Seto Kaiba

So... if there's a Most Improved award for an anime season, HIGHSPEED Etoile might be in the running. The director and animators seem to have finally figured out how to animate a race in an exciting and visually appealing manner. If everything else weren't still horrible, I'd almost believe it was a completely different show. It's not exactly a dignified plot twist that the protagonist Rin Rindo suddenly goes from propping up the bottom of the rankings to the middle of the pack as a result of...

The fatigue is indeed real. Your example is a fantastically appropriate one. The Star Wars franchise is encountering exactly the same kind of audience fatigue that Star Trek did in the late 90's and early 00's, and the Disney execs overseeing it are making the same mistakes that the Paramount execs who flew Star Trek into the ground did. They have a formula that worked well and are unwilling to consider deviating from it even as it becomes increasingly stale and uninteresting. They've got an enormous and highly versatile setting but a very narrow view of the kind of stories that are appropriate to tell in that setting, Maybe the Star Wars writers feel hemmed in by the second word in the title... everything has to come back to a war. (Not that Star Trek learned its lesson either... they just waited until the fatigue wore off and went back to doing exactly what they were doing before.)

Well, after seeing this new trailer, it definitely feels like The Acolyte is headed into Plot Hole: the Series territory. We'll know for sure in a month, though. Except, of course, for any characters appearing in later titles... e.g. Yoda. They're perfectly safe.

My money's on them going for "Little Horus" Aximand instead. He too has a miniature, but unlike Garvi he stays with the Sons until his death during the Siege.

Considering his role in the story, I doubt Garvi's going to show up as part of the Joytoy Sons of Horus line. He only spends the first three books of the sixty-four book Horus Heresy series as a member of the XVI Legion. Most of his appearances in the series are as one of Malcador's Knights Errant, the Legion-less group of Astartes that carried out various special operations on the Sigilite's orders and later... ... shortly before the start of the Siege of Terra. It was only after the Knights Errant were disbanded that he started painting his armor again, and went back to using the colors of the pre-Heresy Luna Wolves during the Siege. If a Garviel Loken figure is coming, it'll probably be either in the Knights Errant marking-less gray armor or in old Luna Wolves white.

Started Mushoku Tensei today while I was dogsitting. Ended up marathon-ing about 14 episodes of it. It's not a bad series by any means, but it does lose me pretty reliably every time Rudeas starts perving on an underage girl... which is distressingly frequent. Thus far, I'm feeling like the series is a more-or-less capably written isekai story with an engaging plot and some likeable characters that's mainly brought down by its protagonist's whole family being slimeballs.

It's true. Sony's press release from after the acquisition of Crunchyroll was finalized in 2021 stated that they intended to merge the Funimation and Crunchyroll streaming libraries, and they confirmed about six months later in Q1 2022 that all of the different anime streaming services under their banner (Funimation, Wakanim, and VRV) would be consolidated into Crunchyroll. They started merging the streaming libraries shortly after that announcement and AFAIK they finished merging the libraries months ago. The last few months the news has been all about merging user accounts for people who'd had both services, but that finished for all outstanding accounts weeks ago and they've shut down the Funimation servers as of April 2. That said, Funimation stopped adding new titles to their catalog around the time the acquisition was finalized. I'm pretty sure they didn't have MOSPEADA on their service when the catalog was frozen. It may be something they've picked up recently as an addendum to having the rights to Robotech delegated to them by Harmony Gold a few years back.

Not surprised it's the same transfer from the DVD release in the 2000s. There would've been a lot more fanfare if they were going to remaster the series again. Still, it's nice to have it available. I'm surprised it took this long for it to land on Crunchyroll since Funimation's been dumping most of its back catalog there with little-to-no notice.

Starting Yatagarasu: The Raven Does Not Choose Its Master... it feels like it might be a very similar series to The Raven of the Inner Palace, which would be quite welcome. (If nothing else, there's certainly a fair bit of courtly cattiness in the first part of this medieval fantasy series...)

Proudly representing the Commorragh Chamber of "Commerce" since 3rd Edition! Picked up Necrons for a bit after they were first introduced, but never updated to the "Newcron" range when they graduated to being Space Tomb Kings because I didn't enjoy their ruleset as much.

Watching HIGHSPEED Etoile's latest episode, and while it was already easily the worst thing out this season it's actually getting worse with each episode... which is impressive in its own very strange way. Episodes 3 and 4 are almost the exact same story of Rin bumping into a top-ranked driver in public, missing absolutely every clue as to who they are even though the're making ZERO effort to disguise their identity and doing things like signing autographs for fans, and spending the entire episode with them blissfully unaware of who they are until they spell it out to her. She's also apparently so bad at racing that the series decides to stop showing the races... it skips straight to the results and when she's not disqualified she's in dead last against even the unmanned cars.

