Seto Kaiba

OK, watching Bartender: Glass of God and I have to admit they have me in an unexpected manner at barely five minutes in. The protagonist hasn't even been introduced yet, but I find myself sympathizing intensely with two hotel HR staffers complaining about trying to fill an impossibly specific open req and the vague and unmeasurable criteria they've been given. Those poor gals are hunting a purple squirrel, and I feel their pain so intensely. (Doubly so when their search for said purple squirrel candidate involves what is essentially a multi-day pub crawl looking for bartenders and they're subsequently told they can't expense it.)🤣 The first episode's not bad, but I'm not sure the direction is going to be one I'll like in the end.

Hrm... after sorting through the pile of new simulcasts, so far I'm planning to pick up: Re: Monster Gods Games We Play Studio Apartment, Good Lighting, Angel Included Bartender: Glass of God The Banished Former Hero Lives as He Pleases I was Reincarnated as the 7th Prince so I can take my Time Perfecting my Magical Ability Wind Breaker A Salad Bowl of Eccentrics An Archdemon's Dilemma: How to Love your Elf Bride Dungeon Meals is still ongoing too, so I'm definitely looking forward to more of that. That's just such a feel-good series that I can't help but smile every time I put it on. The descriptions of Bartender: Glass of God and A Salad Bowl of Eccentrics have me particularly curious. Nine titles out of the first batch ain't a bad start at all.

It takes a true fan to recognize this as not just one of the classic reflex comebacks (lol), but a big part of the why there so few Robotech fans. Robotech fans did an amazing job of driving people out of the Robotech fandom by refusing to accept that you can like something and still be critical of it. 😉👍 I guess it depends what you mean by "quality". I've read, and own copies of, almost everything that's been printed and sold under the Robotech banner insofar as comics, novels, RPG books, and artbooks, and it's pretty consistently amateur hour stuff across the board. I know I'm not alone in thinking that, because Harmony Gold's own official stance on the whole subject was that none of the pre-2001 material would've been cleared for sale if anyone'd been paying attention to managing the brand in the 80's and 90's. The franchise just never got the kind of licensee who could do a professional-feeling job with it* (pre-2001), so it always felt like a tradeoff... you could have have decent fanart-level art and terrible writing or terrible art and decent fanfic-level writing. IMO, some of the best are the parts where it was just unapologietically bad on every front like Wings of Gibraltar. A lot of it was just inconsequential side stories that didn't do anything to grow the setting or expand on the story in a meaningful way. And in that respect, not a lot has changed... even this new comic is just an inconsequential side story that goes nowhere new or interesting and adds nothing meaningful to the setting. It reads like a fanfic, and not in a good way. He did, to a small degree... but even then the Titan Comics Robotech series was still largely just a retread of old ground with art that varied from obviously traced to off-putting to "I think this person has a dental fetish". I do respect what they did near the end though, using the time loop plot device as a way to actively take the piss out of the franchise's various failures and false starts and its inability to come up with a story beyond just the next alien war. To throw that into a Robotech publication with all the fandom's sacred cows took a fair bit of guts, and honestly I'm disappointed we didn't get to see more of the payoff in Remix. Y'know what? Yes. That's exactly what Titan Comics should do. They had - for the first time since what? 1996?** - an actual original Robotech story that wasn't slavishly following or playing in the same sandbox with the TV series. They had the chance to take the story somewhere new and different and they got cut off before they could really do something with it. * Well, OK, they did have Luceno and Daley for the novelization... Luceno and Daley just kinda phoned that one in and tried to turn it into off-brand Star Wars when they got bored. ** Mordecai was '96, right? That last ill-fated issue after Clone?

Isn't "nostalgia as a substitute for quality" pretty much the textbook definition of Robotech licensed works in general? On that basis, Easton sounds like a perfect fit for Robotech. Not an original idea in sight, just an in-the-box story that puts existing characters and set pieces into slightly different configurations from normal.

