Seto Kaiba

A new season of The Irregular at Magic High School... honestly I recall thinking this one was pretty darn tedious, especially after I learned a huge part of the story was just straight-up missing due to the adaptation removing Tatsuya's internal monologue. Hopefully the new season will be a little more coherent.

Kind of... One of the problems with developing stories that bridge the sagas of Robotech is the difference in capability between eras and forces. It's not just a disparity between the tech levels of the original shows either. Robotech II: the Sentinels was the first title to establish that the Defense Forces after the Macross Saga (the so-called "Army of the Southern Cross") are actually made up of the recruits who failed to meet the minimum standards to join the Expeditionary Forces. That aspect got played up further after the franchise reboot in '01, with the ASC's leadership being depicted as corrupt and occasionally outright treasonous and their equipment was canonically made out to be poorly designed and of inferior quality as a result of being proprietary developments made after the Expeditionary Force monopolized all the best engineers. So they only ever get to show up as a resentful redshirt army (like this comic) or as traumatized veterans of a losing war (like in Prelude). They're pretty much only in this new comic to make Rick et. al. look good by comparison. It'll be interesting to see if the prototype Spartas gets some jobbing in or is actually useful for something. That's plot armor for ya... Vince takes a hit and he's wrapped up like he's halfway through putting on his mummy costume for Halloween, Rick takes a hit and he just has a bandaid on the bridge of his nose like a stereotypical delinquent instead of spending a week picking polycarbonate shrapnel out of his face. (But I can't get past how the two minor characters on the right have the same exact face...)

Pretty much, yeah. The only way to make those old comics and whatnot fit together was to do some serious mental calesthenics... and what fandom doesn't obsess over the minutae of the series they love? Yeah, it looks like arse... but really, talk about your downgrades. I'm pretty sure what he said to Leonard to get that was "I'm suicidal but I'd like to die in battle. What can you do to help?" That he presents that as an innovation when the Spartas's - and all other Southern Cross Army units - canonical in-universe reputation is closer to The Alleged Car is interesting in its own right. Maybe its reputation hadn't yet begun to precede it, though you'd think having to borrow it from the United Earth Washout Corps might be warning enough. He's mad because his buddy wrecked an expensive prototype of the best fighter humanity EVER had in Robotech and came back with a prototype of the single worst mecha humanity ever developed in Robotech like it was some kind of achievement. It's like he totaled a borrowed Lamborghini Aventador and tried to replace it on short notice with a riced-out Ford Pinto.

Not sure what situation you mean, specifically. I'm referring to the practice that's basically the norm for anime on streaming, broadcast, etc. and used to be the norm for streaming in general. That is to say, that the studio that produced the series and owns the copyright on it will license it to one or more distributors in other regions. Those distributors will localize it (sub or dub it, edit it for broadcast regs, etc.) and then in turn license it to one or more TV networks or streaming services that air the series. The network or streaming service does not own the series, they're just borrowing it from the catalog of works that the distributor has borrowed from the studio in exchange for royalties and a cash downpayment. Disney won't own any Macross series on their service. They're just buying permission to stream it on their service for a specific period of time from the distributors who licensed the shows from Big West back in '21.

Eh... I'd expect that they'll be subs-only when they debut since most of them haven't been dubbed before. Production of any dub(s) would likely fall on the various distributors who licensed the titles for global distribution like Nozomi Entertainment and Animeigo... and they might not even bother given that subs-only is basically the norm for streaming anime these days. If they were going to Sony Crunchyroll, I'd expect a dub to follow eventually months or a couple years after the fact because they do their own via their merger with Funimation. Given how proprietorial many distributors are about their stables of voice actors, I wouldn't even begin to hazard a guess at who'd get cast for who.

Re: Monster... this one, I'm a bit frustrated by right out of the gate. It's isekai, and given its premise my first inclination was to accuse it of being another one of those lazy copycat isekai titles like Skeleton Knight in Another World which "borrowed" its premise from a subplot in an already-established series. Specifically, it's very similar to So I'm a Spider, So What? and particularly Kyouya/Wrath's portion of the story, though it has some shades of Kumoko's early portion too with the whole gaining new powers by eating what he kills. It might actually be the other way around, though. Re:Monster's web novel started serialization four years before So I'm a Spider, So What?'s web novel did. At this early stage, Re:Monster feels very generic as an isekai title. There are some problematic aspects to its plot buried in the little details, but most of it is unremarkable thus far and it all feels like things we've seen before in So I'm a Spider, So What? and That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime. Maybe it'll find its feet and go somewhere interesting, but it doesn't seem like it will from what I can find.

