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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Ended up binging the first half-dozen episodes of Ron Kamonohashi's Forbidden Deductions. It's really quite good. The titular detective reminds me a lot of the himbo Sherlock Holmes from Dai Gyakuten Saiban/The Great Ace Attorney, and the overall vibe is like if Holmes had resolved to stay out of the spotlight by steering John Watson to the answers and propping him up as the real Great Detective. It takes a fair bit from Sherlock Holmes, albeit framed in a modern context, and manages to keep the course of each case pretty well obscured without violating Knox's ten commandments of detective fiction.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Yes, in Ep21 "Azure Ether" and Ep22 "Northern Cross". When Brera helps Ranka run away from the Macross Frontier fleet in search of the Vajra homeworld, his VF-27 Lucifer is shown to be equipped with one of LAI's prototype Super Fold Boosters. That's not the standard fold booster, which looks like this (the one Alto uses to get to Gallia IV) in Ep11: The one in your screen captures is LAI's newly-developed "Super Fold Booster" prototype that was first used in Ep12 "Fastest Delivery". What makes it so "Super" is that it uses fold quartz harvested from the Vajra instead of synthetic fold carbon. This lets it produce a much more powerful fold effect that can cross fold faults unhindered and fully shields the ship from the different flow of time in higher dimensions. So in practice, it's "faster" and immune to all the usual navigational issues a regular fold booster has to contend with.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Started Ron Kamonohashi's Forbidden Deductions... and I'm really enjoying it. It's kind of a buddy cop sort of show, with two detectives working together to solve murders. One's a newbie on the verge of getting kicked out of the investigations department due to being kind of a clueless meatheat and the other's a shut-in genius detective who stepped away from crime-solving because his weird habits are quite off-putting. It's very clever and fun and it's very well animated.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    The important thing to remember about any Tesla announcement is that any Tesla "new technology" demonstration is a carefully stage-managed sham meant to part the gullible from their money and nothing more. This is a half-step up from the previous scam, which was putting Human actors in robot suits like Chinese robotics firms got busted for doing in demos. These aren't autonomous robots, they're expensive, custom-made, remote-controlled props being remote-controlled by Tesla employees. As someone who's participated in benchmarking teardowns of the entire Tesla product range to date... I'll say right now Tesla is completely incapable of delivering even this meager level of performance in a production product. These aren't real products, and this ever goes into production it'll be a hilariously downgraded scam like the Tesla Cybertruck. (Remember, Tesla has been promising "fully autonomous" vehicles since 2016... something far less complex than an autonomous humanoid robot... and they've so far from being able to deliver it that they've been sued for fraud and false advertising over it with other OEMs delivering more capable solutions for less money.) It really isn't. These aren't even at the level of the Boston Dynamics Atlas from a decade ago... and those were actually autonomous for basic tasks. These are remote-controlled by people and can barely manage basic tasks like pouring drinks or maneuvering across a level floor. They're really not... just as much for practicality reasons as for cost reasons. Humanoid robots are hiliarously impractical at best. Bipedal locomotion is about the hardest form of propulsion to pull off with a robot because it's a lot less stable and requires a lot of extra hardware and software to manage. That increases cost and complexity and decreases operating time. Practical robot design is all about keeping the complexity down and having just enough hardware to do the job it's designed to do. That's why most robots are stationary arms with a few joints and a clawed manipulator, and why self-propelled robots typically rely on a wide, low base with treads for stability. Boston Dynamics developing a robot that can walk nearly as fluidly as a Human across an unobstructed and completely level floor is a gargantuan technical achievement. We're still a long way from a humanoid robot that can maneuver over obstructed or unstable terrain with the speed, fluidity, and endurance of a Human. We're even farther from one that can do so in remote operation, never mind one that has the strength, dexterity, and precision for more than basic tasks any unhandicapped Human could do. Robots capable of sustainably performing complex manual labor either by remote control or autonomous operation are likely a century or more away. Right now, remotely operated humanoid robots as a replacement for human direct labor is at the level of a very simple publicity stunt on the level of Tokyo's Avatar Robot Cafe.