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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... I'd recommend reducing your expectations a fair bit. Chapters X-1, X-2, and X-3 do have art... but with the exception of Chapter X-3 it's rough sketches that are way below the level of the art elsewhere in the book.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    If the Starfleet Academy writer's room is infested with the former occupants of the Discovery and Picard writer's rooms as it almost certainly will be, having him back at all feels like a lose-lose situation. I don't really wanna see the snarky, comedic EMH turned into yet another miserable bastard.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Beautiful and very tempting... but very expensive and with all the other starships Enterprise I've already got, I just can't justify it. If it were smaller scale and a bit cheaper, maybe...
  4. Seto Kaiba
    A Google search turned up pre-Disney art showing that character (or another of his species) with a generally humanoid bodyplan. Is that kid in the back a cyborg? I thought in Star Wars those were basically lobotomized meat robots...
  5. Seto Kaiba
    That's pretty normal for HLJ. They put more care into their packaging to ensure that goods don't get damaged in transit, so books tend to be shipped shrinkwrapped to a cardboard sheet in a box rather than just stuffed into an envelope. It's also why they offer a "private warehouse" to hold items for a month or two to allow you to batch items and get the best value out of the shipment cost. The copy I ordered from HLJ arrived just like yours, shrinkwrapped to cardboard and put into a box with paper wadding. The one I ordered from CD Japan was just stuffed haphazardly into a bubblepack envelope and shipped as-is.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    That looks like an anti-meth PSA. 🤣
  7. Seto Kaiba
    I'm worried about the kids. Look what Star Wars fans did to poor Jake Lloyd.😵‍💫 Disney's proven they can't even really do THAT right anymore, though... so I'd say it's safer to assume they'll find a way to screw it up.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    It's not Paramount+ that's for sale... it's Paramount itself. The current incarnation of Paramount was formed by re-merging CBS and Viacom in the hopes that consolidation would help them succeed with lower costs. It had the opposite effect because CBS and Viacom are two halves of a whole idiot, and so the company's been bleeding money and declining in valuation because many of their channels like MTV and VH1 aren't doing so hot and Paramount+ being the financial equivalent of a sucking chest wound thanks to its profound lack of content. They're looking for a Get Out of Jail Free card for the consequences of actions like selling billions of dollars in stock to fund the development and production of things like Star Trek: Discovery's seasons 3-5. Ah, but which one? Is this the original one from Star Trek: Voyager or the copy from "Living Witness" that was reactivated from a backup module in 3074? No kidding... this, like Discovery's third season, is a rescue from 80's and 90's Paramount's pile of rejected Star Trek series pitches. Various people have pitched the idea of a series set at Starfleet Academy half a dozen times or so, and it's always been rejected because the idea itself is boring and hard to write for. Starfleet Academy's basically just Space College and cadets don't get any dangerous/exciting duty even in field training. They even tried to make the concept into a comic book at one point, and it did so poorly it was cancelled after barely a year.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    So this is basically just the Star Wars version of Star Trek: Prodigy? I have a bad feeling about this... not just because I'm fairly sure the series is going to be bad, but because I'm 100% sure the fans are going to cyberbully the ever-loving hell out of the child actors who worked on this pretty much no matter what.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Paramount still haven't learned their freaking lesson. Discovery was a flop. Strange New Worlds succeeded as a spin-off because it did away with everything to do with Discovery. This is just going to run into the same problem Discovery did, putting a pack of unlikable characters in a setting the fans have already clearly and repeatedly said that they hate. I only hope poor Robert Picardo has good health insurance, because he's going to put his back out trying to carry this series.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Could've saved a lot of trouble by just retitling season two Star Trek: Oops! All Temporal Paradoxes.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    He's not really meant to be likeable. He's meant to be relatable, because his story is all about how the Empire's senseless acts of oppression and petty cruelty gradually radicalized its own ordinary apolitical workaday people into open revolt and forming the seeds of the organized rebellion that would one day bring it crashing down. Din was likeable but I wouldn't call him well-written, in large part because his story is driven by his shockingly firm and consistent grip on the idiot ball and the moon logic of the warrior cult he belongs to. When it comes to writing, as I've often opined, I think Star Wars's biggest weakness is its obsession with Force users. There's nothing particularly relatable about a space magic-using warrior monks living a life of self-denial and their axe crazy edgelord counterparts who dress all in black and do everything "4 teh evulz". The Acolyte suffers from that especially badly, with most of the cast being thinly written stock characters based on all the usual Force user tropes. It says a lot that the only likeable character is the villain who starts opining about wanting to be true to himself... after murdering like eight people. He's only well-written in a relative sense, standing out by virtue of how utterly bland and boring everyone else in the story is. (It is funny that his attitude is basically "What's a couple laser sword murders between friends?")
