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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    I'll admit, as much as I like Mobile Suit Gundam: the Origin for its return-to-form storytelling and its dedication to lavishing attention on some neglected parts of Universal Century history... the faithful recreation of the retro late 70's character designs does look more than slightly out of place at times when juxtaposed against the modern animation-level mobile suits and backgrounds. That and how EVIL Char is in the Gundam: the Origin version of events. Char in the original series was definitely no saint, but he at least hovered around "Noble Demon" territory. Gundam: the Origin's Char runs on "No back left unstabbed" and is WAY more cruel and sociopathic. Whatever its faults, Mobile Suit Gundam: the Origin feels like its main goal is to tell a story and all that noise about gunpla is secondary. That alone is enough for me to excuse a LOT of sins on its behalf. I don't particularly care if the story plays Gundam tropes dead straight or radically defies formula, as long as the story's engaging it'll get a pass from me. That's why titles like the Build Fighters and Build Divers series leave me cold... the story's not the point, it's just steering you to whatever new MSV design goes on sale next week.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    That's not really an answer to my question. What you're talking about was thirty-three years ago, a brief period of a year or two between Robotech's broadcast debut and the one-two punch of having both Untold Story and Sentinels fail to launch that dragged it into the abyss it's been in ever since. It would've made sense to cover Robotech seventeen years ago, when Harmony Gold was making a real effort to salvage the franchise and start fresh. Covering it now feels like wasted effort when it's got nothing going for it but a series of increasingly comical and self-destructive lawsuits, a couple of Kickstarter disasters, a laughably bad comic, and a merchandise line that's mostly ugly apparel. I suppose the first one might be justified on those grounds, since Robotech was the spawn of that attempt Revell made to create a Transformers knockoff based on Japanese model kits. For Robotech proper it feels a bit out of place, since toys weren't exactly something Robotech did well... or at all, for most of its lifespan. Granted, but it's mostly ugly apparel rather than toys... to an even greater extent than before now that Palladium Books lost the RPG and tabletop game license.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    I have to wonder... why bother making a video like this now, of all times? Robotech has literally never been less relevant. All the franchise has had going for it for years has been the lawsuits it's involved in. The last serious effort to continue the Robotech series was the Shadow Chronicles OVA that ended up canceled after just one episode... and that was eleven years ago. What little they've done since doesn't even bear mentioning.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Now there's a Gundam show worthy of interest. Ditto. IMO, Gundam Build Fighters and Gundam Build Divers are expressions of what's wrong with the Gundam franchise... they're exactly the sort of teaspoon-shallow, blatant toy commercial anime series that Yoshiyuki Tomino fought tooth and nail to prevent the original Mobile Suit Gundam from being turned into. It's not a story, it's a collection of 24 minute advertisements for MSV Gunpla liberally garnished with in-jokes.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Given that Zentradi is arguably a dialect of the Protoculture language, it seems unlikely... the two languages don't sound anything like. I wonder if it's the influence of the personnel who ended up possessed by the Protodeviln... Ivano Gunther and Cpt. Autolmauer, both of whom have German-sounding names.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Mobile Suit Gundam: the Origin was a decent-enough manga series, though I felt its attempt to mix character art in the retro 70's art style of the original Mobile Suit Gundam anime with more detailed modern-styled mecha action sequences looked jarring and made the characters feel out of place at times. Where Gundam: the Origin and Macross the First differed was that Origin stuck to a regular release schedule in serialization that kept the audience engaged. First had delay after delay because it was always taking a backseat to Mikimoto's other projects like Mobile Suit Gundam: Ecole du Ciel, so the persistent delays hamstrung its ability to gain a following once it moved from Macross Ace to other publications. The reason I suspect it wouldn't do so hot in the US and abroad is that even a "sure thing" title like Gundam: the Origin tanked in the original attempt to bring it over.