Metallic Rouge episode 13 is out... and I'm not sure that piling medical waste and white phosphorous on an already burning-out-of-control trashfire was the smartest thing that Studio BONES could've done. Honestly, way to waste the first actual decent character reveal in the series... by having it be ten minutes of exposition dump before a five minute fight that kills the character. In hindsight, Rouge's final episode upgrade just makes her look like the illegitimate love child of Gold Experience Requiem and Mazinger... which is unintentionally hilarious. To call the series finale messy would be putting it mildly. It tries to do too much, to have far too many twists and reveals, and ultimately fails to stick any of them because there's no buildup for any of them and they all end up being rendered inconsequential within minutes. The final villain literally spends more time monologuing than actually fighting, and goes down TWICE with humiliating speed and efficiency. It's not a train wreck so much as a coordinated series of train wrecks all occurring in rapid succession in different parts of the narrative. No train left unwrecked, I guess. The actual conclusion of the plot feels like a shrug at best, and the epilogue feels like a non-sequitur. I am just flat baffled that this got approved by anyone in the production committee. "Half-baked" isn't the right word for it. This is a story so thin, underdeveloped, and full of spur of the moment improv that it's like baking when you forgot to buy half the ingredients and are making questionable ingredient substitutions.

Such is the dilemma of the remaster... faithfulness to the original "warts and all" vs. trying to present an improved "ideal" version through post-production cleanup. It's a balancing act, and sometimes the team doing the remaster leans too far in one direction... and the effort isn't always rewarded either. Robotech's remasters, for instance, were variously blasted for things like changing the SFX tracks or for producing grainy visuals with poor color balance. On the other side of the spectrum, Paramount's aforementioned Star Trek: the Next Generation remaster lovingly rescanned and reedited the series from the original large-format negatives and recreated all of the old school analog VFX using modern digital techniques, only for the project to be a financial flop because of how expensive it ended up being.

If the Disney streaming license was to somehow delay/cancel the Blu-ray release plans, we'd likely have heard about it by now via AnimEigo's Macross II: Lovers Again Kickstarter... as AnimEigo would have to either notify backers of the delay or issue refunds in the event of a cancellation.

The Macross Shoji Kawamori Designer's Note artbook from December 2020 has a section devoted to the FamilySoft Macross game original designs, including the Stampede Valkyrie, the Medusa/Star Crusader, and the VF-1SOL.

It's a licensed work, not "Disney vault" fodder... it's much more likely that they'll be using the streaming release to promote the Blu-rays the way Crunchyroll has been doing for its subs/dubs.

Having a good time with The Ancient Magus's Bride. It's fairly cute, and does some good worldbuilding.

Pretty much, yeah. The old site had a lot of issues from the start because HG started skimping on backend maintenance at a fairly early point. They didn't update the server hardware on a regular basis or apply security fixes with any rigor, and the MySQL database holding all the site's text content only rarely got optimized. As a result, it lagged like mad and it got hacked semi-regularly. The site's Community section all but died in 2007-2008 when several volunteer forum moderators who took it upon themselves to suppress criticism of the Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles "movie" for fear that it would somehow hurt the prospects of the proposed live action movie. Ultimately, they ended up banning or otherwise driving away most of the community's active users. The forums ended up a ghost town after another year or two, and the community largely moved to private forums and then to Facebook groups. A few years after the Community section died, the site got hacked again and HG decided to retire the old site in favor of a very basic page with product news and a link to the web storefront. They've prettied it up a bit since and added basic freeware web forums, but most of their audience had long since moved on and the remaining fan community seems to have felt no incentive to use the new forums that were swiftly overrun by bots. It seems to exist as little more than an effort to "show the flag" and remind people they haven't completely packed it in despite handing control of the franchise over to Sony Funimation and Big West.

The first episodes of the Sprint 2024 simulcast season have started to drop on Crunchyroll and HiDive today.

