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Seto Kaiba

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Everything posted by Seto Kaiba

  1. Seto Kaiba
    Given how manners-obsessed Japanese corporate culture can be... I have to wonder if that rant'll come back to bite him in the arse one day.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Started Aho-Girl today, and it's been a good laugh thus far. It's got the same sort of manic energy I fondly remember from the Excel Saga anime.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Well, that was certainly a thing that happened. Gekijouban Youjo Senki is a real trip. It feels a little scattered thanks to falling at kind of an awkward point in the story of the novels, but the story mercifully cuts some of the creepier moments (like the paedophile Russian government official who is obsessed with capturing Tanya) in favor of focusing on the Eastern Front and the introduction of Mary Sioux as Being X's new puppet in the Great War to try and force Tanya into a corner. The animation was generally excellent, barring one REALLY jarring moment of conspicuous CG where the 203rd's mages are briefly animated as fully 3D characters instead of 2D that's really awkwardly out of place. The action sequences were beautifully done all throughout the movie, and it REALLY drew a line under how massively overpowered Mary is thanks to having given in completely to Being X's brainwashing. The final dogfight between Tanya and Mary is a little hard to watch given how almost literally cutthroat its fighting was. There's even a fakeout ending where it looks like Tanya has finally secured her much-coveted rear echelon position after a dramatic speech about the horrors of total warfare... only for her crowing about her victory to be almost immediately shot down one jump cut later when she's informed she's being given command of a new combined arms unit.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    I've just queued up the Youjo Senki movie on a lark... the series was good, albeit too short, so I've got high hopes for this one.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    NICE. Really, that there was a complete non sequitur posted in this thread by accident and we literally couldn't tell if it was relevant to the comic or not says all that needs to be said about the horrid quality and "throw everything at the wall to see what sticks" approach Titan took with its Robotech alterniverse story.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    So... I've started to work my way through my anime backlog now that the winter holidays are upon us. My first port of call was 2017's Saiyuki Reload BLAST. I have to admit I was pretty surprised to see the series was only twelve episodes. The first adaptation of Kazuya Minekura's manga (Gensomaden Saiyuki) had a fifty episode run, Saiyuki Reload got twenty-five, and Saiyuki Reload Gunlock got 26. Except for a few weird moments of low quality (one of which ended up in the OP!) the animation quality is pretty good and the voice actors playing the Sanzo party knocked it out of the park as usual. The self-aware humor gets a little old after a bit, thanks to Hakkai lampshading over and over how the yokai after the bounty on Sanzo seem to have all of two lines. The backgrounds are lavishly detailed with appropriate style given that the Sanzo party is close to India, and the character drama's as good as ever including a few really outstanding and slightly painful-to-watch moments. The one downside is that BLAST took three episodes for a flashback to the events of Saiyuki Gaiden... which feels unnecessary since the flashback was to the same events already flashed back to in the original Gensomaden Saiyuki series. All that's really changed, except for some color schemes, was that the full rape-y subtext of Li Touten and Nataku's relationship isn't glossed over this time around.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Really, seeing it all distilled into a handful of sentence fragments really throws the cr*p quality of the writing at Titan into sharp relief. When they're not just stealing ideas from existing franchises, they're throwing out random Days of our Lives-esque nonsense to fill pages.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    To kill it.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Just let it die. Kill it if you have to... goodness knows J.J. Abrams and Rian Johnson tried.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Ouch... lol. Hey, we were working on making it better, by moving its engineering activities the f*ck out of Italy.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a29655638/fiat-chrysler-psa-peugeot-citroen-merger-cars/ Well, as of today, it looks like the merger is officially on between Fiat-Chrysler and Peugeot. We got the email statements from Mike Manley and John Elkann this morning, and it looks like Peugeot's Carlos Tavares is set to head up the combined company when the dust settles.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    It was inevitable. Like most corporate think tanks, Disney's Star Wars brain trust is so afraid of how negative feedback will reflect on them personally in the eyes of their superiors that they pathologically overreact to the slightest criticisms while chasing an unachievable 100% approval rating. They were so preoccupied with trying to take every last piece of criticism they received for The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi on board that, in their minds, the project's goal invisibly shifted from making an engaging story to silencing their detractors. They tried to please everyone, so they pleased noone.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Solid and mostly united? I dunno... Star Wars fans already had a LOT to bicker about from the old Expanded Universe, and that was before the prequel trilogy came along and we got the first round of "RUINED FOREVER" complaining. (Not saying the complaining was necessarily even unreasonable, just that it occurred.) Woah... I admit I was expecting some negative reviews after the handpicked Hollywood yes-men audience had some dissenters who refused to rave about it, but I was unprepared for the savage beating it received from the top critics. Only 14 of the 37 to chime in so far had favorable opinions of the movie. Some of the criticisms that really stand out are things like "may it be the last episode of a saga that should've ended long ago.", "In its anxiety not to offend, it comes off more like fanfiction than the creation of actual professional filmmakers. A bot would be able to pull off a more surprising movie.", and "Rather than making a movie some people might love, Abrams tried to make a movie no one would hate, and as a result, you don't feel much of anything at all.".
