aceoftherebellion
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Everything posted by aceoftherebellion
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My most recent Macross toy... Yet not Macross Related!!
aceoftherebellion replied to dodiano's topic in Toys
Agreed! I want to see this thing covered in valkyries! -
Only portions of the first 45 minutes, and even then large sections were newly animated. The first film was something like 70% new animation with a few select scenes from the TV show spliced in where appropriate, the second film was almost entirely new animation apart from maybe a few seconds of flashback here and there. Most of the problems are with the film, though. The TV version is solid and really doesn't have the problems the film had, so don't let the crappyness of the films deter you from giving the TV version a shot. The films are almost a complete retelling/retcon, and since there's no word on canon anyway, you're 100% safe to completely ignore them in favor of the TV version. Jenius- That the 171?
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Ouch. That hurts. Mismarked? Bad Seller? Ebay gone wrong? Which set, Ozma or Alto?
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It's not quite as ambiguous as the way i probably made it sound. One of the quirks of the way japanese language works. You could translate it as something like "Sherryl, I Love-" with the rest cut off, but enough of the sentence spat out to at least know what was intended to be conveyed. But since that's not the part of the ending that bothered me personally, and since that's far from my only complaint about the films, I wouldn't say the ambiguity itself is what I find bothersome. (Characterization that's been simplified to the point of outright flandarization for some of the characters is probably the top of my personal list of grievences) The films were rushed. Do You Remember Love simplified the storyline too, but apart from a dip in the middle, it was clever enough to still convey the point to the original series, and my opinion on the frontier films is that they just fail to do that. They made an ambitious attempt, but it just fell short to me, with an ending (ambiguous or not) that I just found overall unsatisfying being the topper.
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Haha, thanks! I kind of feel the same way, yeah. I love Macross and I enjoy a lot of his work, but yeah, Kowamori does come off as pretentious a lot of the time, and it does generally rub me the wrong way. I ignore it because I love the franchise. All that said, I'm also going to echo Jenius- frankly, the Frontier films just weren't that great to me in the first place, that ending or not. Too much accelerated plot, too little development, too much of what made the TV series great just kind of dropped. They're very pretty films, and fun to mindlessly look at, but I didn't think they were very good. Personal opinion, no offense to anybody who liked them. The ending was just the last nail in a coffin.
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It's probably not to appease fanfic writers, or anything like that. It's more like he's got a really specific ending he's enamored with and keeps writing varients on it. The Frontier films end in almost the exact same way Zero ended, and he's done varients on 'triangle resolves with characters separated forever' in most of his recent series. If anything, it's more like a fetish he keeps indulging. I can't say I'm fond of it, and I definitely prefer when he collaborates with other writers to kind of keep some of his decision making in check. Of course, storytelling is rarely original, all tales have been told, the simpsons already did it and all that, and honestly that's kind of okay most of the time. It is unfortunate when a story just doesn't have a satisfying ending, though. That said, yeah, it's something like a meme around here that all discussions end up decaying into ranting about macross 7. It's like Macross World's version of Godwin's law or something.
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I hated that too. Really, it's just Kowamori's favorite trope these days to have a love triangle 'resolve' with the characters disappearing FOREVER. Personally, I try to ignore it. It's like a new-age reinvention of the age old lover's suicide trope, and I always hated that one too. His lines to the girls is something to the extend of "Ranka, I'm sorry but I can't return your feelings. Sheryl... I- (the rest of the line is cut off by noise/dramatic effect)" Yeah, it's frustrating. As far as what's canon- 'yes'. Another of Kowamori's favorite things is to say that everything is canon and nothing is, that all of the macross series are 'different accounts' of true events through different media/unreliable narrators. Pretty much that leaves it to the viewer to decide, and try not to think about the differences too much. It's probably the single most frustrating aspect of being a macross fan.
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Is it a case where the vendor is doing the cutting of prefab acrylic sheets? That could explain some of the problems, if they're getting sheets of variable thickness and just cutting what they get. That still sucks though, I was hoping to buy into a later production run, I hope this doesn't keep you from producing more of these in the future
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Arcadia 1/60 VF-19 Custom Nekki Basara Special with Sound Booster
aceoftherebellion replied to SaitouSad's topic in Toys
I like it that way, personally. It really wasn't much of a weapon, since it only fired speaker pods anyway, and the red ties it in with the 'weird civilian valkyrie' aesthetic it's got going on. -
This was actually the exact implications I got from Zero, and it always seemed to make some sort of sense to me. Otherwise, all of the transformation joints on every valkyrie should be nightmarish structural weaknesses from any engineering standpoint, no matter how well designed the transformation itself looks. That's just simple physics. I kind of assumed from zero that it's why they don't end up just rattling themselves apart in normal flight use, honestly. Let alone Battroids walking around on what should be engine nacelle turbines...