While I was idly poking at Variable Fighter Master File, I spotted one interesting bit of apparent foreshadowing. The VF-25 Master File was released in 2011, but there's a part of it that seems to foreshadow the New UN Forces big scandal from 2016's Macross Delta. The book has a brief part that talks about the MDE weapons that were developed to fight the Vajra in 2059. Towards the end of that section, there is a brief aside about the legal status of dimension bombs and how their use in internal conflicts between New UN Government member states is expressly prohibited by interstellar law. These weapons are so taboo that the few units that possess one are not allowed to publicly disclose that they have them. I just found that interesting, since that's a detail that originated in Master File but seemly became a major plot point in the next Macross series made after the book was written. It puts an interesting wrinkle on the events of Macross Delta that the Brisingr Alliance New UN Forces, since a major part of the backstory there was that the Brisingr Alliance NUNS used a dimensional weapon in a botched attempt to destroy the Sigur Berrentzs. If just using a dimension eater in an internal conflict like the 2060 Windermere War constituted a war crime, the New UN Spacy must've known a lot more about the capabilities of the Sigur Berrentzs than they were letting on and were willing to face war crime charges in their attempt to protect the galaxy from the Delta Wave System. It also explains why they were able to so effectively isolate Windermere IV after the conflict. If they were able to make the charge that Windermere used the bomb stick, they'd be ostracized for using a heinous banned weapon of mass destruction even though the only victims of it were their own people. (Of course, it begs the question of whether the NUNS's second attempt to use dimensional warheads against Windermere IV was also illegal... they had seceded from the New UN Gov't seven years prior, so as a hostile external force was that prohibition still in place?)

Malls are still a thing? I thought most of those kind of shriveled up and died years ago during the lockdowns.

Indirectly, yeah... to that brief licensing free-for-all that allowed Clash of the Bionoids to come into existence.

Well, Metallic Rouge has limped into the final stretch... and ohboy is it a trainwreck of poorly exposited "reveals" and hot nonsense. It looks like there's one more episode of this mess to sit through, but the writing is so messy that it feels like all the exposition they forgot to do in the first 2/3 of the show is being thrown in all at once and the result is even worse than when there wasn't any. The end result is a story where things just happen without any real buildup or payoff. It feels more like an anecdote related by run-on sentence than a narrative. The Witch and the Beast is headed into the final arc of the season, which seems like a bit of a comedown now that Ashaf and Guideau have found the witch who cursed Guideau to... something. Really that hasn't been explained properly. It looks like it might imminently be, though, as this arc starts with a pretty significant flashback to when Ashaf and Guideau first met.

Yeah, there's something similar going on with Joytoy's new Horus Lupercal sculpt. Joytoy's Horus Lupercal isn't based on the main Horus Lupercal miniature from the tabletop game. It's based on the "Horus Ascended" design from the 2022 cinematic trailer, a slightly modified version of the more overtly evil-looking Horus Lupercal design that's been used by the novel series since 2011 but wasn't represented in the tabletop game until just last year when Horus got a second miniature to represent him as the Chosen of Chaos Undivided during the Siege of Terra based on the trailer design. It's a great update to the design, so I'm glad they went with it over the actual Horus Lupercal miniature. It definitely makes me curious to see what they'll do with the Emperor's fabulous ****ing Hawk-Boy Sanguinius and Magnus the Red.

There's a lot of cross-pollination there between the miniatures and the art that's been done for the game books and novels, which is why I was curious. Thus far, they seem to be putting quite a lot of love and attention to detail into all of the figures they're making. It's really nice to see them putting so much effort into delivering a faithful representation of the designs the Heresy artists came up with.

Well, yeah. If Harmony Gold were rational about their Robotech franchise, they would probably have come to very similar conclusions about their Robotech brand's prospects and the inherent advantages of working with Big West and their Macross franchise instead of against them. But Harmony Gold doesn't behave rationally where Robotech is concerned. For some insane reason, Harmony Gold is incredibly reluctant to just let Robotech go and focus on more profitable matters even though it's been over fifteen years since their senior leadership decided the franchise was a commercial failure and cut off funding for new development. It makes no rational sense, but for some reason they are stubbornly committed to maintaining Robotech even though they know it's a losing proposition... no matter that it means losing out on royalties and merchandise sales from distributing the original series with the rest of Macross.

