Seto Kaiba

TBH, a lot of the Reddit post in question feels like wishful thinking rather than anything grounded in fact. #3 in particular feels a bit... overdramatic? Harmony Gold's mismanagement of its own Robotech franchise had little real bearing on Macross until around 2001 when they filed for the trademarks they used to block Macross licensing in the west from 2001-2021. Big West had basically a free hand to distribute Macross sequels outside Japan until that point, but the hairshirt budget and razor thin margins of most western anime distributors at the time meant that certain titles (Macross 7) were too expensive to obtain because of how much the music rights cost for such a heavily music-driven series. Harmony Gold was only really able to interfere with Macross Zero, Macross Frontier, and Macross Delta... but it didn't exactly stop audiences from watching them (fansubs) or buying merchandise direct from Japan. It did lead to Japanese home video releases having official English subs, though, starting from some of the Frontier re-releases. The idea that Macross outpaced Gundam is a bit silly in general terms. Gundam is the 800lb gorilla of the mecha genre and there are few properties out there that could match its brutal assembly line pacing in putting out new series, movies, and OVAs. Lately, they're churning out multiple titles a year. In comparison to Gundam's mass production of media, the Macross franchise is something more... artisinal? It's the product of one weirdo and his mates who put out a new title maybe every five years or so. That new title might just perform well enough to eclipse Gundam in the short term, but only in the short term. It's the difference between a sprinter and a distance runner. (It probably also helps a bit the occasional Macross series is usually a break from the formulaic tedium that Gundam has imposed on the genre as a whole.) WRT Bandai and Takatoku in #5... that's not even accurate. Bandai didn't acquire Takatoku Toys. Due to a combination of circumstances including the loss of licenses from Toei and having sponsored several TV anime properties that didn't do well, Takatoku Toys declared bankrupty in 1984. The company was dissolved during its bankruptcy proceedings and its remaining assets were divided up among its creditors. Their Macross license was profitable, but it wasn't enough to stem the bleeding from the loss of Toei's licenses and the underperformance or outright failure of its Sasuraiger, Dorvack, Orguss, and Galvion lines. At least one of the fabs they outsourced work to did end up being acquired by Bandai after it ended up in rough shape following the loss of Takatoku's contracts, but that's borderline unrelated.

... but those are two ways of saying the exact same thing, though. You just said "No, except yes". For a story to work, it has to have events proceeding towards a conclusion. A sense of direction. It may be a figurative, rather than literal, destination but the story has to be going somewhere in order to progress in any way. The Mandalorian's third season ties off almost every plot thread in Din's story. He's been redeemed in the eyes of his people, he's brought the Mandalorians together and back to Mandalore, he's defeated his people's nemesis for the last time. What's left for him to do that isn't just starting over?

Bartender: Glass of God is developing more or less in the direction I expected it to. It's one of those character dramas where the protagonist is less a character and more a walking plot device that, by some minor act, causes the episode's focus character(s) to have a complex emotional realization or breakthrough. In this case, all he really does is wait for an extremely vague drink order from troubled customer du jour and then serves up a hyperspecific cocktail tailored to their exact situation and then explaining its symbolic link to the situation. I'd hoped for more from this one, but eh...

Do they even dub songs anymore? I don't really do dubs anymore, but last I recall the practice of re-recording or outright replacing songs was largely abandoned by the mid-1990s because it was expensive and the distributors increasingly felt it was unnecessary for most audiences. The only distributor I recall doing it past that point was 4Kids.

Macross Chronicle Episode sheet for Macross 7 Ep18 "Falling Little Devil" offers the viewpoint that Gamlin took Milia's VF-1J into combat for two main reasons: To protect Mylene, who had led him to the hangar where it was stored because she was intending to do literally that same thing herself and he wasn't about to let her put herself in danger. To soothe his own battered ego, as he was feeling thoroughly depressed and useless after he and Cpt. Kinryu were shot down in the previous episode and his wingman and friend Physica was shot down and killed in the episode before that. It is fun that said Episode sheet has a section devoted to calling Gamlin unlucky and noting that going out to fight in a Valkyrie without a pilot suit was a stupidly risky move and that he could easily have died.