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Gave Let This Grieving Soul Retire a whirl... and it's pretty tedious.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    The Healer Who Was Banished From His Party Is, in Fact, the Strongest is j-fantasy at its most unremarkable. It's not unwatchable or even really bad... it's just generic. Really generic. There are times I swear I could see the barcodes. This season definitely has a lot more interesting titles than the previous one, though. I've added a bunch more today including Nina the Starry Bride, MF Ghost, Yakuza Fiance, Ron Kamonohashi's Forbidden Deductions, and Acro Trip. Gonna give a few of those a whirl this afternoon. 😁
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Not to mention that particular SMS branch is not only located in one of the wealthiest and most economically prosperous emigrant fleets... it's overseen directly by the founder of its parent company Bilra Transport. Richard Bilra is a man with "sponsors an emigrant fleet's cross-galactic voyage to pursue his personal interests" irresponsible levels of literal and political capital. Nope. They seem to exist wherever it's narratively convenient for them to do so... regardless of whether it makes sense or not. One trend I've noticed in their appearances in various official media and Master File is that SMS seems to be almost anywhere that's reasonably well-established. Their presences are all on major emigrant fleets like Frontier and Olympia and on emigrant planets that've established themselves pretty well already like Uroboros, Sephira, Eden, etc. Xaos seems to operate in the more remote regions of the galaxy. They have a major contract with the Brisingr Alliance, the mutual defense and economic pact in the remote and isolated stars of the Brisingr globular cluster, and their few other appearances are on remote and underdeveloped or sparsely populated worlds. We don't have enough information on the Elysion-type or its support carriers (semi-officially the Enterprise-class via Master File) to say for sure. The popular hypothesis is that the Elysion-type is an older, transitional design between the "first generation" Macross-class and both the newer Battle-class and the bleeding-edge Macross Quarter-class being trialed in 2059. Essentially, that the Elysion-type is an older, less advanced, and less expensive warship that was possibly either acquired secondhand from the NUNS or simply built to order using a large percentage of the company's funds. (Xaos seems to be operating on a very tight budget, given that they're shown to be effectively out of cash and unable to afford fuel and ammunition within days of being chased out of the Brisingr cluster. At one point in the TV series, they note that it'd take their entire yearly operating budget just to retrofit the Elysion to remove the Epsilon Foundation tech from it.) I haven't heard the part about the NUNS protagonist, what I recall from the liner notes and a few interviews in publications like Great Mechanics was that the series was originally planned to be one cour plus a movie, and that it was expanded to two cour in development.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    'bout eight minutes into Tying the Knot with an Amagami Sister and I have completely checked out. It's definitely giving a "minimum effort harem comedy" vibe.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not going to get my hopes up. Isolation was a masterclass in horror game design. The dev team had a rock solid story concept and a finely honed understanding of how to create and manage tension. It was polished so close to perfection that I honestly don't think there's anything the dev team could add to the formula they created that wouldn't simply detract from the horror. I'll be thrilled if I'm wrong, but I doubt lightning is going to strike twice.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Started The Stories of Girls Who Couldn't Be Magicians today. The visual aesthetic of the series is very bright, but not offensively so and the art style is quite pleasant. Many of the backgrounds and objects in scenes are colored and textured like they were done with colored pencils rather than inks, which lends the whole thing an oddly pleasant storybook aesthetic. It's the story of a girl who, after meeting a mage one night when she was young, decided to study her entire life to become a mage herself and then failed to gain admittence into the magic program at the school she applied to. It's a little bit shoujo, a little bit slice of life... but weirdly charming for what it is. The only thing that bothers me is I'm not sure anyone in this series except the one mage girl at the start knows how hats work. (The uniform includes something styled like gakusei-bou, but only the girls seem to wear them and they're worn off to one side at like a 45 degree angle and with the brim pointed down... which just looks weird.)
