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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    As big a mess as the TV series was, that'd be perfectly understandable. The official website is surprisingly low-key in its coverage of the movie. They have Movie sections added, but they're the exact same pages that were created for the series with zero new art. The Movie page itself is mostly Macross Modelers spots and PVs for Walkure CDs. All they've got for the movie art-wise appears to be a few promotional posters on the main page. Even the mecha page is IDENTICAL to the one for the TV series section from a year ago. This is, like was noted earlier, very much "Walkure World"... the Macross content is incidental at best. What's the over-under on a public apology from Kawamori for the disaster that is Delta?
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Given how consistently terrible the writing in Robotech is... coming down with Chuck Cunningham Syndrome and vanishing into the aether is probably the best possible fate that any holdover character from the original three shows could hope for. Having the writers just kind of forget they exist is a lot more dignified than, say, being killed offscreen and having it never even get mentioned1, stalking their ex and having affairs with married people2, being tortured into an invalid offscreen3, quitting the military because they had a miscarriage4, devolving into a kaiju that spouts one-liners5, getting killed by friendly fire and instantly forgotten6, or reduced to a "wow they suck" cameo7. 'course in the case of Max and Milia/Miriya in Robotech, there's like a 50/50 chance they're straight-up f*cking DEAD and the writers just never explicitly mentioned it, given that the two of them were on the SDF-3 when it got shot in half and were never likely to reappear anyway since they're Macross's most prolific characters and HG is terrified of lawsuits.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    The 9th, I think. EDIT: This coming Friday?
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Macross's creators seem pretty determined to avoid having Macross end up with the same kind of continuity lockout problem that Mobile Suit Gundam's Universal Century continuity has developed over the years. The main installments of the Macross metaseries after the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross - Macross 7, Frontier, and Delta - are all shows that were written as largely standalone stories to keep them accessible to viewers who were new to the franchise. With the stories having relatively few direct connections to other, older shows, any essential details from previous shows that couldn't be gracefully covered in the course of the story proper could easily be covered in that brief blurb before the OP, ensuring the new viewers had enough context to understand everything without requiring them to go back and see every other show first. It was the OVAs, the novels, the manga, and the video games that are more "for fans" in that they spend orders of magnitude more effort drawing connections between the various titles in the metaseries. They can get really deep into that at times, like Macross R tying the liberation of the Varauta colony in Macross 7 to the Vindirance campaign in the Macross VF-X2 game, Macross Dynamite 7, Macross Frontier, and the original series. Let's not speak of Metal Gear though. Even at its worst and most obtuse *coughDeltacough*, the Macross metaseries has never come anywhere close to the sort of deranged, tinfoil hat-wearing, caps lock-abusing, run-on sentence conspiracy theorist cr*p that Hideo Kojima thinks constitutes writing. Like one of Wile E. Coyote's tunnel paintings, all of the depth in the Metal Gear series is completely illusory because what passes for storytelling there is exposition dumps that read like a "Best of" of old Babelfish-translated Usenet forum posts on the New World Order and uses the word "nanomachines" like an effing comma. A refusal to explain anything in an intelligible fashion doesn't constitute complexity1. 1. Thank goodness for Metal Gear Rising: Revengence eh? The only installment in the franchise that was actually any fun, because it was fully cognizant of the fact that the writing in Metal Gear is the unfunniest joke and resolved to address it the only way it knew how... by abandoning any pretense of taking it seriously in favor of being a comically over-the-top spectacle and the spiritual lovechild of Sengoku Basara and Broforce.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, it's not a fair comparison from a hardware standpoint since the Wii U gamepad was little more than an elaborate remote display that could be used like an overpowered portable device provided you didn't stray too far from the console itself, where the Switch simply IS an overpowered portable device with a dock that turns it into a more traditional console and thus is placing a lot more burden on its Li+ battery. On the other hand, from a usability standpoint three hours is three hours unless you've got an external power source.