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    It's still pretty niche, and let's not forget that Latin America tends to be Robotech territory... which isn't exactly a ringing endorsement of taste or sense. Even before then, really... the Robotech series had already worn out its welcome as early as 1992, with hobby press from the period leading up to Macross II: Lovers Again's release being not at all shy about taking shots at Robotech. Hard to say... but I'd bet against Netflix. They seem to be more interested in pursuing development of their own original anime productions, like their partnership with Tsutomu Nihei that's led to them doing Knights of Sidonia and now a Blame! movie. Hulu's mostly picking up older shows, with a few Bandai simulcasts. Crunchyroll and/or FUNimation would seem the logical choice. Macross does have a past business relationship with Shogakukan, who own Viz Media... one of the bigger manga publishers in the US.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    I'd expect demand for Macross manga to wax and wane in sync with the releases of Macross animated features. Both Macross Frontier and Macross Delta had enough momentum to sustain a fair number of manga titles, light novels, and video games. Gundam proved that the market would sustain a reboot manga like that with Gundam: the Origin. I suspect the problem in Macross the First's case was simply that Mikimoto-sensei being overcommitted kept the releases too far apart to build up a strong following. Outside Japan? I dunno... there is a decently large "underground" Macross fandom despite the franchise's No Export For You status but I'm not sure it'd be enough to make the manga a bestseller. After all, the Americanized derivative is a virtual nonentity even in the already niche anime market in the US.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    It's been a dog's age since the last time I played Macross M3, but I think that's the Prime Minister of the New UN Government c.2030.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    We know relatively little about the actual structure of the Earth Unification Government prior to the First Space War, apart from the fact that the head of state was a prime minister. It's not clear if the government was a bicameral or unicameral parliament, but considering that the final United Nations general assembly before its dissolution served as the provisional UN Gov't, the structure may be something like the European Union parliament's technically-bicameral setup with the "lower house" being the parliament, the "upper house" being a rotating council, and executive power resting with the cabinet ministers and PM. The New UN Government c.2050 was likened to the European Union by Kawamori in his Otona Anime #9 interview, so there may be something to the above if the reconstruction of the government was according to its original constitution/charter after the First Space War ended. General Hayase and his fellows were basically the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the Earth UN Forces, so presumably they're answerable to the Unification Government's current Minister for Defense1 or its Prime Minister2. By the time Macross Delta is set, the New UN Government had moved from being a strong central authority to being a more decentralized central government like the European Union3, with the big dust-up ("Second Unification War" c.2050-2051) being a symptom of a gradual devolution of more authority to the individual local governments. One consequence of this and the reorganization the New UN Forces underwent to accommodate decentralization, is that the New UN Government isn't quite so ready to intervene in local conflicts between its member fleets/worlds the way it did back during the 2040s. The local governments in the Brisingr globular cluster and their mutual economic/defense pact (the so-called Brisingr Alliance) seem to have been relying pretty damn heavily on Xaos to protect them since Xaos was much more resistant4 to Var syndrome thanks to Walkure and their own troops are much more susceptible thanks to years of consuming tainted foodstuffs exported by Windermere's government. Their own poor lookout, really, since Xaos turned out to be pretty freaking awful at going it on their own. They ought to have been leaning on Xaos to work in partnership with their local New UN Forces to shield them from Var outbreaks, since they could beat the Aerial Knights using sheer weight of numbers without the Song of the Wind mind controlling them. 1. Assuming that's what the office is called... Defense Minister, Minister for Defense, Secretary of Defense, Minister for the National Defense... there are a lot of potential variants here. There's a fair case for "Secretary of Enuff Dakka" considering how over-the-top Earth's defenses are c.2040. 2. Pseudo-canon/expanded universe material would make that Prime Minister Robert A. Rhysling for that time period. ARMD-14 would later be named in his honor. One has to wonder if Bruno J. Global ever became Prime Minister, since an aircraft carrier was named in his honor (Uraga-class, CV-339 Bruno J. Gloval) in addition to having a Macross-class ship (SDFN-04 General Bruno J. Global) named in his honor for his tenure as C-in-C for the (New) UN Spacy following the First Space War. 3. The aforementioned comparison drawn by Kawamori in Otona Anime #9. 4. As we see in Macross Delta proper with Hayate, even having a fold receptor factor doesn't make you properly immune... it just means it takes a lot more exposure to biological fold waves to go Var.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Wasn't the lagging sales largely to do with the fact that it was a dog's age between releases?
