I've mentioned before the big quality change implemented between Adverge 3 and 4, but I thought it might be useful to illustrate this with some of my own photos, not just Bandai's perfect images.
Adverge 1 Super Saiyan Goku vs Adverge SP Super Saiyan Goku
Aside from the obvious face/eye printing difference, the colors are much sharper, if considerably less bright. The scale of the head is a little smaller. The hair is more translucent as well (I'll get into that again later).
The base for helping the figure stay up is also slimmer around the sides, which is nice. Some of the bigger and heavier figures have it extend further to the back than others, which is a good thing.
These are so different the first practically looks like the suit from the reenactment of the Cell Games, and might make you wonder why anyone went for it at all before. Hey, they looked pretty good when we didn't know any better!
Adverge 2 Super Saiyan Vegeta vs Adverge SP Super Saiyan Vegeta
Much more noticeable proportion differences. If our first Vegeta here seems to be glowering more than usual there's a good reason for that...
...he actually leans forward quite significantly even with his feet flat. When I tried standing these up without the bases initially, he was the one who always fell over first, of course. (Although the newer ones can stand on their own better, they've still got tiny feet, meaning you're best off still using the bases - they're pretty unnoticeable from a decent distance)
Adverge 3 Vegetto vs Adverge SP Vegetto
Adverge 3 was the last before the change and so you can already see some of the differences they were going towards (the legs and stand seem to be the same, for instance). Although the newer one is more accurate and probably better overall, I am fairly fond of the glowy dark blue on the original for the sake of it.
The issues on the humanoid characters are less apparent on the more monstrous bad guys, both pictured here from Adverge 1 and 3. In fact Super Buu seems to have been reused outright for the Adverge SP2 reprint set - I'm not 100% sure of this and so I may get the SP2 one for the sake of science, but I dunno...
Adverge 2 Android 18 and Adverge 3 Andorid 17 vs Adverge 6 Android 17 and Adverge 7 Android 18
With the old Androids, they looked fine to begin thanks to better eyes anyway, but it's interesting to see what changed with their newer versions, once again with a subtle scale down. The old 18 definitely couldn't stand on her own.
Finally, one other thing about these figures, one of my favorite charm points:
The translucent hair glows pretty nicely with decent light. It was somewhat true of the originals, but they pretty apparently decided to go all-in on this aspect with the upgrade by making them even more see-through.
