typical Converge-style compartmentalized bags and of course also the mandatory chewing gum (at least if you are buying from the Japanese store).
The SB-series makes use of hard plastic for the most part and as you can see there is a bit of assembly to deal with as well. Several of the additional components are option parts and allow you to display the vessel in different configurations but there are no new gimmicks in place here; if you saw the original White Base figure everything will be instantly familiar to you.
Here we have the legged ship in its clean mode with all weapons ports and hangar bays neatly closed up. Are you feeling the spectacular vibe of the "poster image" palette? No? Me neither. The ship looks nice though, just as nice as it did back in its first version back in 2021. The base is still as uninspiring as all the ones that came before it in the SB-series. The ship sits on top of it with no pegs or clamps to secure it in place and it will easily be knocked off the base if you happen to nudge it. The fact that the different ships in this series also have quite different bases that also differ in height give it a bit of a hodgepodge vibe if you display ships next to each other.
Talking about the gimmicks for a second we have option parts for the forward batteries to deploy including the smaller fixed turrets and a larger dual cannon that can spin along the horizontal axis only.
Continuing to the sides we have the retractable Mega Particle batteries that pop out from the yellow circular ports. This is done by removing the yellow doors and re-attaching them into separate peg holes and then inserting the arm that holds a twin-cannon into its side. These guns again rotate along the horizontal axis only. The main action takes part in the forward hangar bay sections however. You can open up the doors for each bay and also remove the outer wall to have a look inside the main catapult and mobile suit docking arrangement. The kit even comes with movable little shackles that can move along the length of the launch catapult track but the fact that no mobile suits are provided is in my opinion an incredible oversight. Some of the later releases in the SB-series do come with simple one-colour miniatures of different mobile suits or vehicles and there really should have been a little red Guncannon figure with bent knees in here too. The fact that this wasn't rectified with this edition is a bit of a fail.
Are you feeling the hype of the movie-poster colour scheme? Can you even tell which figure is the original and which is the new variant? Get this new version of the White Base only if you missed out on the original since the difference is beyond negligible. There is also a huge price difference to consider - the original figure is currently rather hard to find and its list price over at Mandarake is twice that of this newer edition (maybe it might come down a little since there are now two of them).
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