Seto Kaiba

"AAA" game development has been headed in this direction for a long time, price-wise. It was never a matter of "if" they would cross the threshold of $60/game, only "when". Studio spending on game development has only increased, while average sales volumes for games haven't really grown at the same rate. About 5,000 games have been developed for the Nintendo Switch and only about 2% of those have sold more than 1M units. Taking the simplest possible case of a game with no physical sales and no marketing, if your retail price point is $60 you need to move 24K copies for every $1M you spend developing it just to have any hope of breaking even after the retailer's cut. If you spend more than $41M developing your game, you need to be a Top 100 game with over 1M sales to break even. Some first-party Nintendo games like ToTK are rumored to have exceeded $100M. So Nintendo's looking at the ugly calculus of their profit margin and, instead of focusing on leaner development and tighter scopes for games are opting to raise game prices to buy themselves more breathing room. At $80/game, the sales per $1M is down to 18K. Open world games in particular are massive money pits, and Nintendo seems to be leading with one.

It can be... it depends on the period and the context. The timeframe and model we're talking about - the VF-3000 in the late 2010s - is very much a "small batch" situation where very low double digit or high single digit numbers are on the table. Especially given that the VF-3000 never entered actual production anywhere and the handful of units that the military got were purely for evaluation purposes. This is twenty years before the VF-17 and still more than a decade before the ramp-up of emigration that supported the VF-11's huge production volume. It's not really any bigger than the VF-3000, it just has a slightly longer nose... and the VF-3000 as a whole was designed with fighter-bomber capability in mind. They had other options on the table too, like the actual VB series that kicked off around that time. IIRC, in Macross M3 that's more or less explicitly the case... the Dancing Skulls are there to escort the Algenicus and oversee testing of the VF-5000. There's actually even multiple YF-11s on the Algenicus at the time. Max and Milia's input is said to have been critical for selecting the canard version of the design for production. Macross Plus itself directly acknowledges that there are multiple prototypes of both the YF-19 and YF-21. The units under active test in the OVA/Movie are the No.2 prototypes of their respective designs. Some official artbooks for the OVA and movie also talk about and even show pictures of the No.1 prototypes that preceded them. Official media usually lists three, sometimes four, YF-19 prototypes that were used for testing before the VF-19A was approved for production. Master File includes those four in its version, and adds a second group of four. Official media typically stops numbering YF-21 prototypes after No.2, and doesn't properly describe any YF-22s. Master File does. Maybe just the limitations of the system at the time... the Sega Dreamcast was not the most powerful console out there even in its heyday, and it took some real engine magic to actually do highly detailed background textures with a sense of depth to them like in Eternal Arcadia. Hm... I'm not sure that would reduce manufacturing costs, due to material requirements. As far as we know, the Inertia Vector Control System uses a very high-purity fold carbon core that is very difficult for even factory satellites to produce in large quantities where the Inertia Store Converter has a fold quartz core that cannot be synthesized with present technology and is subject to restrictions on mining and trade in fold quartz. The initial-type Variable Glaug was modeled on the VF-4 and the Glaug battle pod, neither of which had an inertia control system like that, so I'd assume it was not a factor in that design. The Neo Glaug was originally intended as an unmanned fighter, which has no reason to care about protecting the fleshy meats it wouldn't be carrying. The Neo Glaug bis might benefit from it, as it's a manned derivative of the Neo Glaug with all the performance that implies as a high-end 4th Generation VF design, but the only pilots we ever see in them are fairly elite and might not need the help. Older explanations for the VF-3000's very limited presence attributed it to issues in the design caused by simply scaling up the VF-1's airframe. This supposedly gave its joints a tendency to slip. Newer explanations of the VF-3000's rarity follow the same explanation that Master File adopts. Namely, that the VF-3000 was developed internally at Stonewell Bellcom after the war as a sort of internal rival/alternative to the VF-4 as a VF-1 successor aircraft that the company ultimately dropped of its own volition when it became clear that the VF-4 would become the next main fighter with just a few test aircraft produced. The VF-11 came about a decade later, as a successor to the VF-4 and VF-5000.