  12. Seto Kaiba
    The names are carried over from Kawamori's Air Cavalry Chronicles series concept, where they were the names of the ZaiBach Empire transformable fighters. Beyond that, I'm not sure... I only took half of one semester of German in college, and that was because my academic advisor screwed up some paperwork. Macross Chronicle romanizes their names as Elgarsoln, Panzersoln, and Zaubergern. There's some recognizable German roots there, like Panzer being "Armor" and Zauber being "Magic", but the rest... I have no idea, and neither does Google Translate. I can ask some friends of mine who work for ZF Friedrichschafen later this week. Not that I'm aware... the Blue Rhinoceros team officers who are running the show in the Macross 7 PLUS episode "Spiritia Dreaming" having vaguely German names (Ivano Gunther and Autolmauer), though the other two named characters from the colony don't (Chelsea Scarlett and Irina Hayakawa).
  13. Seto Kaiba
    I don't normally do Kickstarters... but this is SORELY tempting. What're we looking at in terms of backer rewards on top of the media itself?
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Hot damn, that is some fine news indeed.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    I've worked fairly closely with several Japanese suppliers since 2012, and I honestly don't recall ever having seen anything like that in a public setting on the occasions I visited Japan on business. That kind of thing was only ever a fixture of office gossip, usually involving some coworker who's gone to the pub and gotten sexually harassed by a [friend/lover/colleague/stranger] who'd gotten so pickled they could probably breathe fire... not as a welcome thing. Depends what you're reading/watching, but yeah... in general you'll see romances focusing on the majority (heterosexual) appeal. There have been a few works that've been fairly prominent about homosexual characters, though that's a mixed bag. It's definitely the case that there are far more prominent stories about lesbian romances than gay ones, probably because the appeal of that is a good deal broader. Macross has never been especially shy about pushing anvilicious Aesops though, and has been big about "love conquers all", so I wouldn't be entirely surprised if the franchise eventually took a stab at a homosexual romance plot, even if it had to do it in a manga or light novel. (Bobby Margot's popularity on Macross Frontier seems to have at least opened the door for more regular inclusion of gay characters, like Macross R's Anri Mahlberg or Macross Delta's implied Messer-Keith-Roid triangle.) Ranka did mistake Alto for a girl when they first met... maybe that's part of the appeal for her? (Come to that, Michael also mistook Alto for a girl when they first met... and he's been calling him "princess" ever since. Michael's case is at least more understandable since Alto was dressed as a girl at the time, IIRC.) Arguably because Makina and Reina's involvement in the actual series barely progresses beyond the level of "they exist"... and about half of the minimal characterization they get is devoted to ensuring nobody misses that they're a lesbian couple. I'm not sure it's necessarily that the entertainment industry there is unwilling to move beyond it as a fetish as much as it is that there's not really the same kind of hue and cry for representation that the west has in its media lately. Yuri media has a decent-sized following, though part of that might be a broader appeal because, to guys, "girl on girl is hot" even if it's a serious romance where guy on guy has a more limited audience. (Of those I've seen, I confess I'm not sure which was stranger... the titular character of Miyuki-chan in Wonderland being so deep in the closet she's finding Christmas presents, or One Piece's surreal, Rocky Horror-inspired stab at a transgender character.)
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Coming soon, to the "No, we don't know what we were thinking either" clearance shelf at your local game store! Also... "Japanime"? Really. That's the best name they could come up with? From what little I've seen Palladium's staff say on the subject of sales, the "manga size" hurt sales because the books were harder to prop open or search through and several and the Masters Saga sourcebook didn't sell particularly well in general... leading to a late reprint in full size only after it sold out of manga size inventory. It is a Palladium product, after all. The only feedback Palladium seems to have honored was Harmony Gold's insistence that they use official spec this time. That led to them copy-pasting from Macross sites for the Macross Saga book, accidentally resulting in the inclusion of a few things that the VF-1 didn't actually have in Robotech. That's a big part of Palladium's business problem... they haven't bothered to update their system or the layout of their products in over three decades. It was acceptable in the 80's, but these days it looks like they're turning these books out on the office copy machine. ... that might be the first positive review I've seen for the book, and I'm a regular at Palladium's own forums. It's basically Robotech 2.1: in the General Vicinity of the Sentinels because they weren't allowed to actually touch on the events of the Sentinels arc proper by HG, who are taking the attitude that it's something that could get rewritten at any moment to accommodate a future title. It got a better reception than the Genesis Pits book (a Make Your Own B-Movie Monster manual), but it still got torn into over not using the classic Sentinels art for legal reasons and using the Imai Files to pad things out. (There was also a good deal of carping over the lack of mentions of colonization, as in the comics there had been some noise about building colony ships, but inconsistent dialog makes it sound like they were build and then immediately mothballed as useless.)