  11. Seto Kaiba
    I'm glad to hear that they didn't attempt to modernize Ranma 1/2... some titles really need to be in their native timeframe to work as well as they do. Started the second season of As a Reincarnated Aristocrat today, and it picked up exactly where the previous season left off. It jumps right back into the civil war plot that started at the end of last season, with a war council of the region's nobles debating what to do about the opposing faction in the succession crisis kicked off by the assassination of the provincial governor. The art quality is just as good as last season's, and the writing continues to evade virtually all of the isekai genre's usual blatant wish fulfillment pitfalls. No superpowered protagonist, no harem nonsense. True to its title, Ars is making his way in the world as a capable of but average leader by finding talented subordinates using his appraisal skill and then trusting in the skills and expertise he hired them for. In a way, it's quite a refreshing change from the genre's staples. It's standing on the strength of the character writing. Gave Mecha-ude a whirl, and... well... it's pretty much a shounen anime form letter. If I had to use one word to describe it, it would be "nondescript". The story is just another one of those "generic Japanese youth finds a clingy macguffin and then has to join up with other users of clingy macguffins against the evil organization that wants the clingy macguffins for themselves". The art style is "every shounen anime of the last 10 years that isn't Jujutsu Kaisen, Bleach, or One Piece". The way the titular robot arms are integrated into people's clothes makes it feel like it wants to be family friendly Kill la Kill but has none of the personality.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Well, the new simulcast season has officially started. So far, I've got seven titles bookmarked. The second season of As a Reincarnated Aristocrat, I'll Use My Appraisal Skill to Rise in the World is probably the one I have the highest hopes for. I've also decided to give Let This Grieving Soul Retire, Mecha-Ude, 365 Days to the Wedding, Goodbye Dragon Life, Re:Zero S3, and I'll Become a Villainess Who Goes Down in History a try. Have you ever had one of those moments where you judge a book by its cover and then read it only to discover you were absolutely correct? That's what I'm having at about 4:16 into I'll Become a Villainess Who Goes Down in History's first episode. Isekai titles already suffer from a punishing lack of variety, and the otome game-based ones doubly so due to a lack of diversity in storytelling. This is definitely more towards the shovelware end of the isekai quality spectrum and it makes little secret of its copycatting My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!. The closest it seems to want to come to putting its own twist on it is having its protagonist want to become like the villainess in the game (and fail from earnestly trying too hard) instead of trying to avoid it (and succeeding too much). Kind of avoiding starting Re:Zero season three yet... that story has always been a little too dark even for me. I'm glad I'm not a shounen anime fan, because it sounds like those people are PISSED right now. My Hero Academia apparently ended recently with an incredibly unsatisfying end... Now Jujutsu Kaisen is under fire for its own terrible conclusion, which has the mangaka being accused of both stalling and character shilling for the villain... Both titles are being branded as having "The Worst Ending Ever" right now... better hope Eiichiro Oda sticks the landing with the ending of One Piece in the not-too-distant future, or there might be riots.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    February 1983 to approximately June 1984. Takatoku Toys's 1/55 VF-1S came out in February 1983 and the company declared bankruptcy around June 1984 due to losses incurred from sponsoring several anime titles that underperformed. Their assets were liquidated to repay creditors and, after rescuing Takatoku's contract fab Matsushiro Toys from its own subsequent bankruptcy, both the original molds and Takatoku's designs for future Macross toys ended up in Bandai's hands. New toys based on Takatoku's design were sold under Bandai's recently established HI-METAL starting in October 1984.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Oof... no punches pulled there. I agree with a lot of what Brayton's saying there. Alien: Romulus is, in a lot of ways, exactly what fans like me have been hoping for. An Alien film that returns to its roots with Alien's iconic claustrophobic horror. Its main stumbling block is that its writer-director's profound affection for the source material drives every aspect of the story. That devotion to all of the little details made it visually stunning, but its devotion to formula made it too predictable to be scary. Especially when the tension is frequently punctured in order to highlight a blatant fan-friendly reference to past films or games.