Seto Kaiba

Hm... dunno if I'd go that far. The .hack// franchise definitely had far more of a cultural impact than any of those titles will have in the short run or the long run, it was more of an acquired taste where these shows are unimaginative and formulaic but intended for a very wide audience. It definitely popularized the "VR-MMO" schtick that has become such a staple of isekai and isekai-adjacent titles like Overlord, Skeleton Knight in Another World, Phantasy Star Online 2: the Animation, Gundam Build Divers, Sword Art Online, How Not to Summon a Demon Lord, etc. I know a lot of viewers struggle with .hack//SIGN because of how bleak and depressing it can be thanks to Tsukasa's circumstances, and I'll admit I suffered a bit of darkness-induced audience apathy for it myself. I guess that's why they tried to go lighter and softer with Legend of the Twilight Bracelet and such. Hokkaido Gals are Super Adorable! is trying to jerk the audiences heartstrings and not doing a great job as it nears its conclusion. The Will They or Won't They waveform has begun to collapse towards "Won't", with the main girl planning to... ... leaving just one week together with the luckless protagonist. It lacks impact because they haven't even reached the point of a confession never mind dating, and he has two other nearly identical love interests who aren't leaving. It's mildly enteratining but as romcoms and such go it's very much in "You tried" territory IMO.

Hard to say... as we've never seen those ships in their original form. IIRC, the first time we see beam weapons like that is in Macross: Do You Remember Love?. There are a few shots in the original series - esp. in Burst Point - where it looks like the Zentradi might be using the same technology but it's hard to tell as they could just be missile trails but it seems to be more of a Meltrandi thing. The Mardook had the same tech in Macross II: Lovers Again though it's only properly visible in the final scenes of the OVA when the Mardook fleet turns on Ingues's mobile fortress. The Meltrandi Chlore branch fleet in Macross 7's unaired episode Fleet of the Strongest Women has a few ships that are shown using the same kind of beam gun too. I'd have to check, as my recollection of the scene is not perfect, but I think the Macross Galaxy fleet escorts used beam weapons of the same type in the second Macross Frontier movie when they were shown bombarding a Vajra hive. It's likely something of a "premium" feature, since it requires not just the elements to fire the beam but also to project a spatial distortion to twist the path of the beam, so it's not surprising it's an uncommon feature on Human ships that generally prioritize cost-effectiveness for mass production and stealth.

Well, Joytoy didn't make me wait long at all did they? 😁 Fantastic rendition of Heresy-era Horus Lupercal. I wonder if they'll do a pre-Heresy version in Luna Wolves colors too? It'll sure as hell open my wallet if they do. Now THIS gets me excited. Primarchs aside, First Captain Ezekyle Abaddon was pretty much the MVP of the Great Crusade and the Horus Heresy... before also going on to be MVP of the Long War. It was a bit of a shame that he was Too Awesome To Use for much of the Horus Heresy novel series, only really getting to shine in flashbacks to the Ullanor campaign and in the Siege of Terra itself. Even with his limited appearances, he's definitely way more interesting in the Heresy era than the depressed jobber he was in the Black Legion series or as the Chaos Warmaster gargling generic threats. I'll be very excited to pair him up with Imperial Fists Captain Sigismund and a Garviel Loken if they roll one of those out.

One which isn't known for anime and is the origin of the stigma that animation is only for kids? Plus the license would've almost certainly had to have come via Sony, whose subsidiaries have the distribution rights. 😕 ... now that is a potentially bizarre idea. Macross Delta for Kingdom Hearts IV? lol

Hasn't it generally been conceded that we shifted into some weird parallel universe around the time someone shot that one gorilla? Are they, though? This is really a strange outcome. I think most of us were expecting Macross to land on the Sony-owned Crunchyroll service, not just because of its dominant position in streaming anime but because most of the companies involved are owned by Sony directly or indirectly. Sony bought Funimation in 2017, and merged it with Crunchyroll after buying that in 2021, and then Crunchyroll bought Macross distribution licensee Nozomi Entertainment in August 2022. It makes you wonder what the heck happened that, after all this effort to get Macross licensing under Sony's banner by hook or by crook the streaming license landed at Disney...

Is it even necessarily HG they have to convince? IIRC, Animeigo's Robert Woodhead once commented that the issue with DYRL? licensing was that nobody knew who for certain had the international rights after the attempts to localize the film in the 80's. HG has basically delegated all things Robotech to Funimation as of a few years ago too.

