Seto Kaiba

Some of the Harmony Gold "insider" fanboys seemed to believe that it's damage licensee confidence in the Robotech brand if the true extent of the limitations on Harmony Gold's license and its legal problems became public knowledge. The reasonable among us might have cause to wonder "what licensee confidence?", given that Harmony Gold was already scraping the bottom of the barrel in 2008 and have now moved on to licensing the brand to actual criminals in the form of Southeast Asian toy bootleggers.

After watching that trailer, the vibe I'm getting is essentially Starship Troopers 3: Marauder by way of Independence Day... just with slightly higher production values than the former.

Harmony Gold's evasiveness is a survival tactic on a couple different levels. On the one hand, they don't want to get into the details of their legal situation because they can get into a lot of trouble if they do start talking about it and say something that they're not allowed to talk about from a sealed settlement or if they misrepresent the state of affairs and another interested party takes exception. (Like what happened when they claimed to have the rights to all of Macross rather than just its original series in 1999-2000 and it not only got them in trouble, it got Tatsunoko in trouble too.) On the other hand, they don't want to appear that they aren't in control of the franchise... and let's be honest, 99% of the fandom who are still holding out hope for Robotech's future are there for the Macross references. If they were to actually admit they can't use Macross stuff in new film works, they'd damage the fandom's confidence in their brand. As far as we know, it all expires together in 2021 based on comments made by Tatsunoko in their arbitration.

Nah, they don't bother working her into plots anymore... she gets dragged out whenever they need/want to throw the odd reference to Macross into a story, because most Robotech fans are closeted Macross fans who couldn't give a crap about the other 2/3 of the "original" Robotech story. Like in their comic book bridge to the Shadow Chronicles OVA, she appeared solely to be captured and put through such grievous torture that she could never appear again because using her is too legally problematic. Or they'll just kill her off again... she doesn't seem anywhere near as important to the story as previous incarnations. We are, if anything, understating it. There hasn't been an honorable employee at Harmony Gold since Tom Bateman was forced out. This "information session" is going to essentially be the same kind of bullsh*t pep talk you see all the time from venture capitalist CEOs imploring shareholders to keep the faith while the stock price plummets and the company posts massive losses. The kind that, in any other context, would sound like a DPRK news brief... "All is fine. No more questions. Our glorious president will lead us to victory." Well, you get what you pay for. Harmony Gold set out to hire an international marketing coordinator for the Robotech franchise but, like all the other newly-created Robotech franchise positions, the advertised salary was more suitable for an entry level office job in a much less expensive-to-live-in area than Los Angeles. McKeever might well have been the only person to apply for the post, as it would only have appealed to a real idiot who would value working on Robotech over not being paid like an intern.

He's not very effective at it, given that pretty much everyone remotely familiar with the Robotech and Macross franchise knows he's Harmony Gold's liar-in-chief. He's a joke and the only one who doesn't know it is him. (Even the other HG employees don't like him.) Again? They already did it once.

Lemme fix that last sentence... "Join Harmony Gold's coffee boy, Kevin McKeever, as he dispenses lies less believable than a North Korean news broadcast." There is no bloody way that McKeever of all people is going to give a realistic assessment of how totally screwed Robotech is when they lose the rights in 2021. He'll probably deny to the hilt that they're going to be losing the rights.

Alternatively, you can just fire the writers.

Unfortunately, yeah... as long as Bad Robot Productions is calling the creative shots, Star Trek is doomed to fail over and over again. Bad Robot is so enamored of the "action-ized", style-before-substance version of Star Trek they established with the 2009 Star Trek reboot movie that they're determined to make it the norm for Star Trek so they can keep cashing in even though Star Trek fans and licensees hate it.

It's a quintessentially American story... investing enormous amounts of time, energy, resources, and innovative spirit into disproportionate retribution for a petty insult from a highbrow snob. As a former Ford engineer and lifelong Motor City boy, I definitely have to go see this one.

Kinda my feeling, yeah. It makes sense in an OVA where your individual episodes might be separated by six months to over a year the way Gundam Unicorn was in its original format, but for a weekly TV anime series like Gundam Unicorn Re:0096 it's just a transparent attempt to pad the series by extending that ~3 minutes of reused animation from the OP and ED out to 7 or 8.

