Jump to content

Seto Kaiba

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    13830

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Everything posted by Seto Kaiba

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.)
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. 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?.)
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Or Alto... though he only did it during a mock battle with Pixie Platoon. Mind you, it's not like the Zentradi are going to pay enough attention to realize which VFs are flown by squadron leaders while they're fighting and various anti-government forces are going to be familiar enough with New UN Forces markings and organization that they'd be able to visually identify the squadron leader's unit even if it isn't a different variant from the modex and other markings.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    It's worth noting that relatively few models of Variable Fighter actually have a "command" variant... they're more the exception than the rule. Where "command" variants exist, the main reason is typically that they incorporate a more powerful communications system which was too expensive to be included on all of the variants. The performance tuning is technically unrelated, not always present, and usually justifiable as increasing the operational flexibility of the most experienced pilot running the show. Nah, the externally-visible hardware differences are pretty minor... easy to see if you know what to look for and the VF is standing still, but VFs are rarely standing still.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, you'd think that'd be the obvious way to go about it. No such luck, though. When Humanity abandoned Earth in the late 21st century and set out into deep space via bases at Mars and Jupiter. From there, they discovered planet close enough to Earthlike for their needs in orbit of Proxima Centauri and then another orbiting Epsilon Eridani. And, of course, the Zor had long since discovered a third inhabitable world in Phi Eridani's orbit. This doesn't jive with either the show's final title or its working title once it switched to a pure sci-fi mecha anime. It was original Super Dimension Cavalry Regulus for much of its time in development before having its name changed to Southern Cross. Regulus the old name for Alpha Leonis, which is in Leo not Crux. That said, I don't know why they eventually settled on calling it "Southern Cross". That'll be a detail to look for, I guess. The only possibilities I can think of besides "because it sounded cool" are possibly that they're referencing Brazil's knightly order or that particular constellation's use in navigation. Eridanus is a popular destination for sci-fi in general.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    All told, it's kind of a nonsensical/improper statement... Eridanus isn't a star system, it's a constellation. There are 24 main stars in Eridanus that make up the constellation we can see and a total of 87 stars identified as "within" that constellation for astrographic purposes. You could call Glorie itself "in Eridanus", since it orbits Epsilon Eridani. Interestingly, the Southern Cross Army never seems to actually need any kind of translation when speaking to the Zor... even in person. Even if they assumed there was some kind of universal translator in play initially, it's weird that nobody comments on all the Aliens Speaking English going on when they start to talk to the Zor in person. Weirder still if you think about it, the Zor that return to Glorie in 2120 are thousands of years removed from their early 22nd century Human ancestors thanks to accidental time travel... but the language they're speaking is apparently so little changed by all that time that it's still recognizable to 22nd century Humanity. "LEND YOUR EAR TO OUR LACK OF INDOOR VOICES!"
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Having played it myself on XBox and the old Games for Windows Live port, I'm pretty sure it wasn't your driving... the Warthog just handles like an inebriated cow with one short leg on an unlevel floor. It always has, and apparently always will if the gameplay I've seen of the Master Chief Edition is any indication. Just for shiggles, I'm gonna go back and do some translations from a few of the existing Southern Cross publications just to see if there's anything particularly interesting in there. Took a whack at the Southern Cross and Galvion pamphlet earlier. It was interesting to note that this one describes Earth's circumstances in harsher terms. It's not uninhabitable, the nuclear war at the end of the 21st century left it straight-up incapable of supporting life. Also, the place the Zor took off to after ruining Glorie was a planet they discovered in the Phi Eridani system.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Finished season one of Re:Zero earlier. It was nice to see a little character development for Subaru, but it felt like it ended too easily? After several episodes of building Betelgeuse up to be a nigh-unstoppable force of nature whose ability to pull a Grand Theft Me on his followers and even Subaru made him near-unkillable, he goes down like a punk repeatedly and ultimately cashes out when Subaru casually lights him on fire. Season two's opener... ech. Talk about starting as we meant to go on. Most of the troops who were victorious in the fight with the white whale and so on are wiped out, Rem's in your standard soap opera coma, and Crusch has lost her memories (and temporarily an arm), and Subaru's already committed suicide once.... and there's still like 10 minutes to go in the season's first episode.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    ... yep, I can see it. The worst part is that he does it to himself at least half of the time. It's one thing when events beyond his control conspire to ruin his life, but he's so good at putting his foot in his mouth that he must brush his teeth with athlete's foot cream. It makes him kind of hard to sympathize with when he's the architect of his own misery as often as not. I can tell I'm actually getting into this story a bit, though, because I genuinely wanted to punch Subaru when Rem poured her heart out to him and his immediate response was saying he loves Emilia... a girl who just sort of grudgingly tolerates his existence without any apparent interest in him.