That's the last service I would have expected. I would have expected Sony's Crunchyroll to be the ones to get it, since Funimation is now part of it and carries work by the companies that licensed the various titles for the West.

Continuing the wrapup of the 2024 Winter season... The Strongest Tank's Labyrinth Raids is one of those copycat titles that doesn't really feel like it has, or even wants, an identity of its own. It's not an isekai story, but it follows a lot of the same tired "my VR MMO became real!" tropes with the characters consistently using video game terminology and occasionally having hit points show up on the screen for some reason. There is the vague implication that... It can't seem to make up its mind which direction it wants to go on, which makes the story a bit messy. At the very least, the protagonist's siscon tendencies were quickly dropped from the story. The animation work is... not great. It's never better than mediocre, but it frequently dips into the terrible when there are action scenes with a lot of motion. Banished from the Hero's Party S2 is much the same. It's one of those fantasy stories that isn't an isekai title but copies a lot of tropes from them even when it doesn't necessarily make sense to. The first season was a fairly generic riff on the already well-trodden ground of "I'm living a slow life in a fantasy world as a pharmacist" schtick that a dozen or so titles in the isekai genre had already beaten into the ground like a tent peg. Season two is actually taking the story somewhere interesting... in a rather desultory way. It builds on the previous season's minor subplot involving the "blessings" - a sort of talent or compulsion believed to be imposed by the setting's gods that pushes people towards a specific (and not always desirable, safe, or healthy) path in life - and how people balance that with free will. It's still not a very good series, but there's some signs of potential there in season two that weren't present in season one. 7th Time Loop: the Villainess Enjoys a Carefree Life Married to Her Worst Enemy is very much in the otome game isekai style though like a bunch of the other titles I've followed this season it also foregos the isekai aspect in favor of having the protagonist be reincarnated in the same fantasy world they already lived in. It follows a lot of the same otome game tropes with a cast full of pretty boys and the protagonist using her knowledge of future events to derail the previous romance plot and avoid various Bad Ends she's already aware of. It doesn't feel as compelling as some of those titles, I think in part because the protagonist only has the knowledge of a repeating seven year period in the same world. It has much less of the comedy that usually comes with the premise too, partly because her chosen romantic partner is completely deadpan 99% of the time. It's not bad, but there have been several better examples of this same kind of story in the last few seasons so it doesn't really stand out. Villain-san's Day Off never really went anywhere or did anything with its premise. It almost doesn't have a story. It's a tokusatsu series villain who, in his off hours, lives an utterly unremarkable daily life in Japan. I guess it counts as a "feel good" series, with what little it has apart from daily-life being the comedy of a tall, frightening-looking man's over the top reactions to ordinary inconveniences and pandas. I feel like they could do more with the premise. Especially since Villain-san's interactions with his fellow villains are pretty funny and his interactions with the tokusatsu hero team off the clock are just as out there. It's OK, but it feels kind of insubstantial.

