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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Hard pass... anime in general very rarely translates well to live-action. Macross is definitely not the kind of story that lends itself well to live-action adaptation.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    That would've been counter to purpose, as indicated previously. The Mardook aren't Zentradi, and they see the Zentradi as nothing more than disposable biological automata meant for military use. First, Southern Cross has no connection to Macross except being sponsored by the same company. Second, nobody's going to reference Southern Cross. That series was a massive flop in Japan. So much so that it got cancelled barely halfway into its run.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Macross II's tie-in games Macross 2036 and Macross: Eternal Love Song had stories centered on rogue Zentradi fleets, though they had to give the Zentradi a character who actually had some prior development (read: "Quamzin") to add some interest and have a new crop of Zentradi spies experience culture to flavor up a kind of bland antagonist. By the time Macross II's events roll around in 2092, the UN Forces don't even consider rogue Zentradi fleets a real threat anymore because they're so used to fighting them and have refined it to an almost literal art. The ones in Macross Frontier aren't a rogue Zentradi fleet as such, just a bunch of unruly gits in a New UN Spacy Marine Corps unit who started a mutiny for the lulz while assigned to an isolated backwater planet.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    That would have been counter to the story's needs in a couple of different ways. For one, Macross II: Lovers Again is not a sequel to Super Dimension Fortress Macross. In most respects it's a sequel to the movie Macross: Do You Remember Love?. DYRL?'s Zentradi have a very different, and significantly more alien and intimidating, aesthetic than the dated and admittedly slightly goofy 70's-esque look they had in the TV series. IMO, taking the Mardook leadership seriously would've been a lot harder if they were rocking the same Boddole Zer's grey robe from the Ming the Merciless winter collection that looked more than slightly campy even in '82. For two, that the Mardook are an ancient race separate and distinct from the Zentradi and with their own culture and customs was very important to the OVA's plot and message. A good deal of their design and nomenclature is in subtle service of reminding the viewer of that fact. (Macross II's director strongly implied that the Mardook are a surviving branch of the ancient Protoculture civilization who created the Zentradi and Meltrandi.) As a whole, the Zentradi aren't so much grounded as simply devoid of character... albeit intentionally. Their whole schtick was that they were a clone army that had no concept of any aspect of culture or social interaction beyond military duty, again intentionally, to make them more effective and obedient killing machines. There isn't really much that can be done with them in terms of character arcs because of this, though, which is likely why Macross so rarely revisits them as antagonists. The Mardook, by contrast, are an ancient species with their own culture and traditions whose belief in the inherent superiority of their culture and xenophobic desire to preserve that culture from outside influence is their casus belli.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Since the VPN went down for a good while today, I got some more quality watching in. Re:Zero's second season is shaping up nicely to the point where I can almost kid myself that Subaru's going to accomplish something now that his plan to one-up Roswaal has gone so far nearly without a hitch. I'll be rather sad when it lapses back into the usual misery business. So I'm a Spider, So What? is also finally doing something like make progress on the story, now that the hero's dead and the spider is actually starting to learn about the setting instead of just mindlessly leveling. Starting I Couldn't Become a Hero, So I Reluctantly Decided to Get a Job from my backlog... gonna see where that goes.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Wow, as Newbie questions go, this is definitely one... No, all of the shows marketed under the original "Super Dimension" brand - Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Super Dimension Century Orguss, and Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross - are entirely separate stories set in different universes. MOSPEADA is completely unrelated to them as well, except in that its creators were trying to cash in on the success of the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series. Macross, as you know, is set in a universe where an alien warship crashed in the south pacific ocean in 1999 and humanity recovered and reverse-engineered it, leading to a First Space War with the enemies of the ship's original owners in 2009, the destruction of