VF5SS

Hey that's Koichi "MD GEIST" Ohata to you noobs.

I just want everyone to watch the "Triple Changer" feature and soak up all of Bob Budiansky's glorious nerdiness. He is lord.

Check out my YF-19 25th anniversary review.

Vortex is ok if you work at it. The training missions are infinitely replayable at least. Man the game had a full hands on tutorial that took you through all the controls. It's through that kind of ambition I find Vortex enduring. I like the Macross PS2 game because it's actually fun to play while VF-X2 and especially VF-X1 are not.

Big O was always the exception primarily because it's different from most mecha shows. SEED and Geass did pretty poorly in America as evident by the fact they were both pushed into incredibly late time slots. Eureka 7 and Wing both came and gone. I wasn't even aware Eureka 7 made a splash at all.

Kamjin was still a weak villain.

I'm not dead yet. I'm getting better. When we recorded this ACE 3 had not come out yet.

The problem with asking for 5.1 audio is that its a double standard especially for older shows. I'm sure Best Buy wasn't demanding they redo M*A*S*H with a 5.1 track. Those M*A*S*H DVD sets have three language tracks all with monaural sound. It forces companies into an unfortunate envelope of cost-benefit. Sure you can spend the time and money (time being the biggest killer since anime fans always want it now) and get it into the big chain stores but really how well was Aura Battler Dunbine going to sell? Even advertising is a double edged sword since you can put all the whiz bang effects into a trailer but at the end of the day you're still trying to sell old animation to the Bleach/Naruto crowd. And as Cartoon Network proved mecha shows are widely panned by viewers anyway. Robotech's biggest advantage was that it was dubbed and finished years ago. All they had to do was re-master it (well the second or third time right?) and press out some boxsets. I've heard that much of the problems with the Macross dub in terms of directing and pronunciation were deliberate. The ADR director was Matt Greenfield, the same guy who did the subpar Megazone 23 dubs with all the fake 80's slang. He seems to be all about the gimmicks for these dubs. The gimmick for MZ 23 was 80's slang and keeping the same voice actors through all three parts whereas in Macross the gimmick was Mari Ijima. Of course both came out having that awful staccato acting and weird dialog changes.

Part of the problem is that the big chain store Best Buy would not carry anime if it did not have some kind of 5.1 track and a dub track. Of course this places the burden on publishers like ADV to make 5.1 dub tracks for shows made way back before even stereo was widespread. I also think that updating the sound in any way tends to make the show seem older as now you've got a crazy complex effects track with 1980's TV visuals. It just doesn't mesh.

So then why do you like bland unlikable characters, derivative storytelling, bad music, ugly mecha designs, and the all the spectacular time wasting scenes in Macross II? I don't know where you live Mr Space Cadet, but I'm on earth where making a robot balance a dinner plate on its head is a bad idea. Especially if you want to make a toy of it. And the size of the support arm doesn't matter since the only new toy planned is still 1/100 scale which is too small to make effective at supporting the dinner plate. And the sniper rifle and beam gun are not over-long or front heavy. This ain't the gun from Superman at Earth's End.

The thing with the sexy characters is that if you're gonna try and emulate Japan's usage of boobs for dollars then you have to do it well. Having every female character share the same weird body type right down the disinterested background bridge lady is like the director saying, "look! hawt babes everywhere! you want this right?" The characters in Shadow Chronicles seem to be complete oblivious to how they look outside of "i like ur patch huurrr." And it doesn't help that main lead Maia has two outfits, neither of which are terribly interesting. Guess what guys? The demographics in anime and manga have shifted to having a much larger female proportion (something like 40% for Shonen Jump readers last I heard) and like my friend Bea would say, "girls like pretty things!" You don't get cosplayers to watch your poo with stuffy jumpsuits and outdated armor.

Nobody makes fun of Drill Asamin and gets away with it. Oh mai waifu.

He's a herp derp "alpha i cans get laid nerd." derp.

NEEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRDS!

Honestly, I think Risa Ebata and Yûichi Takahashi (I'm not sure who did with what) are not necessarily terrific artists, but they are great designers. The basic designs in Frontier are really solid and look great in the show and as done by other artists. This is similar to how the artwork from the Touhou series is pretty bland but the same character designs look good when done by other artists. By contrast the Shadow Chronicles designs are really bland and outdated. Their duty uniforms are laughable, combining the worst of modern skintight cheap-o scifi with some of the worst aspects of the old Mospeada designs such as their ridiculous collars.

Maia's hair was donated to Akiha Shishidou from Sora kake Girl. Fortunately they threw out the granny voice.

