Jump to content

Seto Kaiba

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    13136

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Everything posted by Seto Kaiba

  1. Seto Kaiba
    Catching up on a few titles after a busy week... Gyakuten Saiban seems to have come over a bit filler-heavy. They're on their second or third filler story this season and they're not even halfway done. Some pretty heavy recycling of plots going on in the filler too... one has to wonder how many seemingly unique and valuable things Harumi can break and glue back together wrong. It still seems to be going strong though, enough to make me wonder if they'll end this season where the games did or we'll get to see Naruhodo get disbarred for introducing forged evidence to set up the plot from Gyakuten Saiban 4. CAPCOM in particular is probably pretty keen to keep the series going to build awareness for the release of Gyakuten Saiban 7 in the not-too-distant future. Kaguya-sama: Love is War (I'm sorry, but the localization title is WAY punchier than the real one) continues to be just plain great. The OP, Love Dramatic, is still an incredible earworm. The whole of episode 3 was comedy gold, though honestly the best is Shirogane's mental breakdown leading to him reading the phone book instead of responding. The over-the-top narrator honestly makes this series. He could be reading a VCR manual and still make it sound like a high-stakes duel to the death. The Price of Smiles feels like it's struggling. The quality level of the animation has taken a visible, significant dive starting in episode 4. Comparable to, or possibly even worse than, the slide in animation quality in Macross Frontier's eighth episode. Even the battles have become kind of boring since it's mostly just theurgears standing still or slowly advancing line abreast and shooting at each other on full auto. There's no real weight to the violence since the theurgears never show damage on their CG models, they just sort of stumble and fall down, which lacks the weight of either exploding or seeing the brutal physical damage the way Iron-Blooded Orphans did it. It really feels like this series doesn't know what it wants to do or be. I could understand if maybe this were a light novel or manga they were adapting and were skipping bits of it, but it really feels like there's a boatload of missing context in this series that's supposed to add meaning to the war which is the focus of the plot. "Cruelty porn" would be the best way I could sum it up. Just two sides doing senselessly horrible sh*t to each other to completely destroy the sheltered and hopelessly naive 12 year old princess who is the main character. Well, just the one side really... the Imperial Army seems to win every fight no matter what. They've got some Gundam SEED-grade plot armor. Two members of Stella's unit survived a point-blank anti-armor mine blast with nothing more than a single sprained ankle to show for it. (Also trees magically gain this plot armor whenever any Imperial Army soldier shelters behind one...)
  2. Seto Kaiba
    It does look like he's been grooming Tenjin Hidetaka to take over for him...
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Honestly, the 4koma about the background girls is just as funny as the main one. It looks like they're doing an official localization of the manga, with six volumes available already.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    ... and the trend continues. Just once, can someone who wants to defend Delta actually pay attention to the story? For starters, Major Valan wasn't the one planning or approving the use of thermonuclear reaction weapons and/or dimensional warheads. That was the New UN Forces and New UN Government. Second, dimensional warheads aren't illegal... just restricted. The military needs government approval to transport and deploy them. Third, Xaos did not win or end the war. They waltzed in arrogantly, got their asses handed to them, and barely scraped a draw at the end thanks to a deus ex machina. In both the TV series and movie, Windermere IV's government takes its ball and goes home only because they can't weaponize the song of the wind anymore due to Heinz's deteriorating health, leaving them at a massive disadvantage vs. the numerically and tactically superior New UN Forces. Xaos spends the entire series and first movie screwing up and practically handing victory to Windermere. Movie 1 clearly states that a NUNS intelligence operative (Wright Immelmann) stole the star singer DNA on Lady M's behalf. Lady M's supposed threat is completely toothless because, as Windermere's own representatives called Walkure out on, she's got a lot to answer for herself like illegal cloning and stealing star singer DNA from Windermere. (It also basically ignores the fact that the NUNG has no real need to negotiate, since Windermere's armed forces are basically declawed thanks to Heinz being out of action.) We can only hope... I don't think I can take third trainwreck with the Macross name on it. Likely 2022, or the 40th anniversary. Your tastes are so specific and so esoteric that I suspect you not giving a damn is the only realistic outcome. That first one is what they're supposedly telling us... though, really, that last one is the most likely but not mutually exclusive with the others.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    But he's said it's an all-new story, not the second half of a story... it'll be something entirely separate from the Macross Delta series. Delta already has a decent amount of info pointing to Xaos being a pretty shady outfit. I mean, the star of their entertainment division is an illegal clone made from "stolen" genetic material that they've weaponized... making her a de facto child soldier. The Ragna branch's staff includes a member of a fascist group that tried to overthrow the New UN Government, a wanted criminal, an illegal immigrant, and a stalker. Lady M has been interfering with the New UN Forces' operations for years with disastrous effects, like delaying an evacuation of a city in close proximity to a planned thermonuclear detonation resulting in injuries, massive property damage, and a fair few deaths. Under her leadership, Xaos did such a bad job defending the Brisingr cluster that they actually made it easier for Windermere to take over by improving the power of the ruins and throwing the control system to an ancient mind control device out on the front lines where it could be easily captured. You'd almost think that Lady M was on Windermere's side, as often as her and Ernest's plans ultimately supported Windermere's goals. Lady M IS the greater threat. Every time she gets involved she makes things WORSE. The whole mind-controlling-the-galaxy thing wouldn't have even been possible if Lady M had heeded the New UN Forces' long experience and left the ancient Protoculture's discarded tech well enough alone. After the last three times, you'd think she'd have taken it as read that the ancient and massive Protoculture system was probably a doomsday device like all the others.