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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    The covers were posted on a Facebook group I'm on. Given the timing, I'd assume they were probably shown off at the Wondercon@Home Robotech panel? The same post is the one that noted that the two sagas are going to be covered in one book, titled "Home Front".
  2. Seto Kaiba
    That's rather uncharitable. It's not like Southern Cross's concept was unworkable. Tatsunoko rushed to get an original mecha IP to market and cut every corner they could to make it happen quickly. So it ended up being heavily and blatantly derivative of the most successful titles in the genre at the time, with the gaps filled in with material from series concepts Tatsunoko had rejected before deciding on a mecha anime, and design work done in-house by a team that didn't really have the skill set to do transforming robots instead of hiring experts. You probably could redo Southern Cross and actually make it passable... but it'd mean basically starting over from the series concept and developing it properly. You wouldn't be able to get away with turd-polishing the existing material. 39 episodes would be a hell of a stretch in this day in age, though. Unless you've got serious confidence in your property from your production committee, it's hard to get more than 13 episodes in this day in age.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, no. Just no. Like, I actually feel bad because of how excessively optimistic that statement was. Southern Cross only lasted as long as it did back in 1984 because the mecha genre more or less at the apex of its popularity and influence. It was comparatively easy to get funding for any old story involving "real robot" type mecha at the time, thanks to the success of Mobile Suit Gundam and Super Dimension Fortress Macross. It was easier for those shows to gain a following too because mecha was the in thing at the time. Southern Cross tanked in Japan at a time when conditions in the industry were nearly ideal to succeed with mecha anime. Nowadays? No chance. These days, a new mecha IP has to have some serious clout and creative talent behind it or it'll never get made. You can't quarter-ass development the way Tatsunoko Production did on Southern Cross and expect to get anywhere except a nice deep financial hole that other properties will have to fill in. Tatsunoko itself recently had a refresher course in that fact of life on their 55th Anniversary when they rolled out their first original mecha IP in ages, The Price of Smiles, and it promptly tanked every bit as hard as Southern Cross did on only a twelve episode run. The Arming Doublets are nice designs but heavily dated, but the actual mecha designs are so bland, generic, boxy, and ugly that they're never going to sell. It's an object lesson in why you hire mechanical designers to do your mechanical designs instead of throwing the task at three randos in your studio and saying "I need three transforming robots and six enemy mechs by lunchtime". Hell, the picture you posted is pretty solid proof of my point. The new (and embarrassingly bad) Robotech RPG isn't even giving Southern Cross - AKA the "Robotech Masters Saga" - its own sourcebook the way previous ones did. It's been combined with MOSPEADA (AKA "the New Generation Saga") into a single book. (History repeats itself, I guess, since the ADV FIlms remaster of Southern Cross also ended up being squashed together into a double-pack with Genesis Climber MOSPEADA in order to make it sell. That's how I ended up with my copy, actually. They did do a rather nice job with the box art.)
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Macross made a pretty big splash when it first debuted, and is noted as an inspiration to a number of different shows from that period... the most notable of which being Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    It's a well-known fact that MOSPEADA's creators were "taking pointers" from Macross in the development of their series. Esp. at the insistence of one of their merchandising partners, Imai Kagaku, who were adamant that the series had to prominently feature transforming fighter jets like Macross's as they were already riding that particular gravy train and wanted to keep it going. There's also a fair amount of Starship Troopers in there, with aspects of the Inbit being inspired by the pseudo-arachnids from the novel. Some of the earliest Inbit concept art from the show's development is much more overtly insectoid. Not really, no... they share some basic design traits in common but aesthetically and structurally they're completely different. I'm pretty sure human forces would notice the difference immediately... because the Zentradi mecha are orders of magnitude bigger. Your standard Zentradi clone soldier is between 9m and 10m tall. The Inbit Iigaa is 2.5m tall. In scale to a statistically-average 1.8m (~5'11") tall Human male, the Iigaa is 0.5m (~19.5") tall... approximately the size of a statistically-average newborn. The very largest Inbit mecha, the Ghoss, is 8.6m tall. In scale with that Human male, equivalent to a person approximately 1.72m (~5'8") tall. Bear in mind, that's compared to an unarmored Zentradi soldier and equivalently scaled Human standing flatfooted. Most Zentradi mecha are nearly twice the height of the very largest Inbit mecha (the Ghoss, at 8.6m). The Regult is 15.12m tall, the Glaug is 16.55m tall, the Nousjadeul-Ger is 16.4m tall, and the Queadluun-Rau is 16.75m tall. Most Inbit mecha would be little bigger to a Zentradi mecha than a garden variety crab is to you or I. I'd hazard to say that'd leave most people looking at them in no doubt that they were different pretty much right away.