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    There's not much of one, honestly. Mariafokina Barnrose was the de facto leader of the anti-government organization Vindirance in Macross VF-X2, but her entire schtick in the game was that she was a mysterious ace pilot so almost no personal details come out in the course of interactions with her. Under her leadership Vindirance is basically an anti-government group only in that they're opposed to Latence, the Earth-supremacist group inside the New UN Forces that strongly supported Earth's interference in the domestic affairs of colony worlds. The Ravens CO, Major Gilliam Angreat, is implied to have some previous history with her but no specifics are ever discussed. She's crazy well-informed, having access to classified intel at a level that even Gilliam (a federal NUNS Special Forces commander) didn't, and she's implied to have a network of allies and sympathizers inside the New UN Forces as well. She's such a capable ace pilot that she's able to beat Aegis Focker in his VF-19A with a VF-1S+ Valkyrie Plus, and once the Ravens become aware of Latence's planned coup d'etat against the New UN Government, she's the one who orchestrates the offensive against the hijacked Macross-13. Macross Chronicle offers a mention of in-universe rumors that "Mariafokina Barnrose" is an alias of Therese Mariafokina Formula Jenius, and that the reason Vindirance was such a successful organization was that it was being clandestinely supported by New UN Forces flag officers including her father Maximilian Jenius. The novelization of Macross Frontier indicates that, in the aftermath of Latence's defeat, the New UN Government created a regulatory bureau overseeing the VF-X Special Forces units called the Barnrose Organization. A man who tried to live his life according to Voltaire's "When You're Evil"... that's barely an exaggeration. This guy's a prick. He's the President and CEO of the Critical Path Corporation, an interstellar corporation that has close ties to both the New UN Forces and General Galaxy corporation and indulges heavily in black market arms sales and illegal weapons testing. Critical Path is known to have pioneered research into the applications of fold quartz, including bankrolling Dr. Mao Nome's 117th Research Fleet expedition to study the Vajra, and developed and sold weapons to anti-government groups including opposing forces like Latence and Vindirance. His official bio notes him to be an extremely intelligent fellow who was given special education from a very young age to enable him to take over his father's company and run its legitimate and black market interests. A top-notch pilot, artist, musician, and businessman who is rather amoral and doesn't regard human life as any obstacle to making a profit. At just nine years old, he placed first in the classical conductor division in the Earth Culture Preservation Festival in 2038, and was granted special admission to college, where he graduated in two years then did three years of flight school. He took over Critical Path at age 16 following his father's death in 2045, and has been evilly supporting Latence and Critical Path's black market arms deals ever since. He's responsible for the Jamming Sound system that Latence uses to paralyze Earth's defenses in the final stages of the game, and has a personal VF-17S. He's shot down and killed by the VF-X Ravens, though the Macross Frontier novelization implies that he was experimenting with cybernetics and the rather Ghost in the Shell-y idea of divorcing the consciousness from the physical body and survived his own death by uploading his mind into the network and exists as a disembodied data entity in the Macross Galaxy fleet. The same novels also indicate that the reason Ozma Lee got a dishonorable discharge from the New UN Spacy was because he took issue with Brando's interrogation of Ranka in the Board of Inquiry hearing about the loss of the 117th Research Fleet and beat the stuffing out of him.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    What @Lorindor said. I've always been mainly interested in RPGs and strategy games, or really anything that's heavily narrative-driven (e.g. stealth games like Dishonored or even the so-called "walking simulators" if the story's good). Nintendo's last few generations of console have all had fairly lousy third party developer support so they've been painfully platformer-heavy. That kinda left games like Pokemon, Fire Emblem, and Project X Zone as the main draw to their consoles for me. My friends and girlfriend get more use out of my Wii U than I ever did, since I mostly use Virtual Console and visual novels on my 3DS to get my kicks... how stuff like the Zero Escape trilogy1 slipped Nintendo's kid-friendly net I'll never know. I'm kind of hoping the lack of a really obviously terrible gimmick on the Nintendo Switch will provoke more support from third party devs and result in a more varied catalog, but I'm waiting for at least two or three titles up my alley before I actually jump. Right now, the only big draw for me is Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition and the vague promise of a 2018 Switch-exclusive Fire Emblem. (Be nice if we could get the remastered port of 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors and Virtue's Last Reward that the PS4 recently got.) For anyone who's got one, what's the battery life in actual usage like on the Switch? Once bitten, twice shy after the Wii U's gamepad battery. 1. 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors for the DS was a real slap in the face... was NOT expecting something with that much gory death and sexual innuendo on a Nintendo console. That the 3DS picked up both sequels, Virtue's Last Reward and Zero Time Dilemma was incredibly gratifying.