To be frank, I really don't think so... it's something similar, but not that specifically. It's one reason I wish Robotech would stop doing side story comics like this latest Robotech: Rick Hunter miniseries. Robotech's story is already a very narrowly focused narrative where nothing happening outside of the immediate proximity of the TV series protagonists really matters. Making ever more side stories and interquels with inconsequential stories where the conclusions are either foregone or simply don't matter in the greater scheme of things doesn't do anything to advance the story or grow the setting. The franchise has been in a holding pattern with nothing noteworthy going on for over seventeen years now since Shadow Chronicles flopped. At least let the licensees do something with the setting besides run circles inside the ringfenced plot of a forty year old TV show, y'know? No matter how much the Robotech: Rick Hunter miniseries builds him up, Zeraal really can't be anything more than a speedbump because this is an interquel set between the end of the Macross Saga and the start of the Sentinels arc. He can't seriously hurt or kill the protagonists because they're Saved by Canon due to being main characters in stories set later down the timeline and he can't really do anything significant to the Earth since the timeline has no major conflicts in the period between Khyron's death and the departure of the SDF-3. He can run to the end of his leash and bark, kill some redshirts, and that's about it. He's a toothless foe because the ending is a foregone conclusion. So all the comic really does with the setting is reaffirm that the Southern Cross Army are a redshirt army of xenophobic dirtbags ... and that didn't really need to be reaffirmed IMO.

Well, my watchlist for the Spring 2024 simulcast season is growing at a pretty respectable clip. I'm up to 13 shows already, after adding Astro Note, HIGHSPEED Etoile, The Irregular at Magic High School S3, and A Condition Called Love to my list. I have to say, the Spring 2024 season feels like it has a lot more to offer than Winter 2024 did. Despite promising the return of several top tier isekai titles like KonoSuba, the Spring 2024 lineup feels like it has a lot less isekai and isekai-adjacent material in it and a lot more diversity of thought in storytelling... a development for which I am intensely grateful. Astro Note's synopsis reads like the center of a Venn diagram of To Love Ru and Bokura wa Minna Kawai-sou, so I'm a little hesitant on this one. It even starts exactly the same way that To Love Ru did, with the alien girl love interest fleeing pursuit in a space fighter. Though instead of homaging Star Wars during with a fake Death Star trench run, it's doing a big homage to Space Battleship Yamato instead with retro 70's style designs. They even color-toned those opening scenes to look like vintage 70's anime, which was a fun touch. The retro vibe seems to exist throughout, with the character designs also having some subtle retro touches here and there. Most of them look straight out of 80's SF, with the main girl Mira bearing an uncanny resemblance to Misa Hayase from Super Dimension Fortress Macross. It's pretty cute, and the retro aesthetic adds a certain charm to the proceedings as well. The creator is clearly very fond of late 70's and early 80's anime, and it shows through in the character designs and a fair bit of the plot. I think the sheer density of the subtle in-jokes and references to old anime will probably appeal to a lot of people here. HIGHSPEED Etoile is one that jumped out at me because its premise sounds weirdly similar to that of Macross the Ride of all things... a professional entertainer, in this case an aspiring ballerina named Rin Rindo, is forced to drop out of her chosen vocation and ends up pursuing a career in professional racing. That's a very strange pivot regardless of whether it's from idol singer or ballet dancer, but it caught my attention so... The character art is all 3D CG models, which makes them look very uncanny in a bad way. It's like looking at a badly textured 3D model. Head-on, it looks like normal animation, but at any other angle every character looks like a 3D model from an anime video game cutscene in a lot of the worst ways. There are a BUNCH of moments just in the first ten minutes or so where characters look like faceless crash test dummies wearing masks with faces screen-printed onto them because their faces are only on the front surface of their heads. The crowds in the stands don't even get that much, they're literally faceless masses animated very jerkily. The animation just looks terrible 90% of the time. The racing suits and cars are covered in logos for real brands. The "King" and "Queen" of the circuit have ads for King Amusement Creative, King Records, Takara Tomy, the Wixoss TCG, Kyoto Tool Company (KTC), Anileap, Yamato, Serendix, and Good Smile Company, among others. Ads for Honda, skincare brand Kose, Nosh, Tanita Products, Oioi/Marui Group, Brand Galleria, Raytrek, Nakazima, Performance Racing, Quaras, Chill Out, Toyota Gazoo Racing, Wacom, Cup Studio Paint, Yostar Games, Mixalive, Gugenka, SF Group and many more. Considering that 80% of the actual race here seems to consist of static shots of the exteriors of cars, closeups of logo-marked helmets, and color commentary it feels more like watching a slideshow of brand logos than an actual anime. With this many sponsors, they ought to have been able to afford actual animation right? Even less helpful is the fact that the show's protagonist doesn't even appear until 19 minutes and 50 seconds into a 24 minute and 07 second episode... giving her approximately 1 minute and 50 seconds of actual screentime, none of which is relevant to the episode's plot, before the episode ends. A Condition Called Love is written up as a fairly standard romcom about a normal girl who befriends, and then falls in love with, a handsome loner boy. Hopefully it has more to bring to the table than just that, or it can execute that premise flawlessly. This one's actually pretty darn cute. I think it'll go in some interesting directions if the main guy can stop being intensely creepy.