Earth's surface in 2010, and eventually mass emigration into space beginning in 2012... leading to stories set in various emigrant fleets and planets across the galaxy over the next half century or so. Orguss is set in a universe where a world war over possession of a space elevator is underway in 2062, in which one side's attempt to destroy the space elevator with a dimensional bomb results in a fighter pilot being sent into a bizarre mélange of overlapping alternate reality Earths and plunged into the middle of a conflict between a humanoid race called the Emaan, a militaristic human faction called the Chiram, and a race of sentient robots called the Mu. Southern Cross is set in a universe where a nuclear war broke out near the end of the 21st century that left Earth incapable of supporting life, forcing the surviving human population to emigrate to space colonies in the outer solar system and then to a pair of newly-discovered Earthlike planets named Liberte and Glorie. In 2120, the recently-established settlement on Glorie comes under attack by a mysterious force called the Zor, who claim the planet is their homeworld and who are desperate to recover a native plant which they need to maintain their harmonious society. MOSPEADA is set in a universe where humanity had only just started to colonize the rest of the solar system when Earth was abruptly invaded and conquered in 2050 by an alien race known as the Inbit, forcing the survivors to flee to the colonies. 33 years later, after one failed attempt to retake the planet in 2080, the colonies send a second military force to retake Earth from the Inbit armed with a newly-developed transforming fighter and the latest transforming motorbike/powered armor called the MOSPEADA. The survivors of that doomed second recapture force are stuck operating behind enemy lines as they try to link up with the colonial forces and retake the planet.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    We don't make the news, we just report it. Present and accounted for, as is the case in most sci-fi. Macross makes far more liberal use of gravity and inertia manipulation technology than most sci-fi properties I'm familiar with. We did see that it has its advantages several times in Macross Frontier, with the Macross Quarter repeatedly exploiting its greater maneuverability to dodge incoming fire from heavy quantum reaction cannons on Vajra ships and the Battle Galaxy. If you want to think about it this way, a Macross-type warship exists for one main reason: to deploy a disproportionately large heavy quantum reaction beam cannon. Because those heavy quantum reaction beam weapons have such overwhelming firepower that can one-hit kill enemy warships, entire taskforces, or even a small fleet in a single shot, they're quite a significant strategic advantage. The greater maneuverability of a Macross-type warship could be seen as a means to offset the weapon's inherent disadvantages: its limited field of fire, the amount of time it takes to charge the cannon to fire (which can be several minutes), and the amount of downtime to reset the weapon between shots. (Limitations like this are why thermonuclear reaction weaponry was considered superior to heavy quantum reaction beam cannons in-universe... the same destructive potential, but more flexible, scalable, and most importantly spammable.) Well, duh... but the question asked was EXPLICITLY about the IN-UNIVERSE rationale behind it.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    I'd assume it probably has a lot more to do with a simply excessive thrust-to-weight ratio for a warship, the ability to move the main engines around as the legs, and an excess of high thrust secondary engines to act as outsized verniers.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Tatsunoko Production doing a poor job with its anniversary titles seems to be a bit of a running theme. The 55th anniversary commemorative title, The Price of Smiles, was a complete and utter trainwreck... a mecha anime that couldn't seem to think of anything to do with mecha and had a plot so incoherent and half-arsed it made Southern Cross look like a timeless masterpiece.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Since it's a meeting-heavy day, I've got another new anime running in the background while I listen to other people argue. BORUFI: I Don't Want to Get Hurt, so I'll Max Out My Defense is... odd, to say the least. I'm not really sure what this series is trying to be at present (2ep in) but it definitely feels like the story's going to revolve around the massive sense of anticlimax that comes from Kaede having accidentally created a game-breaking build in her VRMMO. I am enjoying the in-jokes and homages, like that the second group of player-killers who attack her in the game's first event are obviously the Black Tri-Stars from Mobile Suit Gundam and attempt to Jet Stream Attack her (before getting no-sold anyway). She's so bored with what a non-event combat is that she's resorted to drawing the Nazca lines in the dirt.