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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Is it linked on that Twitter? I searched the usual suspects and came up dry. (on a filtered VPN at the mo') ... in all fairness, this feels a bit like the pot calling the kettle black. Macross Delta had the entirety of its antagonist faction, save one character, given over to effeminate, fancifully-dressed prettyboy dandies following yaoi and reverse harem tropes so hard they might as well be the Darwent Castle Host Club, two of whom formed two sides of an strongly implied gay love triangle and one of whom has to outright invoke "have I mentioned I'm straight today?". There's no friggin way that wasn't bait for the fujoshi.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Second movie? I was given to understand by those who'd seen it that this was clearly a One-and-Done affair...
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Probably because doing a compilation movie is significantly cheaper than an all-new film, allowing them to do the movie faster with less money and studio manpower. Japanese audiences are already well-accustomed to compilation movies with a good deal less new footage than Macross Delta: Passionate Walkure has, so they're not likely to care overmuch about not getting an all-original anime film. The fact that the Macross Delta series itself wasn't really all that remarkable, and served mainly as a vehicle to launch Walkure, would've made it unlikely that they'd do an all-original movie to riff on a barely-there story for the sake of a two-hour AMV. With a new Macross series already under development, a compilation movie was probably a smart way to go with the remaining manpower.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    In this context, a compilation movie is a movie made by cutting together existing footage from a TV series or OVA to retell the story of the series in a feature film's 2 hour runtime. There will usually be new footage made for the film, but the ratio of new to reused footage is usually low. The Mobile Suit Gundam and Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam movie trilogies are good examples of this, as are the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex movies. Macross movies do sometimes reuse footage from the series (e.g. Macross Frontier's duology), but the ratio of new to reused footage has always been astonishingly high. Macross Delta's movie is reportedly much closer to a traditional compilation movie, in that half or more is reused footage from the series.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Hey, if they wanna mix it up I ain't gonna stand in their way. Several different classic Zentradi mecha have brief cameos in the Macross the Ride light novel... it's apparently fairly common for Regults to compete in the Ostrich class races that are popular with the Vanquish League's Zentradi fans. (Think a GERWALK mode footrace and you won't be far wrong.) Angers 672 absconds with a Queadluun-Rau briefly at a race venue, prompting a brief but furious dogfight. SMS's Queadluun-Rhea/56 battle suits also show up briefly. The Queadluun-Alma's more the hideous, mutant lovechild of the Feios Valkyrie (itself the hideous mutant lovechild of a VF-11A and Queadluun-Rau) and a Queadluun-Rhea (the New UN Forces own improved Queadluun-Rau). The result is as terrifyingly deadly as it is ugly.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    If you thought the Macross Delta TV series was good, yes. If not, no. Word from Japan is that Macross Delta: Passionate Walkure is much closer to being a traditional compilation movie than previous Macross films.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    It's also possible Kawamori's getting his chance to do the project he was thinking about when they made Delta... one that doesn't have a singer, and focuses instead on competing flight demonstration teams.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    As I've had to point out to a few friends who were disappointed by Macross Delta: Passionate Walkure, while it's technically true that compression makes diamonds... it's much more common for compression to simply make garbage more compact. Thus far, nobody has mentioned anything to me regarding a trailer at the end of the movie like the one at the end of Macross Frontier: the False Songstress.