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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    That was my hypothesis as well... that this'll be something broadly analogous to the VF-19ACTIVE Nothung or VF-22HG Schwalbe Zwei. An ace custom job with a different name that's nevertheless still thematically related to the original model's. Like how "Sturmvogel" and "Schwalbe" were the names of two different Me 262 variants, or how "Caliburn" was the Latin translation of the Welsh "Caledfwich" and eventually became "Excalibur" once translated into French, while "Nothung" is thematically tied in as another Sword-in-the-Stone type magic blade from Norse mythology (as an alternate name for Gram, Sigurd's/Siegfried's sword). Thematically, if they keep borrowing from Norse mythology the way they've done heavily starting in Macross 30 onwards, the new VF will have a name drawn from Der Ring des Nibelungen as well. Perhaps Siegmund, Siegfried's father? Sieglinde would feel a bit off-brand despite her being associated with shape-changing since her entire story arc was about vengeance. They've already used Brunhild (the specific build of ARIEL II that was used on the YF-25 and YF-30). Grimgerde has potential issues since Gundam recently had a MS that used that name in Iron-Blooded Orphans. Norn is probably off the table for the same reason (RX-0 No.2 Banshee Norn in Gundam UC). Maybe they'll branch out mythologically and go for another dragonslayer, since that was Siegfried's best-known feat?
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Not really. There weren't any aliens in Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross. The Zor were Human All Along. That was the big plot twist that the series never got around to due to being cancelled. What little is available in the minimal official materials for Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross attributes the changing design of the Zor's Bioroids during the course of the war on Glorie to the Zor's efforts to improve their combat performance and overall survivability. The Zor were the descendants of the original colonial pioneers whose ship had vanished en route to Glorie in a warp drive accident. They settled Glorie in the distant past, lived there for generations, ruined the planet in a nuclear war the same way their pre-accidental time travel ancestors ruined Earth, and then decided that this "war" thing was a crock and totally rearchitected their entire society around a new concept of emotional control via division of responsibility for Information, Judgement, and Action to abolish it. By the time Glorie was habitable again after terraforming by a new wave of settlers from Earth helped lift the final stages of the planet's nuclear winter, they'd lived in a harmonious society for so long that war had become a bit of a lost art to them. The Southern Cross Army's saving grace was that the Zor's overwhelming technological superiority was being wielded by rank amateurs who were "learning by doing" when it came to waging war and weren't remotely interested in conquest or fighting.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Continuing in Re:Zero... I have to admit, as isekai protagonist superpowers go Subaru has what may be the weirdest I've ever heard of. Beware Subaru Natsuki, a brain-dead hikikomori with the incredible power of real-world Save Scumming. Talk about losing the superpower lottery. It'd be broken as all hell and ripe for abuse if only he could control it and activate it at will. Instead, it only works if he dies... and because the world hates his guts, he never dies quickly or cleanly. It's definitely an interesting subversion of the usual isekai tropes. Instead of arriving in a new world in possession of awe-inspiring power (like Satoru Suzuki in Overlord), the potential to become stupidly powerful very quickly (like Naofumi Iwatani in Shield Hero), being Cursed with Awesome (like Tanya von Degurechaff in Yojo Senki), or bringing a powerful cheat at the start (like Kazuma Satou in KonoSuba, who brought a literal god with him), Subaru Natsuki got a superpower that might as well be fueled by post-traumatic stress disorder. Truly, nobody screws Subaru Natsuki but Life. It's like if Yamcha were the main character of Dragon Ball Z. EDIT: Jeez... he's been killed three times already and is only JUST starting to notice he's been repeating the same day over and over. This boy's about as sharp as a sack of wet toilet paper.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    It's blurry, but it's enough for me to fill in the gaps left by the lighting glare in the cleaner picture. Sadly, it doesn't say anything interesting or noteworthy. There are a few statements of the obvious like that this aircraft's wing design is basically the same except that the larger leading edge extensions increase the wing area, and that it's different from both the Siegfried and Kairos. It even seems to be playing dumb about the operator, as though we'd somehow missed that it was obviously being used by Delta Flight in the trailer. It's pretty obvious in context that this is another Xaos Valkyrie Works ace custom derivative of the VF-31A Kairos. The Brisingr Alliance doesn't have the resources to carry parallel development of multiple next-generation VFs the way the wealthy Macross Frontier fleet could, and the VF-31 itself was made to maximize cost performance above all else using mainly off-the-shelf parts and a design optimized for multipurposefulness.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    It did, at that. I suspect a lot of the game's issues were caused by the cel shader they used consuming more resources than anticipated. Kinda surprised they haven't attempted to port Battlecry to a newer system, since that was the only one of their video games that got at least vaguely positive reviews and it wouldn't stretch the Switch's hardware at all given how simple it was for the time. Porting the GBA Macross Saga game feels almost self-defeating. You don't normally re-release a game which was in the running for "Most Disappointing Game" for its console with reviewers.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    It's a low-rent version of .hack//SIGN for the younger generation with incredibly poor writing. Both .hack//SIGN and Sword Art Online share the same basic premise of the protagonist being trapped in a fully-immersive VR MMORPG and unable to log out. The .hack//SIGN series was more of a philosophical work with relatively little action, only a single player trapped in the game, and the motive being a well-intentioned and entirely benign part of the program that's been hijacked by a custodial AI that doesn't want to cease to exist the way it's programmed to when its task is complete. Sword Art Online is more of an action series, where tens of thousands of players are deliberately trapped in the game by its one-man dev team who programmed it to kill them in real life by destroying their brains if they die in the game for asinine and largely arbitrary reasons that could best be described as "well, we need to have a villain".