Harmony Gold, for one. So much so that they made a request to Big West in the contract negotiations that Big West refrain from using OG Macross characters in new works. Including games like the recent Macross Shooting Insight game. They're afraid that if those character and mecha designs become intrinsically associated with Macross instead of Robotech, it will erode their franchise's distinctiveness. Which, when you think about it, is actually a pretty reasonable fear on their part as their attempts to keep the franchise alive are pretty much entirely Macross-centric and focused on endlessly rehashing the Macross Saga. It's possible that there's some new approvals process because Big West is now involved in the management of both franchises. Or maybe they agreed not to do DYRL? merch at some point in the negotiations.

Yeah their attention to detail is definitely excellent on that front. It'll be worth seeing what they come up with for Magnus and a few of the others that are known to have some weird options and unusual equipment. Yeah, that's pretty much expected. Games Workshop doesn't often let licensees come up with original takes on their lore. Relic were, I think, one of the very few to actually be given permission to do that... and from that we got the bloody magpies. Though have they clarified if they're only referencing the miniatures or are they also using the official art from the rule books and the novels?

The thing about that, is that Magnus having at least three different canonical appearances is from the Horus Heresy before he became a daemon primarch. Both the tabletop game and the novels describe Magnus having an inconstant physical appearance because of his incredible psychic power. It's a bit of an in joke on the part of the writers referencing his inconsistent depiction in old material. So they wrote him as one of those beings like the emperor who has a subjective physical appearance. Different people see different things when they look at him even if they're all looking at the same time. He also has a degree of conscious and unconscious control of his appearance so sometimes even the same person will see different things moment to moment as his mood changes. The one thing he can't change following his bargain with Tzeentch pre-Heresy is that he's only got one eye and cycles through all the different descriptions of his face from older media: having one huge eye in the center of his head like a classic Cyclops, having once had two eyes with one covered by a scar, or having one normal eye and then just smooth skin over where the other should have been like an eye had never been there. It only got worse once he became a daemon primarch. (It's also why in TTS when the emperor jokes about Magnus being shorter than his brothers, he counters by saying that that's entirely his choice... he uses his powers to make himself taller or shorter at will a bunch of times in the novels.) In honor of that in joke, they gave his newer miniatures multiple heads reflecting all three major variations. I'm wondering if they'll reflect that same decision in the Joytoy figure.

I wonder if it has something to do with one of their other licensees garnering a rare double cease-and-desist from Harmony Gold and Big West for making Macross bootlegs. Either that or perhaps the provisions of the agreement related to preventing "brand confusion" go both ways and HG has to get approvals from Big West to do DYRL? merch the same way Big West apparently has some kind of editorial control over future Robotech development since the agreement. Odds are we'll have to wait until someone puts their foot in it and the courts have to sort it out before we get a definitive answer. I'd assume Big West will probably continue to do the same JDM end-run they've been doing for their more recent releases and just put official English subs on domestic releases for western fans who really want to see it.

To date, there has been no evidence or statement from any party suggesting the disposition of the DYRL? merchandising rights has changed. Last we heard from HG, they had cut a renewal of the license from Tatsunoko a year or two before entering into negotiations with Big West.

Magnus the Red will be where we see exactly how committed Joytoy is to the bit. If they're really committed to their craft, he'll come with three exchangeable heads: one with a single central eye like a classical cyclops and two normal faces that have either a big scar over a missing eye or no scar but only one eye. All three are treated as equally valid appearances for him in the books and the tabletop game, thanks to YMMV psyker nonsense. If they're really really committed to the bit... Ferrus Manus will have a detachable head. I can tell TTS has ruined me, because Dorn just doesn't feel right without the mutton chops now.