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Damn that's an awesome photo. I've been thinking about picking one of these up myself, actually! I'm sure Yamato's new mold will be better in every way, but I'm not that patient and the old one obviously still looks pretty awesome IMO
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To support Third Party or not to support.....that is the question
aceoftherebellion replied to jvmacross's topic in Toys
I can't say I'd be terribly interested in 'macross like toys'. I'm invested in the universe as it is, not 'stuff that kind of resembles it'. Otherwise, things like Astroplan would have been a lot more appealing. Unless it's recognizably the design in question, and not 'a new take on it', I'm vastly less interested. -
And now I'll never be able to not see it as the Bat-Valk again. VF-1S Bruce Wayne custom. I kinda like it...
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Welp, touche then, I take it back. Maybe the game really was just that popular. They certainly put enough into marketing it, that's for sure
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Maybe because it's a unique design? The Macross 30 version YF-29s didn't do nearly as well IIRC, so it's probably more than just a game popularity. Maybe there's just enough takers that an all-new-valk was too much to resist.
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Oh yeah, it's a version one. Can't afford to upgrade to the v2s yet, so I've been tweaking/customizing to make up for it.
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This does give us some unexpected insight into some of the problems Yamato and Bandai have faced, though. Factory produce just one item (prototype), they pay attention to the details to please their client, everything seems fine. Bulk order, they start cutting corners for speed. Nasty to see it first hand, hopefully your vendors will work it out.
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Yeah, it definitely isn't very well designed, but you could probably fill a book about that. Gerwalk is still a mess, still needs those craptastic extra plastic supports but at least it can hold itself together in Battroid now. Maybe I should snap a few pictures and put up a tutorial on how I did it. :|a
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A metric butt-ton of joint tightening and other minor mods. Added a bit of extra plastic to the gerwalk joint ratchets, a ton of work tightening the hip and ankle joints, and a whole lot of stubborn-ness.
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Very different companies, very different philosophies. Bandai's a huge company that really doesn't need our money. They can sit on the Frontier license, put out valkyries that are 'just okay' and coast on it, making just enough to make the line worthwhile and not sweating the difference since they've got an entire empire to sit on to shore up the difference. Yamarcadia has always been a smaller company(companies) that need their fanbase to stay loyal. It's really that simple. Bandai releases are okay. Even the V1s aren't that bad. Flawed, yeah, but better than Yamato's early efforts. What I'd really say is that both lines- Bandai and Yamatocadia- hit a zenith with their respective V2s and haven't really been able to surpass that. Maybe that's just the limit of toy technology, who knows. Bandai's definitely been dropping the ball as far as QC and materials quality recently, and there's really no arguing that the CF-171 was unacceptable, period. There's no defending quality that low. They've done some things right, but it's reasonable that people can be grumpy. Most of Yamato/Arcadia's biggest fails are the better part of a decade or more behind us, so it's harder to continue to hold that against them, while Bandai's failings have been unfortunately consistent in terms of engineering and materials gaffes. It's hard to ignore that, and I think that's where most of us are coming from. They've still made some good toys.
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That's a pretty color scheme, I like it. I'd also be all for a jamming birds, although I'd rather see the rest of sound force first. That's all a pipe dream at this point, probably, so I could just agree that a VF-11 reissue is a relatively realistic wish that I could get behind. -Although even then, they didn't sell that well the first time around, right? :/
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Sliiight update to my display to better incorporate my newer valks
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IDK if this has been answered already, but did they ever put out any Frontier figures that would scale okay with the CMs trading figures? I love the way the figures in that size look next to the yamato valks and I'd love to have at least a few from each series, but IDK for Frontier stuff
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Any plastic cement designed to work on ABS should theoretically work here. It might even help overall to even out the bad plastic mix, since most plastic cement is solvent based, it might help to sort of 'melt it back together'. I'd be willing to give it a shot if I hadn't already superglued my parts into submission.
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The thing is, the previous VF-171 had the exact same pants on head engineering as the CF does, so it can't just be that. Otherwise all of the Alto 171s would eventually fail too a the same spot, and that's not what's happening. I'm sure the bad design can't help, but mine broke in a place that wasn't under tension at all, before I even tried transforming it. The plastic always breaks in the same way- it doesn't show any signs of stress, the 'white stress marks' we always see when plastic is actually under stress and tension. This plastic crumbles into tiny bits. That's pretty much the exclusive domain of plastic degredation. I suspect the real culprit is Bandai's shiny silver-plastic- very very reminiscant of the old Hasbro gold plastic, right down to the swirl marks from poorly mixed plastic in various spots. That especially explains the ones that seem to crack and deteriorate while standing on the shelf. Not exactly a hopeful outlook, but the symptoms match.