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    It's explicitly an all-original story... which means that ain't it.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Have you looked at Gundam recently? They're on their third show that is literally JUST a gunpla commercial.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    During the most recent Crossover Live, IIRC.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    The villain of the story... who knows? Maybe it'll be Lady M, once the New UN Government, New UN Forces, and Brisingr Alliance local governments finally overcome bureaucratic inertia and initiate legal proceedings against her and her company for a laundry list of criminal and questionable activity. The real villains, of course, are the production committee and Kawamori for back-burnering or canceling a new series in favor of inflicting another serving of Delta's weaksauce on us all.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Lately I've been re-reading some old favorites like Kaichou wa Maid-sama! and B Gata H Kei, mixed in with some newer stuff including Kaguya wants to be confessed to and the 4koma spinoff We Want to Talk About Kaguya, The Rising of the Shield Hero, Overlord, and the re-release of Macross the First. I recently finished re-reading Blame! thanks to that lovely new edition that came out over the last year or so. I've been looking for recommendations to broaden my reading list, so I'm glad you made this thread. I hope to glean many useful recommendations from it in the future. I have... though my opinion of it is not high. Like the ONA, the Mobile Suit Gundam Thunderbolt manga is relentlessly dark to the point that it quickly becomes relentlessly dull. It'd probably be a pretty good action series if only it were possible to get invested in the characters. The problem is that the series is so thoroughly committed to gritty grimdark grim darkness that the cast is mostly made up of complete bastards. It's not like Yazan Gable's often-comedic sociopathy, these are just unapologetically sh*tty human beings 24/7/365. TL;DR it's a Gundam manga that really wants to be Attack on Titan written by Buckets-of-Blood guy. The art quality is consistently excellent though. The only thing I can really complain about there is that the Atlas Gundam is one of the most hideous Mobile Suits I've ever laid eyes on and the character art style makes many characters (esp. Claudia) look like they were supposed to be in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure and wandered onto the wrong set. I don't know about you, but seeing a Federation division leader unironically trying to rock a pompadour takes me right out of the story. If you want an oddly lighthearted, charming Gundam manga, I highly recommend Developers: Mobile Suit Gundam before the One Year War. It's about the team at a little engineering subcontractor that developed the first Minovsky reactor-powered prototype for the MS-05 Zaku I.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    It only appeared once, but yeah... the entire cockpit block can be ejected, and it has a modest rocket engine for propulsion. We only ever see it manually deployed on that VF-1D Hikaru borrowed early in the original series. The Sky Angels book depicts it in use in two of the five methods of emergency escape the VF-1 had. The other three use the ejection seat. But the text is useless... it feels like it was drunkenly hammered out over a long weekend spent mixing drinks.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    It's Robotech. The brand as a whole never left 1986. To be fair, the same could be said for Southern Cross's mechanical designs themselves... Tatsunoko Production didn't exactly bring their A-game to the series. Even the show's own promotional materials take the piss out of the Logan on a regular basis.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Only a few VFs have ever been depicted with that capability... For the VF-1, the only resource I know of that talks about it in any level of detail is the old and lamentably hard to come by Sky Angels doujinshi. You may be in luck, though, since there's a Variable Fighter Master File volume devoted to the VF-11 Thunderbolt allegedly coming out in late February (being SoftBank, expect mid-March if not later). The VF-11 was far and away the most prominent user of that escape capsule concept thanks to reused animation in Macross 7. I'm not aware of any resource that talks about the Fz-109's escape pod in any detail.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, I found that out the hard way a couple days ago on the shipping score... Pretty much cleaned them out of their remaining stock of old Master File volumes for my translation project.... the box was heavy enough that FedEx sent two guys to deliver it.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    On a lark, I read the first fifty or so chapters of the manga. That show isn't likely to reach the part in the story where it actually becomes interesting in one season. (It seriously took about 43 chapters to get past the story being more or less entirely about leveling up.)
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Doomcock looks suspiciously like those "automated personnel units" from Star Trek: Voyager.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Bummer. I would've liked an Auroran kit... but I can certainly understand not wanting to risk provoking a lawsuit-happy outfit like Harmony Gold.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Kaguya-sama: Love and War's second episode is solid gold... it's on track to be my favorite for this season. The overdramatic narration adds a certain je ne sais quoi that enhances the absurdity of the entire affair and makes it twice as funny. My latest slowpoke item is Lupin III Part V. I'm not sure what I think of a Lupin III that seems to have gone half Ghost in the Shell with Lupin having a monocle computer that can hack security systems.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Reading the dialog once was one time too many...