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Don't thank me, I'm just the messenger. All told, the impression my friends gave me was that Macross Delta: Passionate Walkure is indeed better than the Macross Delta TV series... principally because it's shorter and thus they're forced to make more efficient use of time. Eh, I think there's something to be said for Mirage's Sv-262Ba.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Based on feedback from friends of mine in Japan, since I couldn't wrangle a trip over there to see it this year... whether the film is "Good" or "Bad" would be entirely contingent on whether or not you thought the TV series was good or bad because apparently in a break from Macross tradition the film is basically just a more compact version of the series that doesn't change much.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Nonsense, everyone loves gravy in their fruit salad. I will most definitely be taking a pass on this one when Bandai puts it out. I collect beautiful Valkyries... not ugly ones. It should say something that, despite my antipathy for the story, two VF-31s have already landed on my shelves and a third is en route.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Reports from those who've seen it already suggest the film is over 50% recycled footage from the TV series, and I'd expect at least half the non-recycled footage to be new Walkure concerts, so on balance we're looking at maybe 20min of new animation that isn't specifically Walkure singing. I'd guess the Armored Pack is probably dusted off for the final battle only, like when Alto's VF-25F got its Armored Pack for the final push in Macross Frontier's 25th episode and only had it on for like 3 minutes. I do have to admit that, considering the VF-31 itself is made mostly from "off the shelf" parts that were developed for other VFs, having an Armored Pack that is similarly built is hardly indefensible, and arguably just an example of consistent design... even if it is ugly.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    I'd say it's greatest weapon would be that it looks like exactly what it is... a bunch of old animation assets haphazardly jammed together into piece of junkyard vomit. They're clearly hoping that their enemies will mistake it for space junk or become ill looking at something so ungraceful. Weapons-wise, this looks pretty straightforward... entirely because this is like 80% reused models from Macross Frontier. The packs seem to cover the internal ordnance bays and Bifors CIMM-3B micro-missile launchers in the engine nacelles/legs, but the 4 Mauler ROV-127E 12.7mm anti-aircraft beam machine guns and Ramington LM-25s 25mm rapid-fire railguns are still exposed. The new weapons appear to be a kludge of bits taken from the APS-25A/MF25 Armored Pack and TW1 Tornado Pack, the VF-171EX Nightmare Plus, and Destroid Cheyenne II. Specifically, the leg and torso packs appear to be slightly modified versions of the APS-25A's leg packs with the Ramington CIWS micro-missile launchers, same with the upper torso armor. The ordnance container has been replaced with a twin beam cannon that looks like someone put a cooling shroud on the TW1's TW1-HPC/MF25 heavy quantum beam cannon turret. It probably will turn out to be exactly that. The guns on the arms are clearly reuses of the 30mm 6-barrel GE rotary cannons from the Cheyenne II destroid, something borrowed from that unused-in-the-final-film Konig Monster variant which was used in the Macross Frontier: Sayonara no Tsubasa trailer at the end of Macross Frontier: Istuwari no Utahime. The bits on the sides of the booster rocks look like someone took the Sentinel AVM-11R long-range missile container from the Nightmare Plus and just added another chamber to it and painted it white. It looks like there's a pair of micromissile ports inboard of each of those. All in all, it's an ugly, clunky mess that looks like the output of a bored designer being told that he's got to have a new mecha for the movie to make Bandai happy and threw it together in a single night's coffee-fueled binge of jamming existing art assets together regardless of whether they look like they belong.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    They've finally driven him mad?