You'd think, but not really. It's actually kind of jarring and out of character how Lacus is demoted to a distressed damsel and doesn't really do anything for most of the movie until the big bad assaults her... after which her only real role is fanservice and delivering an upgrade to Kira that lets him Mary Sue his way through the final battle. I tried to be fair to the film and actually went to see it twice while it was in theaters. It's beautifully animated, but the writing is SO lazy that it's painful and it still has that Gundam SEED problem of aggressively samey design for characters and mobile suits alike. The enemy mobile suits are the worst of the lot, looking a lot like someone just tossed a Gyan head onto a generic Gundam body. Getting started on this season's new anime in a bit. I've picked up three so far in addition to the continuing titles from last season: The Too-Perfect Saint: Tossed Aside by My Fiance and Sold to Another Kingdom Catch Me at the Ballpark! Once Upon a Witch's Death

What you're describing there is normal franchise writing, which is not at all what I'm talking about. I actually quite enjoyed The Clone Wars for what it was. The connections I'm talking about aren't subtle in any way. In many cases, they make up a significant part of the entire show in question. IMO, it shows a rather profound lack of imagination (or perhaps a lack of confidence) when almost every new Star Wars series seems to have to be a spinoff or a sequel to the one well-received show that just happens to have been made by LucasFilm's Chief Creative Officer 17 or so years back.

I think you may have missed a key point earlier on... Andor is a prequel to Rogue One and therefore has a modest number of callbacks to the Original Trilogy, but that's different from what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is Disney Star Wars near-constantly depending on nostalgia for one very specific Star Wars title: the Star Wars: the Clone Wars cartoon. Rebels and The Bad Batch are direct sequels to The Clone Wars, picking up characters and plot threads from it. Ahsoka is a direct sequel to Rebels, featuring a character who was introduced in The Clone Wars (and even namedrops the main witch character from The Clone Wars). The Mandalorian's Mandalorians are from a faction from The Clone Wars and their traditions are too. The Book of Boba Fett is the same, but it also brings in the Pykes and Cad Bane from The Clone Wars. The Acolyte is all about the force witches based on their depiction in The Clone Wars. Tales of the Jedi alternates between being a The Clone Wars prequel and side story. Tales of the Empire alternates between being a side story and a sequel. Tales of the Underworld might be the most blatant one of the lot, being the backstory for one Clone Wars original character and a sequel to another's. Andor, Resistance, and Skeleton Crew feel like the only only corners of the Star Wars universe that are largely free of the shadow of Darth Filoni. (Not completely free, Saw Gerrera is one of his creations too...)

It has less singing, yes... Lacus is basically demoted to a macguffin rather than a character with actual agency in the story.

Well, if nothing else we can definitely say that Strange New Worlds has not lost its sense of fun... which means it should remain VASTLY more watchable than almost anything else the franchise has done in the last decade besides Lower Decks. Bring it on.

I don't think that would be a correct argument. Andor is one of the few titles in the Disney+ Star Wars lineup with a plot that isn't BDSM levels of tied up in fanservice references to Filoni's The Clone Wars cartoon.

The series finale of Ameku M.D. came out today. Whooboy what a stinker. This one is bad even by this show's standards, with the resolution being such an arse-pull that the writer is probably facing investigation for practicing proctology without a license. The final case is a locked room mystery where a drug dealer drowns in his father's locked study, and Dr. Ameku is just BSing her way through the explanation without any way to back anything she's saying up because the victim was cremated already and everyone just kind of rolls with it even though there's no proof and the detective somehow drops the charges without consulting any authority (even though the police couldn't establish means or motive, they were going to try him anyway). I feel like I lost some IQ points from watching this slop.

There goes Star Wars, back to nurse at the teat of Clone Wars nostalgia instead of coming up with something new and interesting. Can't exactly pretend I'm excited for a miniseries exposition dumping about two one-dimensional meme characters from a 15 year old show. Not much interest in every western's black hat gunslinger and the girl who got replaced by an even less subtle version of TPM Darth Maul.