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Nope. His last mentioned assignment was the "outer space special science force" in 2039 October. The specific model Isamu wore is said to be the standard model used by the (New) UN Forces c.2040. IIRC there's something in Master File about earlier marks of that suit being white instead of blue, but that's not official setting material. It's marked up in the line art as a sensor system in the line art, so it's probably supposed to be a polarized cover like the ones on the YF-19, YF-21, etc. As to what kind, probably the VF-11's FLIR cameras, LIDAR array, and optical sensors like the similar hybrid sensor clusters on the aforementioned VFs and their successors. The VF-11 Master File, if it's written properly, may clear that up somewhat. The animation generally represents it as an opaque panel though.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    I've just finished the latest episode of The Price of Smiles. The Price of Smiles is clearly aiming for both Macross's "both sides are good people" and Universal Century Gundam-style dark and depressing... and so far, they've got the Gundam side down pat. A little too well, I think. It's going to be really difficult to see any of the Empire of Grandiga's soldiers as sympathetic after this though. Stella, who the OP makes out to be the new main character in the wake of Joshua's death, crosses a few lines that you generally don't get to come back from in a show like this. So... the Imperial Army murders a bunch of dudes and our new leading lady has enough psychological problems to make Sousuke Sagara look like a model of mental health. We're clearly meant to think of these enemy soldiers as sympathetic, but it's kinda hard to when they have very little problem with blowing up a town (implied to kill a bunch of civilians on top of the soldiers they murder to plant the bombs). If I wasn't cheering for the Kingdom of Soliel before, I sure as hell am now. They at least seem to fight with something resembling morals.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    The Texas Instruments/Raytheon AGM-88 HARM was originally designed with a passive radar homing system with home-on-jam capability to defeat noise jamming. The later AGM-88E AARGM upgrade added GPS and inertial guidance systems as well as an EHF active radar homing system for terminal guidance in the event that the target moves or attempts to shut its radar down before the missile reaches it. Quite frankly, I'm on the side of "looks good" over 100% accuracy. For the classic TV VF-1J, the red accents on the missiles will really pop against the white airframe.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    At time of writing, they have 2 years and 55 days before the term of Harmony Gold USA's license ends and the rights revert back to Tatsunoko Production's control. If it were a simple case of money owed, it would be one thing... but you're missing a LOT of important context that completely turns your premise upside-down. That sum that Tatsunoko "owes" is an arbitration order to pay Harmony Gold's court costs and attorney fees. Tatsunoko is refusing to pay that sum, in order to lure Harmony Gold back to court to overturn the arbitration's findings. Why? Because Tatsunoko hasn't abandoned its contention that Harmony Gold is skimming off the top of royalties owed to them for home video sales, streaming of the animation, and merchandising. They want to overturn that arbitration's findings and secure a judgement against HG for money they contend HG owes them. They aren't exactly on good terms. Then, of course, there was that sidebar argument in the arbitration where Harmony Gold claimed that its use (with permission) of Tatsunoko's IP made it owner of that IP and that they could continue using it after the license expired. Tatsunoko had to deliver a pointed reminder that 1. copyright law doesn't work that way, 2. they don't appreciate Harmony Gold falsely claiming ownership of their property, and 3. Harmony Gold's rights expire 14 March 2021. Mind you, Tatsunoko Production itself is "under new management". When Nippon TV bought a majority stake in them back in '14, they made it clear they want to maintain tighter control over Tatsunoko's catalog. Tatsunoko has also been on much better terms with Big West, and would throw Harmony Gold to the wolves in a heartbeat in exchange for a cut of the Macross sequel profits (a cut they so aredently desire that they went to court twice unsuccessfully trying to get a piece last decade). So, yeah... Tatsunoko owes Harmony Gold some money (for now). But, by the same token, Tatsunoko sincerely believes that HG has been (and still is) systematically stealing royalties owed to them for the Robotech license. They've seen Harmony Gold make false claims of ownership of Tatsunoko's property as part of a legal proceeding. Their new management wants to keep licensees on a short leash and is courting Big West. They took pains to draw a line under the fact that Harmony Gold's license expires 14th March 2021 and that all rights revert back to them at that point. Where renewal of the Robotech is concerned, as a magic 8-ball might say... "Outlook not so good". HG generally doesn't even acknowledge the anniversaries of the source material behind Robotech, let alone celebrate them.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    That would probably be prohibitively small... at 1/100 scale it'd be about 2 1/3 inches tall in Battle Sniper mode (61mm if we're scaling from Imai's 1/32 scale plans). About 1.5x as tall as a Lego minifigure or 2/3 the height of a typical GI Joe. (A bit less than half as tall as a HiMetal R destroid.)
  25. Seto Kaiba
    "You idiots! These aren't them! You've drawn their stunt doubles!" I swear, the ideas we come up with poking fun at the comic sound way more fun and interesting than the comic we're actually getting.
×
×
  • Create New...