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Seto Kaiba

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Everything posted by Seto Kaiba

  1. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... everything is unfortunate for Harmony Gold. Especially - to pivot back to the topic at hand - that this is the best they could muster for an official art book in 2021. Doubly so now that the licensing deadlock is broken and comparisons will be drawn against Big West's official art books in terms of quality and presentation going forward. Udon Entertainment is normally at least a competent publisher. Between this Southern Cross book and the previous Macross book they did, the only conclusion I can reach is that the staff at Udon working on Robotech's art books phoned it in, probably while working on something more profitable. That said, the historian in me really cannot fully express without profanity how annoyed I am that they included all this stuff from the Science Fiction Sengoku Saga series concept and framed NONE OF IT in its historical context, even though the entire concept for Science Fiction Sengoku Saga was historical period dramas retold "IN SPAAAAAAACE!". You could get away with not explaining that stuff if your readers were Japanese or you had a reasonable expectation that they would already be familiar with Sengoku period history like if this was, say, an artbook for Sengoku Basara or Samurai Warriors... but most Robotech fans aren't likely to be versed in Japanese history at all, so to them this is just a gallery of bizarre armor pictures rather than a conceptual spacefuture Who's Who of Sengoku period warlords.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    I think the Auroran transformation was published in an old issue of B-Club, but I'd have to check to be sure. But anyway, the safest assumption whenever Robotech tries to tell you something is "new" or "never before seen" is to respond with "Liar".
  3. Seto Kaiba
    I'm pretty sure the one up top is the Hōjō clan's. The one on the bottom is the Oda clan's... (yes, that Oda clan). I'm more irritated by the fact that the book makes zero attempt to frame the concept art from Science Fiction Sengoku Saga in any useful context... like giving an explanation to the very blatant Fuurinkazan banner that shows up at one point or explaining what these seals are. Poor quality in a Robotech book? About Southern Cross? Who could have seen this coming? Oh, that's right... Everyone. Everyone saw that coming.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Well, if you were expecting us to shout "Burn the Heretic!" you're probably going to be disappointed. Wrong fandom for that, after all. It's perfectly fine if some Macross titles aren't to your taste. Everyone is different. I would note that Macross Plus is more popular with western fans than Japanese ones. It got kind of a lukewarm welcome when it came out in Japan, in no small part for the reasons you didn't much care for it. Shoji Kawamori is credited as its designer in the game. Scramble Valkyrie is... well "non-canon" isn't quite the right word, but it's not part of the official Macross setting and chronology... a game that came out in late 1993, during the runup to both Macross Plus and Macross 7. About a year after Macross II: Lovers Again was completed. While Shoji Kawamori wasn't directly involved in a lot of Macross development for a few years there, Studio Nue worked on several Macross video games including FamilySoft's trilogy and Scramble Valkyrie and created several new/original designs like the VF-1SOL series from Scramble Valkyrie, the VF-X3 Medusa, LDR-04 Maverick, QF-9iE Ghost, and SDP-1 Stampede Valkyrie.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    "Gate" AKA Breaker-1 is the only one given any discussion/description, but only in vague terms as a ~19 year old consummate professional operative. There's mention in passing of more members of the Breakers in the field with her. Mainly in terms of how the Breakers are described as an ultra-super-top-secret organization of elite intelligence operatives with the latest tech even the military doesn't have yet and a license to kill. (I guess it doesn't really help the edgy fanfic feel that ships and mecha with the Dark stealth upgrade were already being painted black...) But this is just an initial impression based on the description in Mospeada File.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    No word on that that I can find... and Tatsunoko Production's page for it has a region-lock that defeated even my main VPN. What I was able to glean from Entertainment Archive Alpha: Genesis Climber MOSPEADA File is: Not much else is said about the setting of Genesis Breaker, the article is mostly a recap of the MOSPEADA setting.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    I'm still just plain baffled that the name of this new custom VF-31 is apparently "Parmenides"... Of all the possible names for a fighter aircraft, why name it after a Greek philosopher who specialized in metaphysics?
  8. Seto Kaiba
    If Game of Thrones hadn't tanked in its final season this would be a license to print money... but now? This feels like a big risk for very little reward.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Random question. Did anyone ever translate the Genesis Breaker section in the last MOSPEADA File artbook? I've been skimming it to answer some questions on another site and was wondering if I'm duplicating effort or not by doing a translation. (I'm very amused to see that we've all apparently been spelling the aliens name wrong this whole time... oh well.)
  10. Seto Kaiba
    I could buy that argument if the other members of her guild were actually around when she does this nonsense... but increasingly she's on her own and they only find out about it well after the fact so they're not even reacting to it.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Making my way through Borufi, and at episode 8 it feels like the story has run out of ideas. It's a comedy, but the only joke is that Maple is stupidly overpowered because she keeps picking up overpowered abilities from hidden bosses she bumps into and using them in ways that the devs didn't anticipate. It doesn't really go anywhere or do anything with that except repeat it. Her gaining some new overpowered upgrade has reached the point of being a once-an-episode gag.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Macross 7 Encore isn't explicitly placed in-continuity... fans have tabled a number of guesses based on circumstantial evidence from the episodes themselves, but there's no obvious fit for them. Their stories are essentially out of continuity with the TV series proper so you can watch them after it with no real impact to your enjoyment of it. Bare minimum, they have to be set after episode 28 because of certain mechanical designs that are present which first appeared in episode 28 and also feature some mecha that were first used in episode 44 but obviously built beforehand. Most fan assessments usually put them somewhere around episodes 39-42. They're... all over the place, and in no particular order. About half of them are set before the series, showing little tidbits of backstory for characters like Ray, Veffidas, Gamlin, Gubaba, Gepernich, etc., while most of the rest aren't set at any particular/obvious time during the series.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Nope. Absolutely not. Wouldn't dream of it. OK. As you'd expect, it's mostly obvious stuff like that this is its Fighter form, that the mark on top is "eye-catching" and "probably a person's personal mark". That "unlike the Siegfried, the Super Pack is attached by folding the main wing down" and that "the minigun pod is so large that it does not fit under the main wing". The only noteworthy bit is that this new VF is apparently called the "Parmenides"... an odd choice, since Parmenides was a Greek philosopher whose fragmentary surviving work is best known for dictums like "Nothing comes from nothing" and ruminations like the distinction between objective and subjective experience. The YF-30 and stock VF-31 are named for Greek personifications of time (chronological time/Chronos and moments of great change/Kairos) while the original Xaos VF-31 custom was named for the mythic hero Siegfried.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Or when some Zentradi decides to repurpose a suit made for extravehicular activity for combat...
  15. Seto Kaiba
    That's not the standard Zentradi spacesuit... this is: That's the general duty Zentradi space suit, variants of which were used in almost every battlefield role including being worn by spacecraft crews. This is a heavier armored spacesuit meant for hand-to-hand combat issued to the armored divisions. A lightweight variant of it was occasionally used as a pilot suit. Neither the standard-issue spacesuit nor the armored spacesuit is, in its standard configuration, equipped with flight capability or a powered motion assist. A variant of the armored spacesuit that appeared in the official setting PS3 game Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy WAS presented as a flight-capable powered suit... but it wasn't exactly great in actual combat. (It's basically the weakest enemy unit in the game by a substantial margin, and understandably so as it's basically just an ordinary infantry spacesuit that some idiot put rocket boots on.)
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, the Nousjadeul-Ger battle suit is a mass-produced mecha in the Zentradi forces in either version of the story. From the dates on the art, the Nousjadeul-Ger may have been so late to appear in the Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series because its design wasn't completed until the series had been on the air for several months.
  17. Seto Kaiba
  18. Seto Kaiba
    So, we've got another look at the new VF-31 Custom that Delta Flight is using... GERWALK and Battroid modes this time.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    ... why Barbie pink? Meltrandi gear is typically either kind of lavender, blue, or red.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    There is that, yeah... we first saw something like this in Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy, where the ancient Protoculture's ruins on Uroboros had what amounted to a fold-based teleporter network that was used to facilitate moving between the area map and the various "dungeons" in-game. That got scaled up to interplanetary levels in Macross Delta when the activated Protoculture ruins in the Brisingr cluster revealed an interplanetary fold network joining the key worlds of the delta wave system.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Didn't pick it up myself because... y'know... the R-word... but from what I've seen posted the quality is about what you'd expect from a Robotech art book. (Which is to say, it sucks.) The "new" art seems to be mainly reprints from the Imai Files but with even less useful commentary than the Imai Files had.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    When companies start side businesses, the results can sometimes be rather odd. Among the historical side businesses of my last couple of employers are things like soy-based plastics, biofuels, charcoal briquettes, glassmaking, aircraft manufacture, ballistic missile parts, radar systems, spacecraft, and museum management. If those side projects take off you eventually end up with a conglomerate like Daewoo that does everything from make electronics to cars to guns to fabric to managing hotel franchises and container ship fleets. (This is how we ended up with companies like SMS and Xaos in Macross... a successful company founded a side business to take advantage of an emerging market and the next thing you know Space UPS has a private army and Space AOL is managing idol groups.) For an L.A.-based company to try to break into television is more cliche than bizarre.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Their primary business is a moderately successful rental property management operation that manages eleven apartment complexes in the greater Los Angeles area.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    That, in all likelihood, has to do with Harmony Gold's problematic attempt to migrate its streaming licenses to Funimation back in 2019. Harmony Gold has moved its portfolio of anime properties between streaming services a surprising number of times in the last ten years, likely due to Robotech's poor performance on streaming services in general as an old property that hadn't had any new material in ages. Their most recent attempt to change licensees back to Funimation ran into issues when HG's intermediary - Kew Media Group - abruptly declared bankruptcy, liquidated its assets, and went out of business just a few months after the deal was closed.1 Due to the bankruptcy leaving a lot of KMG's licenses invalid or in limbo, that likely disrupted Funimation's plans to add Robotech and its component shows to their library as well as any other streaming services that hosted that content via KMG. Oh, yes... it has been. Deliberately so, in fact. That was Harmony Gold's whole plan to "protect" Robotech... they leveraged trademark law and Big West's apathy when it came to the global market to effectively block anyone from licensing of distributing Macross titles outside of Japan. Big West only finally started to do something about that back in 2016, and the dam finally broke this past March. 1. Barely a month after closing the deal to have Funimation distribute Robotech, Kew Media Group notified its investors that its CFO had made inaccurate disclosures regarding the company's working capital. There were reports made to the media of significant internal accounting irregularities, including covering up losses by borrowing money intended for payment of royalties from their distribution arm. When the news broke, the company swiftly defaulted on a $100 million credit line extended by three different banks, ended up in bankruptcy, and had its assets liquidated. That left many of its contracts invalid or in limbo.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    The only place I can recall ever seeing stuff like that was in modeling magazines showcasing kit customizations from the 90's and early 00's... specifically ones that replaced the GBP-1S thruster "backpack" with a complete NP-BP-01 booster system from the Super Pack. (Like the one in the October 2002 issue of Model Graphix)
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