30 Minute Missions Build - Rabiot White

Pro Tip - when you bring your Gundam loving four year old into the hobby store, make sure you set expectations ahead of time. Otherwise she may grab a box off the shelf, parade it around the store in the cutest way possible, and make every employee and customer fawn over her. Then you can’t really say no to her when she asks you to buy it. Which means that you’ll end up with, as she put it, a “purple Gingum that I love so much”.

Except it wasn’t a Gingum Gundam, but a 30 Minutes Missions kit:

About 30 Minutes Missions Kits

While I guess they’re not technically Gunpla, they are ¹⁄₁₄₄ scale model kits made by Bandai. It’s not super easy to find good information about them, but I think it’s obvious that 30 Minutes Missions exists to allow Bandai to indulge in its favorite business practices free of Gundam’s existing legacy and reputation.

Customs and Accessories

Bandai wants you to buy model kits. Lots of them. And one of their favorite ways to convince you to is through FOMO.

Okay, maybe FOMO isn’t quite the right way to describe it. Basically, they find ways to make a given model kit feel incomplete, and the only way to fix it is to buy more stuff.

Maybe that means having to buy an accessory pack that contains missing weapons or other gear. Or maybe it means buying another kit that was specifically designed to have swappable/compatible parts. Maybe all the marketing material encourages you to create custom designs.

This has been Bandai’s MO with Gundam for quite a while now. It arguably started with Gundam Build Fighters and Build Fighters Try, both of which revolved around characters building custom Gunpla. To that end, they released lots and lots of weapons and accessory packs for the express purpose of customization (though I believe the models themselves typically came with all their accessories).

Then came Iron Blooded Orphans. While it was a traditional Gundam story (in the sense that it didn’t revolved around literal model kits), the show’s mobile suits were intentionally designed so that they frequently changed weapon loadouts and armor, and each one was built around a common inner frame structure. This allowed Bandai to make the kits highly compatible (to encourage you to buy multiple kits and swap their parts), as well as gave them an excuse to continue to make accessory packs containing all of those alternate weapon loadouts and armor.

After IBO, the trend continued with the (once again) Gunpla-oriented Build Fighters and Re:Rise. Once again, sometimes weapons and gear that appeared in these shows were sold separately in accessory packs.

Consider that Build Fighters came out in 2013. That means that Bandai has leaned on this FOMO-esque business strategy for nearly a decade now.

And while I have no insight as to what goes on in Bandai’s corporate meetings, my gut tells me that somebody probably realized that they can’t keep doing this forever. Much of the appeal of Gunpla is that the models are recreations of cool mobile suits that you watched doing cool things in a show or film. You buy the kit with the hopes that you might recreate iconic scenes or poses. And you can’t really do that if the model in question doesn’t have all of its iconic weapons or gimmicks.

To be clear, not every mobile suit has to have every single (obscure) weapon or gizmo it ever touched, but if it doesn’t match basic expectations, sooner or later people are going to start feeling burned. And after nearly ten years of this stuff, I wouldn’t be shocked if a lot of people started feeling burned.

(case in point - there’s a reason I don’t have many IBO or Build-style kits in my collection)

But that’s exactly where 30 Minutes Missions comes into play. It’s a new, original line with no thematic or narrative ties to Gundam. It can be built from the ground up to encourage customs, army building, etc, and can accommodate all the accessory packs Bandai can dream up. Those who like that kind of stuff can have at it, while those who don’t can stick with traditional Gunpla.

At least, that’s how I envision it in theory. But how does it actually pan out?

Good In Theory

There are some small, subtle, but smart aspects to the design of 30MM:

• Each mecha comes in a variety of colors. I see this as an attempt to encourage army building. You can have different armies or squads with their own separate color scheme.

  

• No matter the color scheme, the color palettes tend to lean towards being monochrome. This, I think, makes it easier to do custom paint jobs.
• More mecha colors means you can also manufacture accessory packs in different colors. And since these mecha aren't depicted in TV or film, builders can mix and match colors without fretting about whether or not it looks "accurate".

  

• The mecha are all very robotic looking. The parts or accessories from one of them won't look out of place equipped on another.

  

• Some of the accessory packs include extra armor. If you want, you can take a regular-sized mecha and make it extra bulky.
• Because the mecha are built from the ground up to be compatible, you can easily give your mecha two different kinds of arms, two different legs, a different head, etc
• Accessory packs include all sorts of things, from weapons, armor, effect parts, and even terrain

  

If you’re going to encourage customs and army building, these are all good practices to adopt. It’s sort of a win-win scenario; Bandai sells more stuff, but builders get a ton of freedom to make truly unique designs without having to resort to kitbashing.

Bad in Practice … ?

So far so good, but how well does it all work out in practice? While keeping in mind that I’ve only built this one 30MM kit for my child, I can say that the experience was underwhelming.

Good - Easy Build

It looks to me that this model (and presumably all the other 30 Minutes Missions kits) uses the same “Evolution Fine Point Build” system that Bandai experimented with for the High Grade Leo. The pieces are all organized on the runner by body part, and they even re-use some of the Leo’s joint pieces.

This makes for a build that’s quick, and a finished model that’s sturdy.

Bad - Simple Build

This model costs around $17-$18 MSRP, even online. And yet it only come with three runners and some polycaps:

Look, I’ll be the first to admit that there isn’t a direct correlation between the number of runners and the cost of a kit. For example, an expensive kit may not have a lot of parts, but the parts themselves are all extremely large. Or there may not be many runners, but they’re all filled with lots of tiny, precision engineered pieces.

And of course, there are also engineering costs to consider. For example, high Grade Iron Blooded Orphans are cheaper than other kits of similar complexity, and that’s because their use of a common inner frame saved a ton on R&D money.

Having said all of that, I still don’t understand why these 30MM kits are so pricey. I have no doubt that these models also reuse parts amongst themselves, and they’re not exactly intricate or complex. If we use the HG Leo as a comparison, that model has a similar build, and more accessories, and is still a few bucks cheaper.

Good - Lots of Details

There are lots of surface details for you to panel line if you choose to do so.

Bad - Lack of Color

Even a lot of panel lining won’t hide the fact that this Rabiot (and most 30MM models) is lacking in color. If you’re not interested in custom paint jobs (or buying differently colored armor packs), you’re going to be stuck with monochrome mecha.

Good - Poseable

Because the model has such simple armor, nothing gets in the way of the joints expressing their full range of articulation. And because of the simple build, nothing is likely to fall off or pop out. You can pose this thing for days.

Bad - Posing is Boring

With only one accessory, there isn’t all that much you can do with it during poses.

Bad - FOMO Sales Tactics

Just look at how much of the manual is devoted to upselling:

If I were new to model building, and I saw all of this, I’d feel like I’d been had, like the thing I just bought wasn’t good enough.

But instead, I’m a veteran builder, which is why I find myself asking why a nearly $20 kit doesn’t come with any of these goodies.

Conclusion

These models clearly aren’t meant for me, but I’m not even sure if they’re good for the people they are meant for. If the base models were $10-$12, and accessory packs $8-10, I could see the appeal. But at their actual prices, you’ll be paying a lot more for a single fully kitted 30MM mecha than you would for an equally fancy looking High Grade Gunpla. And if you were to multiply that by however many you’d need to build an army, and the financial calculus just doesn’t work out.

Don’t get me wrong - I’m glad my kid loves it, but I’m thankful this wasn’t something I got for myself.