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Cassian Andor, in 2016 and 2022.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Hollywood as a whole has always struggled to write female protagonists. Disney's unwillingness to accept that trying to please everyone means you'll ultimately please nobody has just trapped them in a worse version of what other properties go through when trying to write a female protagonist. They can't look past the character's gender, so they inevitably veer into "strong female protagonist" cliches built on the sexist tropes that they're trying to subvert and end up writing an uninteresting middle-of-the-road character that can't be too much or too little of any one trait without risking accusations of sexism or Mary Sue-dom. They invest so much effort into making the character inoffensive that there's little to work with in terms of personality when the time comes to write a story for that character. Star Trek's Kate Mulgrew has been pretty open about this problem since the 90's. She opined that her character was so unevenly written because of the flip-flopping between the different female protagonist cliches that it felt like her character was undiagnosed bipolar. The series was saved by breaking the rules and introducing a character who was too much or too little in basically every category (Jeri Ryan's Seven of Nine). Unrelated:
  15. Seto Kaiba
    To be honest, I don't think I have seen any source for this series attempt to explain the minor variations in uniform colors or trims in any functional or organizational context. The only differentiation noted in Genesis Breaker is between infantry and pilots, but even that is strictly textual when talking about the Mars Base plan for retaking Earth. Not sure why you would, the protagonists arguably aren't real soldiers so much as they are borderline secret agents. One of the previous art books even described them as the government's hit men for suppressing dissent.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    They've been trying to turn a boy brand into a everyone brand. Disney bought Lucasfilm because the Star Wars brand prints money. They want to make as much money off of their new acquisition as possible, because they are a corporation. So they are trying to make it appeal to the broadest possible audience to maximize their profit. They're just having an absolutely miserable time trying to pull it off since they massively underestimated how invested the fandom was in the status quo. No matter what they do with it, large portions of the fandom simply will not accept it. If they try to go their own way with it, they get chewed out for not respecting the lore. If they try to color within the lines, they get chewed out for being unoriginal. So Disney is stuck swinging for the fences in the hopes that they will land a hit by sheer dumb luck because nothing else they've tried is working. They've tried copycating the originals, they've tried going their own way, they've tried writing by committee, they've tried EU style backstories and background character spin-offs...🤪 They hired a fan who treated the project like an astonishingly high budget fan film. The writer's room was full of fans too. So the script ended up being something like a bad fanfic, full of little continuity nods and love for the source material and all those little ideas that sound super cool in a fan's imagination but don't necessarily translate well into an actual narrative. How they got as far as actual filming with the script in that state is a mystery for the ages. I can only imagine any executive who was shown the "power of many" scene would have been left waiting for Ashton Kutcher to jump out of the woodwork and announce that they had been Punkd.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Nope. The book is pretty light on art overall. Barring, I think, one chapter illustration all of the book's art of soldiers is of the titular "Breakers". The rest of the book's art is principally their equipment (Riding Suits, Ride Armors, incidental stuff like sidearms and rations), with a little bit on the new Invit designs and a bit on the Genesis Breaker versions of a few key designs from the original series like the Ikazuchi, Izumo, and Anubis-1 missile. There is a picture of Mars Base that's used in the book twice, but nothing related to things like ship crews, other bases that existed in the original's backstory, etc. Like the original series, which focused on the survivors from several different Mars Base units banding together on Earth, Genesis Breaker focuses on a unit of elite intelligence agents from Mars running a mission behind enemy lines to study the Invit.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    No problem. 👍 Except for certain proper nouns that are consistently written in English and often in all caps (e.g. "GENESIS BREAKER") and the names of various mecha, characters, and chapters which are written both ways, it's pretty much all Japanese yes.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Several toy makers/lines are mentioned in the interview section, but only in a historical context. Keiichiro Maeno, the toy designer working on the project on behalf of "Lil' Golem", reminisces a bit about having worked on the Beagle MOSPEADA toy line before it went under and moving on to Sentinel's RIOBOT line near the start of the interview section. I do not see any mentions of new/forthcoming toys, just past releases like the Sentinel/RIOBOT 1/48 Legioss (in passing) and the dedicated spread for the 1/12 scale Intruder Gate ride armor.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    My copy of the new Genesis Breaker MOSPEADA book rolled in today during lunch, so I'll break it down real quick. The book is 114 pages including: 4 pages devoted to the roundtable interview with the creators 2 pages summarizing the timeline 5 pages of character bios (one each for Gate, Every, Eagle, Simmons, and Necessary) 1 page of equipment line art 5 pages of mecha line art broken up into half-page segments for the Bulldog TLEAD, Dropship, Spiteful Legioss, the modernized ship designs, and two pages for the Invit's "Star Ovary" and the twenty or so types of Invit (lettered A-R plus Invit Gate). 