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Both my parents are Trekkies, though mercifully Klingon isn't one of the languages I speak. I had classes in real-world languages that are almost as useless, like Imperial Roman dialect Latin. None of that soft vowel Church Latin nonsense. Isn't it always? So, this one's got a bit of a story to it... Japanese military terminology is a bit on the old-fashioned side, as many of the country's modern military traditions are borrowed from western allies. This particular tradition was quite old before modern navies existed though, and actually shares an origin with the tradition of having the ship's captain have golden laurel leaves on his cap. Specifically, this is a tradition rooted in the Imperial Roman navy. A patrician (nobleman) who had overall command of a vessel was called a Magister Navis, or the "Ship's Master", and as a badge of his rank was entitled to wear laurels. Of course, as a good chunk of Europe had a massive boner for anything that smacked of the good old days of the Roman Empire, calling the commanding officer of a ship the Ship's Master or, later, "shipmaster" or just "master" became a well-entrenched naval tradition. The term wasn't solely a military one either, though its military usage persisted because it wasn't actually very common for the commanding officer of a ship to be a full naval Captain unless the ship was a large, rated ship with more than twenty guns. Movie buffs will recognize Master and Commander, a title related to this that referred to an officer who commanded a ship too large for a Lieutenant, but too small to rate a proper Captain and for which the commanding officer was trained in navigation. When the Convention of Kanegawa ended Japan's policy of isolationism by threat of force in 1854, many of these military traditions were picked up by cultural osmosis as Japan geared up to build a modern naval force of its own. So, 艦長 (Kanchou, lit. "Warship Leader") came into use as a title for the commanding officer of a warship without respect to an individual's actual rank. It's essentially the equivalent of an English "Shipmaster". Likewise, 提督 (Teitoku) is not a rank, but rather a title for the commander-in-chief of a particular force. Sometimes translated Captain General, the kanji's meaning is more like "Strategy Director". I like to translate this one as Fleetmaster, rather than Admiral. EDIT: Essentially, part of it is simply tradition... and part of it may be that they are canonically speaking English, and everyone knows what a mess Captain vs. Captain vs. Captain can be when all those have different meanings. Max's actual title is 船団長 (Sendanchou, lit. "Fleet Leader"), presumably because his rank is too low to merit being referred to as a full Fleetmaster. As a fun nested side note, because there are multiple points in this one: The fleetmaster in Macross Frontier's animated versions is not named Perry, his name is Pelliot, possibly a nod to explorer Paul Pelliot. Commodore Matthew Perry's name is spelled differently from his. His name in the novelization is Jean-Luc Tarkovsky, possibly a nod to Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky (and probably Jean-Luc Picard). In the novels, he is only the commanding officer for the NMCV-25 Battle Frontier, the fleetmaster is a General by the name of Kelvin Backflight. His actual military rank is Brigadier General. Yes, Bruno J. Global's rank at the start of Super Dimension Fortress Macross and Macross: Do You Remember Love? is Brigadier General. Max is indeed a Colonel in Macross 7... and every Macross 7 sidestory that involves an evil/corrupt New UN Forces officer will always have the big bad be a fellow Colonel so Max can't simply take them to task on rank alone.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    All in all, Star Trek: Discovery is REALLY feeling like a bad fanfic these days. I used to think its biggest problem was that it was trying very hard to be an action series instead of the contemplating science fiction that previous shows have been. This Mirror Universe arc definitely disabused me of that notion. Discovery would have been an eminently salvageable series if it had decent writers.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    ... ... ... OK, so now I'm left wondering what you actually HAVE read or seen. Even in Macross, the Zentradi were only really major players in Super Dimension Fortress Macross's story and the Macross: Do You Remember Love? adaptation of same. Macross II: Lovers Again was the only animated feature to treat them as the recurring menace they canonically are in the ongoing continuity. Zentradi stories are mostly confined to the no-export-for-you no-subtitles-for-you things like video games and the light novels. Robotech made them even less relevant, since in that version they only had the one main fleet, not thousands, and it was entirely destroyed in Ep27 instead of losing only about 1/3 of its forces. The New Generation indicated the Zentradi were functionally extinct c.2042, and via Prelude they might now be truly extinct c.2044, with Miriya being the last living example (if she wasn't killed offscreen during the attack on the SDF-3). Their presence in the comics was minimal, almost a bit part, and the novels made it an actual bit part.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    ... so you skipped basically everything? Not a strategy I disapprove of, mind, since it avoided exposure to worst of the absolutely sh*t-awful material in Robotech. The stuff I referenced was predominantly drawn from the Prelude comic, which spins off of the old Sentinels one.