Yeah, I do seem to skew heavily towards "disappointed" in a lot of the streaming originals don't I? I've thought about that a lot, and while I know my own eccentric tastes are probably a part of I also feel like a common thread in a lot of the ones I've found disappointing has been a "style over substance" approach to showrunning. A lot of these new shows sink most of their time, effort, and money into making a series visually spectacular without taking the time and care to make sure it's narratively spectacular too. As someone who's more engaged by compelling characters and a well-composed narrative than pure eye candy, that's become a deal breaker for me on several titles. As long as it makes internal sense... though it definitely feels like it's counting on shock value to carry it in quite a few places, both in the violence and the humor. The second episode is certainly atmospheric. Hasn't really done much to explain things, but there's a definite sense of direction to proceedings by the end of it.

To be honest, yeah... I'm inclined to agree. If the setting is underdeveloped to the point that the answer to "why are things like this?" is "just don't think about it" or "it has been left as an exercise for the viewer", that often means the rest of the writing is going to be similarly lacking. Not always, but often enough to be a pretty reliable indicator of quality. After watching the first episode, I definitely feel like Fallout expects me to already be familiar with the setting from the games and I definitely feel like I'm missing some critical context and/or knowledge. Given that the whole streaming race is driven by visual quality above all else, it's a safe bet Amazon will spend big to make Cavill's Warhammer 40,000 series look every bit as nice as Fallout. What Cavill's project will end up spending that money on is anyone's guess, since we don't know if he's adapting an existing story or developing an original one, or what the focus of the story will be. It's a really big setting with a LOT of options, and quite a few of the most celebrated candidates for adaptation are devoid of things like powered armor.

... really? 🫤 I hope Fallout has a better explanation than that, because that's some hot nonsense. That actually sounds less believable than those old Star Trek episodes where some aliens find a book someone left behind, assume it's a description of the ideal society, and model their entire culture on it or build an entire world based on it. Cultural development just took a powder for 120 years?

The Many Sides of Voice Actor Radio is shaping up to be one of my favorite titles for this season. Yumiko and Chika's dynamic makes their interactions a lot of fun, and the premise is a fresh and interesting one. I'm very keen to see where this goes in the future.

Looking into starting this one tonight or later this week How necessary is it to have played (or at least be familiar with) the game series? (Asking because I have never played the games and have basically zero familiarity with the franchise beyond hearing some friends complain about Fallout 76.)

My assumption would be that the person who created the 3D model probably used the animation itself as reference instead of the line art from the animator's model sheets. These kinds of issues are very common in fan projects by Robotech fans, who frequently fail to even consider the existence of things like off-model animation, animation errors, or dialog errors and inconsistencies. Southern Cross unfortunately had a fair amount of off-model animation, and that's led those fans to some... interesting... incorrect conclusions about the designs of the series. Inconsistencies in how the Tactics Air Force fighter "Sylphid" is drawn led Robotech fans to conclude there were as many as three different types with different wing designs when there's actually only one, for instance. I'm betting that 3D model was put together using a combination of incorrectly-proportioned fan art and a stills from the animation, some of which are off-model. Considering the weird lengthening of the nose and widening of the body, I suspect it's Yui's fan art they referenced.

Interesting, I honestly wasn't expecting to see them roll out something from that grand tome we call Codex: Australian Wildlife... er... Codex: Tyranids. It looks like they've done a great job with the sculpts as always, though the color scheme from the cover of the Codex is definitely one of the less interesting/appealing ones. 🤔

Seeing a decent-quality arming doublet figure really makes me wish Tatsunoko Pro would go back and revisit the Science Fiction Sengoku Saga pitch they canned back during the development of Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross. There's a fair bit of love for retro designs on the air right now and that could actually go over pretty well. Certainly a lot better than their attempts to get back into the mecha genre.

It is, yeah. Designing a believable transformation for something like a car, a tank, or a plane is pretty damned hard even when you're cheating and using "anime magic". It gets far harder if you have multiple alt-modes to consider and they all have to plausibly look like they belong to the same vehicle. Designing that same transformation in a way that can be applied to a transforming toy or model kit is exponentially harder. Keeping it simple while still getting the job done is a virtue, even if it sounds silly in the abstract... and the Spartas's transformation is simple enough that it CAN be replicated on toys or model kits with a minimum of "cheating". The Ammonite design team did all right job considering they were trying to keep the designs simple enough for merchandising and were not by any means specialists in designing transforming robot toys the way Kawamori is. (There are certainly transformations that could be described in less dignified terms out there... like the Gundam Arios and GN Archer from Gundam 00. Their combined flight form essentially involves the GN Archer jamming its head up the Arios's backside.)