  17. Seto Kaiba
    ... surely you jest. Never mind that Reina is shown feeling Makina up on at least one occasion, she's got a line in that jellyfish festival episode (9, IIRC?) that's pretty much a straightforward declaration that it's a night for getting laid and she's gonna get some. Now, I don't know what cultural norms are like on Zola (Reina's homeworld) or Ragna, but that's generally in "more than just a warm friendship" territory here on Earth. Japan's nowhere near as uptight about that kind of thing as America is. Homosexuality was more or less an accepted, and to a certain extent romanticized, cultural practice until the Meiji era and influx of western cultural values in the early 20th century. Some of Japan's most storied and romanticized historical figures were involved in socially-accepted homosexual relationships, and popular fiction in the country hasn't exactly swept that under the rug either. (Kawamori's Nobunaga the Fool even cold-opens on the incident at Honnou-ji, where Nobunaga and his attendant/lover Ranmaru die together... setting up the reincarnation romance plot that pervaded the series proper on no uncertain terms that Nobunaga and Ranmaru were lovers.1) They don't have quite the same obstacles to showing a homosexual couple that we have in America, where even progressive franchises like Star Trek spent decades flip-flopping on whether or not they were going to have a gay romance at any point.3 Not that I've seen. Japan and China both have some pretty aggressive ideas about personal space, and that kind of touching wouldn't be done casually... and especially not in front of others. 1. Mind you, Kawamori's particular anachronism stew establishes that Ranmaru Mori was a reincarnation of Jeanne d'Arc, so it's more like a bi reincarnation romance where Jeanne/Ranmaru/Jeanne's2 gender is a revolving door while Nobunaga stays male consistently. 2. This gets a bit confusing to explain... Jeanne d'Arc is reincarnated centuries later as Ranmaru Mori, then dies and is reincarnated again as Jeanne Kaguya d'Arc who adopts the alias Ranmaru Mori while dressing and living as a man in the household of Nobunaga Oda's reincarnation. 3. Star Trek first alluded to it, ironically, in an attempt by Gene Roddenberry to shoot down Kirk x Spock shippers in the novelization of Star Trek: the Motion Picture. Star Trek: the Next Generation's attempt to tackle it in "The Outcast" was shot down by casting over the objections of Frakes and others. Deep Space Nine toyed with the idea of Garak being gay and attracted to Bashir, but ultimately abandoned it and only touched on it via a taboo reincarnation romance in "Rejoined" (the reincarnation part is taboo, not the homosexuality). Voyager didn't touch it. Star Trek: First Contact was going to introduce an openly gay man as a bridge crew member (Lt. Hawk) but the writers ultimately ended up having to kill him off after being assimilated by the Borg. Enterprise's armory officer Malcolm Reed was supposed to be gay but the network backed down from that too. It wasn't until Discovery that they finally worked up the courage to do it, and they promptly killed off one half of the show's token gay couple in the mother of all mixed messages.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    We've had a fair few implied love triangles with at least one same-sex side in the last few shows, it wouldn't surprise me. Macross 7 had that one episode with the tabloid journalist trying to get the Gamlin x Basara shippers going. Macross Frontier had the Nanase's crush on Ranka and Ranka's borderline crush on Sheryl, a preemptively resolved Cathy-Ozma-Bobby love triangle, and what could've been implied as an Alto-Michael-Klan love triangle since the origin of Alto's nickname was later established to be that Michael had actually hit on Alto when Alto first joined Mihoshi Academy as a performing arts student (and was, at the time, dressed as a girl for a theater performance). Then, of course, Macross Delta had a rather more than implied Messer-Keith-Roid love triangle.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    As far as I'm aware, there is no difference in the development backstory for any of the VFs between the Macross Frontier TV and Movie versions. The VF-27 doesn't even have a Mechanic Sheet in the movie section of Macross Chronicle, it only got one for the Super Pack add-on. Courtesy of the liner notes from the sixth volume of the Macross Frontier Blu-ray release. Offhand, I think that remark is also corroborated by the Mechanic A-sheet for the VF-27 in Macross Chronicle's Macross Frontier TV grouping.