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    It's always been one or the other... they're the only two good movies in the franchise. Nah, that was writer/director Fede Alvarez's doing. He's a self-confessed huge Alien fanboy who, armed with the substantial creative control that comes from being a writer-director, partly used the film as a "fix fic" to correct things that bothered him about the franchise's setting. One of those things he, as a fan, went out of his way to fix that a more sensible writer would probably have left alone was the lack of direct connections between the main series and Ridley Scott's semi-orphaned not-actually-a-prequel Prometheus and its disastrous "The studio said I had to put xenomorphs in this one or they'll fire me" followup Alien: Covenant. He even went out of his way to retcon out Ridley Scott's Covenant stance that David 8 created the xenomorphs, a plot hole the fans had been annoyed with for years. A smarter writer would probably have left that out completely, since Prometheus never fit with the franchise thanks to Scott, Spaihts, and Lindelof trying to use it to soft-launch a completely unrelated storyline about rogue AI instead of actually writing an Alien prequel and only grudgingly connecting it to Alien in the sequel while still trying to make Evil AI into the greater scope villain.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    No, it's just a reference to one of the iconic scenes in the movie. During Hikaru and Minmay's date (the one that ends with them going for a joy ride in a VT-1) one of the places they visit is a sort of holographic cosplay boutique with a room full of circular projectors that, when stood on, project a holographic costume over the person. In that boutique, they both jump through several different sets of projectors which put them in various themed costumes. The final set of projectors they land on in that scene put the two of them in a wedding dress and a wedding suit like those in that art.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    When I read that post, I was sitting in my office... which currently has no less than three different Macross wallscrolls hanging in it and adjoins a room with four bookshelves and three display cases given over mainly to Macross stuff... and all my inner monologue could come up with was: They have taken the bridge and the second hall. We have barred the doors but cannot hold them for long. The floor shakes... jpop... jpop in the living room. We cannot get out. A pile of untranslated books looms in the dark. We cannot get out. The Macross shows are coming.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Part of the reason it's not as big a deal as it feels like it should be is that the Zentradi probably had a lot of help from unscrupulous defense corporations like Critical Path. Critical Path in particular are so overtly villainous that not only were they apparently selling to all sides in the Second Unification War, their CEO manages to still be a minor villain active in the novelization of Macross Frontier despite having been dead for about eight years at that point. It's hard to say, since we get few glimpses far enough into the past to see what these PMC units were previously using and we've only seen a few branches of each. The novelization of Macross Frontier suggests that the Macross Frontier fleet's branch of SMS was outfitted with VF-19As and VF-22Ss before they transitioned to trial production VF-25s. Macross the Ride instead says a fleet-specific VF-19E monkey model (the VF-19EF). We never get to see what SMS Sephira branch uses because the only aircraft of theirs that we see in Macross 30 is the YF-25 that Leon has been asked to deliver to SMS Uroboros branch (as a parts donor for the YF-30). The SMS Uroboros branch wasn't a proper branch so much as a clandestine research outpost and there doesn't seem to have been any consistency WRT what Valkyries it had. It may have had the VF-11C as standard, since that's what they dig out of storage for Mina. We never learn what Xaos's Ragna branch used before the VF-31. Even in flashbacks, we see Arad using a VF-31A instead of his VF-31S. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if they were using old VF-171s or even older models like aftermarket VF-17s or VF-14s. Xaos's Pipure branch had the VF-171EX in the early 2060s, and one of them ended up customized after sustaining some damage. One of their researchers had a privately owned VF-19.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    <.< >.> Pretty sure it's straight up annexed a couple rooms in my house by this point.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Chronicle does cover a selection of enemy mecha from the games... but its selections are a bit weird and inconsistent and heavily biased towards Macross VF-X2. For example, it has the Variable Glaug from Macross M3 but not the Zentradi combining mecha from the same game. It's got most of the boss or mission objective enemies from the Macross VF-X2 game (e.g. Macross 13, the Hatchet-class destroyer, the Rorqual-type unmanned sub, and Vandal-type gunship, and the Annabella Lasiodora and Gjagravan Va mobile weapons). It's got the Meltrandi capture ship, Zentradi jamming station, and Queadluun-Nona from DYRL?'s game version. VF-X itself is represented only by the Feios for some reason. Early polygonal 3D was pretty rough, and they were working with the Playstation 1... it's not super surprising they had to compromise that way to get enough enemies onscreen.