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Probably, yeah... the Macross Delta animation staff reused a lot of CG assets from Macross Frontier and its movies for the series. That said, there was only really one case where the decision to reuse old assets was the island ship on Ragna where the Island Cluster-class 3D model was rescaled to be barely larger than the Macross Elysion, which looked incredibly awkward with the dome's ceiling being so low to the ground. We've seen via many Macross stories that a variable fighter design can expect a service lifespan of ~20 years before the New UN Forces (local or otherwise) get to seriously thinking about its replacement. The actual replacement process can take close to a decade as new fighters are gradually phased in though. Local New UN Forces in remote or under-funded regions of the galaxy are still going to be using the VF-171-II and VF-171-III Nightmare Plus as their main fighter into the 2070s while they wait for their own 5th Generation fighter design to enter mass production and reach a deployment level where it has effectively supplanted the VF-171. If you look to sources like Master File, the VF-25 was gradually being phased in to replace the VF-171 in the fleets that adopted it in 2065, and we know the VF-31 won't even be ready to be officially adopted by the Brisingr Alliance NUNS until 2069 or 2070 according to Kawamori. If he's going to introduce a 6th Generation Variable Fighter, Kawamori's going to have to jump the timeline forward to the mid-2090s or 2100s for the standard development cycle to have rendered the 5th Generation properly obsolete. My suspicion is the 5th Generation will actually end up lasting longer than average considering that it took twice as long to develop and represented a HUGE advance over the 4th Generation. My guess is it'll be 40-50 years before there's a 6th Generation. Without either starting over or jumping forward massively, the options for new fighters basically boil down to yet another regional 5th Generation VF or actually using the ones that they've already made. I'd really like to see the New UN Spacy using the VF-24, VF-25, and VF-31 as mass production fighters.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    I can see it now... The phone rings in Dr. Jan Neumann's office near the end of the workday. The caller ID says DYSON, ISAMU A. Fully ten minutes are spent on overdramatic pan shots across Jan's desk, capturing his increasing panic, with bombastic music and the sound of panicked heavy breathing in the background reaching a crescendo as he picks up the phone (a la Death Note's infamous potato chip scene). The call lasts less than five minutes, with Jan politely asking if he can put Isamu on hold for a moment. Cut to outside, a muffled but clearly terrified scream is heard clearly even through the closed windows, startling birds off of the windowsill and nearby trees. Fade out to later that night, as a clearly distressed Jan is breathing into a paper bag in the back of a company car driven by Shinsei security, having been foiled in his attempt to burn the office down to prevent Isamu from ever getting his hands on another VF-19. Roll credits.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    As a fun side note, Timothy Daldanton was the first of several "remember the new guy" characters established to be First Space War veterans who served under Vrlitwhai and adopted human names after integrating into Earth's culture under the New UN Government. Other entrants in that category include Macross Frontier's Richard Bilra and Naresuan from Macross the Ride. Timothy Daldanton had a long and highly successful career in the New UN Forces before quitting to become leader of the anti-government group Black Rainbow. He was a part of the military escort for the short-range emigrant fleet that settled Eden, he fought for the New UN Forces during the 2nd Defensive Battle of Macross City in 2030 against Zentradi terrorists, and commanded a much-celebrated New UN Spacy Special Forces unit attached to the Macross-3 fleet known as the Black Rays. He's also the one responsible for clueing the VF-X Ravens in to Latence's existence.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Sometime right about now, we're still actively pretending Gundam Build isn't just a commercial for ugly MSV gunpla kits thinly disguised as a boy-friendly version of Angelic Layer. And to think Yoshiyuki Tomino fought bitterly to prevent Mobile Suit Gundam from becoming one of those toy commercial robot anime... kind of puts me in the mind of this quote from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Hysterium: "My father would turn over in his grave if he saw me like this." Pseudolus: "Your father is alive." Hysterium: "Well... this will kill him."
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Mildly curious... is there anything announced for the Switch in the TRPG category yet? It was Fire Emblem: Awakening that really got me to use my 3DS, so I'm kind of waiting for something in the strategy category before I take the plunge on buying a Switch.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Just finished episode 31 of New Mobile Report Gundam Wing over lunch. I've been forcibly reminded of my original reaction to the series when I watched it for the first time... the unshakeable feeling that the writers had a complexity addiction. I'm barely halfway into it, and I have completely lost track of which side I'm supposed to be rooting for. Who were the bad guys? Is it the Alliance? OZ? Other OZ? The do-nothing stuffed shirts in the Romefeller Foundation? All five Gundam pilots? The five scientists who created the Gundams and trained them? It's like watching a slow-motion game of pass the parcel where the parcel is a villain ball. And I KNOW that isn't all the factions who'll poke their oar into this one by the end... there's still White Fang, the Bartons and the Marimaia faction, the Preventers... I really, REALLY want to see an Abridged version of this where Heero is voiced by the guy who does Alucard for TFS's Hellsing Ultimate Abridged. "HEERO! COME AND KILL MEEEEE!" "B*TCH I MIGHT!".
