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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    For the record, just as the Late Period Bioroid Type I and II would have replaced the Middle Period models, the MS-09B Dom was basically the third main enemy mecha used by the Principality of Zeon in the original 1979 Mobile Suit Gundam series. Eh... it goes the other way as often as not. For instance, in Super Dimension Century Orguss the mecha developed by the Emaan who the protagonist is allied with have more of a rounded and streamlined aesthetic where the mecha developed by the hostile Chiram have very jagged, angular mecha designs and the genocidal Mu are quite angular as well. The way it usually shakes out is that the more rounded and streamlined a design is the more advanced it is. Sleek just seems to equal advancement and chunky equals primitive. The technology of the Southern Cross Army is all square edges and angles, while the technology of the vastly more advanced Zor is more rounded and streamlined by design. The same goes for my earlier example. The Chiram are the least advanced, technologically, of the factions in Orguss and all their stuff is hard edged. The Emaan's more advanced tech is more streamlined, and the very advanced Mu are very streamlined but with lots of sharp angles in the streamlined plates. Reconguista in G is another good example, where the mecha that are used by the Amerians and the G-Self are more rounded and streamlined and the more hostile the Capital Army gets the more angular its mecha become.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Antitrust laws apply when a company is engaging in anti-consumer and anti-competitive behaviors like price-fixing or [having/attempting to have] a monopoly on a particular market or industry. The beef between Macross's owners and Harmony Gold is a matter of intellectual property law. Specifically, trademark law. When Harmony Gold was preparing to relaunch the Robotech franchise c.1999, they realized that they were facing the prospect of Robotech having to compete against Macross's own sequels and the higher-quality merchandise that was being imported from Japan. They initially (and mistakenly, according to them) claimed that their license gave them the exclusive rights to ALL of Macross rather than just the original series and sent a bunch of Cease and Desists to toy importers. Because their claim was groundless, that ultimately kicked off the copyright review filings in the Japanese courts so all parties could be assured of who owned what. Their fallback was filing for trademark registration on the word Macross, the series title card, and various other distinctive odds and ends as a means of ensuring they AND ONLY THEY could legally use those specific marks in the United States. Trademarks offer the owner/registrant of the trademark legal protection of a sign, design, name, or expression that distinctively identifies a particular product or service. The reason that Big West can't just go and challenge Harmony Gold's trademarks on Macross's name and logos in the US the way they could in China, the United Kingdom, and the European Union is that trademark law here is written somewhat differently. US trademark law gives precedence to the first party to use the trademark in actual commerce in the US when disputes arise. Other countries, like the ones where Big West successfully challenged HG's trademarks, have provisions that cover corner cases like the first user not being the actual owner and give precedence to the actual owner of the brand/product/property. The other thing about trademarks is that, in order to register them, you have to actually be using the mark in commerce. You can file for registration of a trademark before you first use it in commerce, but you have to actually be using it in order for registration to be granted and you have to keep using it for periodic renewal of the trademark registration. That is why Harmony Gold keeps producing what little merch it does even it doesn't sell well... they need to be able to demonstrate they're using the trademarks to renew them. Harmony Gold's main business is rental property management in SoCal, so they're in no risk of going out of business if Robotech goes belly-up. Film production and licensing is, for practical intents and purposes, more a hobby for them than anything. People who know about Frank Agrama's criminal history, of course, have very good reason to suspect that the "hobby" is more for the purposes of money laundering to facilitate tax evasion. At the end of the day, as long as Harmony Gold is gone from the picture and Robotech is finally laid to rest I'll be happy. Even if they have to buy out Harmony Gold's license and so on to do it.