That is likely the case, yeah. Official publications for Macross Delta spare almost no thought for the VF-171s used by the Brisingr Alliance New UN Forces. The CG model used in the animation is the same one used for the basic (Block II) VF-171 Nightmare Plus that was the New UN Spacy's standard fighter in Macross Frontier, with the only changes being a new texture applied to the model that replaces the original blue colors with khaki and some minor changes to the exterior markings. Bandai's Mecha Colle model kit for the Macross Delta VF-171 identifies it as "general aircraft, frontier space specification" in Japanese and "standard model - rim world model" in English. The Macross Delta VF-171s are definitely not the EX model or a derivative of same as they lack the signature bubble canopy, downward-tilted nose, and EX-Gear of that special model. Based on the reuse of the CG model and its description as a "frontier space specification" of the standard model, it can be reasonably concluded that they're a locally-produced version of the same standard Block II VF-171 that was the main VF of the New UN Forces at the end of the 2050s in Macross Frontier.

Honestly, it's incredibly weird that the VF-1 is still being used as a training aircraft in the Macross Delta series. By 2067, the VF-1 is a 59-year-old platform and it's three to four generations behind the current model VFs that the military and PMCs are using. That should make it effectively useless as a training aircraft for combat pilots because its performance and technology are so far behind what the aircraft they would be flying in combat have. Xaos may have been using them for Hayate's training specifically because he was an unqualified pilot with minimal experience and crashing one of those is a heck of a lot cheaper than if he crashed a VF-31. It's probably not standard practice to use those for training. In 2059, the VF-1 is used as a training aircraft... but only in civilian flight schools like the Macross Frontier fleet's Mihoshi Academy where students are getting their basic pilot's licenses. SMS trains pilots directly on the aircraft they're going to be flying, and the New UN Spacy probably does the same assuming there are training versions of the VF-171. When we see Gamlin training in Macross 7 PLUS, The aircraft he's shown training on is a VF-11C Super Thunderbolt... the aircraft that was the standard military fighter used in the 37th fleet. Then once he joined the special forces, he moved to a VF-17D Nightmare. Odds are he never touched a VF-1 prior to borrowing Milia's.

I'd say The Mandalorian season three already did a pretty decent job of laying the groundwork there. They already had two or three episodes in there devoted to showing just how incredibly dysfunctional and doomed the New Republic already was just a few years after Return of the Jedi. They don't need to hammer that one home any further. It feels to me like they were already reaching pretty hard bringing Gideon back for a third go.

I know I'm terribly late to the party as I'm just finishing up season three... but really, what's left to tell story-wise for the movie?

True... though, if anything, that's a Reality Ensues moment. Gamlin was trained on the VF-11C Thunderbolt and VF-17D/S Nightmare. Both of those VFs are at least two generations newer than the VF-1 Valkyrie and have considerably higher performance. He hopped into a VF he'd never trained on, and discovered it had about 1/5th of the performance he was used to. Like someone whose daily driver is a Dodge Charger SRT Hellcat who finds himself driving a Toyota Prius while on holiday. You KNOW she's never gonna let that go. If Gamlin and Mylene ended up married, you KNOW she'd blackmail Gamlin with that every chance she gets.

The Banished Former Hero is, I think, the first title in my Spring 2024 simulcast lineup of 18 shows and counting that I'm ready to say isn't worth watching. It is, as I feared, pretty much a form letter "the overpowered protagonist is overly overpowered" type series that really doesn't seem interested in doing anything to develop its cast of characters or trying to take the formula in any new or different directions. A good 1/3 or so of the last episode is watching someone watch a blacksmith repeat the same dozen or so frames of animation as they beat on a sword on an anvil. They couldn't even be bothered to animate the sword being worked on, so said character is beating on what looks to be a completely finished sword that's only hot in one small spot. I started I Was Reincarnated as the 7th Prince so I Can Take My Time Perfecting My Magical Ability and... well... it's basically more of same. Apart from the first 90 seconds or so where the protagonist is revealed to be a commoner who was executed for some nonspecific crime, it's basically been a one-joke series where everyone overreacts to how overpowered the reincarnated-as-a-kid protagonist is. I'll stick with it a bit to see if it develops at all, but right now it's one note. Re:Monster found a way to make its previous dalliance with the... ... worse. The latest episode has a mass suicide in it for seemingly no reason other than so the protagonist can show that he's less evil than the adult hobgoblins by refusing to allow them to abuse a new batch of captives they brought home. Other than that, this episode is basically just more of him hunting monsters and eating them to gain new RPG skills. It's definitely not what I'd call a riveting viewing experience. It's about as entertaining as watching actual riveting, to be honest. I'm starting Vampire Dormitory, which recently joined the simulcast schedule. This one is also unhelpfully starting with an attempted suicide, albeit a mercifully unsuccessful attempt that doesn't result in any physical harm because... Gotta hand it to 'em, they are not messing about when it comes to getting right to the premise. They promised vampires and dormitories, and they've already delivered vampires within the first 90 seconds. I just hope the dormitory doesn't arrive by similar means, or someone's going to find out how the Witch Witch of the East felt after Dorothy's house fell on her. I think the premise might need a bit more thought, as it basically amounts to: I know that's probably not what the author was thinking, but that's what it basically boils down to... and that realization makes the whole bit that follows intensely weird and slightly off-putting. I'm also starting As a Reincarnated Aristocrat, I'll Use My Appraisal Skill to Rise in the World. The title doesn't really leave much to the imagination, about the genre or the premise... but let's cross our fingers and hope for the best. It's a genuine isekai this time. The protagonist is an unremarkable salaryman who died of a heart attack in his apartment's doorway only to discover he'd been reborn in a fantasy world. The premise is pretty much exactly the entire synopsis... with the first episode being just an introduction to his standard JRPG appraisal skill and him using it to help a boy from outside the country land a job as a soldier after detecting his incredible skills. It's actually not bad. Especially once it unexpectedly decided to tackle the subject of racial discrimination.

