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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    ... and the complete confusion that'll set in when the new edition catches back up to Vol.5 and 6 of the previous edition, which diverged into an original flashback story.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    It says a lot about how I was raised that my first exposure to that quote was the dedication plaque from the USS Excelsior. One of the things I love best about Macross is that it's almost always somewhere completely new. It makes the "shared" Macross universe feel much bigger when you can have multiple stories going on and building up without any crosstalk between them, or with two stories in the same place that are going on independently enough that the participants in one are only dimly aware of the goings-on in the other. It's a setting big enough that earthshaking events and life-or-death stakes can be damped down enough by distance, time, and relevance that they can be either headline news half the galaxy away or squeezed in above an ad for mildew remover on page fourteen below the fold. (I suspect that Delta explicitly being set in a remote, generally poorly trafficked part of the galaxy will mean the events of the series will not be widely known outside of the Brisingr globular cluster during future shows. Even the New UN Government barely acknowledged it as anything but a tiff between colony worlds until the very end.)
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, but in theory they're trying to at least stay within eyeshot of the official setting. It's not a bad thing, by any means. It's just that, as a Macross researcher and translator, I'm quite amused that a doujinshi Masahiro Chiba wrote before Macross: Do You Remember Love? came out and probably never expected anyone to remember or take seriously is apparently STILL referenced as an authoritative work by the writers of Macross publications both official and non over 34 years after he published it. (I confess I do sometimes wonder if he's either as amused by its longevity as I am or if he's a little embarrassed by people going back to his oldest work all the time like artists sometimes get.)
  4. Seto Kaiba
    A point of order... the Space Battleship Yamato franchise isn't developing new material. The last new original story they had was the Space Battleship Yamato: Resurrection movie almost ten years ago. What they've been doing ever since is just remaking the first few Yamato titles. "Left" and "Right" are subjective, and depend entirely upon where you're standing at the time. What's that saying... "Not all who wander are lost"?
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Macross 7 is very like its contemporary, Mobile Fighter G Gundam, in that you really need to be able to disengage yourself from your expectations of what a "traditional" title for the franchise is like and just go with the over-the-top enthusiasm in the show. (They were both intended for a somewhat younger audience, IINM.) If there's one thing that the last few years have proven pretty definitively is that it really IS quite impossible to make a show or film with universal appeal... especially if you're making a sequel to some existing title. You can't please some of the people any of the time. I'd rather Macross experiment and push the boundaries of its concept than stagnate the way that Universal Century Gundam titles have been doing for ages and turn to jerking itself off by making shows explicitly about its own merchandise. If it means one show in a dozen isn't a satisfying and delicious treat, so be it... it's still better than the only question being what we're calling the space nazis this season.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    We've known the Iron Chiefs were attached to the Megaroad-01 fleet for ages... though it's weird to see a SVF-184 Iron Chiefs VF-1, considering their first and only mention was as one of the first units to transition to the VF-4A. It looks like the legacy of the old Sky Angels VF-1 tech manual is still alive and well. The summary there for the SVF-184 Iron Chiefs mentions them being attached to ARMD-06 Constellation in 2011, after the First Space War ended. That means they're going with the unofficial history where there were two surviving ARMDs (Constellation and Midway) that escaped getting blown up by being out at Apollo Base and the L-5 manufacturing station.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not enough of a bastard to reply to this by singing "When September Ends". Anyway, here's Wonderwall... Seriously though, we probably won't have any real news until the end of September. I'm hoping for something akin to what Kawamori was talking about before the last project became Delta... a show about air racing or flight demonstration teams. (I'd love an adaptation of Macross the Ride, though I suspect the toy companies wouldn't be too thrilled with it since design-wise it's basically a showplace for Macross's version of MSV.)