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, the UK, EU, and China were the ones where Big West has taken back the Macross trademarks or is in the process of doing so. Australia's probably not on the radar, since its anime distribution industry is pretty minimal and AFAIK mostly focuses on sub-licensing stuff from distributors in the US or UK. All told, for a GBA game it doesn't look that bad... but from the video here the gameplay definitely looks pretty spartan. I guess it's just another fine addition to the Nintendo eShop's shovelware collection.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    It's enough that I'm actually curious to see where it's headed... I've not read the light novel, so I'm more or less in the dark except for what I know from Isekai Quartet. If it keeps this level of subversion up, it may prove to be an actually-pretty-entertaining examination of the problems with most examples of its genre. Very much like my favorite isekai series, Overlord, is an examination and heavy subversion of most of the standard western fantasy tropes. KonoSuba was fun. Or, at least, the parts of KonoSuba that got animated were fun. Once you get past that part in the light novel it gets really samey really fast. Natsume Akatsuki seems to think character development is something that only happens to other stories, so Kazuma is stuck in a perpetual loop backsliding into being a NEET who has to be physically dragged out of the house between story arcs. FWIW, the anime was excellent. I guess you could say it's one of the few titles that stood at the apex of the genre over the last few years, alongside Overlord, Yojo Senki, Re:Zero, and Shield Hero. I've seen and/or read all of those except Re:Zero so far, and they were all at least pretty good. Overlord is still my favorite of the lot. Most of the isekai titles I've seen are minimum-effort form letter garbage like Isekai Cheat Magician, That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, and The Hidden Dungeon Only I Can Enter. It's not that I'm having an issue with it. I'm just sort of remarking on how and where it's subverting expectations. Mind you, I am kind of a completionist... so even if a show is dreadful if it's not too long I'll usually stick with it to the end to see if it gets better so I can at least see the full scope of what the author intended, even if it's a pile of awful gibberish. There are only a few shows I've failed to get all the way through. Stratos4 and Strike Witches are on that short list, because the former was an excuse plot for yuri ecchi material and the latter just left me feeling like Chris Hansen was going to bust through my living room wall like the goddamn Kool-Aid Man. I want to go back and give ALDNOAH.ZERO another go at some point, it had an interesting premise but was just badly paced so it got back-burnered in favor of other shows.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    So... since it's the only part of Isekai Quartet I haven't watched yet, I decided to start Re:Zero - Starting Life in Another World today. All in all, I know very little about it going into it except that Subaru is someone so pathetic even Kazuma from KonoSuba could mock him with impunity and both Ainz Ooal Gown and Tanya von Degurechaff thought he was pathetic... so my hopes for him are not high. From the first couple minutes, I may still have to revise them downward further. Very few isekai stories seem to have any real idea of how to get the story started... and Re:Zero is no exception. Subaru is out buying cup ramen at a convenience store at night, blinks, and finds he's now in a public square in the middle of a medieval town full of demihumans. He takes this way too f*cking well. I guess it's effective storytelling in its own way. That he's so utterly unbothered, and even excited, by suddenly being pulled into an alternate world and losing everything and everyone he's ever known and immediately assumes this is the start of a new and better life as a Main Character says all that needs to be said about the kind of person he is. After having to see that embarrassing spectacle, it's rather cathartic to see the usual isekai tropes defied when he discovers he's every bit as useless there as he was on Earth. He keeps putting his faith in the standard isekai tropes, apparently blind to the fact that none of them have yet applied. Nobody f*cks Subaru Natsuki but Life, and Life is using a cactus as a condom.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    What's the surprise? That HG is trying to find water in a dry well again? None of the Robotech video games sold all that well, that's why they stopped developing them after the Invasion underwhelmed so thoroughly. I'm guessing you played the Gamecube release and found its hundred and one soft-lock glitches?