We're into the home stretch on the Winter 2024 season... The Unwanted Undead Adventurer remains one of the less dull, but still not particularly interesting, titles in the season. It's story hasn't really done anything to grow beyond the now tired and overused isekai trope of the protagonist being reincarnated in a fantasy world as a monster and working to evolve their monster form towards a human appearance to go back to a normal life. The trope itself is marginally more tolerable without the usual isekai trappings - Rentt is reincarnated in the same fantasy world he already lived in - but it still feels like extremely well-trodden ground thanks to several high-profile isekai titles like So I'm a Spider, So What? and That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime. The only thing that really makes Rentt stand out is that he's actually reasonably pleased to have Come Back Strong and intends to use his superhuman abilities to chase his life's dream of... ranking up as a generic fantasy adventurer. The series also echoes the same basic tropes of isekai with Rentt having the makings of a harem already together even before the start of the story proper, with multiple women being willing to overlook that he's a cannibalistic monster because it's him. After the first couple episodes, when Rentt resumes working as an adventurer, the story loses what little sense of direction it had and he's just another murderhobo with questionable sartorial choices in an obviously D&D-inspired western fantasy setting. Eleven episodes into The Wrong Way to Use Healing Magic and the story still feels very amateurish, underdeveloped, and lacking in original thought. If nothing else, the writer of the original light novel - Kurokata - has a bright future writing for Capcom's Resident Evil series. From start to finish, it feels like someone C.S. Goto'd their fanfic for another series. The characters are thinly written and cliched, there doesn't seem to be any actual reason for the conflict driving the story, and the one antagonist that's been introduced so far is a basic axe crazy Black Knight who just happens to be weak to only the protagonist's technique... It's bland and lifeless and terminally lacking in imagination. At the end of the day, it feels like the output of an AI prompt to write a statistically average isekai series. Tales of Wedding Rings is just a form letter ecchi harem anime with an action excuse plot. It is what it is, and what it is is borderline unwatchable. Mashle's second season follows on from the reasonably strong first season and remains pretty entertaining, if One Punch Man-style comedy is your thing. It's still committed to its bit as a parody of Harry Potter, though it's gradually pivoted more and more towards being a standard shounen action series with each episode of the second season as the story's antagonist moved away from inter-house conflict as the obligatory magic boarding school to a government kangaroo court and then the setting's off-brand Voldemort "Innocent Zero". It definitely feels like it's running out of ideas, though... and there's only so long Mash can continue doing physically impossible things like punching music out of the air before the conceit that he doesn't have any magic has to be dispensed with. Blue Exorcist: Shimane Inquisition Saga really should have been a compressed filler arc in the manga and the anime. It was one of the weakest story arcs in the manga, focusing on a character who spent the entire story up to that point making themself as unlikeable as possible and an antagonist who was a teaspoon-shallow card carrying villain with no real motive besides "be as evil as possible at all times". It's being made years after interest in Blue Exorcist faded, and feels really skippable in terms of how little substance its story has and how it's sandwiched between two more important story arcs. It's a 3/10 hard skip at best unless you LOVE Blue Exorcist. A Sign of Affection remains one of my standouts for this season. In isolation, the romance story is nothing particularly remarkable and the art style definitely speaks to the author having very specific tastes. It's the sensitive and clearly well-researched treatment of the main character's deafness that really sells this one. It gets invested in the problems that the deaf have in social and professional situations and the difference that it makes to have people willing to put in the effort to make them feel welcome and supported. It loses a little of its tension with the teased relationship starting relatively early in the story, but it remains an interesting and unconventional take that's managed to hold my interest for the entire season.

It's unlikely to be the second one, since it's SOP for the localization distributor to claim a copyright on any parts of the localization they produce themselves... like remastered audio or video tracks, subtitle scripts, dub audio tracks, etc. HG can't have been in the dark about that because that's the genesis of their copyright on The Other Series. That's also why the Macross II kickstarter had to acquire the rights to the English dub audio tracks from the 90's release. It's not automatically included. It's also a safe bet that they knew in advance Animeigo intended to do a remaster, because that would probably have been a part of the license agreement in the first place. The most likely explanation is that HG just cheaped out, as they did with so many other things.

Pretty sure it was just that HG didn't want to pay up for access to Animeigo's remastered/cleaned-up audio tracks... and they either figured audiences wouldn't care, or hoped that ADV Films would do the job just as well. I've always privately suspected that Animeigo got the license because Harmony Gold believed its own hype and thought it'd never sell. When it sold well, they suddenly wanted it in the hands of their main distribution partner, probably because of more favorable license terms.

Crunchyroll started announcements for its Spring 2024 lineup. Not a lot stands out so far... there's something that looks like an off-brand Godzilla called Kaiju No.8, a third season of Konosuba, another cour of Mushoku Tensei, a Saint Seiya series, a third season of The Irregular at Magic High School (or "It's not incest if we genetically modify you so much you're not technically related anymore." ), and the inevitable slew of isekai shovelware. HiDive's new app is finally working. It's actually a huge step up. Way too freaking late, but a huge step up from what they had before. For now, I'm digging through my backlog. Lupin III Part V is as good as I remember it being, though the inexplicable pink jacket breather episode in the middle of the first arc is odd to say the least.

It was one of those quiet, moody, action-dramas that were big in '02. Its exposition was often on the subtle side and buried in relatively slow-paced conversations between various characters separate from the action.

In a way, it's actually kind of impressive how everyone working on Metallic Rouge except the animation team is completely phoning it in. The most recent episode (#10) is really blatantly stalling for time... The Witch and The Beast is wrapping up the "The Witch and the Demon Sword" arc... I had high hopes for this series based on the first story arc, but it's turned out to pretty weak on average. There's been almost no exposition about the main characters, and otherwise it's basically just a monster-of-the-week format with slightly more emphasis on action (and an arsehole protagonist) than Witch Hunter Robin.