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Given what we've seen from the line art teased earlier, I'm 90%+ sure that this is going to effectively be the same mounting strategy used for the Passionate Walkure VF-31F w/ Lilldraken. Yeah, it looks like it's set up to rotate, like the Lilldrakens or wingtip engines on the VF-25's Tornado Pack do.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Finished Cautious Hero a bit ago. Ristarte is definitely the Goddess of Thirst, not the Goddess of Healing. I think she hit peak crazy around the time she was buying Seiya a banana hammock with a hole in the front on the grounds that she'd be able to see his equipment that way. All in all, an enjoyable series. I had a lot of fun with it.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    As much as I want to be enthusiastic about Strange New Worlds trying to get back to being proper Star Trek, I'm going to keep my expectations in the gutter. As promising as it may look and sound, it's still the same showrunners behind Discovery and Picard.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Enjoying the hell out of Cautious Hero... Seiya's unique approach to fantasy world bullsh*t really is a breath of fresh air, especially in the reactions it forces everyone else to display.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    It's pretty clear that it's not quite up to the task on the Macross Quarter-class, given that Cathy Glass gets so queasy from it she has to go throw up as soon as her first sortie ends.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Apart from what's been previously stated about facilitating a greater field-of-fire for the main heavy quantum reaction beam cannon and preserving its stealthiness by storing some of its weapons internally, the transformation also makes the ships more maneuverable. The Macross Quarter-class, for instance, is described as having fighter-like maneuverability despite being a medium-sized warship.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Caught up on current stuff again... So I'm a Spider, So What? has finally dropped the first overt clue that the spider's story and human story are occurring at least 15 years apart. Not much for actual plot development in this latest episode, just some worldbuilding WRT the demon war and our first real look at the spider from someone else's perspective (in which it's a horrifying monster that mows an entire adventurer party down without breaking a sweat. The Hidden Dungeon Only I Can Enter did some backsliding towards pure fanservice territory, with a hot springs episode that managed to be fanservice-y while only featuring the hot springs for about 30 seconds. Jujutsu Kaisen launched a new story arc, which is delving into Fushiguro's past and the cursed objects that were stolen in the raid on Jujutsu Tech in the last story arc. It's mainly setup right now, but it's still pretty engaging. All caught up on Re:Zero: Life in a Different World from Zero. I have to admit, I did not expect to like the series as much as I am. I'm not sold on any of the ships that seemed like the main attraction from the outside looking in (e.g. Isekai Quartet) but there's some truly interesting worldbuilding going on here around the witches. Especially the attraction an object like a book that foretells like the Gospels the Witch Cult use or the Book of Wisdom that Roswaal had... and the idea that the books are telling a biased and highly selective version of events in order to steer their users towards some unknowable end goal. The witches themselves are particularly interesting since they seem to be generally non-malicious but have a bad case of Blue-and-Orange morality and abilities that border on the Lovecraftian in places, not to mention Puck's own... abilities. Roswaal himself appears to be an abomination of forbidden magic since he's 400+ years old and apparently quite devoted to the Witch of Greed. Kaguya-sama: Love is War season two was pretty excellent as well. The animation seems more fluid than the previous season's, though I wish they'd gone a little farther with the story than they did. They did adequate justice to the student council elections and Ino's... experiences... with seeing Kaguya and Miyuki's antics out of context, though they chose to end on the bit where Kaguya's ancient cell phone breaks which was kind of a downer ending. Lastly, I started This Hero is too Careful for Me, which I guess is localized as Cautious Hero: the Hero is Overpowered but Overly Cautious. It's been a while since I saw a series where the main character(s) drew me into the story so quickly or became likeable so fast. Freyja Wion in Macross Delta was probably the last one to do that. Between Ristarte's reaction to being told her next world-saving gig tops the threat assessment chart is some unprofessional but definitely relatable outrage, followed by her realizing she's been narrating and dismissing it as a product of stress. (They got an audible chuckle out of me after only a minute or s when she starts taking jabs at the Isekai genre in general when she says she pulls her heroes out of Japan because there's less expository work involved... and several of the character sheets she throws away are protagonists from other isekai stories including Satoru Suzuki from the Overlord series). Combine that with Seiya's utter disinterest in, and disgust with, having been isekai'd (and his summoning being a very blatant homage to Terminator) and instinctive distrust of everything Ristarte says, they make for a deeply entertaining duo. I'm all in. With a start like this, this has to be good.