  14. Seto Kaiba
    So, I did some digging into my own question during an especially dull teleconference with Turin... and the fuss about George Lucas having been "banned" from the premiere of Rise of Skywalker seems to be pure conjecture on the part of overworked YouTube hack brigade. George Lucas didn't attend the premiere of Rise of Skywalker, and it isn't clear if he was invited or not, but they've jumped headlong to the worst/most controversial possible conclusion as is their custom. Considering what George's previous "unfettered" story ideas were like... this can only be taken as one of the vanishingly rare good decisions Disney made in the development and production of what otherwise seems set to be a criminally bad travesty of a film. When half your handpicked Hollywood premiere audience of yes men can't bring themselves to effusively praise the film, you're in for a critical beating.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    So, in all likelihood, the leaks really were Disney market research and not the worst NDA enforcement job in human history. Delightful. Any truth to what Doomcock is shrilling about, about George Lucas supposedly not being allowed to attend the premiere?
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Good, bad, or ugly? My money's on "ugly".
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Eech... it looks like Wave really didn't do justice to Kazutaka Miyatake's design for the Marauder suit. IIRC Miyatake originally drew it for Hayakawa's translation of the novel, then used it in DAICON III and DAICON IV before it was polished further and used in Studio Nue's unauthorized 1988 Starship Troopers OVA. Studio Nue's 1988 Starship Troopers OVA is easily the most faithful film adaptation of Heinlein's original novel by a significant margin... which is a double-edged sword, in that Miyatake did a pretty good job turning the descriptions of the Marauder into something the animators could use and that the story's boring as f*ck for the most part.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    More likely as a nod to the course correction he's attempting to make from The Last Jedi's massive f*cking-up of the story back towards his original, f*cked-up story. We've seen Kylo and Rey destroying some kind of actual goddamn shrine to Darth Vader's melted helmet, so it's safe to assume General Hux has confiscated Kylo Ren's collection of The Cure albums and he's back to pretending he's something that could be mistaken for an aspiring Sith Lord... in bad light... at 200 paces... in a thick London fog... while wearing sunglasses.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    It had a goofy-ass voice changer when it appeared intact in The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi... so presumably there's some electronics in there. If he went to the care of repairing the helmet in a way that deliberately drew attention to the repair as an artistic statement (as described in my last post), he probably replaced or at least repaired any electronics in there. He is Han Solo's kid, so he's probably not bad at fixing things. Growing up around a rustbucket like the Millennium Falcon probably offered a LOT of opportunity to practice.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Darth Vader always had a subtle Japanese aesthetic to his armor... and this is kind of a nod to that. Kylo Ren repaired his broken helmet, kintsukuroi-style. Rather ironic for a man who was saying, as recently as the last movie, to let the past die and kill it if you have to. Kylo's gone and pulled a 180 philosophically by repairing his helmet using a method that symbolically respects the history of the object by treating its breakage as an event in its history and not the end of its history. In short, he's suddenly celebrating the past instead of letting it go and killing it if he has to.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    More or less. As I see it, most of the creative problems plaguing the Terminator franchise stem from the inability of its writers to establish a consistent stance on whether or not you can actually change the future/past using time travel. Each new film's writing problems stem from reversing course on the previous film's stance... except Salvation, which didn't bother with time travel. Can you change the future? The franchise's answers are (in order): No, Yes, No, Who Cares?, Holy Cr@p Yes, and No in that order. Genisys and its planned sequels were a soft reboot that would, according to the screenwriters, have revealed that you absolutely CAN change the past using time travel... but you can't change YOUR past. It's a Zero Time Dilemma-style scenario where you create another alternate timeline every time you try. The goal was to both start fresh AND explain away all the problems in previous films by establishing that they occurred in separate alternate timelines... and Genisys's soft reboot timeline was a product of interference from multiple efforts on Skynet and the Resistance's part to change or preserve history that warped history into something none of the time travellers recognize thanks to the butterfly effect of so much time travel abuse.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Give it an issue or two for the sales to slip a little further... then I'm sure we'll see all manner of faces traced from double peace sign ahegao hentai.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Almost certainly not. When Robotech was new and at the apex of its popularity, it never achieved more than unremarkable middle-of-the-pack ratings as a serialized kids show and its merchandise line was largely a flop. Its fanbase has been shrinking ever since thanks to Harmony Gold's repeated failures to get an animated continuation to the series produced, the initially poor and consistently declining quality of its licensed merchandise, and the infighting in the fandom itself. With no signs of any future developments of any appreciable merit, that steady downward trend is unlikely to ever reverse itself. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to say that much of what remains of Robotech's brand awareness is because of the legal problems its existence causes for more successful properties like Transformers, Macross, and MechWarrior, not because anything it does "creatively" attracts attention. There are, in all likelihood, more Macross fans in Japan alone than there are Robotech fans worldwide. (Really, that Robotech is now double-branding most of its merchandise with the Macross title and logo should tell you all you need to know on that score.) Well, perhaps if you're looking exclusively at strictly legitimate channels. Macross shows have done a roaring trade on the internet via fansubs and bootleg DVDs and Blu-rays with subtitles. Macross Zero did a lot to build awareness thanks to how damn pretty it was, and interest in the franchise really exploded when Macross Frontier hit fansubs in '08. We're talking millions of downloads of individual English subtitled releases on a weekly basis, and that's not counting other languages. Macross's shows do account for only a fraction of its total output though, so even if the shows were ALL licensed we'd still be able to say the majority of Macross content was still for Japanese audiences only. Considering that a Robotech live action movie would be unable to use the vast majority of the content of the Robotech TV show... isn't that a self-answering silly question? It'd have to be Robotech in name only to avoid copyright infringement lawsuits.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, definitely planning to avoid the Christmas rush and depending on how bad bad is when the reviews drop I'll either wait until mid-January or February or I'll wait until it lands with an audible splat on streaming services midway through 2020 like I did for Solo: a Star Wars Story.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    As with their other "new" designs, it's just borrowed from somewhere else. It's a lightly tweaked version of the earliest concept version of the Legioss back when it was still called the Vector, when MOSPEADA was under development as Descent Soldier Vector. Personally, I think it's fugly. Other way around... this panel says that Dana's being blamed for forcibly redirecting funding from development of the Alpha Fighter prototype1 to the YF-42. This might look like a throwaway line, but this is Titan Comics doing some expert-tier trolling of die-hard Robotech fans. If the Robotech RPG fan community hadn't basically imploded once Palladium Books got the rights, there would be actual fights going on over that one panel. Like, actual flame wars and threats of violence from those two-and-a-half sentences. The suggestion that the mecha of Robotech's Macross Saga are superior to the mecha of Robotech's other two sagas is a genuine berserk button for die-hard Robotech fans... especially fans who play the Robotech RPG. It's a more reliable way to start a fight than saying "Roll for initiative", thanks to the point technically being true in the 2nd Edition Robotech RPG. (Even after a massive NERF, the VF-1 is still basically as good as the game's massively buffed Alpha, and only got better after the setting changed and all the Macross mecha became invisible to the Invid because they don't use magic flower fuel.) 1. Presumably the Robotech-exclusive VF-X-6 Genia is the same as in From the Stars. 2. Macross's VF-X-4. Par for the course... Robotech won't be happy until the metaphorical bar is being used for a limbo contest in Satan's wine cellar. Really, I'd thought their point was that it sucks to be in the Robotech universe, period. They literally started with a stable time loop of Forever War where humanity was repeatedly genocided by various aliens only to die horribly trying to go back into the past and stop it all from happening over and over again and in so doing start the loop of death and horror all over again. Now they've added space zombies to the mix.
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