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    It wasn't always... you could fairly say they fell back into bad old habits once animated Robotech kicked up its heels and died for a second time. They first fell into the bad habit of letting any rando willing to cut them a check license Robotech a few years after Macek's brilliant direction steered Robotech II: the Sentinels and the Robotech: the Untold Story movie into their early and shallow graves. Nobody gave a toss about the property anymore, so they started licensing it to all comers in the name of making a quick buck and the only oversight they ever exercised was to cut licensees off when sales slipped to the point that they were no longer collecting a decent amount from royalties. When they tried to reinvent and relaunch the series as a serious anime property c.2000, they actually made a commendable effort to exercise proper oversight and quality control over what their licensees were putting out. They even went to the trouble of keeping previously-problematic licensees who'd once again obtained licenses (Palladium Books) on a short leash for a while there. It lasted about eleven years. Right around the time the trademark registration for the Shadow Chronicles sequel lapsed in late 2011, they gave up on overseeing licensees and the quality tanked. Past that point is when we started seeing pure garbage being churned out again like the Robotech/Voltron crossover comic, the RPG putting out a glorified monster manual and then a bad adaptation of the Imai Files, the totally-unmanaged Robotech RPG Tactics fiasco, etc. etc. Five'll get you twenty that they're the ones who insisted on having cameos by all the animated Robotech titles in the finale... to counter fan complaints that the comic was taking the piss out of "real" Robotech. Nobody VOLUNTARILY references Robotech 3000 unless it's to apologize for it. Even Carl Macek. So yeah, with the Robotech merchandising situation being what it is and the animated Robotech series and Robotech comics being dead in the water, this move to negotiate definitely feels like Harmony Gold is looking for the exit.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    I'm reliably informed they mainly use a legal document preparation service for that kind of thing.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    I love that they kept the Dom's big 80's shoulderpads.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Can I just briefly say I love your screenname, @Rhubarbarian? All told, I think the main reason that Harmony Gold has started double-branding a lot of its merchandise and making the Macross logo increasingly prominent is because there just aren't enough Robotech fans left to sustain their merchandise lines otherwise. They're still trying to offload limited edition toys that were made over a decade ago, and they're not foolish enough to think the same few hundred fans are going to repeatedly spend thousands of dollars on gaudy, overpriced paperweights Kidslogic was making without winding up in trouble with the missus. They're trying to improve their sales by introducing a low-cost alternative to the admittedly expensive and difficult-to-obtain Macross toys from the bigger outfits like Bandai or Arcadia.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Almost all of it, really. The Macross logo is now more prominent than the Robotech one on most of their merchandise. More a hackneyed attempt to Macross-ize Southern Cross to avoid using the wildly unpopular Southern Cross design works... resulting in something that looks like a really awful Macross fanfic.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    They have Harmony Gold over a barrel... this is not a situation where HG is going to increase its hold over Macross. It's far more likely that this is Harmony Gold seeing a golden opportunity to offload the a non-performing asset like Robotech on an interested buyer for a princely sum, or offering a sweetheart deal in which Robotech gets to continue limping towards oblivion at its own pace in exchange for getting out of Macross's way. It's probably a coincidence. Robotech has been on the ropes for quite a while now. With Big West applying pressure on them abroad, it was only a matter of time before Harmony Gold approached the owners of the Macross franchise to attempt to either save or sell the Robotech brand. "Remastering" a critically-panned flop of a game that was ranked by reviewers as one of the Most Disappointing games for its console was a bizarre move by any standard of measure.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Very unlikely, given Big West's past reactions to Harmony Gold's attempts to increase their hold on Macross. The US will continue to be a mess because Big West doesn't have grounds to dispute the trademarks due to differences in trademark law. HG's appeal to the EU finding looks to be purely pro forma... they filed an appeal because you're supposed to exhaust the appeals process before giving up, not because they expect the result to actually change. What I suspect this is, is Harmony Gold playing for a conclusion to their long game. HG has little-to-no chance of saving anything on the appeal, so they're going to either attempt to let Big West buy out their Macross license and trademarks for a king's ransom and abandon Robotech, try to force a distribution agreement for the rest of Macross that would let them collect royalties on it in the US in exchange for abandoning their claims elsewhere and abandon Robotech, or attempt to push for a "we'll let you distribute Macross in the US provided you let Robotech continue to be a thing in markets where you took the trademark back". Given that HG has shown no real inclination to maintain the