Caught both the KonoSuba movie and the The Irregular at Magic High School OVA over the course of a long and particularly tedious road trip. The KonoSuba movie God's Blessing on this Wonderful World!: Legend of Crimson is about as frustrating to watch as I remember the same story arc was to read in the light novel. It isn't actually padded, but it feels padded because of how much of the story is spent sitting around doing essentially nothing. There's a little bit of humor in how cringeworthy all the residents of the Crimson Demon village are as an entire (designer) race built on the concept of chuunibyou but it wears out its welcome relatively quickly and that leaves a lot of the humor in the hands of jokes about how Yunyun is friendless and Megumin's family is broke. It's beautifully animated, at least, and the anime adaptation skips over a lot of the light novel's worst moments of Kazuma's lack of character development. The Irregular at Magic High School: Reminiscence Arc is a lot less fun. It's basically just an exposition dump about Tatsuya and Miyuki's backstory and a lot of it is stuff that already had been established earlier in the series. It's mostly just an excuse to show off that Tatsuya has always been stupidly OP. Starting The Irregular at Magic High School S3 over lunch. Given how serious the series has been up to this point, the first episode of season three has several very out-of-place moments where the animation style changes to support physical comedy. One female character goes super deformed and sprouts a Warner Bros-style wheel of feet to charge across the classroom and a protracted bit comedy in the middle where multiple characters slide across the screen without walking. It feels especially out-of-place by the end of the episode where the Chinese representative is seen to take orders from some kind of cybernetically puppeteered corpse.

As far as we know, it had not left its position in Macross City from the time it's restoration was completed in 2012 until Sharon Apple hijacked it in 2040. There is no mention of it leaving its position after that event.

HIGHSPEED Etoile is still a very strong contender not only for most skippable series of the Spring 2024 lineup, but of the last year and CY2024 as well. A dumbarse protagonist can work in a shounen adventure series where their only concern in the world is being strong enough to beat up the next bad guy. It's less believable or excusable if the protagonist is in a profession with an extremely high skill floor and they're forced to operate in a professional context. Like Ep1, Ep3 feels like a waste of an entire episode because... There's a limit to how much idiocy you can excuse in a protagonist... and when Rin Rindo not only doesn't know the rules of the sport she's debuting as a professional in but also doesn't know who the people she's competing against even are, it strains believability too much. An Archdemon's Dilemma: How to Love Your Elf Bride was good again this week. They're trying to build some tension in the story, but all it really feels like is the author showing that they at least looked up the list of demons in the Lesser Key of Solomon on Wikipedia. There's some good character moments though. Vampire Dormitory is feeling increasingly like one of my standouts for the season. It's surprisingly good fun with Mito and Ruka having some good banter and some nice moments together. It's very reminiscent of Ouran High School Host Club in some ways, with Mito being very similiar to Ouran's Haruhi. As a Reincarnated Aristocrat, I'll Use My Appraisal Skill to Rise in the World is still pursuing its unconventional approach to the isekai genre, and I'm happy to see it. It's not quite as exciting as the other titles that made names for themselves by subverting the genre's expectations (e.g. Overlord, KonoSuba, Yojo Senki, Re:Zero, and Shield Hero) but it's still very engaging character drama right now and it's undeniably satisfying watching the classist but not unreasonable Lord Raven repeatedly eat crow as his son Ars brings him various incredible talents that he can't bring himself to reject. Chillin' in Another World with Level 2 Super Cheat Powers is not really developing in any new, interesting, or unconventional directions. It's very much a form letter "overpowered protagonist" isekai fantasy, though it's at least a little less lazy about it than many of the other entries in that category like Isekai Cheat Magician. It's watchable, but thus far the series hasn't brought anything to the table we haven't seen other shows do before and do better. It mostly seems to be veering into the obligatory harem part of the mandatory tropes, with the main love interest Rys spending most of the episode chasing away other girls she thinks are trying to capture her "husband's" attention romantically. I Was Reincarnated as the 7th Prince so I can Take My Time Perfecting My Magical Ability is also not developing in any new, interesting, or unconventional directions. It too is more form letter isekai-style power fantasy and unlike Chillin' in Another World it's INCREDIBLY LAZY about the fact. The story has no stakes because nothing in it can do more than to harmlessly amuse the incredibly overpowered protagonist Prince Lloyd. It's just boring. It feels like if you were to cut out all the scenes of people ranting about how amazing or impossible the things Lloyd is doing are, the show would probably be only about a quarter of its total runtime (and a good chunk of that would be the OP, ED, eyecatches, and the omakes). Re:Monster still has yet to do anything to really distinguish itself as an isekai series, with the last several episodes having been devoted almost entirely to a standard isekai binge acquisition of new Skills in the inexplicably game-ified fantasy world. Nothing about it really feels original or interesting, and the only thing it's really doing differently from other titles with essentially the same premise like So I'm a Spider, So What? and That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime is that the protagonist has a harem who seemingly all love him simply because he's not a standard-issue rape-y j-fantasy goblin. Otherwise, it's pretty much pure form letter isekai power fantasy writing so it's incredibly dull with little-to-no sense of direction or purpose to the story. There's some hilariously bad copy-pasted animation in this latest episode though, with all of the summoned skeleton warriors using exactly the same looped animation. The Banished Former Hero Lives as He Pleases could only politely be described as incredibly tedious. It's never moved beyond being one of those isekai-adjacent titles that has an obligatory overpowered protagonist with cheat powers from the gods in a j-fantasy world with unexplained game mechanics. It doesn't even do anything with its one halfway original idea about the Power of the Hero leading to the Hero inevitably being as hated and feared as the dark lord they've been created to destroy. Eminently skippable. Tadaima, Okaeri is one I'm starting this week. It was billed as a more straightforward story about a gay couple raising a child together and dealing with discrimination because of their orientation... and that description turned out to be more than a bit wide of the mark. A more accurate description of the setting reads more like a prompt for an mpreg fetish writer than anything, so I'm not surprised they didn't mention that... It's not lewd in any way, thank goodness, but the bait-and-switch premise makes the story a lot less topical, interesting, or impactful. It honestly feels like kind of a wasted premise and a weak effort to dodge a potentially controversial topic in the laziest way possible that inadvertantly makes the story unnecessarily complicated to no useful end. I'm actually rather disappointed by this one, as there've been a number of shows recently that've tackled similarly thorny topics without resorting to such cheap cop-out moves and done them justice.