Yep. It's exactly the same plot as Gundam SEED Destiny... just as a speedrun version. A quick skirmish with Blue Cosmos ends in a false flag operation that an outwardly benevolent, technologically advanced, Coordinator-supremacist de facto autocracy ruled by a former genetic researcher and eugenics enthusiast from the Mendel institute uses as a pretext to use the Requiem beam cannon captured from Blue Cosmos to hold the world's nations hostage James Bond villain-style so they can force everyone to adopt a new social model based on the crackpot pseudoscience of genetic predestination also known as The Destiny Plan with the assistance of their super-coordinator protege, an angsty teenage incel "super coordinator" with anger management issues who hates Kira Yamato on principle. If I had a nickel for every time that happened in the Cosmic Era, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.

*space banjo intensifies* It's an odd choice, to be sure... given that official materials also make the VF-3000 out to be a flawed prototype that was never produced on a large scale. Master File does throw a nod to it, though, with the statement that a small number of VF-3000As were subsequently produced and used by adversary forces. That is a little more odd. The VF-5000 wasn't developed on Neo York. It was the first (new) design to come out of the Shinsei Industry VF design headquarters on Earth after it was formed by merging the aerospace engineering divisions of Stonewell Bellcom and Shinnakasu Heavy Industry in 2012. It was developed to be a comparatively inexpensive VF, but it was also intended to be a general-duty main VF with high production volumes. It was a continuation/conclusion of Stonewell Bellcom's attempts to perfect the concept behind the VF-1 Valkyrie, which had previously brought about the VF-3000. As far as we know, pretty much every new (non-enemy) model VF prior to the VF-25 was designed on Earth. The Test Flight Center at Eden's New Edwards AFB is Earth's favorite proving ground for new VF designs (likely due to the unspoiled planetary conditions), but both Shinsei Industry and General Galaxy keep their VF design teams headquartered on Earth. A bit... though in the latter case, the New UN Forces were almost forced to save face because there was not way they could admit to the truth of what happened without it turning into an even bigger scandal. There was no way they could admit the Sharon Apple system that went rogue was intended for military use, that said military AI system also used an illegal processor known for its tendency to go crazy, or that Isamu had stolen the YF-19 from the test flight center to spoil the Ghost X-9's debut by attacking it. Isamu provided the military with a relatively easy way out that also happened to make it politically difficult to punish him for the crimes he committed. (So he got an ironic reward instead, ending up promoted on a course towards a desk job, the thing he would hate most.) There would be no way to pretty up the theft of the latest model VF by anti-government forces, which is why the Algencius's captain was worried.

To break the contents of the book down: 4pg "Making Of" section that talks about the early story treatment and some storyboards 30pg "Character" section basic written bios and some line art. 48pg "Mecha" section with no surprises, fairly basic coverage of the VF-0A/D/S, raid spec, armored spec, SV-51, Cheyenne, Monster, Octos, F-14A+, MiG-29, Asuka II, and Auerstedt. The only thing it does that's not strictly relevant to the events of the OVA is mention the VF-0B (but not VF-0C). 4pg interview with Kawamori 4pg interview with unknownCASE animators Hiroyuki Kashima, Atsushi Sakiyama, Hiroshi Yagishita, and Tomisaburo Hashimoto 3 1/2 page interview with Hiroshi Ohnogi 3 1/2 page interview with Ichiro Itano 3pg interview with Junya Ishigaki 4pg interview with Kazutaka Miyatake 2pg interview with Takuya Saito 16pg "Gallery" section of screenshots and some random lineart.

After a quick review, the contents of the included booklet are pretty standard stuff... even the interviews are nothing remarkable. Only two details really stood out to me. One being a statement in the brief section devoted to Edgar La Salle that he is Claudia La Salle's younger brother, something that I don't think I've ever seen put in writing before. The other is a brief, almost nonchalant, mention of an unproduced alternate ending to Macross Zero that was included in the script that had Shin staying behind on Mayan island with Mao as the island's new head priestess.

If you've already watched Destiny, there's no need to watch the new movie... it's just Destiny again and worse. (No really, the plot is exactly the goddamn same...)