My weekly watch group is starting Kaguya-sama: Love is War season two and Lupin III Part V... both excellent shows I'd highly recommend. Honestly, Kaguya-sama: Love is War is what I'd call the best romcom anime of the last ten years or so. It just seems like that one never has a dull moment, though with three seasons and a movie any further development heads into the parts where things get dramatic in an unfunny way. Lupin III Part V is another trip and a half... blue jacket, AKA modern Lupin, still just feels weird considering most of the iconic Lupin stories are set in the 60's (green jacket) or 70's (red jacket). Lupin's new signature gizmo, an AR monocle that he uses to hack things like video cameras, is an odd bit of future tech but no weirder than some of the nonsense he's had in the past.

It's Japan, a certain amount of social drinking for work is expected... and those long hours and late nights the animators do surely mean a fair amount of caffeine... ... but I think the best/most probable explanation I've heard anyone pose was over on MAHQ/MechaTalk. Specifically, that Studio Bones seems to be using Metallic Rouge as a sort of elaborate demo reel to showcase the capabilities of its animation staff and that the kind of threadbare story is an excuse plot crafted to get them from one animator friendly set piece to the next. That'd definitely explain why the series is visually very impressive but narratively a complete train wreck. Watched some more of The Foolish Angel Dances with the Devil... and I've completely lost track of what's going on with this one. This latest episode was just one huge exposition dump, and it's clearly dumping things that are supposed to be important and shocking but the series has done so much nonsensical screwing around that it doesn't really feel like important and shocking revelations. It feels like an excessively dramatic distraction from the antics of this dumb*** couple. Hokkaido Gals are Super Adorable! is still a cute but kind of generic romcom. The will-they-or-won't-they is leaning heavily towards "will" right now, though it still has a bit of an issue in that the three female leads don't feel particularly distinct since they all have essentially the exact same appearance but for their hair. (I guess the mangaka has a type.) I've basically given up on 'Tis Time for Torture, Princess. Dungeon Meals is still a damn solid series, though. Kinda weird that now, of all times, after the cast have been eating all kinds of horrifying monsters that explicitly or implicitly eat people the series decides to actually mention food safety when Laios gets sick from eating uncooked meat that contains parasites.

But why is it happening?

I had no idea they even made a kit of that. Am interesting find indeed.😄

Nope... Metallic Rouge was written by Yutaka Izubuchi and Toshizo Nemoto. Izubuchi's principally a mechanical and character designer with a lot of iconic titles on his CV including Gundam 0080 and Gundam ZZ, the Patlabor movies, and Yamato 2199. Nemoto's a writer whose filmography is less impressive but still contains some major titles like Legend of Galactic Heroes and Macross Delta. How it ended up such a complete and total cluster**** is anyone's guess. Villain-san's Day Off had an entire episode bereft of the titular character, focused on Valentine's Day and White Day. 7th Time Loop's story is regaining a bit of its sense of direction, though toward what end I have no idea. Things are happening and the protagonist clearly knows what they are, but she's really cluing the rest of us in because she's too busy doing a Sweet Polly Oliver for some reason. Banished from the Hero's Party is still stumbling towards a conclusion as Rud tries (and largely fails) to convince the new alleged Hero to be less of a Lawful Stupid Paladin. The Strongest Tank's Labyrinth Raids forgot a chunk of its own premise for a bit WRT Homunculi, and has started building up towards a second season I'd suspect it's not getting... with some fuss and noise about a Demon King named Greed who's apparently driving research into Homunculi for military use in the neighboring kingdom. Blue Exorcist stumbled to the more-or-less end of the Shimane Illuminati arc with the defeat of Dr. Gedouin, though the resolution is every bit as weak as I remember from the manga given that it's essentially a triple deus ex machina... Mashle's still as over-the-top as you'd expect from its premise being Harry Potter by way of One Punch Man. Honestly, the disrespect Mash has for his opponents is real and they are taking it personally. It's actually pretty funny seeing him trolling opponents who think they have the upper hand. (Even if the idea that Mash's insane physical ability isn't magic now wears a little thin.)

Eh, maybe... I'd wager most of us have at least temporarily left some boxes sit in a hallway during moving, cleaning, or transferring stuff to/from a storage unit or new home or let a cosmetic/non-critical home repair wait a bit for lack of time, money, or some other practical reason. All the same, starting a discussion thread to publicly complain about the how someone you sold collectibles to in person keeps up their home and publicly shame them in absentia by characterizing their behavior as hoarder-like is some serious Karen-tier rude behavior. (Even if it is hoarder-like behavior, it's still rude to do it behind their back.) @TangledThorns should have kept this to themself, TBH. That it most assuredly is... but that clutter is part of what makes a home feel like home.