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Safe bet they're not... the Robotech franchise never had many women in its fanbase from the word "go", considering mecha wasn't exactly a genre with a strong female following to begin with and its middle installment's main character was a misogynist's caricature of strong women. Probably didn't help any that Macek subsequently chickified the few surviving female characters in Sentinels1, and a host of authors from the comics and novels took that as Macek starting as he meant to go on.2 One of the few nice things I can actually say about this comic is that it isn't nearly as abusive of its female cast as most other Robotech works are. The female cast in Titan's Robotech are only badly drawn and awkwardly scripted. 1. Like Misa/Lisa being Demoted to Extra after her wedding to Rick and eventually ending up on the receiving end of a "get back in the kitchen" courtesy of Macek and Yune to address a plot hole in the animated series by letting Rick take over the Expeditionary Forces. Milia/Miriya caught a nasty case of Chuck Cunningham syndrome and straight up vanished from the story most of the time. Every other female character was there simply to be someone's love interest or wife. 2. I have neither forgiven nor forgotten the Waltrips for taking the already butchered Robotech version of Minmay and apparently deciding she wasn't unlikeable enough already, gave her a massive boob job, and turned her into an obsessed stalker and then a homewrecking village bicycle.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    At least since it's in comic book form this time, the audience won't be subjected to a noise uncannily close to a choir of cockatiels passing kidney stones the size of golf balls.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    That's where the Harmony Gold sycophants go... so, again, not really the best barometer of how fans actually regard the comic because unfavorable opinions are literally VERBOTEN on HG's own official site. You forgot the best part! She's going to sing, all right... and because it's Robotech, they'll have to use the her repertoire from Robotech's animated series. She won't be taking the stage to something dignified like Do You Remember Love? or Love Drifts Away... this bullshit tryhard comic is going to go completely to pieces with her singing Stage Fright or My Time to be a Star. It's going to be hilariously out of place in the story they've created... like having the xenomorphs in Aliens drop everything and spend five minutes doing the Macarena while Hicks and co. try to escape the colony.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    That there are a few out there saying they love it doesn't make my statement untrue though... the few surviving Robotech boards have been virtual ghost towns for over a decade, populated by only the most devoted, die-hard Robotech fans. You know, the kind of complete nutters who'd declare Harmony Gold were set to dethrone Hershey and Mars and become the leading chocolatiers in the world if Tommy Yune sold them an old Whitman's Sampler box full of dog turds as long as he first scribbled "ROBOTECH" on the box and told them it was Carl Macek's vision. The official Robotech boards in particular are a terrible barometer of the fandom's actual opinion... they're not just a ghost town haunted by a few sycophants, they ended up that way because mods there only permit users to post gushing, effusive praise of Robotech products. The rather more populous and active Robotech Facebook groups are a better indicator of how the comics are perceived by fans. On those, the vast majority of fans make no secret of finding Titan Comics' Robotech cringeworthy at best. Very few of them will actually admit to buying it, and the few well-known habitual HG brown-nosers are struggling to find something nice to say about it in the face of overwhelmingly negative reactions to it. Most topics posted about it are the same as the posts in this thread: "Gather round! Gather round! Let's all look at the freak!" every time a few pages from the latest issue are released.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Now, I'm no art major... but I'm pretty sure the only artistic movement this should be filed under is "bowel". That's a fairly grave insult to reality, which is consistently better-written than this shabby mess. This comic is so poorly composed it's more Misère-en-scène than mise-en-scène. I don't mean to say it's dreadful, but I'm pretty sure the cenobites would consider it an aperitif. From the reactions I've seen on various Robotech Facebook groups, it's not all that palatable for the hardcore Robotech fans either. Most seem to find the art style offensively off-putting, and even the most devoted and vocal Harmony Gold kiss-asses have been seen struggling to find anything nice to say about it. Sure, there are some people buying it... but it seems like an awful lot of them are buying it out of a morbid sense of obligation to the dying Robotech franchise than because they actually like it.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Does trying to strong-arm Dr. Neumann into illegally selling him a federal New UN Forces spec VF-19 under the table one piece at a time sound like mellowing to you? The New UN Forces kicked the man upstairs so he'd have fewer opportunities to cause trouble, FFS.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, those Japanese blu-rays are NOT cheap. Even when collected into box sets, Macross is averaging about $63.50 a disc.... at least Delta was only two cour, Macross 7 was almost a grand once shipping was factored in. Crunchyroll has it, IIRC.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    I don't recall him ever mentioning a Siegfried Platoon.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Are we talking actual cruising speed, or just maximum sustainable speed in level flight? The VF-19's faster in terms of maximum sustainable level flight speed at 10km, mostly because it's somewhat more streamlined than the VF-25. The VF-25 is going to be more efficient, and probably also have a faster cruising speed than the VF-19 thanks to the more advanced engines.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Somehow, I'd imagine having a highly capable, professional soldier like Isamu would probably take one look at Ernest Johnson and ask "You're so BAD at this! Why are you here?"
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Hayate's "Immelmann Dance" basically got forgotten after about episode 6, and he only really used it like twice. Once in that borrowed VF-171 and once when he took Freyja out in his new VF-31J when Messer came after him and threatened to shoot his ass down. Also, bioroid? