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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    While I was idly poking at Variable Fighter Master File, I spotted one interesting bit of apparent foreshadowing. The VF-25 Master File was released in 2011, but there's a part of it that seems to foreshadow the New UN Forces big scandal from 2016's Macross Delta. The book has a brief part that talks about the MDE weapons that were developed to fight the Vajra in 2059. Towards the end of that section, there is a brief aside about the legal status of dimension bombs and how their use in internal conflicts between New UN Government member states is expressly prohibited by interstellar law. These weapons are so taboo that the few units that possess one are not allowed to publicly disclose that they have them. I just found that interesting, since that's a detail that originated in Master File but seemly became a major plot point in the next Macross series made after the book was written. It puts an interesting wrinkle on the events of Macross Delta that the Brisingr Alliance New UN Forces, since a major part of the backstory there was that the Brisingr Alliance NUNS used a dimensional weapon in a botched attempt to destroy the Sigur Berrentzs. If just using a dimension eater in an internal conflict like the 2060 Windermere War constituted a war crime, the New UN Spacy must've known a lot more about the capabilities of the Sigur Berrentzs than they were letting on and were willing to face war crime charges in their attempt to protect the galaxy from the Delta Wave System. It also explains why they were able to so effectively isolate Windermere IV after the conflict. If they were able to make the charge that Windermere used the bomb stick, they'd be ostracized for using a heinous banned weapon of mass destruction even though the only victims of it were their own people. (Of course, it begs the question of whether the NUNS's second attempt to use dimensional warheads against Windermere IV was also illegal... they had seceded from the New UN Gov't seven years prior, so as a hostile external force was that prohibition still in place?)
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Malls are still a thing? I thought most of those kind of shriveled up and died years ago during the lockdowns.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Indirectly, yeah... to that brief licensing free-for-all that allowed Clash of the Bionoids to come into existence.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Well, Metallic Rouge has limped into the final stretch... and ohboy is it a trainwreck of poorly exposited "reveals" and hot nonsense. It looks like there's one more episode of this mess to sit through, but the writing is so messy that it feels like all the exposition they forgot to do in the first 2/3 of the show is being thrown in all at once and the result is even worse than when there wasn't any. The end result is a story where things just happen without any real buildup or payoff. It feels more like an anecdote related by run-on sentence than a narrative. The Witch and the Beast is headed into the final arc of the season, which seems like a bit of a comedown now that Ashaf and Guideau have found the witch who cursed Guideau to... something. Really that hasn't been explained properly. It looks like it might imminently be, though, as this arc starts with a pretty significant flashback to when Ashaf and Guideau first met.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, there's something similar going on with Joytoy's new Horus Lupercal sculpt. Joytoy's Horus Lupercal isn't based on the main Horus Lupercal miniature from the tabletop game. It's based on the "Horus Ascended" design from the 2022 cinematic trailer, a slightly modified version of the more overtly evil-looking Horus Lupercal design that's been used by the novel series since 2011 but wasn't represented in the tabletop game until just last year when Horus got a second miniature to represent him as the Chosen of Chaos Undivided during the Siege of Terra based on the trailer design. It's a great update to the design, so I'm glad they went with it over the actual Horus Lupercal miniature. It definitely makes me curious to see what they'll do with the Emperor's fabulous ****ing Hawk-Boy Sanguinius and Magnus the Red.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    There's a lot of cross-pollination there between the miniatures and the art that's been done for the game books and novels, which is why I was curious. Thus far, they seem to be putting quite a lot of love and attention to detail into all of the figures they're making. It's really nice to see them putting so much effort into delivering a faithful representation of the designs the Heresy artists came up with.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Well, yeah. If Harmony Gold were rational about their Robotech franchise, they would probably have come to very similar conclusions about their Robotech brand's prospects and the inherent advantages of working with Big West and their Macross franchise instead of against them. But Harmony Gold doesn't behave rationally where Robotech is concerned. For some insane reason, Harmony Gold is incredibly reluctant to just let Robotech go and focus on more profitable matters even though it's been over fifteen years since their senior leadership decided the franchise was a commercial failure and cut off funding for new development. It makes no rational sense, but for some reason they are stubbornly committed to maintaining Robotech even though they know it's a losing proposition... no matter that it means losing out on royalties and merchandise sales from distributing the original series with the rest of Macross.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Harmony Gold, for one. So much so that they made a request to Big West in the contract negotiations that Big West refrain from using OG Macross characters in new works. Including games like the recent Macross Shooting Insight game. They're afraid that if those character and mecha designs become intrinsically associated with Macross instead of Robotech, it will erode their franchise's distinctiveness. Which, when you think about it, is actually a pretty reasonable fear on their part as their attempts to keep the franchise alive are pretty much entirely Macross-centric and focused on endlessly rehashing the Macross Saga. It's possible that there's some new approvals process because Big West is now involved in the management of both franchises. Or maybe they agreed not to do DYRL? merch at some point in the negotiations.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah their attention to detail is definitely excellent on that front. It'll be worth seeing what they come up with for Magnus and a few of the others that are known to have some weird options and unusual equipment. Yeah, that's pretty much expected. Games Workshop doesn't often let licensees come up with original takes on their lore. Relic were, I think, one of the very few to actually be given permission to do that... and from that we got the bloody magpies. Though have they clarified if they're only referencing the miniatures or are they also using the official art from the rule books and the novels?