We have a bit more than that... we have things like normal operating mass, main engine thrust, number of verniers, and some statements about generator output. But yeah, there's not a ton of fodder for like-for-like comparison.

Macross II: Lovers Again isn't non-canonical, it (and at least its two prequels) are an official "parallel world" (alternate universe) timeline since 1994. That said, the technological development of the Macross II "parallel world" timeline is rather different to what was later defined in Macross Plus and later titles. The pace of new model development is more consistent across the whole timeline, and therefore slower than the early portions of the ongoing Macross timeline. There's also more emphasis on Humanity reverse-engineering and applying lessons learned from the study of Zentran and Meltran overtechnology. The Valkyrie II series VFs - the VF-XX, VF-2, VF-2SS, and VF-2JA - were developed in the Macross II timeline's late 2050s and 2060s based on new overtechnology captured from an unnamed Zentradi Main Fleet that attacked the emigrant ship Million Star and then the Sol system in 2054. All of the Valkyrie II series VFs apply lessons learned from the study of Zentradi battle suits. The refinements adopted into the next-gen VFs included substantial improvements to armor and structural materials, to actuators, and to the thermonuclear reactors and generators that provide thrust and power. These improvements were first tested on the VF-XX Zentradi Valkyrie in 2060. They were then adopted by the VF-2 series that entered production in 2072 and further improvements were made for the VF-2SS in 2082 and the VF-2JA in 2086. The main metric most fans look at for comparing VFs is usually engine power or thrust-to-weight ratio. In those terms, the VF-2SS and VF-2JA are about comparable to the main (ongoing) Macross timeline's 3rd Generation VFs like the VF-11. The VF-2SS is said to have approximately 3x the engine power and generator output of the VF-1, which given the operational mass puts their thrust-to-weight ratio between 6.43 and 8.67, or a bit more than the VF-11 to a bit less than the VF-17D respectively. Mind you, thrust-to-weight ratios approaching 10 are more or less the limit to what a Human pilot can actually take unassisted. Gamlin was shown to struggle a bit to draw out the full potential of his VF-17D/S, which is 9 or 10 depending on model, and the 4th Gen VF-19 and VF-22 are noted to have had very few eligible pilots because they were beyond even 10. The 5th Gen VFs are over 30, which gives them incredible acceleration and maneuverability performance that they can only achieve because they have a means to cheat those excessive g-forces away using inertia capacitors. The two areas where the Macross II VFs are seemingly more advanced than their main timeline counterparts are in the adoption of AI wingmen and railguns. From a late 2030's update to the VF-4, Macross II VFs were using funnels and bits (yes, like Gundam, but computer controlled) as autonomous wingmen to protect and improve the firepower of VFs. The VF-2SS notably deploys with five bit wingmen that provide fire support and defense. They also make extensive use of railguns for gunpods and larger cannons. In the main timeline, railguns are still a relatively new feature for VFs as of the 5th Gen and the ones we've seen aren't true railguns so much as railgun-assisted conventional cannons which employ both a chemical propellant and a linear accelerator.

Since I don't watch dubs, it didn't occur to me until I saw Big s's post... Zethus is probably referring to the way Netflix picked up the Neon Genesis Evangelion license years after it was abandoned following the collapse od ADV Films, and/or the new translation and dub they produced for it that fan consensus seems to hold is vastly inferior to the one done under ADV Films. So I guess the answer in the first part would be yes... it's similar to how Netflix picked up the Evangelion license. In the second part, not so much. It's already been confirmed that Macross II, at the very least, is going to be released with its original English dub in addition to subtitled Japanese, and presumably that'll be what Disney+ uses as well. It wouldn't make sense to do a clean translation of the OVA for the home video release and have the streaming service do a different clean translation at the same time.

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.