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    This has been a pretty unremarkable season... Caught the final episodes of Ossan Newbie Adventurer, The Magical Girl and the Evil Lieutenant, and No Longer Allowed in Another World today while home sick, and none of it was really... eh... impactful? Interesting? None of it was bad, it's just deep in "So OK it's average!" territory. It passes the time but it does not really entertain. My hopes are much higher for next season's lot.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Very little, admittedly. Like the Variable Glaug, we know almost nothing about its development because it was developed in secret by anti-government forces using technology from a stolen New UN Forces VF. All we have beyond that is some information about encounters with it in game stories and some basic physical and performance data. Yeah, you'd think a development like that would be a pretty huge deal in-story... but somehow it doesn't seem to have been. If I were to speculate as to why, my hypothesis based on the current state of the Macross official setting would be that the Feios Valkyrie was probably every bit as Awesome But Impractical as the VF-19 and VF-22 were. The New UN Forces ended up dropping their plans to adopt the VF-19 as a main Variable Fighter because its performance proved to be too much for most pilots to handle and it was too expensive to be practical in large numbers for most governments. The VF-22 was just as bad, if not worse, thanks to the highly complex and difficult-to-manufacture Inertia Vector Control System and Brain-Direct Interface. The Feios Valkyrie almost certainly has all the same problems, given it's a 4th Gen equivalent VF with even higher performance than the VF-19/VF-22, so it was likely only built in small numbers for the same reasons: too expensive, and too hard to find pilots for. (Those anti-government groups don't have the financial resources or recruitment potential of the military either, so they probably felt those issues even more keenly.) The remark about updated Queadluun-Rau systems comes from the Macross Digital Mission VF-X Official Program, but is not elaborated upon. It seems rather likely that what it's referring to is an improved version of the Inertia Vector Control System that is basically the one distinctive/unique system of the Queadluun-Rau.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    It's certainly not outside the realm of possibility, given what we've seen of Zentradi names in post-war titles. Especially if his family were Earth culture otaku like Naresuan.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    It's pretty clear that's not the case if you think about it. After all, Quamzin and Laplamiz didn't have any relationship other than a professional one until very near the end of the original series. They had their first kiss in episode 32, which is set in November 2011. That's barely a month before they both died in episode 36, which is set at the very end of 2011. There's not enough time for the two of them to have had a child together before they both died. (Temjin's expanded backstory in the novelization of Macross Frontier describes him as being a natural born Zentradi whose parents had been among the Zentradi who defected to the UN Forces during the First Space War and continued to serve in Earth's defense forces after the war. That rules out Quamzin and Laplamiz being his parents.) We can be pretty sure that it was not... both for the reasons stated above, and because we know the character was not originally named Temjin during development. There is one part of your hypothesis that does actually work though. There are several other Zentradi characters who are noted to have taken Human names, sometimes with historical significance, because they are essentially Earth culture otaku. Macross R's villain Naresuan is one such example... He was a defector who took the name of a king from the history of Thailand for some reason.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Finished Code Geass: Roze of the Recapture tonight... and I gotta say this is one I would NOT recommend. It's a very lazy, very half-arsed sequel to Lelouch of the Rebellion that just kind of mindlessly repeats plot points from the original series. The writing remains pretty bad to the very end, and if anything the fight choreography gets significantly worse towards the end as most fights devolve into high speed circling each other. Its big twist is... ripping off Mobile Suit Gundam F91 and Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny at the same time... the villain is basically Great Value Rau le Creuset and his master plan is the same on Iron Mask used in F91. When all's said and done, it's as beautifully animated as you'd expect a Bandai Namco Filmworks project to be... it's just boring as hell. None of the characters are developed, the mecha designs are all derivative and generic, the choreography's flat and lifeless, and by the end it just degenerates into a string of cameos by Lelouch of the Rebellion characters who seem to occupy every important position in the world outside of Hokkaido.
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