Having seen actual hoarder situations of the "legal intervention was required" level with my own eyes, I really deeply disagree with the characterization there. Being able to implement an orderly and visually appealing storage/display solution for your collection in your home is a matter of time, money, and of course space. Mostly money, if we're being honest with each other. With enough money, you can simply buy a big enough space and attractive storage solutions for your entire collection and hire someone who can do the installation work for you. Not every working stiff has the time to DIY an impressive storage solution or the money to hire someone to do it for them. That doesn't make them borderline horders. That just means they don't have the resources to do it right now. Using myself as an example, if you came to my home at this exact moment you'd find a pretty significant portion of my Macross collection and my model kit Pile-of-Shame neatly stacked in the corner of my living room. It doesn't mean I'm a borderline hoarder. I moved about a year ago, and I work 60-70 hours a week on average. Building display cases to house that collection in the space I've set aside for it is on my to-do list, but it's less important than other more expensive, time-consuming, and necessary home improvements on that same to-do list The TL;DR here is... don't judge other people like that. It's a dick move.

The Unwanted Undead Adventurer's latest episode is a breather one. It's rather amusing in an undignified sort of way to see Rentt bested by a The Wrong Way to Use Healing Magic brought another pretty unremarkable episode. The story really has yet to do anything to stand out in either a good or a bad way. Even the big bad of the current part of the story is nothing more than a standard Dark Knight whose special ability is the equally standard... The Witch and the Beast is three quarters of the way into a four-parter "The Witch and the Demon Sword". It's definitely the weakest story the series has brought so far, not helped by the fact that the twist was telegraphed so heavily it failed to surprise even a little. This season's been a bit of a bust, all in all. Dungeon Meals is still pretty darn good tho. Going backwards a bit to watch The Ancient Magus's Bride while I recover from dental surgery... I've heard that one is rather good.

Not an uncommon reaction to Space Runaway Ideon, truth be told. It didn't exactly go over great with audiences when it was new either, though Tomino's made noises about wanting to remake the whole bloody thing. It got truncated by cancellation in its original broadcast run, so the ending was a rushed affair. It certainly feels that way. Something about a studio deciding to do an original sci-fi/action series for a major anniversary seems to bring out the absolute worst writers imaginable. Studio Bones has done lots of great work in its 25 years and counting, and it actually came as a bit of a shock to me that Metallic Rouge was an original IP by them because it's so incredibly underdeveloped and so badly written. When Tatsunoko Production decided to do a original IP mecha anime for their 55th anniversary I expected it wouldn't be very good but I wasn't expecting they'd just go and make the worst series they'd produced since Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross. Imagine a sci-fi story so badly written that the only way its plot can function at all is to have Humanity at the level of interstellar travel and planet-scale terraforming forget that Conservation of Energy is a thing. Studio Bones's Metallic Rouge is nearly as problematic in that it's a conflicting jumble of cyberpunk cliches without any real cohesion and that its writers don't seem to understand that exposition is something a story does have to do every so often so the audience knows what's going on. Hoping for more from today's The Witch and the Beast, The Wrong Way to Use Healing Magic, and The Unwanted Undead Adventurer. (HiDive went and released a new version of their app that is hilariously broken... it's way more full-featured than their previous bare-bones offering but they can't even get the subtitle streams working.)

Ah, yeah... Tomino-sensei has had more than a few moments in his career that've left me thinking that he was definitely NOT all right when he made them. Even his brighter and more upbeat work has a lot of darkness hiding just beneath the surface. Like Gundam: Reconguista in G, where several characters have to deal with lingering caste-based discrimination despite centuries of peace and prosperity because their ancestors were... Speaking of awful futures... Metallic Rouge has once again stumbled through some awful exposition in its latest episode. It really is embarrassing how poorly paced and composed this series is. It's oddly impressive how uninteresting Studio Bones managed to make a series about Rockman X-style sentient androids fighting each other because one side wants to instigate a robot uprising. The whole thing is just such a massive arse-pull that it completely fails to land... and leaves this ridiculous Rockman X-ing the show's been doing up to this point feeling like far and away the least interesting part of the setting.

And there it is... Exactly what I wanted from the line. Justaerin terminators.