  10. Seto Kaiba
    The thing about that, is that Magnus having at least three different canonical appearances is from the Horus Heresy before he became a daemon primarch. Both the tabletop game and the novels describe Magnus having an inconstant physical appearance because of his incredible psychic power. It's a bit of an in joke on the part of the writers referencing his inconsistent depiction in old material. So they wrote him as one of those beings like the emperor who has a subjective physical appearance. Different people see different things when they look at him even if they're all looking at the same time. He also has a degree of conscious and unconscious control of his appearance so sometimes even the same person will see different things moment to moment as his mood changes. The one thing he can't change following his bargain with Tzeentch pre-Heresy is that he's only got one eye and cycles through all the different descriptions of his face from older media: having one huge eye in the center of his head like a classic Cyclops, having once had two eyes with one covered by a scar, or having one normal eye and then just smooth skin over where the other should have been like an eye had never been there. It only got worse once he became a daemon primarch. (It's also why in TTS when the emperor jokes about Magnus being shorter than his brothers, he counters by saying that that's entirely his choice... he uses his powers to make himself taller or shorter at will a bunch of times in the novels.) In honor of that in joke, they gave his newer miniatures multiple heads reflecting all three major variations. I'm wondering if they'll reflect that same decision in the Joytoy figure.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    I wonder if it has something to do with one of their other licensees garnering a rare double cease-and-desist from Harmony Gold and Big West for making Macross bootlegs. Either that or perhaps the provisions of the agreement related to preventing "brand confusion" go both ways and HG has to get approvals from Big West to do DYRL? merch the same way Big West apparently has some kind of editorial control over future Robotech development since the agreement. Odds are we'll have to wait until someone puts their foot in it and the courts have to sort it out before we get a definitive answer. I'd assume Big West will probably continue to do the same JDM end-run they've been doing for their more recent releases and just put official English subs on domestic releases for western fans who really want to see it.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    To date, there has been no evidence or statement from any party suggesting the disposition of the DYRL? merchandising rights has changed. Last we heard from HG, they had cut a renewal of the license from Tatsunoko a year or two before entering into negotiations with Big West.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Magnus the Red will be where we see exactly how committed Joytoy is to the bit. If they're really committed to their craft, he'll come with three exchangeable heads: one with a single central eye like a classical cyclops and two normal faces that have either a big scar over a missing eye or no scar but only one eye. All three are treated as equally valid appearances for him in the books and the tabletop game, thanks to YMMV psyker nonsense. If they're really really committed to the bit... Ferrus Manus will have a detachable head. I can tell TTS has ruined me, because Dorn just doesn't feel right without the mutton chops now.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    I agree completely. Other franchises have already tested that paradigm to (self-)destruction and found it's a terrible ****ing idea. To everyone who isn't in the know, it's just a plot hole. Like Star Trek, when they put all the backstory for their 2009 soft reboot film into a limited comic that even Star Trek fans didn't read and then spent years regretting it and walking that sh*t back.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    My 20+ title Winter 2024 season is almost done... I'm down to just five titles now: Mashle, Metallic Rouge, The Witch and the Beast, Bang Brave Bang Bravern, and Dungeon Meals. I gotta say, Winter 2024 has been a pretty unremarkable season. Of the 22 titles I ended up sampling, I'd call almost all of the shows I followed mediocre-to-poor fare. A bunch of them (e.g. The Strongest Tank's Labyrinth Raids, Banished from the Hero's Party, The Wrong Way to Use Healing Magic, etc.) just feel painfully underdeveloped, with a tediously unoriginal concept spread too thin across the most generic kind of light, often isekai, fantasy story. The other frequently recurring problem was that quite