It's a bit much to ask us to wait until 16 June 2395 isn't it? One thing to say for Alex Kurtzman's tenure at the head of the Star Trek franchise... he's made Doomcock much more entertaining than Star Trek itself, by ensuring that he's never short of stupid decisions and highly visible incompetence to rage and storm about.

If anything, it's even more convoluted since they've got multiple realities apparently all repeating the same time loop with different variations and at least one of them is invading the others deliberately just to be a dick. It's like a fifty soap opera pileup in terms of the number of lame cliches being thrown out, from evil twins to fake deaths... They've basically just taken it back to how it was before Harmony Gold rebooted Robotech in '01. Back in the late 80's and the 90's, it was a macguffin that could do pretty much anything. Carl Macek's explanation of it was more or less straight-up magic. The energy produced by the "Flowers of Life" was actual life force being drained from the flowers of life and the cancelled Robotech 3000 series would have revealed that the stuff was straight-up self-aware and would rebel against the abuse of its power (the plot of the cancelled series). Using it to power things like mecha made them pseudo-living, which was the explanation given for how they were able to maneuver like living things. The novelization took it even further and made it into, for all intents and purposes, The Force from Star Wars... something that had apparent power over causality itself, granted psychic powers, facilitated time travel, and had an omniscient will of its own. When Harmony Gold rebooted Robotech in 2001 in an attempt to reinvent it as a viable mainstream mecha anime property, it was de-mysticized into nothing more than a highly versatile material that could be used in energy generation (not unlike petroleum).

Even serious Robotech fans don't like Robotech 3000... that was literally why it was cancelled after just one trailer. Harmony Gold and Netter Digital showed the trailer at a few cons and the fan response was so overwhelmingly, vehemently, unilaterally negative that Harmony Gold cancelled the series and then cancelled the series AGAIN when Carl Macek attempted to revive it as a traditionally-animated property. It was so universally scorned that even Carl "I meant to do that" Macek admitted the series was a mistake in his foreword for the Shadow Chronicles artbook. Its one and only defender was the late khyron_prime, who built a website devoted to an insane conspiracy theory that the series was cancelled because members of the Netter Digital staff sabotaged it during production as part of some internal power struggle rather than because the fans rejected it outright. Yeah, the armor is totally Halo... not the first time this dreadful tome has done that either.

It's been delayed what, twice already?

They're referencing Robotech 3000... Stop and appreciate that fact. THEY'RE REFERENCING ROBOTECH 3000. The worst failure in the Robotech franchise's history... prior to Robotech Academy, anyway. An ill-conceived series concept so appallingly bad that even the legendarily low standards of the Robotech fandom couldn't stretch far enough to pretend it wasn't utter garbage. This isn't scraping the bottom of the barrel anymore... they're a couple kilometers down into bedrock and continuing to dig.

Isekai Quartet is still very much a "for fans only" series ten episodes on, but it still manages to be entertaining nevertheless in no small part because of how many terrible people are in the typical isekai anime's story. Like the light novel it's adapting, The Rising of the Shield Hero definitely feels like a much weaker series now that the first major story arc is over. Naofumi feels a lot more generic and uninteresting once his grudge against the Kingdom of Melromarc is settled by the Queen. He still thinks the other cardinal heroes are morons (and he's not wrong), but he is not the same jaded misanthrope who made such an interesting protagonist early in the story. Now he's just a Stalwart Hero of the Land. Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn Re:0096 feels like a critical failure of editing. Every episode starts with a four minute long recap of the unnecessarily convoluted story thus far, which gets pretty redundant after a while when it's recapping all the way back to episode one and events that aren't even directly connected to the episode.