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Mainly, a Southern Cross feature that was published in the June '84 issue of My Anime magazine... with a bit from a promotional pamphlet from the series and the Pioneer DVD liner notes. Information about the series is quite sparse, and this is one of the few points that's actually discussed in any significant detail... though even that paltry amount of info is spread across at least three separate sources. AFAIK, the time travel aspect of it is only directly referenced in the Pioneer DVD notes while the My Anime entry just alludes to it in an oblique way by describing the Zor as mutant Earthlings who'd settled Glorie and then abandoned it to wait out a nuclear winter and reengineered their society in the name of emotional control by dividing themselves into trios with each individual being responsible for either information, judgement, and action. The promotional pamphlet for Southern Cross and Galvion mentions where they went and why they came back. They went to Phi Eridani, and returned once the nuclear winter on Glorie started to lift because conditions on Phi were not optimal for the transplanted lifeforms from Glorie. (It also talks about what a complete dump Glorie is, and how humanity ruined Earth so conclusively that the planet is incapable of supporting life.)
  19. Seto Kaiba
    So... all I was able to turn up on this front was a remark in Document of Macross: No.004 pages 005-006 (the paragraph that straddles the book's spine) was that the initial rounds of storyboards were done by Fumihiko Takayama based on an early draft of the script and some image boards that Kawamori did, and then Kawamori did the final ones. If a fellow translator could check my interpretation of that paragraph, it'd be appreciated.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    What @JB0 said. Unless a spacecraft is illuminating itself with onboard lights or close to something large that's either reflecting a lot of light or brightly illuminated itself, it's going to end up looking like that screenshot in reality. The way ships and fighters are brightly lit in films is one of those acceptable breaks from reality that's done for audience convenience. Ultra-long range precision fire support. The VF-25G is designed to operate in tandem with a RVF-25 that provides it with fire control data, remain outside the combat area, and engage targets of opportunity in support of the rest of its squadron. It wasn't designed to hunt enemy commanders. Most widely-used models of VF don't even have a command variant and other threats, rogue Zentradi forces are largely indifferent to casualties anywhere below the level of losing an entire fleet command battleship, and other hostiles like the Vajra or Dyaus are completely indifferent to losses and don't have a chain of command to disrupt. It's not even technically correct to call the VF-25G a "sniper" unit, since it's assigned to a regular platoon and operates in support of it. It's actually a designated marksman VF.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Really, the best thing to do would be go to back and make Science Fiction Sengoku Saga. The design team had some actual passion there, and put a lot of love into the designs for the armor and equipment. I suspect someone on staff was a history buff, since there were a lot of iconic historical touches like Shingen Takeda's famous Fuurinkazan banners and armor designs based on the very real armor of several of the Sengoku period's most famous or infamous warriors like Shingen Takeda, Tadakatsu Honda, Masamune Date, Ieyasu Tokugawa, etc. I've read two different editions of that last one and I'm not clear on it either.