5 pages of the 1/12 scale Intruder ride armor model 74 pages devoted to the actual story in twelve chapters 12 pages of new story broken up into 3 new-for-this-book "Special Edition" chapters (X-1 thru X-3) devoted to the fates of the other main characters. 2 pages of glossary/keywords It looks like the new content to the book is principally the three new Special Edition chapters of the story which comprise pages 100-111. I admit I haven't been keeping up with this title, so some of what's in there story-wise is definitely a surprise to me. It looks like the Invit's backstory was completely rewritten to go for more of a darker and edgier cosmic horror angle. The Izumo's been redesigned to have thirteen synchrotron cannons now... it had just the one in the anime.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    That's certainly how Sloane presented the organization when it made its debut in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Season 6's "Inquisition". Of course, that didn't really last much past their first appearance as by Season 7's "Inter Enim Arma Silent Leges" they had effectively grabbed the villain ball with both hands and transitioned from "so secret even the Tal Shiar and Obsidian Order don't know about them" to being an open secret protected only by the most ridiculous arbitrary skepticism. Discovery just made it a million times worse by having them walking around openly on starships with special Starfleet badges indicating their affiliation openly. That series also screwed them up worse by making them more or less indistinguishable from Starfleet Intelligence, borrowing large chunks of plot from the much (and deservedly) maligned DS9 relaunch novel series's Control mini-arc, and turning them into little more than Starfleet's Murder Inc. Yup. Even the novels, awful as the are, did a better job of depicting Section 31 as a covert organization. This is like off-brand James Bond, but with a really kitschy sci-fi aesthetic slapped on that manages to look hilariously cheap despite the no doubt ridiculously huge budget.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    *sigh* In a way, it's kind of impressive how committed Paramount is to ignoring audience feedback. Star Trek fans said loud and clear (and repeatedly) that they don't want this vaguely racist dystopian misery porn. That's a big part of why Star Trek: Discovery flopped domestically and internationally and was cancelled two seasons early to finish as the franchise's worst-rated series. The whole Section 31 concept was already pretty goofy in Deep Space Nine, but Discovery's version was so incredibly stupid that it was one of the most-mocked parts of the series up to that point. Even Lower Decks called out how stupid it was. That's why they put Michelle Yeoh's character on a bus. I'm amazed she didn't demand to exit sooner, given that she was stuck playing a cringeworthy and deeply racist "yellow peril" villain. I guess, at the very least, she might be able to use this to add a Razzie to her list of awards, because this looks absolutle dogsh*t.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    It does a bit... though I'd assume it's entirely coincidental. I doubt anyone working on Robotech was even aware that the Sky Angels doujinshi existed, never mind actually having a copy.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    We never get an objective frame of reference for speed, so that's really more perception than anything. That said, the configurations using drones almost certainly do go faster because the drones are lighter than the heavy booster rockets. The tradeoffs there being that the drones cost substantially more, carry much less weaponry, and don't improve the fighter's armor. I'd question whether any fighter except perhaps the VF-31AX Kairos Plus really gets that benefit though. The Sv-303's mini-ghosts don't contribute to its output because they're run off capacitors rather than having dedicated engines, and the Sv-262's Lilldrakens are a range extender rather than something meant to boost performance. The "Super Ghost" from Absolute Live!!!!!! seems to be the only one big enough for its engines to offer a large increase in output, as it seems to be pretty much a full-sized Ghost.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Everyone has their own preferences, naturally. I know that I've found a number of dubs frustrating because characters have been recast mid-series, which ultimately put me off the dub entirely because the new voice actor was way less suitable to the character. Like when Saiyuki replaced David Matranga with Lex Lang as the voice actor for Sanzo. Lex Lang's a really good voice actor, but he was just the wrong guy for the role and it took me right the hell out of the series. Most, yeah... at least initially. Simulcasts are a big part of anime streaming these days, so most new shows that are streaming on services like Crunchyroll, HiDive, etc. come out subs-only at first because that's faster. Cheaper too, but speed is what matters. They loop back later and add dubs for the shows that performed well enough to merit the extra investment. The older shows dumped onto those services from back catalogs tend to come with dubs already because they were previously released with dubs on DVD back before streaming was even a thing. Cowboy Bebop had a phenomenal dub... unfortunately that kind of led to Steve Blum being absolutely bloody everywhere in the 2000s. The voice actor pool just isn't big enough to have decent variety outside Japan. (Steve Blum got especially bad in games. I remember Quake IV being a really awful case where 90% of the characters were voiced by Steve... such that the majority of the in-game dialog was him talking to other characters also voiced by him. Truly, that was a case of "Me's a crowd".) Unfortunately those good dubs are more the exception than the rule... Outlaw Star, Cowboy Bebop, Trigun, Saiyuki, Full Metal Panic!... for every one of those there were fifty awful screech-a-thons with bored voice actors sleepwalking through the script.
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