More or less, yeah. It really was. It is honestly a shame that Remix got canceled. The odds of it actually being good in the long run weren't great, but it was a genuine effort to do something halfway original with the property from a writer that acknowledged the franchise's creative shortcomings and bad habits and was willing to try a different direction entirely for future development even if it meant making hamburger out of some of the fanbase's sacred cows. That it also got away from the creepy tracing-heavy photorealistic art style of the previous comic was an unexpected but welcome turn of events as well. (Though we will be eternally grateful for the previous comic coining such memorable phrases as "a defibrillator on legs".) This new Rick Hunter miniseries is incredibly toothless stuff by comparison.

The Banished Former Hero Lives as He Pleases is another one of those isekai-adjacent fantasy stories in which the protagonist lives in a generic fantasy world that for no particular reason has JRPG-like mechanics like levels and skills. Its gimmick seems to be that the stupidly overpowered protagonist in an otherwise all female party (and future harem) is explicitly Not the Hero, he's just... hero-adjacent... because he was the hero in a past life and retained all his memories and abilities. It feels kinda tedious, perhaps because we've been down this road so many times before and the tropes are all a bit careworn now.

To be frank, I think it said all that really needs to be said about this latest Robotech comic. It's utterly unremarkable. Why? Because it really is just the latest in a long line of minimum effort titles that have nostalgia as their only real selling point. It doesn't add anything new or interesting to the setting or the characters. The "Malcontent" era between the First Robotech War and Robotech II: the Sentinels is so overused it could fairly be called the default setting for Robotech side stories. The principal characters are all established ones. Even the villain, Zeraal, is a returner from the Robotech: Battlecry game... which itself did the malcontent side story thing for the game's second half where Zeraal was just store brand Khyron. Everything it does has been done before, in a very similar manner. I'd make a joke about "Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent", but they didn't even go that far. And because they didn't go that far, we know the story will be a nonevent in the setting because we know what happens to these characters later... except Zeraal, but he'll almost certainly be dead again in the final issue. The one thing it does that hasn't done done before is they're using YF-4s instead of VF-1s... and even that's only a technicality, because From the Stars and Remix had them too, albeit not as prominently. I can wax lyrical about the many different ways it's a lazy, low quality, painfully unoriginal comic selling entirely on the basis of nostalgia... but the same point can be made much more succinctly by simply acknowledging that having nostalgia as the sole selling point is normal for the franchise and that this comic is thoroughly normal. It's a bit off topic, so I'll spoiler tag it so folks can skip it more easily.

Ooo... now that's a fun outing. The original Alien was peak claustrophobic horror... they just don't make 'em like that anymore. I'm kinda worried for Alien: Romulus with the trailer having facehuggers all over the place and one character wielding a pulse rifle that it's gonna go more for the action emphasis of Aliens instead of that lovely subtle claustrophobic horror of the original film and Alien: isolation. It's just not scary when the xeno's hopping into center stage and posing. Not knowing where it is (and not seeing it coming) is a big part of what makes it scary.