a few (e.g. Villain-san's Day Off, 'Tis Time for Torture, The Foolish Angel Dances with the Devil) had such narrow premises that they were either locked into a single joke for the entire story or had to virtually abandon their premise after just a few episodes because they couldn't find any way to work it into what the characters were doing. Netflix's Dungeon Meals definitely stands head and shoulders above all the other titles I watched this season for sheer enjoyment. It's been a while since a series grabbed me the way Dungeon Meals did and had me actually impatient for a new episode the entire way through. The worst of the bad lot was definitely Metallic Rouge. Beautifully animated by Studio Bones, but with the worst writing I've seen since Tatsunoko's The Price of Smiles. The art is amazing, and the plot is a nonsensical trashfire. The one bit of good news I saw on the horizon is the Overlord movie's coming out this fall. I'm very interested to see if they'll tone the light novel's story down at all for the film, as it's home to some of the light novel's most controversial moments.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    More than having no defined start or end, what I'm getting at is that the timeline itself is almost entirely arbitrary. As a franchise, The Legend of Zelda doesn't really do continuity between games on any appreciable scale. There are a few games that are sequels in principle, but in practice only two or three actually reference the events of the previous game and no one Hero explicitly appears more than twice. All that can really be said is: Other than that, it could be happening in literally any order and it wouldn't make a bit of difference... and with the exception of the first one and the last one on that list, it's more a polite suggestion than a hard rule. The film doesn't need to pay any heed to the game's supposed timeline because the games generally don't either... in part because most of them were made before the timeline was. They can have a free hand and do whatever the hell they want to bring us an engaging moviegoing experience without being beholden to some Holy Writ of Canon. The Legend of Zelda is like Bioshock Infinite, except instead of "there's always a man, a lighthouse, and a city" it's a hero, a distressed Princess who's usually named Zelda, the same old eldrich horror pig demon man.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    You'd think they could've just tacked an extra zero on there and avoided the perceived continuity problem entirely, but here we are. 🤔 The most practical explanation I can think of for why they're staying close but not too close to the Skywalker Saga is to save money and minimize risk by reusing existing virtual assets, physical sets, costumes, makeup, and props from other productions.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    As noted previously, a good deal of the discontent from the die-hard Star Wars fans on social media seems to center around the perceived Sith-Jedi continuity snarl between the dialog in The Phantom Menace and the setting of The Acolyte. Looking in from the outside as a casual Star Wars enjoyer, the long-time fans seem to react especially poorly to anything that changes the previously established timeline or how the setting works. Andor is brilliant. You should definitely watch it, even if the first two and a half episodes are a bit of a slog. That's an easy one... it's all about managing and minimizing risk. Disney's been playing it safe with Star Wars ever since 2017-2018. The one-two punch of the substantially negative fan reaction to The Last Jedi in 2017 and the failure of Solo: a Star Wars Story at the box office in 2018 put them on the defensive in a big way. The ensuing panicked "recalibration" saw them axe their planned lineup of __________: a Star Wars Story films and have the final film of the sequel trilogy micromanaged and written by committee to ensure that it would be made as inoffensive to fans as possible. It's also why televised works have largely been Filoni mining the rich seams of pre-Disney nostalgia with de facto spinoffs of pre-Disney shows and new stories operating in close proximity to the original trilogy like The Mandalorian, Obi-Wan, Andor, etc. The farther afield they go, the less the writers are able to use nostalgia as a crutch in their writing and the more they have to change the visual design of the story. The Acolyte being 100 years ahead of The Phantom Menace seems to be their idea of a happy medium for now... far enough away that the events of the Skywalker Saga aren't yet relevant to the story, but close enough that they don't have to tweak the visual aesthetic any. Killing a few Yuenglings might dull the pain of Obi-Wan a little...