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Part of the problem being that some folks can't seem to separate "objectively bad" from "I didn't like it". Macross Delta has been a fairly successfully and well-received Macross series despite its flaws. The negative reception it gets from certain parts of the English-speaking fandom seems to have a good deal more to do with fans either not getting certain core themes of Macross or simply not being in the show's target demographic to begin with. Sufficed to say, there's a profound unwillingness in some corners to actually judge the show on its own merits (or lack thereof) rather than based on the viewer's unrealistic expectations of a Macross series. I suspect, on that note, this new series will not make those same malcontent fans happy.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    It can't conceivably be anywhere near as boring as the first book's attempt to explain how they applied overtechnology materials to threaded fasteners. I'm betting it's a structural improvement meant to make them more robust in hand-to-hand. I think he meant more why the design was changed... and what the advantage of the square hands is.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    No, it's not completely drawn from scratch. The character and mecha design hasn't really changed that I've seen.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    A fair amount of a VF's weight is in the legs (the engines), so having the center of gravity pretty low probably helps.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Well, the Macross Delta series certainly brought out the toxic fans in the Macross fandom the way that The Last Jedi did for Star Wars. There was SO MUCH B*TCHING about Walkure and how they operated, even though very little of what they were doing was in any way new to Macross and most of it had been part of the setting for over twenty years at that point. Totally mirrored the Star Wars fans whinging themselves inside-out about Luke doing the same thing every other Jedi Master did in response to a new dark lord rising or Rey holding her own against said dark lord after one afternoon of verbal abuse from an old-of-practice hermet in the boonies. Thankfully, the impact Macross Delta's hatedom had on Macross was a lot less than the impact The Last Jedi's hatedom had on Star Wars.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    It's a natural evolution of the online social concept... having a separate account for every group was rather clunky and cumbersome. The current model means you have just one account that is portable across an enormous number of social environments. It's less of a headache for the end user, if you discount the suspect use of personal data by Facebook itself. Honestly, I've tried to take a more positive outlook on Delta's ending. Big West and Satelight have gotten Pretty Soldier Sailor Walkure out of their system and made a quick buck on the idol group before its members spun off the pursue their own solo careers. Now they can focus on telling an actual story instead of on frantic promotion of an idol group, because they won't want to undermine their own achievement by attempting to launch another idol group hot on the heels of the previous one. The first half is a satisfying and enjoyable series almost as good as Macross Frontier. The second half is a such an unqualified disaster caused by a profound lack of exposition and a spectacularly lazy attempt to recycle Macross Frontier's second half that it feels like a punishment for enjoying the first half. That was Walkure's schtick... one constant about Macross is that Kawamori never lets them do the same schtick twice in a row. IIRC, he wanted to do something more alone the lines of animating Macross the Ride, a show with no idols that was about dueling airshow teams, but he got overruled. Now the pendulum's due to swing the other way and hopefully give us something that's at least more balanced than Delta was. Passionate Walkure isn't available on BD/DVD yet, but I'm inclined to suspect it's going to turn out to be Walkure's version of Interstella 5555.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    GERWALK mode isn't really made for fast forward flight... it's more for hovering and attack helicopter-like support maneuvering. That said, as powerful as some of those sub-engines are they don't really NEED to be big to achieve the intended result. The VF-1's liquid fuel rockets are small, but they're more powerful in terms of maximum output than the fighter's FF-2001 engine running at overboost (200%). The VF-25 had a bank of six small thrusters that, from the color of their exhaust, appear to be small thermonuclear reaction thrusters that are on the back of the airframe body in the part where it connects to the forearm shield. They're visible in that shot shortly after Alto rescues Ranka from the hull breach in Island-1 in Frontier's second episode. There's a part on the VF-31 that looks like it's probably something similar, though simply angling the VF's main engines is going to produce some pretty impressive thrust on its own (e.g. what we saw Hikaru do in the original series w/ that VF-1D, with one foot for hover thrust and one for forward motion).
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Page 061 of the Macross Delta Character Design Works book. It really doesn't look anything like a Zentradi Army uniform. If it weren't for those rank tabs on the shoulders and those funky shoulder pads, it'd be a pretty generic gray long coat of the type you could buy in practically any store. What he's wearing under it looks like it might be the regular uniform shirt from the New UN Forces duty uniform in Frontier and Delta, for those who aren't "fancy" like Major Marin or Brigadier Peliot (who wear either ties or ascots). More interestingly, a good view of the pilot suit looks nothing like contemporary New UN Forces-issue TSV or TSS-series pilot suits either. It looks for all the world like it's based on the Feios Valkyrie's pilot suit from Macross Digital Mission VF-X. He's not in a leadership position though... he's just a rank and file pilot. The New UN Forces officers we see are wearing a mostly unmodified version of the same New UN Forces duty uniform from Macross Frontier.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    No offense, but from your remarks elsewhere it's pretty clear you didn't care before... about any title after maybe DYRL?. Nah, Macross Delta doesn't seem to have done any harm to the Macross fandom. The movie Passionate Walkure reportedly did quite well in Japan recently. It's slow here because forums are kind of on the decline as an online social environment while Facebook groups are on the rise, and this site's kind of Delta-hostile thanks to so many older fans who were opposed to the series on principle because it was basically the second coming of Macross 7. I'd be surprised if it did. Past performance, Kawamori tends to set new series in new locales with the minimum necessary references to past shows. Future novels... hell yes, we'll almost certainly see Windermereans who've emigrated away from Windermere facing suspicion (if not racism) for their homeworld's hostility towards the New UN Government. 