Studio Apartment, Good Lighting, Angel Included looks like it's set to be another one of those "random eccentric girl shows up and innocently cohabits with an introverted guy who isn't used to girls"... with the only real twist being that this one's an angel instead of the more traditional space alien or what have you. It's got some cute moments and some unnecessary fanservice, feels like this one might skew too generic to really be properly enjoyable tho. Time will tell. An Archdemon's Dilemma: How To Love Your Elf Bride seems to have the exact same premise as I'm Giving the Disgraced Noble Lady I Rescued a Crash Course in Naughtiness. Some random edgelord wizard holed up deep in the woods has the largely undeserved moniker of "Demon Lord" and ends up looking after some poor cinnamon roll of a girl. That this one felt compelled to open its main plot with a scene depicting a sexual assault is questionable taste at best, even if the perpetrator literally had the smug smile slapped off his face to reveal he was wearing a second smug smile underneath it. (The Ars Goetia sure is popular lately, isn't it? Looks like a bunch of the principal characters in this are named for the demons of the Lesser Key of Solomon.) I felt Disgraced Noble Lady was pretty weak stuff, so maybe this one can do the same thing better. Looking at the OP, I'm kinda hoping it won't turn into another case of "we spent the entire budget animating magic circles" like Demon King Academy.

Gave the first episode of A Salad Bowl of Eccentrics a whirl... and I'm not sure I'm sold on it yet. The only part of it that really stuck with me was the bizarre choice to have our world represented by the gold-plated statue of Oda Nobunaga in front of the JR rail station in Gifu. It made slightly more sense when the story was revealed to be set in Gifu, but still... The premise is cute and there's the potential for some good humor. The nudity was unnecessary to the story.

OK, watching Bartender: Glass of God and I have to admit they have me in an unexpected manner at barely five minutes in. The protagonist hasn't even been introduced yet, but I find myself sympathizing intensely with two hotel HR staffers complaining about trying to fill an impossibly specific open req and the vague and unmeasurable criteria they've been given. Those poor gals are hunting a purple squirrel, and I feel their pain so intensely. (Doubly so when their search for said purple squirrel candidate involves what is essentially a multi-day pub crawl looking for bartenders and they're subsequently told they can't expense it.)🤣 The first episode's not bad, but I'm not sure the direction is going to be one I'll like in the end.

Hrm... after sorting through the pile of new simulcasts, so far I'm planning to pick up: Re: Monster Gods Games We Play Studio Apartment, Good Lighting, Angel Included Bartender: Glass of God The Banished Former Hero Lives as He Pleases I was Reincarnated as the 7th Prince so I can take my Time Perfecting my Magical Ability Wind Breaker A Salad Bowl of Eccentrics An Archdemon's Dilemma: How to Love your Elf Bride Dungeon Meals is still ongoing too, so I'm definitely looking forward to more of that. That's just such a feel-good series that I can't help but smile every time I put it on. The descriptions of Bartender: Glass of God and A Salad Bowl of Eccentrics have me particularly curious. Nine titles out of the first batch ain't a bad start at all.

It takes a true fan to recognize this as not just one of the classic reflex comebacks (lol), but a big part of the why there so few Robotech fans. Robotech fans did an amazing job of driving people out of the Robotech fandom by refusing to accept that you can like something and still be critical of it. 😉👍 I guess it depends what you mean by "quality". I've read, and own copies of, almost everything that's been printed and sold under the Robotech banner insofar as comics, novels, RPG books, and artbooks, and it's pretty consistently amateur hour stuff across the board. I know I'm not alone in thinking that, because Harmony Gold's own official stance on the whole subject was that none of the pre-2001 material would've been cleared for sale if anyone'd been paying attention to managing the brand in the 80's and 90's. The franchise just never got the kind of licensee who could do a professional-feeling job with it* (pre-2001), so it always felt like a tradeoff... you could have have decent fanart-level art and terrible writing or terrible art and decent fanfic-level writing. IMO, some of the best are the parts where it was just unapologietically bad on every front like Wings of Gibraltar. A lot of it was just inconsequential side stories that didn't do anything to grow the setting or expand on the story in a meaningful way. And in that respect, not a lot has changed... even this new comic is just an inconsequential side story that goes nowhere new or interesting and adds nothing meaningful to the setting. It reads like a fanfic, and not in a good way. He did, to a small degree... but even then the Titan Comics Robotech series was still largely just a retread of old ground with art that varied from obviously traced to off-putting to "I think this person has a dental fetish". I do respect what they did near the end though, using the time loop plot device as a way to actively take the piss out of the franchise's various failures and false starts and its inability to come up with a story beyond just the next alien war. To throw that into a Robotech publication with all the fandom's sacred cows took a fair bit of guts, and honestly I'm disappointed we didn't get to see more of the payoff in Remix. Y'know what? Yes. That's exactly what Titan Comics should do. They had - for the first time since what? 1996?** - an actual original Robotech story that wasn't slavishly following or playing in the same sandbox with the TV series. They had the chance to take the story somewhere new and different and they got cut off before they could really do something with it. * Well, OK, they did have Luceno and Daley for the novelization... Luceno and Daley just kinda phoned that one in and tried to turn it into off-brand Star Wars when they got bored. ** Mordecai was '96, right? That last ill-fated issue after Clone?