  19. Seto Kaiba
    The Philips CD-i games never happened. It was a mass hallucination. A bad future prevented by the Hero of Time. Moonlight reflecting off of a misidentified aircraft through swamp gas on a horrible night to have a curse. Something like that. 😛 In all seriousness, I prefer Link as a silent protagonist in the games for pretty much the reasons you said. He's usually a deadpan stoic in cutscenes (unless you count the Wind Waker game and the similarly styled spinoffs like Spirit Tracks) and his status as a heroic mute meant that you could project whatever personality reflected your gameplay style onto him. Giving Link an actual personality of his own is going to be really contentious no matter what direction they go because of all the ****ing memes and fan comics and so on about Link as an emotionally vacant stoic, a heroic sociopath, a gremlin-esque kleptomaniac, a snarky action hero, leeroy jenkins moron, a closeted femboy... and so on. I'm sure they'll go with something comparatively safe, but the paths not taken will be talked about for years. ... y'know what, **** it, let's give a whole new generation an anxiety disorder and adapt Majora's Mask. Does it even need to be on the timeline? I mean, the Legend of Zelda timeline's pretty much entirely for show and has no bearing on any of the stories that make it up.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, like I said, it's meant to be a knee-jerk reaction to the content immediately in front of you... not a vote of confidence on the potential of what the video in front of you might be trying to sell. That's a bit wide of the mark, in point of fact. "Review bombing" was a term coined by game and tech journalists back in the late 2000s to describe coordinated campaigns of gamers mass-posting negative reviews of games to punish the developers and/or publishers for misdeeds like false and egregiously misleading advertising or using particularly restrictive or detrimental DRM. 2008's Spore gets cited as the origin of the term quite a bit. The term was later appropriated to describe similar punitive campaigns of mass negative review posting in other contexts regardless of justification. Film studios and TV networks do sometimes try to blame large numbers of early negative reviews on review bombing... but it doesn't take long for the truth to come out one way or the other, and you can pretty reliably predict which way it'll go based on how hard they're reaching for plaudits in their self-published promotional material. What it is in this case, we can only guess... it could be fans downvoting it based on past performance, or it could be people really just don't thrill to the concept. Time will tell. Well, yes and no... If you start your own, the setup costs can get quite expensive... but if all you're interested in is the results you can hire one of the many private firms that provide bot-driven social media "engagement" for pocket change. There are dozens of services that'll happily sell you likes, follows, retweets, and what have you for as little as a penny per interaction if you're willing to buy in bulk. A quick Google search'll turn up pages of services willing to sell you likes by the thousands for the cost of a burger at McDonalds. Studios don't typically do it because it's really bloody obvious when you see it happening, and most social media platforms have rules against buying engagement now. It's easier and less conspicuous to simply buy up the entertainment news websites that're publishing reviews and source their artifiical positive press more organically.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    From what I can see about it on social media, it does seem that there is a significant portion of the Star Wars fanbase who are not enamored of the premise for The Acolyte. The sticking point for many of them appears to be the apparent continuity problem mentioned earlier in this thread WRT the Jedi explicitly stating they haven't seen hide nor hair of a Sith in 1,000 years with this series set just 100 years before that statement. It's certainly possible it's review bombing, but given the size and devotion of the Star Wars fanbase it's at least equally likely that it's an honest-to-goodness audience reaction to the teaser trailer specifically. The Like/Dislike button does specifically court that kind of snap judgement.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    The Legend of Zelda's got a broad strokes universal adaptor plot that can be neatly slotted into a bunch of different aesthetics without issue. The creative team working on it ought to have a pretty free hand in coming up with their own aesthetic and approach to the story. 😁 The only issue is that Link will almost certainly actually have dialogue... which will be every bit as weird as hearing a Mario that doesn't have Charles Martinet's over-the-top Italian accent. Not a dealbreaker, just a weird thought as someone who's used to Link as an unspeaking protagonist.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, unexpected platform aside it's nice to know that Macross shows are going to be widely available in the near future. Streaming releases should presumably be followed shortly by home video releases... it's shaping up to be a pretty good year to be a Macross fan.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    He's a TV/movie review YouTuber whose schtick is dressing up as a parody of Dr. Doom, and it generally isn't. As reviewers go, he usually falls into the "toxic fanboy" category. I'm actually kind of surprised to hear he's still around. I don't think I've ever seen him talk anime, though... I've only ever seen him ranting about western SF like Star Trek or Star Wars.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    So it's not a Star Wars story? A flogging in the court of public opinion, apparently! 26% positive, 74% negative +/- 1%... that's one hell of a marketing SNAFU.
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