Haha. Larger and more impractical? Have you seen any other mecha show besides Mac II? The VF-27's beam gun is no worse than say the Zeta Gundam's Hyper Mega Launcher, L-Gaim MK II's Buster Launcher, or a Zaku's Magella top cannon. It's a big weapon but most of that is the hollow front barrel and it is meant to be wielded with two hands.. Even the Armored VF-25 is pretty well balanced with the major bits distributed all over the body. The VF-2SS pack is the only one that's essentially trying to balance a serving plate on its head :3

Pfft. At least the VF-27 holds its gun with two hands. The railgun thing on the VF-2SS was always a bad idea. I have the Bandai kit and that whole assembly makes it top heavy and the crappy little articulated arm didn't help either. Is there even anything that holds the assembly over the head or does it just rest on top like in the kit? I see nothing like that in the TIAS.

Eh. Most of those shows cited other than Exosquad were pretty mediocre. They all suffered from terrible animation and "you can't kill anyone" syndrome. The villains were super hammy. For example the Clan Jade Falcon guys in the Battletech cartoon had tattoos that glowed when they sneered to make them look extra evil. Heavy Gear couldn't even be about war like all the Votoms stuff it was clearly based on so they just made it about some arena fighting. Invasion America was actually shown in prime time as a miniseries of "more mature animation" but it kind of fizzled out. The funny thing was how the Japanese phrase "Yosh!" became the alien's way of saying "alright." In retrospect it just made the main character (and the writers) look like huge weeaboos.

No.

Translation: All the robots are black and the women dress like deviantart rejects.

Well unlike what some of the crazy fans say, Robotech is still anime and is marketed as such. If anything there really is no more market for space opera cartoons that aren't anime.

To be fair, if there was some money to be made you would think Big West would negotiate. Although we have seen the depth of stubbornness from Japanese companies and creators regarding rights issues. Just look at Matsumoto and Nishizaki's battle over Space Battleship Yamato. Also the state of the American (and the world's) industry is not terribly encouraging One of things that separated the American industry from the Japanese one is that the American industry was born out of selling the shows themselves rather than the merchandise. If you listen to Matt Greenfield's commentary on the Megazone 23 Part 1 DVD he says they really got their start selling OVAs since they were easy to get and generally consisted of a handful of episodes at most. Which is why when they started putting out TV shows the episode count per tape or disc was really low. The explosion of TV show on DVD totally rocked the Anime Industry on both sides of the pond as now people were less willing to pay 20 bucks for four episodes when they can get an entire season of MASH for that much. Likewise digital distribution is making TV broadcasts more and more irrelevant. How does this all relate to Robotech? Well think of how many times ADV released the show. What was it like three or four counting weird poo like those single episode mini-DVDs? So you've got a long show being re-released constantly in multiple editions which not only takes up space and sours fans who bought the first versions, but also it confuses newcomers (especially that guy on Conan O'Brien with his recliner of rage). It's an old show so you're not getting a lot of new fans. And what of the merch? Robotech gets through by having the market share because the Macross stuff is import only. However, the advent of online shopping and wholesale international shipping is a fairly substantial impact on this market. For example when I was at Anime Boston the dealers room was stuff with Gundam kits in a time where Gundam has disappeared from the local Toys R Us's. Sure there were a few Robotech Masterpiece toys but there were few and far between compared to the number of Bandai VF-25 kits, Macross toys, Frontier toys, and other things. The sheer breadth of Macross merchandise is huge and word is getting around. Sure the average consumer usually doesn't import but anime is not for the average consumer. The way I've come to understand it from listening to journalists and insiders like Daryl Surat and Neil Nadelman, doing well enough in the industry means selling like a tenth the DVDs that Dragon Ball Z sells. The gaps between the first bestseller and the second bestseller tends to be pretty large and the same titles hold the top constantly. It's the gap between the average consumer and the fans. So if selling the show really doesn't matter, what of the Robotech merchandise? The Mospeada stuff is all priced too high and their Macross stuff is pretty poor especially when compared to Bandai and Yamato. And we've discussed the poor prospects of Palladium games. Granted most of this rant is just "gut feeling," but when I look at Big West's perspective I figure they are getting paid for all the junk that gets made of Macross no matter where it is sent in the world and even without having direct access to foreign markets Macross continues to make its presence known without Robotech.

It's about Nishizaki trying to recapture that ol Yamato magic. Don't think I didn't see what you did there Nishizaki with that Blue Noah reference. Keep your failures to yourself.

Man, that Robotech 3000 trailer is so generic it almost looks like they just took some animation meant for something else and re-dubbed it. Save for rock dude. Why does Robotech have rock dudes?