Isn't "nostalgia as a substitute for quality" pretty much the textbook definition of Robotech licensed works in general? On that basis, Easton sounds like a perfect fit for Robotech. Not an original idea in sight, just an in-the-box story that puts existing characters and set pieces into slightly different configurations from normal.

Metallic Rouge episode 13 is out... and I'm not sure that piling medical waste and white phosphorous on an already burning-out-of-control trashfire was the smartest thing that Studio BONES could've done. Honestly, way to waste the first actual decent character reveal in the series... by having it be ten minutes of exposition dump before a five minute fight that kills the character. In hindsight, Rouge's final episode upgrade just makes her look like the illegitimate love child of Gold Experience Requiem and Mazinger... which is unintentionally hilarious. To call the series finale messy would be putting it mildly. It tries to do too much, to have far too many twists and reveals, and ultimately fails to stick any of them because there's no buildup for any of them and they all end up being rendered inconsequential within minutes. The final villain literally spends more time monologuing than actually fighting, and goes down TWICE with humiliating speed and efficiency. It's not a train wreck so much as a coordinated series of train wrecks all occurring in rapid succession in different parts of the narrative. No train left unwrecked, I guess. The actual conclusion of the plot feels like a shrug at best, and the epilogue feels like a non-sequitur. I am just flat baffled that this got approved by anyone in the production committee. "Half-baked" isn't the right word for it. This is a story so thin, underdeveloped, and full of spur of the moment improv that it's like baking when you forgot to buy half the ingredients and are making questionable ingredient substitutions.

Such is the dilemma of the remaster... faithfulness to the original "warts and all" vs. trying to present an improved "ideal" version through post-production cleanup. It's a balancing act, and sometimes the team doing the remaster leans too far in one direction... and the effort isn't always rewarded either. Robotech's remasters, for instance, were variously blasted for things like changing the SFX tracks or for producing grainy visuals with poor color balance. On the other side of the spectrum, Paramount's aforementioned Star Trek: the Next Generation remaster lovingly rescanned and reedited the series from the original large-format negatives and recreated all of the old school analog VFX using modern digital techniques, only for the project to be a financial flop because of how expensive it ended up being.

If the Disney streaming license was to somehow delay/cancel the Blu-ray release plans, we'd likely have heard about it by now via AnimEigo's Macross II: Lovers Again Kickstarter... as AnimEigo would have to either notify backers of the delay or issue refunds in the event of a cancellation.

The Macross Shoji Kawamori Designer's Note artbook from December 2020 has a section devoted to the FamilySoft Macross game original designs, including the Stampede Valkyrie, the Medusa/Star Crusader, and the VF-1SOL.

It's a licensed work, not "Disney vault" fodder... it's much more likely that they'll be using the streaming release to promote the Blu-rays the way Crunchyroll has been doing for its subs/dubs.

Having a good time with The Ancient Magus's Bride. It's fairly cute, and does some good worldbuilding.

Pretty much, yeah. The old site had a lot of issues from the start because HG started skimping on backend maintenance at a fairly early point. They didn't update the server hardware on a regular basis or apply security fixes with any rigor, and the MySQL database holding all the site's text content only rarely got optimized. As a result, it lagged like mad and it got hacked semi-regularly. The site's Community section all but died in 2007-2008 when several volunteer forum moderators who took it upon themselves to suppress criticism of the Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles "movie" for fear that it would somehow hurt the prospects of the proposed live action movie. Ultimately, they ended up banning or otherwise driving away most of the community's active users. The forums ended up a ghost town after another year or two, and the community largely moved to private forums and then to Facebook groups. A few years after the Community section died, the site got hacked again and HG decided to retire the old site in favor of a very basic page with product news and a link to the web storefront. They've prettied it up a bit since and added basic freeware web forums, but most of their audience had long since moved on and the remaining fan community seems to have felt no incentive to use the new forums that were swiftly overrun by bots. It seems to exist as little more than an effort to "show the flag" and remind people they haven't completely packed it in despite handing control of the franchise over to Sony Funimation and Big West.