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    I hate how much of an earworm this is, no matter how it's mixed. Great show. Just, absolutely great.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Seriously? Necro-ing a thread that hasn't seen a reply in almost twenty years to whine? The funny part is, the vague details of the ancient Protoculture's fall are about as dark as it ever gets... it's all uphill from there even in the Macross II: Lovers Again timeline these games belong to. In fact, this timeline's take is actually more optimistic than Kawamori's. In Kawamori's version, the Protoculture simply flee to their last strongholds on the edges of the galaxy and slowly go extinct. In this timeline, some of the Protoculture actually manage to escape the collapse of their civilization, learn from their mistakes, and make fresh starts elsewhere in the galaxy, with humanity being a product of one of those fresh starts. It's even implied that the Mardook in Macross II are a surviving group of Protoculture, who Earth's love songs inspire to find a lasting peace for themselves and appreciate other cultures instead of fearing them. (Hell, even Zentradi invasions aren't much of a threat after a while in this timeline. Quamzin's roaring rampage of revenge falls apart due to the intervention of a pair of fresh-out-of-the-academy cadets in Macross 2036 and the Zentradi "invasion" in Eternal Love Song is revealed in-story to basically be the Zentradi coming to hide behind humanity after biting off more than they could chew fighting a Meltrandi main fleet. After a while, the periodic rogue Zentradi attacks are demoted to little more than a recurring PR stunt for the Spacy, with the humans effortlessly rolling over the Zentradi invaders and adding shiploads of defectors to their forces every time.)
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Six episodes into How Heavy are the Dumbbells you Lift? and I have to say that of the unconventional sports-type anime I've seen, this is far and away the most enjoyable. A protagonist with an entirely mundane relatable goal, and moderately educational material snugly wrapped in a quirky yet anarchic sense of humor, tongue-in-cheek parody of other genres, and a fairly mild amount of fanservice that's nowhere near as exploitative as I'd figured it would be. Had a few moments where I involuntarily laughed out loud. Especially when the narrator matter-of-factly announces that the remainder of a section on arm wrestling will be presented in the format of a shounen battle anime. (That and the way Machio just... deflates... whenever anyone forces him to actually put on clothes and makes a slide whistle noise every time. That his face never changes when he hulks out and inexplicably grows about two additional feet in height and puts on ~200lb in solid muscle for the sake of posing is bizarre in its own right.)
  9. Seto Kaiba
    So, on a lark, I started How Heavy are the Dumbbells You Lift?... and had to briefly stop and check I hadn't scoffed someone's edibles. It's... it's... an experience. On the surface, an only-partly-wholesome pseudo-sports anime about someone trying to get into shape... albeit freighted with the occasional fanservice-y technique demo. Below that surface is a very strange place indeed, with a fitness trainer who alternates between being proportioned like a normal human being and looking like an even more musclebound version of Kenshiro from Fist of the North Star (whom he cosplays at one point), a best friend character who is apparently living in a world class competitive boxing gym, and a girl whose enthusiasm for muscles crosses the line from personal taste and ordinary fetish into feeling genuinely depraved. It rattles back and forth between the bizarre and the educational so readily and so often that I can't look away. Half the time it's an amusing little PSA for personal fitness. The other half, it's every bit as bemusing as someone asking you out of the blue for a lightly grilled weasel on a sesame seed bun. It's weirdly compelling in the same way that Iwakakeru was weirdly disappointing and bland. They're both unconventional, but Iwakakeru took itself completely seriously while Dumbbells isn't so much taking refuge in audacity as it is living luxuriously in a palatial 15 bedroom mansion it built in audacity.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Fanservice aside, I Couldn't Become a Hero, So I Reluctantly Decided to Get a Job has gone to some interesting places... though none quite so bizarre as the show's climax, where Raul brutally beats the stupid out of two former hero candidates with a classroom ruler, and the store's manager delivers a no-holds-barred beatdown to a demon bent on murder using nothing more than a vacuum cleaner, a blowdryer, a boombox, and a rice cooker. (After she magically weaponized the vacuum cleaner to suck up his magic, turned the dryer into a wind cannon, and the boombox into a sonic weapon, there was a great moment of subverted expectations where it looks like she's about to do something to weaponize the rice cooker by magic... but just beats him about the head with it instead because it's a blunt object.) (They really went all-in on the Star Trek references with the old guy. He looks like Patrick Stewart, his wagon looks like the classic TOS Enterprise, and his vanity plate is "NCC-1701-D". It can even fly.)