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Fun fact! The VF-11 was almost a combiner. You can see the early gattai version of it in the Shoji Kawamori Macross Design Works book. The main cockpit with the canards was going to be one part, and where the rear-facing laser cannon is was going to be a second cockpit for the larger second plane. None of which I am aware, it's a Sega Dreamcast game.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... even when they depicted the actual crash, it looked identical to the post-retrofit SDF-1 Macross from Super Dimension Fortress Macross. Kinda makes you wonder what they did to restore the ship in this version, besides possibly slap a new coat of paint on it and make it a little less corpse-y. One thing we can rely upon is that, as a Robotech property, whatever resolution the comic comes up with for its limited run is virtually guaranteed to be a cliched mess that'd send a real writer in search of the pepto-bismol. My guess would be that, as Harmony Gold has basically zero interest in what you'd call "continuity management", the Titan Comics Robotech comic will not be considered an official alternate timeline or anything like that. It'll probably fall into the same category as all the other comics that aren't directly tied into the Robotech animated continuity... namely, the unenviable status of "well, that's a thing that exists... but it's not part of Robotech proper". Titan's Robotech limited series is a pretty transparent "get something out to distract the fans from the lack of progress on Robotech's animated continuity" affair, now that it's become largely public knowledge that the Shadow Chronicles sequel is canceled and they had that disastrous Kickstarter flop with Robotech Academy and ended that with a ragequit.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    It's a very safe bet that this comic will not feature repeats of the stable time loop... for the simple, straightforward reason that this is a limited-run comic. The time loop thing is probably just a way for them to avoid having to discuss the Robotech Masters, Invid, etc. since they know that there's little to no money to be had in a comic adaptation of the latter sagas. Go back a couple pages to the teaser images that showed Roy and Adm. Hayes in his Halo knockoff body armor exploring the wrecked alien starship. They discovered that it was a ship from Earth full of dead humans literally almost right away. One of the first things they found was a computer that was still in working order, and which spoke to them in English. They also found the corpses of the entire bridge crew, complete with dog tags. (The comic implies, with all the subtlety of a half-brick to the skull, that the thing that prompted Hayes to swear Roy to secrecy was the discovery that the corpse he examined was his own daughter.) Maybe they'll break the stable time loop, but either way the series is reportedly not going on past the "Macross Saga".
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, Mythbusters did rather conclusively prove that it's possible to polish a turd... but in the final analysis all the polish in the world can't make it any less sh*t. That's what rational fans are looking at the Macross Delta: Gekijo no Walkure movie as: a superficial improvement to something fundamentally unpleasant. Considering Walkure was basically supposed to be carrying Macross Delta, it's still rather surprising that there's so little for the series. The lack of character development across the board is likely an explanation for it but it doesn't really diminish the impact of the sheer lack of fan material from the series. Even the characters of Walkure in the series don't seem to be popular enough to muster a decent volume of fanart.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    If you're going to drop acid, at least bring enough for the rest of the class.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Bah, practice your foreign languages petaQ! The guide I linked to does have a visual translation of most of the standard menus from the Gefion, the Gefion's hangar deck, the Hunter's Guild, and the standard City menus. Once you unlock your first Super Pack and discover the super moves, it becomes a bit less onerous... especially when you get the Double Strike Pack for the VF-1 and realize you basically have a Valkyrie that can do the kamehameha now. The Itano circuses from the VF-0's Ghost Booster and the VF-1's Super Pack are pretty nice too, tho. (Seriously. Goku would be proud.) If I had a penny for every case of a HUD saying "ROCK ON"... and who could forget the TV tagline about Ranka from the Frontier TV series: "Images in Dairy Life". It really is helpful that things like liner notes started spelling this nonsense out in English for us... tho it did feel like it added some seriously unnecessary punctuation in the names of the Aerial Knights. Yeah, Boquomouxy isn't likely to be topped anytime soon as "most absurd proper noun". (That's the factory satellite that makes the Quel Quallie theatre scout pod.) Do give his blog a look, he's working piecemeal on several novels at once right now including the ones for Macross Delta and Do You Remember Love?.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Word.
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