Eech... if the latest round of Star Trek leaks are true, then CBS and Star Trek are having a REALLY terrible year. Reportedly, CBS is rushing the Star Trek: Picard series through production as a green screen extravaganza to keep costs down thanks to receiving a significantly smaller budget from the distribution deal with Amazon. They've apparently got around four episodes of material shot so far, but may be headed back for even more reshoots after a disastrous test screening at which something like 80% of the audience disliked what they were shown. It's also reportedly, as expected, being done in the same J.J. Abrams/Kelvin timeline-esque design aesthetics that were used in Star Trek: Discovery... because apparently they've decided to brazen it out and hope it'll catch on instead of admitting it was a mistake. It'll be interesting to see if the series ever sees the light of day, since they may well end up running out of cash before they ever actually finish the season... Amazon is allegedly suffering buyer's remorse. Star Trek: Discovery is still up sh*t creek without a paddle, as nobody seems willing to step forward and put up the enormous sum necessary to produce the third season of Star Trek: Discovery.

No, it's right here on MacrossWorld:

YES. My friend @Jack Verse was able to play the game all the way through and quite enjoyed it despite not speaking a word of Japanese, thanks to a very fine translation guide published on these forums as a Google Doc. Mandarake, eBay, Amazon, CDJapan (backordered 5-10 days if you want the Best Edition new), etc.

At least the title isn't "Haruhiko Mikimoto Forever"... the world can only contain so much irony.

Amazon Prime has the entire series, so no need to bootleg or go to illicit YouTube streams.

Oh, I agree... that was unpleasant enough in the web novel that even Malty's substantial hate-dom felt a twinge of pity for her. It's not exactly a race to the bottom in terms of depicting dark and disturbing content, but apart from That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime and KonoSuba the top Isekai series don't seem to be shy about animating the dark and disturbing content. Overlord left in the frankly horrific treatment of the prostitutes in the brothel the Eight Fingers run in Re-Estize both times it came up in the Men of the Kingdom story arc, the massacre of the Workers in the Invaders of the Great Tomb arc, and Ainz's killing of over 180,000 of the Re-Estize Kingdom's soldiers with one spell in the Caster of Destruction arc. Goblin Slayer kept most of how rapey the goblins are, though they thankfully left out describing in detail the horrific fates of the party who tried to oust the goblins from the old Elf fortress (even if it did still animate the end result). If it gets another season, we'll have to see if they remain faithful to the novels when it comes to the arc with the goblin paladin. The Rising of the Shield Hero left in the horrific treatment of demihuman slaves including what happened to Raphtalia and her friends after their village was destroyed. I wouldn't bank on them not animating that if the anime gets that far. On a lighter note, I marathonned the hell out Isekai Quartet this afternoon. It's... weird. As weird as you'd expect a short comedy crossover slice of life school comedy about the characters from KonoSuba, Re:Zero, Overlord, and The Saga of Tanya the Evil to be. It's got a bit of a fridge horror aspect for an Overlord fan, what with Ainz and co. being brought over to the alternate world pretty much immediately after Ainz killed 180,000 enemy soldiers on the Katze plains, and having him joke about using his instant-kill spell Grasp Heart. Some of the humor definitely comes from the characters whose horrible personalities compliment each other getting along a little too well... like Tanya and Demiurge, Rem and Albedo, or Albedo and Aqua. Also took another whack at Mobile Suit Gundam UC: Re:0096 while I was at it. Its animation is so beautiful... but its story is such a dumpster fire. It's got that usual Universal Century side story problem where it's impossible to like anybody because everyone's an a-hole. Banagher's the wettest blanket in an underwater laundromat, and everyone else has more angst than a 24 hour emo rock playlist. It's not as bad as Mobile Suit Gundam Thunderbolt, but it's still pretty obvious it's a gunpla commercial masquerading as a show. There's a strong argument to be made that Syam Vist and the Vist Foundation are bigger villains than the entire Zabi family, Principality of Zeon, and all of the Neo-Zeons. They had the original Federation Charter all along and could've resolved the entire spacenoid rights crisis at ANY TIME... but they waited until there'd been THREE wars over the subject before doing anything, and all they actually did was pass the buck. Struggling through a rewatch of Nobunaga the Fool as well. The premise is interesting, but boy does it drag in the middle after the fight between the Takeda under Caesar's command and the Oda forces ends with Nobunaga totally wrong-footing Caesar with an invitation to a tea ceremony when a surrender was demanded. Mobile Suit Gundam: the Origin: Advent of the Red Comet has been consistently good. When it's not ham to ham combat featuring Ramba Ral and the Black Tri-Stars in mobile suit prototypes, it's Char being a magnificent bastard. I haven't had a show featuring a villain protagonist this good since Code Geass's first season. Who'd have thought Gundam without Gundams would be a winning formula? (The best part of catching up has been that I discovered my office's switch from MS Office to Google's G Suite means that services like Crunchyroll, YouTube Premium, and Google Play Movies aren't blocked by their firewall anymore... so I can watch over lunch on my office's big damn 1080p monitors without using up my MiFi's data plan.)