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Essentially, yes. There's not much point in using visual camouflage intended to defeat the human eye when VFs and battlepods do their detection, range-finding, and aiming with powerful radar, infrared, laser, LIDAR, and optical camera systems that are all far more potent and precise than the Mk.I Eyeball. But especially in space, where any VF that doesn't have strong external light source nearby shining on it is going to be illuminated primarily by its running lights and formation lights like in this shot from Super Dimension Fortress Macross Ep6 "Daedalus Attack". That's Hikaru's VF-1J, btw... which is gloss white with red trim. Bah, the minute Roy finds out the Zentradi have liquor rations he'd go full MAKE LOVE NOT WAR. Yes, Major Roy Focker was the Commander of the Air Group aboard the Macross. Macross is a bit old-fashioned about the CAG title/position, though. Instead of being an administrative-only position for an officer promoted out of squadron command, it's a title held by the most senior serving squadron leader among the ship's embarked squadrons as it was in World War II. The CAG is effectively the department head for the ship's aircraft and reports directly to the captain. The CAG doesn't command all the aircraft during operations though, that's normally handled through the various flight controllers, the forward air controllers, and so on. As indicated previously, the visible differences between variants is pretty minor and profoundly unlikely to have any real implications for the survivability of a unit's commanding officer. They're only easy to tell apart when they're standing still in Battroid mode, which they generally do not do in combat, and if you know what you're looking for. The chain of command being what it is, even the loss of a squadron leader is more an inconvenience than a crippling blow. The New UN Forces generally doesn't bother with dedicated command variants, because it's cheaper to have one common variant for all pilots. The VF-1's the only main fighter that was known to have a command variant. The 2nd Gen VF-4 and VF-5000 didn't, nor did the 3rd Gen VF-11, the 4th Gen VF-19 1st Mass Production Type (VF-19A-E), the 4th Gen VF-171, or 5th Gen VF-24. Command variants only reliably show up in VFs intended for niche operations like special forces units (VF-17, VF-19 2nd Mass Production Type, etc.) or in the isolated case of the Macross Frontier fleet's 5th Gen main VF (VF-25), though it's not clear if they actually use the VF-25S as such or just have everyone in the NUNS operating the VF-25A/C type. The VF-31 follows the central NUNS model of having one variant for everyone.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Almost certainly not. Squadron leaders have overall command, but in operations the squadron is broken up into platoons of 3-4 aircraft apiece. The squadron leader commands a platoon of their own and gives direction to other platoon leaders as necessary. If the squadron leader is shot down, it may temporarily disorient his platoon but the squadron executive officer (who is commanding another platoon) would assume command and the #2 plane in the leader's platoon would assume command of what's left of the platoon. For instance, Roy had overall command of the ~24 aircraft of the SVF-1 Skulls... but platoon leaders like Hikaru took direction from him and in turn directed the members of their platoon (like Hikaru's Vermilion Platoon). In the movie version, Hikaru, Kakizaki, and Max (Skull 011, 012, and 013) are the three wingmen in the platoon led by Roy himself. The chain of command exists for that very reason. Generally speaking, at the speeds they're going they're not going to be close enough to see specific details of the paintjob for more than an instant...and in most cases, squadrons have fairly uniform paintjobs as well. (Also, in space, without direct illumination the paintjob is going to be indistinct or outright impossible to see anyway... which isn't usually animated except for drama, as in the 6th episode of the original series "Daedalus Attack" or in the opening of Do You Remember Love?.)
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Almost caught up on Re:Zero... this has been some seriously dark sh*t. "Misery porn" doesn't go quite far enough to describe it. Everyone in this fantasy world seems to be at most one mild inconvenience from becoming a serial killer, and a fair number of them seem to have decided "Why wait?". Worse still, it seems my earlier musing was dead on... Subaru's Return by Death seems to work identically to the Uchikoshi's SHIFTers in the Zero Escape trilogy, creating a new alternate timeline every time his consciousness is sent back in time. He's not changing the past to eliminate a bad future, all of the loops occur in parallel to everyone except him and maybe his witch benefactor.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Half the time it's more like one of those unsolved murders specials on Netflix... Join us next week for another installment of Who Killed Southern Cross? Eh... it's not completely awful, but it was still pretty bad even in its day. That's why it got cancelled. Plot holes were never its problem, though. Southern Cross was simply uninspired, unoriginal, unremarkable, and underdeveloped. In a lot of ways, that's arguably worse than simply being bad. A really bad story can still be memorable, or even cross the line into still being entertaining because of its badness. But being boring and unremarkable? That makes an audience apathetic and gets a show forgotten. They could've done some interesting things with the setting and the concept, but they don't seem to have ever thought that far ahead.
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