Robotech brand, I suspect HG is looking for an out that comes with a big payday. Granted, anything from Harmony Gold should be taken with a a small sea's worth of salt. There's a world of difference between the risks involved in, say, lying to fans about whether or not a particular project is still under active development and claiming to have rights under contract that you don't actually have. Since Robotech has no investors, there are no real consequences for making false statements about the status of productions because there are no securities involved. Lying about the status of contracts or contract negotiations? THAT can get you sued, especially if you claim to hold exclusive rights that belong to someone else. When it comes to their legal difficulties, Harmony Gold has mostly been reasonably accurate in what they say publicly. They do, however, tend to use deliberately unclear language in their announcements to disguise any details they might consider disadvantageous. Like the largely unqualified dismissal of the Big West v. Tatsunoko copyright review that they unwittingly started by stating flatly that it was strictly a Japanese matter and didn't affect their rights. (Which was true, but calculated to give fans the false impression that HG was free and clear to use Macross however it liked.) Or when they insisted on describing having acquired the merchandising rights to DYRL? to keep VF-1 toys out of the west as being able to "release [DYRL?] as a product", which gave fans the false impression they had the distribution rights too. That HG publicly stated in an official press release that they had renewed their license means they almost certainly have done so. That negotiations went on as long as they did and that they kept mum about it for so long suggests things didn't go well, it probably cost them some significant concessions (like abandoning the money they were owed from arbitration), and it potentially wasn't for as long as they'd hoped either.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Unspecified. Neither Harmony Gold nor Tatsunoko has commented on the duration of their license extension.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    14 March 2021... approximately eleven days hence. In all fairness, there is a fair amount of circumstantial evidence that suggests that senior management at Harmony Gold actually has a pretty realistic view of Robotech's standing in the industry and its (negligible) future prospects. They won't even fund new Robotech development anymore. They seem to be playing the long game in the hopes that they can either sell their stake in Robotech to a Hollywood studio for a king's ransom or at least frustrate Big West into paying them royalties for use of their trademarks in the US. Link(s)?
  12. Seto Kaiba
    I disagree with the assertion that later designs look simpler. The designs of the forearms and legs are a lot more complex on the Middle period Type I and II Bioroid and the Late period Type I and II are a lot more complex to draw with all that additional business going on on the chest and face. The middle Bioroid Type I and Type II are noticeably less bulky and more streamlined than the somewhat blobby and indistinct early Type I and Type II. It literally looks like it'd move faster than the early types. They've also moved the sensor blister to the center of the torso and added a redundant energy transfer conduit. The late Bioroid Type I and II picked up more human-like physique around the torso, possibly to further improve mobility, but also clearly are layering on thicker armor for better defense and moved some of their energy conduits underneath the armor for better defensive performance. (While the more angular sloped armor absolutely works for low-aspect fighting vehicles and is more an aesthetic choice for giant robots, it is a way to signal to viewers that a mecha was meant to be heavily armored.) All that said... the reality is that you can blame it on the designs the creators of Southern Cross were plagiarizing. The early model Bioroid Type I and Type II are pretty obviously ripping off the original Gundam's MS-06 Zaku II. The Type II is even painted green to further enhance the resemblance to the MS-06F Zaku II, though the Type II Custom used by Siefriet Weiss knocks it out of the park by being a fetching shade of Char Aznable red. The mid model Bioroid Type I and II seem to be the MS-07B Gouf equivalent, and the late model Bioroid Type I and Type II are pretty obviously modeled on the MS-09B Dom right down to the Type I having "inherited" the Dom's distinctive + shaped face.
  13. 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?
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. 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".
  19. 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.
  20. 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.
  21. 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.
  22. 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?
  23. 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...
  24. 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.
  25. 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.
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