  11. Seto Kaiba
    A little from column A, a little from column B... But at least it's easily justifiable in-universe. The Brisingr globular cluster is an isolated and economically underdeveloped region of the galaxy, so it's only natural that the governments in the Brisingr Alliance and their New UN Forces would heavily favor equipment that offered a high degree of operational versatility. The VF-171 Nightmare Plus would've been a well-received aircraft out there for exactly that reason, since the stock VF-171 could be converted to an attacker, bomber, reconnaissance plane, and drone mothership with the exchange of modular components. The VF-31's basically just one better, since it only has to exchange the one (admittedly large) hot-swappable mission package. It'd be right up their alley do to a Tornado Pack minus the Pack part like they've done here... mounting the rotating boosters directly to the wingtips. Various other components, like the standard ordnance container's gun turret setup, are already inspired by the Tornado Pack's turret, so why not kitbash a poor man's Tornado Pack into existence while they're at it... esp. since Windermere already did exactly that with the Lilldrakens.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Hard to say... especially since some materials (e.g. Master File) have indicated that the boosters on many models of FAST Pack are at least partly modularized so they can be customized to the needs of the operating unit, able to exchange weapons space for more fuel or vice versa. Except for that fin on the top, they appear to be the exact same Super Pack as the one the Siegfried was using previously, just mounted on the winglet hinge like a Lilldraken instead of dorsally.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Originally posted by @charger69 Not much information of value in the text, except a notation that the monitor turret (head) now has an asymmetrical design. Nice pictures though.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that was the first real look we got at active stealth in the animation itself, when Guld's YF-21 vanished from the radar on Isamu's VF-11B. It was Macross Zero that retconned active stealth into VFs from the very beginning, and later saw the active stealth systems in the YF-19 and YF-21 reclassified as 3rd Generation ones.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    So, I was poking at Variable Fighter Master File; VF-22 Sturmvogel earlier... and stumbled upon a section devoted to a second type of active stealth system it claims the VF-22 had. Normal active stealth in Macross is an active cancellation technology not dissimilar in principle to what noise cancelling headphones do to sound waves, producing a wave that has an identical frequency and amplitude but an opposite phase to cancel out the net amplitude. This alternate system that's mentioned for the VF-22 is called the Electromagnetic Sphere Field Stealth system, and it's written up as a sort of related development from the pinpoint barrier system and reads like a relative of plasma stealth. Apparently the system throws a spherical electromagnetic field around the aircraft that is so intense it can block both radar waves and laser wavelengths from search LIDAR systems. In an amusing case of "reality ensues", they mention that this draws a gargantuan amount of power and actually blinds the VF-22's own radar and LIDAR systems as well, forcing it to either rely on sensors aboard a towed decoy outside of the electromagnetic field or flying blind for a bit. Not the weirdest tech tidbit I've found in Master File so far, but it's up there.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Incidentally guys, remember the forum rules... we don't talk about the R-word or HG here. It gets threads locked. Macross II: Lovers Again had some interesting stuff going for it, as a more conservative and Gundam-influenced Macross sequel than the stuff that Kawamori came up with later on... though it didn't quite light the world on fire the way some of its hype, especially in the US hobby press at the time, said it was going to. I have quite a soft spot for it, since it was my first real Macross series, though I wouldn't quite rank it as my favorite anymore even though I have more Valkyrie II's than any other model of VF in my collection. The Protoculture in particular definitely went in a radically different direction after Macross II, instead of the implied existence as a sort of nomadic but stagnant culture they became irresponsible vanished precursors from the far side of Clarke's Third Law.
  17. Seto Kaiba

    V-BR-2 ...

    Seto Kaiba replied to Gidiot's topic in Fan Works

    Very nice!
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, just finished the second season of Re:Zero myself. It was nice to see Subaru actually make a few lasting gains in the story after two seasons of the humiliation conga and various grisly deaths that he gets to remember every detail of. That said, I am struck with a horrible sense of foreboding that those gains won't last and he'll be back to acting like a twit and getting killed six ways to sunday as of the start of the next story arc. (Kind of like how his comedy counterpart, Kazuma Sato from Konosuba, is always reset back to being a hikikomori at the end of every story arc in his series.) I'm three episodes into I Couldn't Become a Hero, So I Reluctantly Decided to Get a Job... and it's cute, but I feel like it's a little too fanservice-heavy? There's a lot of upskirt panty shots and moments of censored nudity so far, most (but not all) of which involve Fino. It is rather amusing that the one with the filthiest imagination is clearly the manager, who is VERY clearly a Shipper on Deck for Raul and Fino and clearly has no ulterior motives for having her live next door to him whatsoever how dare we say such a thing.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Silly it most definitely is. Fanservice-y too. Someone on staff is clearly a Trekkie as well... that dirty old man customer who comes to buy one lightbulb is drawn to look like Patrick Stewart, and he pulls up in a chariot(?) that looks like the original USS Enterprise. Not sold on the series yet, mainly because it's going pretty hard with the fanservice.
  20. 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.
  21. 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.
  22. 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.
  23. 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.
  24. 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.
  25. 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.
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