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Hugo is... well... he's headed in the general direction of The Caligula about to ski jump off the slippery slope. There are, admittedly, several very good reasons that he does the things he does... none of which make his actions any less abhorrent. As to the circumstances of the spider's reincarnation, it is absolutely incredibly spoileriffic...
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Finished the first season of The Irregular at Magic High School last night while working on other things. All I can say for it is that sh*t got real REAL fast. I know this kind of school drama thing tends to revolve around an absurdly powerful student council and often an absurdly influential student body, and even though the series made no bones about the fact that magicians were seen as living weapons it was still very shocking to see so many of the characters who've been engaged in innocent school drama shenanigans only an episode or two earlier tearing through the Chinese invasion force with magic. It was expected that Tatsuya wouldn't see any issue with killing via magic as a living strategic weapon, and Ichijou is literally famous for his gruesomely lethal method, but the rest of them? Yikes. They're so casual about their lethal techniques too. Thinking my next series might be either the Bleach spinoff Burn the Witch, Dagashi Kashi, or maybe some of the re-released older stuff Crunchyroll has started making available like Voltres V, the original Mobile Suit Gundam, All-Purpose Cultural Catgirl Nuku Nuku, or Golden Boy.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    It was both, for the record. And yes, it is a racial/ethnic slur. You'll even find it on Wikipedia's List of Ethnic Slurs. In the 19th century it was considered a neutral demonym for Japanese people, but even then its actual usage was more than slightly tinged with the kind of racism that was socially acceptable back then. Please don't use it, as that kind of thing is very much against the rules here. Amusingly, the facts do not care what you believe. Macross's creators are very much on the record about Macross being a love story set against a backdrop of a space war, not a war story with a romance subplot. Likewise, this truth is reflected in the promotional materials and merchandising for the franchise. It's promoted on its characters far more than its mechanical designs. Model kits and toys are certainly profitable, but you'll find that character goods, soundtracks, audio dramas, and the like make up a greater proportion of the franchise's merchandising. Especially in the TV installments like 7, Frontier, and Delta. Yes, the anime has mecha in it... but it's not about the mecha. It's about the people and their relationships.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Jujutsu Kaisen continues to be my #1 for the season. The animation quality remains excellent, and while things have bogged down a bit in the last few episodes with a protracted fight between the invading special-grade curses and the students from the two Jujutsu schools the actual fight sequences themselves are extremely well-choreographed. The oddly anarchic sense of humor the story has definitely plays well with it too, like the two meatheads of the cast (main character Yuji and the rival school 3rd year Aoi Todo) having weirdly excellent chemistry for an extremely bizarre reason (namely, Todo wanted a friend who shared his taste in women and immediately decided to be besties thereafter), or the principal of Jujutsu Tech being an elderly man who fights curses with a Gibson Flying V and the power of rock. The Hidden Dungeon Only I Can Enter has actually gotten less rubbish. It's still a terrible show that never should have been animated, but at least for the near term it's stopped trying to titillate in favor of trying to develop its characters a bit. Not that it does a very good job of that either, but at least I'm no longer cringing every thirty seconds and it's no longer has such a striking resemblance to the absolutely sh*t-awful mess that was Ulysses: Jeanne d'Arc and the Alchemist Knight. So I'm a Spider, So What? continues to be pretty "meh". It feels like the That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime general accountancy simulator phase of the story is nearing a close and that it might actually try telling a story soon instead of watching the nameless main character disinterestedly peruse massive lists of MMORPG skills. The stuff going on with the other, human cast is mildly more interesting... if only because the story's actually bothering to explore what happens when you take someone who was already a self-entitled arrogant little sh*t and gives them immense power without a sense of responsibility. You get someone who thinks the world belongs to them and that they can murder with impunity. Kind of like a less-interesting, less well-developed, and less-justified version of watching Satoru Suzuki jump off the slippery slope in Overlord. Attack on Titan's final season... well... what can I say? This is Misery Porn. Nationalistic Misery Porn. Everything and everyone is awful always and forever. There are no heroes, just the psychologically damaged and emotionally stunted Survey Corps members whose post-traumatic stress disorders have manifested as misanthropy or worse and the peoples on the continent including the nation of Marley who are dealing with the cultural, emotional, and psychological fallout of a history consisting largely of supernaturally-empowered genocidal pograms being enacted against them by the now-defunct Eldian Empire. Quite honestly... Hm... honestly, I can't say I see the appeal. I'm having a lot more fun with the supporting cast than the Gary Stu at the heart of this series. Especially Mikihiko and Mizuki. The shipping going on in the background among the characters is more fun than the actual story.