'course they did kinda worry that bone quite a bit in Delta itself with the suspicion towards Freyja.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Pretty big reach, IMO... considering that aliens and hybrids usually have some obvious trait that marks them out as such. (Pointy ears, exotic skin colors, extra appendages, etc.) Wright's jacket is pretty close in design to Ushio Todo's special forces longcoat, and he was a certified human (and certifiably crazy). The hat looks like a black version of the regular New UN Forces standard issue one (which is usually white, which I guess marks him out as special forces). "Natural talent" is kind of a recurring schtick in cases like this. Look at how it worked for Mylene... she had basically zero experience and in fairly short order her natural talent for VF operations had her flying at the same level as elite special forces badass normal Gamlin Kizaki. Alto too. He changed majors at Mihoshi Academy from theater to space flight and he was flying at a level rivaling professional soldiers with two years of regular commercial-grade spaceflight training. Hayate's had the advantage that mecha control systems have been at least partially standardized for somewhere on the order of half a century by the time he made the move from a forklift operator to fighter pilot.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Somewhere between "vanishingly small" and "zero", I reckon. With Macross releases still effectively blocked from regular distribution channels in the US by You-Know-Who through at least mid-March in 2021, there's nothing for them to gain by unveiling the series in a market they can't legally distribute that series in and where the fandom isn't all that big. (To say nothing of doing so at a convention that takes place on the opposite side of the country from the biggest concentration of Macross fans.) Smart money says they'll do the big reveal in Japan, to the home market crowd. I'd love nothing better than to be wrong about that though. Like Delta, our path to legitimate access is going to be the Blu-ray release when it comes out three months or so after the series airs in Japan. Hopefully sales of the English-subbed DVD/BD Macross Delta and Macross Delta: Passionate Walkure are strong enough that the new series will follow suit and include official subs. Otherwise, we're stuck with fansubs.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    As noted previously, it would appear that this latest Macross production is likely operating on similar production timing to what was used for Macross Frontier and Macross Delta. If that is in fact the case, we shouldn't expect to hear anything of significance until mid-September at the earliest. The last two times it was a title reveal in September, followed by the first trailer in late October, and then the cut-down teaser edition of the first episode airing in the last week or so of December.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    I could kinda see that... admittedly not because it's not enjoyable in its own way, but because it's so wildly off-tone from the usual Universal Century War-Is-Hell depression-fest that it stands out like a live peacock in a police lineup of thanksgiving turkeys. As much as the Gundam franchise indulges in continuity porn via the Universal Century, I suspect a lot of that inclination to dismiss it stems from it having been decanonized. The UC's obsession with continuity has reached the point that like half of what gets produced is side story material and they had at least one whole series devoted to continuity porn (Unicorn). The fandom does lapse into an attitude that the UC is for SERIOUS BUSINESS and "fun" and "lighthearted" stuff should go be in a different timeline... like what happened to G-Reco. Which makes it all the more tragic that they didn't cast Tim Curry. (His scenes in Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3 were him chewing the scenery with such gusto that it rivals Raul Julia's hammy M. Bison from Street Fighter or his earlier performance in Rocky Horror. "SPAAAAAAAAAAACE!")
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Agh... I'm gonna miss it by three days! Three stinkin' days.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    If it's not an imposition, what all did you hear about G-Saviour from the online community before watching it? I've only rarely seen G-Saviour lumped into the same category of celluloid cancer as the Star Wars Holiday Special. Usually, fans tend to lump it in with other quickly-forgotten adaptations that were accidentally funny because they were campy as hell but tried to play themselves seriously like that 1994 Street Fighter movie or Starship Troopers. I found watching the movie to be a lot like seeing someone's compilation of all the overacted live-action cutscenes in Command and Conquer.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Hopefully another 100% original feature that Sunrise can easily disown if it turns out to be a steaming turd like G-Saviour. I'd hate to see them sh*t all over a classic like Char's Counterattack. Never underestimate the ingenuity of fools... mother nature is always building a bigger and better one.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    They even brought a redshirt (or greenshirt, fittingly for Macross) with them in true Star Trek TOS fashion. You could always tell when Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Ensign Ricky beamed down to a planet, Ensign Ricky's wife was about to collect on a Starfleet widow's pension. To be fair to Star Trek, Starfleet is only ever depicted or described as an actual military agency in its bleak, conflict-heavy alternate quantum realities like the Mirror Universe, the Kelvin timeline, or that short-lived one in "Yesterday's Enterprise". (Discounting fabrications like "Living Witness".) They've always depicted Starfleet as an exploratory, scientific, diplomatic, and humanitarian aid agency first and foremost. They moonlight as soldiers in wartime but they're more like a space coast guard than a space navy. They can't deviate from the TV series story too much... Robotech fans are known for being highly averse to change. She could get away with it, since she was only a 1st Lieutenant and chief flight controller for alpha shift rather than, say, the CO, XO, CAG, or some other high administrative talking head. To be fair, he does an awful lot of making things worse before he saves the day... like covering up for Guld's mental instability and his attempt to sabotage the Shinsei team by framing Isamu for an attempted murder.
  25. Seto Kaiba

    Hi-Metal R

    Seto Kaiba replied to joppewo's topic in Toys

    Got in my preorder for Nex Gilbert's VF-2SS early this morning. Not about to miss out on the Macross II love while Bandai's actually showing it for once.
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