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    lol, it had its drawbacks. Just looking at the development history of Southern Cross is enough to tell you we're better off without that lawless attitude. ... and all I can picture is Jeanne with Leonidas's beard screaming "THIS! IS! SPARTAS!" and having her tank punt Seifriet's red Bioroid into a pit. I think he meant the other kind... Some of them... well... don't ponder them too hard or Chris Hansen'll bust through your wall like the goddamn Kool-Aid Man. Remember, the original pitch for Southern Cross came from a h-doujinshi artist who specialized in lolicon and diaper fetish material. How and why Tatsunoko green-lit that I'll never understand. You'd think the author's... specialized practice... would have been a huge red flag.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    A fine and fair point. Most of the mecha anime I've seen do still tend to follow the organizational logic of either the JSDF, the US Armed Forces, or a mixture the way Macross does. I suppose I can't really take it for granted that it works the same way in Southern Cross even if it typically seems to. Somewhat unhelpfully, not every character bio lists the age of the character in question. From the available bios, most of the ATAC 15th Squad's personnel have realistic ages for their ranks and positions. Jeanne's three main male subordinates are all in the early-to-mid 20's. Former 1st Lieutenant Charles de Etovard is 23, Sergeant Andrzej Slawski is 26, and Corporal Louis Ducasse is 21. They're apparently ALL adults... just really undisciplined ones. Which makes it a bit strange that Jeanne is so young and yet the most senior NCO of the lot. I admit that, prior to looking into this, I'd actually assumed the same thing you had... that these were mainly teenagers. Even Lana and Marie appear to be at least a couple of years older than Jeanne, given that Lana's backstory mentions an old romance she had at the age of 16, implying that she's at least a few years older than that, and Marie talks down to Jeanne about being a maiden looking for love at 17, contextually suggesting she's at least 18. Seifriet Weiss is also implied to be a few years older than Jeanne. The org charts published do definitely indicate the ATAC 15th Squad is a frontline combat unit, not a training group... so these are (mainly) adults in the business of killing. I'm not so sure about that... they definitely have a fashion industry given how often Jeanne is busted for sneaking fashion magazines places and the fight she gets into over that dress. A music scene too, with jazz clubs and the like where Bowie keeps sneaking out to play. Jeanne gets involved with that lounge singer too.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Are we doing reduction to absurdity now? I can do snark, but I'd really prefer to have a serious discussion. It's not like Tatsunoko Production is dependent on the residuals from a trio of nearly-40 year old shows to keep the lights on. Animation production isn't the most profitable business in the world, but they're not so pressed for cash that they can't afford to turn down a contract with a company they don't trust or one that offers unfavorable terms. Companies need to make money, but they're not obligated to take any and every opportunity. Companies dissolve contract partnerships like this all the time, and for far flimsier reasons than the ones that Tatsunoko took Harmony Gold to court over. The sum Tatsunoko collects in royalties from Harmony Gold's license is not exactly critical to its financial well-being either. It's more like a stock dividend than a paycheck. They could've walked away and left Harmony Gold to burn without any real harm to themselves. The problem, as I've said before, is that there isn't a significant financial incentive for Tatsunoko to end its partnership with Harmony Gold. They don't really stand to gain anything by siding with Big West because the market's already saturated with the original Macross series and they won't collect any distribution royalties from the sequels. It'd be a wash or small net-negative.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Watching s'more Re:Zero before bed... and holy hell this show doesn't have ANY intention of letting Subaru catch a break does it? I'd kind of hoped the show might get past its obsession with making Subaru suffer horribly after the first story arc where he was repeatedly disemboweled, had his head caved in, got his throat slashed, lost a few extremities, committed suicide by jumping off a cliff, was cursed to death, and got nearly torn apart by wild dogs. I'm all of about one episode into the show's second story arc, and he's already managed to be challenged to a duel after insulting the assembled knights in the royal castle... and even though they're using wooden swords, the fight is so horrifically one-sided and brutal that even the knights who'd gathered to watch him get his ass beat are visibly upset. Even Yamcha gets more dignity than this. He basically has a psychotic episode at the end of it all. If I didn't know there was a lot more to this show I'd almost expect him to snap and become a serial killer or something... the faces he made during his rant are not faces a mentally well person makes.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    There's no obligation for them to do business with Harmony Gold, so no... their hands are not tied. That's what that idiom means... that you're unable to act freely because of some rule, law, or obligation. Tatsunoko does not need the money from the Macross-Southern Cross-MOSPEADA license. They could have just said "No" to Harmony Gold request for renewal and shopped any or all of the three shows around to other distributors with every expectation that several would've bid for Macross. That's kind of what we were expecting given that Tatsunoko took HG to court over its suspicions that HG was cheating them out of royalties owed. Tatsunoko just doesn't stand to gain significantly from ditching Harmony Gold and freeing up Macross because it can't collect royalties on the sequels.
×
×
  • Create New...