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Eh? As the thread's topic indicates, we're mainly discussing anime that is currently airing... though when pickings are slim the topic also tends to be "What anime are you currently watching?" as well. For instance, I've been watching (in parallel) the current-season offerings Jujutsu Kaisen, The Hidden Dungeon Only I Can Enter, So I'm a Spider, So What?, and Attack on Titan's final season. I'm also backtracking to some of the stuff I've missed in previous seasons like my current marathon through The Irregular at Magic High School, the poor writing of which I have been expressing my frustration with. There are a bunch of streaming services around these days that'll let you follow shows currently airing in Japan on as little as a few days delay like Crunchyroll, Funimation Now, VRV, and so on. Several of those are kind of redundant since they carry each other's content, and Crunchyroll and Funimation Now are supposedly going to merge in the not-too-distant future.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Yup. You might recall back in Macross Plus, Shinsei Industry's Dr. Jan Neumann attempted to puncture Isamu's inflated opinion of himself by pointing out what happened to the other very confident test pilots who'd boasted they could handle the YF-19's incredible performance. Four were hospitalized with injuries from test accidents and the other died, one YF-19 was totaled and the other needed some serious TLC from the hangar crew before it could be flown again. The YF-19's airframe could absolutely handle the output of its next-generation engines and the kind of high-g maneuvers the pilot could make it pull. The pilots themselves? Not so much. And, of course, you might remember they never did really manage to fix that problem... leading to the New UN Forces, with the number of loss-of-control accidents in training being one of the major factors that killed the New UN Forces' plans to adopt the VF-19 stone dead. Same deal with the VF-27, really... even with an inertia store converter the aircraft's performance exceeds what a flesh-and-blood human can withstand and therefore it needs to have specially hardened cyborg pilots. One has to wonder if the Sv-262 crossed the line into that territory, necessitating the setting's most-powerful ISC to date. Well, given that heavy quantum is almost certainly what a ship's gravity control system is using to produce gravitational effects... one could argue they very probably already are using the stuff for reactionless flight. I'd expect that using it /as/ a fuel would be problematic since it a fusion detonation in the stuff is so violent that it straight-up vaporizes whole starships. Kind of like a more extreme version of the problems we'd have with the Project Orion concept (which used nuclear pulse-detonation thrust for high-acceleration spaceflight). It also supposedly has a somewhat limited "shelf life", moreso than hydrogen which can be stored indefinitely with a suitably good magnetic trap.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    First, stop calling Japanese people "Japs". That's racist. Second, the mecha have never been the main selling point of Macross. Never. Macross has always been, first and foremost, a character drama. If you ask Macross's creators, they'll be only too happy to tell you Macross is - and always has been - a love story set against a backdrop of space warfare. Not a space war story with a love subplot, a love story with a space war subplot. The mecha are not the main selling point. They're entirely incidental and it's perfectly possible to have a Macross story that lacks them entirely (e.g. Macross the Musiculture). Frontier isn't Macross's roots. Frontier is a show that didn't stray far from Macross's roots... Super Dimension Fortress Macross for the love triangle and Macross 7 for the emphasis on music. All in all, I think that's more a "time will tell" sort of question. There's more marketing emphasis on live concerts for Walkure because, if you assemble an idol group that's your main profit mechanism and an idol group is not cheap to maintain. I think the telling part will be whether Walkure is still a hot ticket item with the fans a decade or more after the ending of the Macross Delta series the way Sheryl Nome/May'n and Ranka Lee/Megumi Nakajima are. (TBH, I don't think they will be. Idol groups tend to split up past a certain point, as individual members start looking towards solo careers. Walkure also got a lot less development as characters in Macross Delta than the very-memorable Sheryl and Ranka did.) It's harder to use sales figures to make that determination since digital downloads have muddied the picture somewhat.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    One of the many reasons I love Kawamori and Chiba's collaborative efforts into technology porn is that so much of the futuristic-sounding technology used in VFs is actually very real... just obscure, or experimental. Even really out-there stuff like the YF-21's variable camber wing are directly lifted from real world experimental or production technologies. They show their work in a big way... and the engineer in me loves that. If we ever get a proper description of how it works, it'll be interesting to hear how. If I had to guess, I'd suspect they're using the superheavy quantum produced by the fold quartz in the reheat system for exhaust flow compression... similar to what's done inside of the turbine's thrust production stage, but on a more aggressive level. It'd be interesting to see which would happen first... the loss-of-control accident or significant airframe damage. Even properly reinforced airframes that have aerodynamic profiles that weren't designed for the amount of thrust they're being given can become incredibly unstable and prone to loss-of-control accidents. Hakuna Aoba in Macross R got his reputation as the "Uncrowned King" because his VF-1X++ custom is using engines rated for nearly three times what it was originally designed to take and further supplemented by rocket boosters... turning it into a nigh-unflyable mess that's one accident away from being a carbonized smear and a spray of shrapnel all over the nearest course hazard. The VF-9E supposedly had similar problems after General Galaxy tried to drop a VF-22 engine into it. (Surprisingly, the VF-11MAXL is never described as having issues despite being upgraded with engines a generation newer and substantially more powerful... but then, those were one-of-a-kind made-to-order ace custom units for the elite of the elite... so skill and custom engineering may be bailing them out there.)
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Now there's an absurd statement. For the record, Macross Plus wasn't even a Macross series for most of its development and neither Plus nor Zero were particularly well-received by Macross's core audience in Japan. If you asked Macross's intended audience what the roots of Macross are they'd point you to the romance story in the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series and the emphasis on music from Macross: Do You Remember Love? or Macross 7. Delta was fairly close to those roots in terms of the importance of music.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    TBH, even that doesn't pass the BS "sniff test". Tatsuya deliberately flubs his entrance exam for First High to avoid outshining his prospective-heir-to-the-family sister... then takes every available opportunity to show off his skills while his sister loudly, obnoxiously, and almost literally sings his praises and gushes about how much more amazing than her he is to anyone and everyone who will listen? It's just bad writing. By the Nine Schools Competition his excuses have become so incredibly flimsy that it's completely unbelievable everyone's eyes aren't constantly rolling at his absurd attempts at false modesty. That's the premise... for sure. But it's so unbelievable that it crosses the line twice from "actually pretty funny" to "cringe inducingly stupid". That anyone believes Tatsuya is a nobody is ridiculous on the face of it. For one, the girl he's bodyguarding is clearly an incredibly powerful magician whose abilities and status have already gotten her recognized as being more or less top in her year in First Year Course One. On its own, that'd be enough to assume she was part of the country's magical elite and probably at least from a branch family of one of the Numbers. That would mean she's a Living Weapon... and you don't send a powerless nobody to guard someone like that. You send a Person of Mass Destruction who can paint the walls with any threat that could tangibly threaten someone like that. For two, they're open about being siblings... meaning it's also obvious HE'S the scion of a powerful magical family, and since magical ability stems from a decades-long process of eugenics and genetic engineering that makes it the safest possible bet that he's similarly powerful. Throw in his effortlessly beating up groups of more experienced battle mages and undefeated expert combatants, and the whole thing crosses the line into silliness. The fact that his own father bullies him despite knowing that he's a walking strategic weapon boasting the kind of firepower that can make a nuclear warhead look like a squeaky fart shows that everyone around him is too dumb to live. On a quasi-related note, I've noticed that fantasy isekai anime seem unable to resist throwing in increasingly elaborate homages to Overlord. Yojo Senki had advertisements for the light novel series in Tokyo in the opening. Goblin Slayer has the side story Hero facing off against a lich who is very clearly a non-infringing Ainz Ooal Gown. Now The Hidden Dungeon Only I Can Enter has its protagonist visiting an environment in the titular dungeon that is clearly a copy of the 6th Floor of the Great Tomb of Nazarick.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Yup... this little design feature, called Vortex Flow Control, has been well attested-to in coverage of the YF/VF-19 and later VFs over the years. It's explained in some detail in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-19 Excalibur and there's a diagram showing how it works in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-25 Messiah on page 30. Long story short, this is a form of attitude control via negative pressure where gas in injected directly over the airframe surface to change the flow of vortices across the airframe and cause the nose to be pulled in the opposite direction of the gas injection. Kawamori's inspiration for including this feature was the same experimental aircraft that inspired the YF-19's design in general: the Grumman X-29. Grumman's X-29 was a USAF/NASA technology demonstrator used to evaluate a bunch of different technologies including triple-redundant digital fly-by-wire, forward-swept wings, supercritical airfoils, aeroelastic tailoring, close-coupled canard control surfaces, and attitude control via vortex flow control.
  22. Seto Kaiba

    Bandai DX VF-31

    Seto Kaiba replied to UN Spacy's topic in Toys

    I'd be pretty surprised... given how that thing is pretty obviously still a stock VF-31 at its core. This, to me at least, feels more like the kind of upgrade that would get a special variant letter and maybe a different name, but not an entirely different model number. More like the VF-19EF Caliburn, VF-19ACTIVE Nothung, VF-22HG Schwalbe Zwei, or YF-29B Perceval. I really want to make a mean-spirited joke about its most likely pilot, but it just wouldn't be appropriate.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Probably a fair amount of reinforcement would be necessary. The FF-2999/FC2 engines used by the Sv-262 Draken III are more powerful than the derated FF-3001/FC2 engines used by the VF-31 custom "Siegfried" as-is (1955kN vs 1875kN), and the fold reheat also produces a greater performance increase than the fold wave system does (25-30% vs 15%). The end differential is a ~18% difference in the engine's total deliverable thrust when all is said and done. The Siegfried type's derated FF-3001/FC2 engines are already apparently more than the stock VF-31A airframe can handle, given that Hayate gets gently scolded by Makina about the amount of extra maintenance work his rough handling makes for the hangar crew. The better ISC from the Sv-262 would be a nice improvement though. The increased size of the forearm guns marks an odd reversal too. The Siegfried type previously downgraded its railguns to a smaller caliber than the military spec, presumably for less possibility of collateral damage, and now they're wielding these outsize cannons? All told, it shouldn't be too different from what the /FC2 engines are already doing in their primary accelerator stage... so it shouldn't be a huge additional burden on the airframe control AI or existing hardware. It might have some nasty implications for frame stability though. In the trailer, it appears to have a normal transparent canopy similar to previous VF-31s.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    ... yeah, that's just blatantly bad writing. Thus far, there's been nothing in the story that would remotely justify Tatsuya arbitrarily deciding to make everyone underestimate his Mary Sue-tier powers even more than they'd be doing if he were passing himself off as a normal but capable Bloom. Quite honestly, it's absolutely ridiculous that it'd take anywhere near that long for his classmates to notice. Arbitrary skepticism can be a useful storytelling tool if applied sparingly, but Tsutomu Sato has the entire rest of the cast lay it on with a f*cking backhoe. It'd be one thing if he went out of his way to avoid displaying any unusual abilities or amazing proficiencies, but he makes only the most token effort to disguise his incredible prowess and he shows off his incredible repertoire of near-impossible advanced techniques at every turn and everyone still dismisses him as just another Weed. The very first thing he does on campus is out himself as someone with incredible abilities when he reveals he can read the magic formulas of others while they're casting them. He follows that up by revealing a pair of custom CADs by an incredibly reclusive master craftsman hailed as The Best Ever, and proceeds to one-shot one of the best fighters in the school in a formal duel that nearly baffles the upperclassmen in the more advanced Bloom course... all in the same day. At that point, any pretense that he's a normal Weed is completely absurd. That's BEFORE anyone found out he was a master engineer who could finetune CADs by hand to make competition-grade ones perform as well as military-grade custom equipment and started inventing spells on the fly the way he did in the competition.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    On my third attempt, I'm about seventeen episodes deep into The Irregular at Magic High School. As I recall being told last time I attempted it, the protagonist's inner monologue is basically plot-critical and wasn't included in this series. The lack of that critical context is definitely an aspect of the TV anime that comes across even if you don't know it's not there. Tatsuya reacts to absolutely everything with unnatural calm and his abilities are so over-the-top in practically every respect that the entire idea that he was assigned to the second-class program at his particular magical vocational school rings incredibly false. This level of blatantly overpowered doesn't normally happen outside of isekai stories. I just watched him one-shot a guy famed in-universe as a magical one-man army, and it's already been revealed he's actually a genius magical engineer hailed as the greatest of his craft. Like come on guys, there's no drama or tension here when the protagonist is basically indestructible and nearly unstoppable.
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