And it's exactly the nonevent anyone familiar with the franchise already knew it would be from the outset. Yaaaaay... 🥱 A final pointless chapter in a stakeless side story set in the Nonevent Saga where all the main characters are Saved By Canon because it's an interquel and the villain's just a disposable expy of a popular antagonist from the TV series. Otherwise, it's pretty much the usual form letter writing you see in Robotech comics. We get the obligatory reminder that the story is set between the two sagas the fans actually care about: the Macross Saga and the Sentinels. There's the occasional reminder that the Army of the Southern Cross is canonically useless, some halfhearted fanservice in the form of unnecessary cameos by established characters and incidental fanfic-level stuff like naming ships after dead characters that breaks the flow of the story, a character who isn't canonically infantry goes full Rambo for some reason, a fair amount of horribly stilted banter between enemies, and they take the mandatory cheap shot at Minmei based on how she was flanderized in Sentinels too just to put the cherry on top of this sundae of mediocrity. It's a mess... but it's a mess in all the usual and expected ways that licensed Robotech works are a mess. That horribly dated writing is 100% on-brand for Robotech, though. It's a product of the editorial process of the TV series. They were trying to take three shows that were written with a high school-aged audience in mind and dumb them down for a primary school audience. All that exposition dumping was to make sure the audience could still follow the story. (The same reason other kids shows do the same thing where the villian monologues and explains their entire plan.) That's also not exactly a small part of why projects like Shadow Chronicles got mercilessly dragged by fans and non-fans alike when they put them up on public display. They're still writing like their audience are kids from the 80's and not the older teens and twenty-somethings they were trying to attract in the 2000s or the adults that've made up most of the fanbase since the late 90's. That's just how Robotech has always treated him since Robotech II: the Sentinels. Never mind that Breetai was one of the most senior commanders in the Zentradi forces in the Macross Saga or that he's hands-down the most experienced fleet commander the Earth Forces have by an enormous margin thereafter, he's made into one of Rick and Lisa's loyal sidekicks and assigned to the segregated all-Zentradi unit aboard the SDF-3. He even gets killed off in an undignified manner after leading a dwindling force of Zentradi grunts for decades in Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles. The disrespect is real... but then, in Robotech, Humanity is canonically xenophobic as all get-out. It's certainly a far cry from the respect he got in Macross, where he became commander of the Spacy's flagship after the war and Chief of Staff of the Spacy a few years after that when General Global retired, with his service being commemorated by naming a Macross-class ship after him.

A Condition Called Love is definitely one of the creepier romance stories I've seen. That Hotaru is basically romantically tone deaf is about the only thing keeping Hananoi in the game, because this guy is constantly engaging in stalker-tier behavior. It's actually kind of weird nobody has called him on it and that word hasn't gotten around his school considering how many acrimonious exes he supposedly has. A Salad Bowl of Eccentrics is definitely keeping things fresh and unusual with its changes in perspective from the princess working as a detective to the homeless lady knight. It's a comedy, but it gets weirdly frank about several hard-hitting topics like homelessness, illegal immigration, and now the predatory behavior of cults in Japan.