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    The poses are unnatural-looking, and the gunpods have that weird Liefeldian thing going on where they look like someone realized they ought to be holding something only AFTER the art was finished and hastily added it in Photoshop.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Hey now, I haven't solved any dubious puzzle boxes... This almost isn't terrible as long as you don't look at Roy or that knockneed VF-1S in the background. Side effects may include nausea, headaches, insomnia, constipation, oily discharge, severe deja vu, stiffness in joints, blurred vision or temporary blindness, loss of life, diarrhea, thrombosis, and rectal bleeding.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    They got deleted... sparing our eyes the horror.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    I confess I'm not sure what the significance of the gender symbols is supposed to be... the Canaanite god Shahar was male, and so was his twin Shalim. There was, however, a Shahar ♂ in the YF-27's series of prototypes in addition to the Shahar ♀. The YF-27-3 Shahar ♂ was assigned to Maj. Brera Sterne of the Galaxy fleet 52nd Fighter Wing "Antares" platoon. It's implied to have a four-engine configuration, and it's noted that it was outfitted with an ISC despite its unstable engine output and has some lag in its control system. The YF-27-5 Shahar ♀ was assigned to Maris Stella, the Project Stella "cyber-grunt" prototype and was used for illegal combat data collection via black ops. It's a two-engine version which has no ISC, and thus is slower and has lower output than the YF-27-3, but it's better armed and a more stable aircraft overall. (It's hinted that this version was made to mislead people as to the level of capability of the final craft.)
  24. Seto Kaiba
    As I've seen it explained, the YF-29 Durandal belongs to a separate development program that was running in parallel to the YF-25 Prophecy program that Master File calls Project Triangler. It wasn't (intentionally) related to the YF-25, (YF-26,) or YF-27, though the production-intent YF-27/VF-27 is an aircraft completed using stolen development data from the YF-29 program. The YF-29's designation comes from its status as the new VF debuting on the 29th anniversary of the Macross franchise. The name is a nod to an existing tradition of giving VFs with design series numbers ending in "9" to be named for swords. The VF-19 series set the bar there pretty high by using Excalibur, a mythical sword, and riffing on that theme for special variants like the VF-19EF's "Caliburn" and VF-19ACTIVE's "Nothung". "Durandal" is a fitting name, as the mythical sword the name comes from was reputed to be the sharpest in existence and indestructible... per Kawamori, the YF-29 is the strongest VF in Macross. There may be a very subtle nod to Sheryl there, as she was shown to be fluent in French in the series and the mythical sword Durandal is the sword of a French paladin (Roland) in French epic literature (e.g. The Matter of France). The stories that make up the Arthurian mythos come to us from a number of different languages including Welsh, Latin, French, and German. As a result, there are no shortage of variant names and alternate spellings. "Percival" is only the most accepted English spelling. It's also been rendered as Perceval, Parsifal, Parzival, etc. It's possible they started with one of those. It's also possible that's just a typo... like what happened to the YF-27-5. "Shaher" is a nonsense pseudoword. The correct spelling, "Shahar", is a Hebrew word that was translated as "Lucifer" in the translation of the Book of Isaiah from Hebrew into Latin. Translating foreign words into katakana is a somewhat imprecise science due to differing rules of pronunciation between languages.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe the license expired and someone else got it, like Diamond Select? Not too long ago, I got a few of Diamond Select's Star Trek offerings (an ENT-A and ENT-B) and they're pretty darn good. I'd love to see someone tackle the unused Enterprise Season 5 NX-01 (Columbia-class in the EU).
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