Mostly, it's the small expected sales volumes and narrow profit margins. As I understand it, physical media is a bit of a specialty market in Japan. The average home in Japan is fairly small by western standards, and with space at a bit of a premium it can be inconvenient or just plain impractical to build a large home video library. This has kept the video rental industry alive and well in Japan and in so doing kept the expected sales of any given home video release on the low side. Prices are set higher, in part, to compensate for the lower expected total sales. That fans were still willing to buy physical media those high prices meant there really wasn't an incentive to try lowering them. It certainly doesn't help that anime is made on such razor-thin margins that home video sales and merchandise are downright essential to a show's commercial success or failure. The studios stay afloat on the profits from the few hits they put out year to year, with most of what they produce barely breaking even or resulting in a short-term loss that may or may not be recouped by a slow trickle of profit from years of merchandise, streaming licensing, international licensing, and back catalog home video sales. With such a narrow margin between turning a profit or writing off a loss, the higher price means fewer units need to be sold to break even. They do announce them fairly quickly these days, but even if they don't the massive disparity in price could easily entice a savvy Japanese fan to purchase a Blu-ray from America for a fraction of what the Japanese domestic market release would cost. Consider, if you will... the average Japanese Blu-ray disc costs about $64 (US) and typically has three TV series episodes on it. That's $21.25 an episode. Macross Delta was a bit more expensive at $71.91 a volume for nine volumes/26 episodes plus various cuts of episode one, and cost over $647 when all was said and done. Getting a 26 episode anime series on Blu-ray in the US? $52.50 including the average sales tax. That's $2.02 an episode... a savings of 91.88%. In terms of spending power, importing the American Blu-ray would save a Japanese fan enough money for: 140 gallons of gasoline, two inexpensive Windows 10 laptops, a reasonably high-end smartphone, 185 cans of Coke, 21 dinners out, or approximately a month's rent in a typical 2K or 2DK apartment. Savings-wise, that's nothing to sneeze at... especially with Blu-ray prices creeping up towards $72/volume and some of the more popular shows having more than 26 episodes. Even the limited low-priced edition Macross 7 Blu-rays cost over $500 for the complete series, at about $9.93 an episode.

Yeah, if Macross were to take off bigtime in the west I'd expect to see music mildly deemphasized towards a more balanced story like Macross Frontier. Gundam's plastic model kits cross barriers of language and culture a lot more easily than Macross's J-Pop albums, but music is so essential to the Macross experience and core themes that they can't deemphasize it very much without hurting the setting and story. Frankly, I'd be shocked if Kawamori didn't have a raft of studio executives, production committee members, and assorted hangers-on auditing his concepts and proposals to make sure what he's coming up with is actually marketable. It's very rare for a creator to actually be given a completely free hand to do whatever they please, and on the rare occasions that they do get complete control it almost never ends well.

My collection seems to be pretty mixed in that regard... though it seems to vary by distributor. I'm not sure if it's still an issue, but for a while there the Japanese studios were vocally concerned about the possibility of losing profits from home video sales to fans importing the less expensive western home video releases of their shows. Gundam's focus was always selling model kits... Macross's is on selling music. Macross Delta is, if anything, proof that Macross has ALREADY succumbed to the "saturation bombing" effect of focusing on the profit center at the expense of the story. Kawamori has, IIRC, expressed some frustration already that he's tied to a formula for Macross titles that includes a love triangle, music, and space war. It's just not as bad as Gundam, which has evolved its Universal Century to the point that new shows are basically written mad lib-style.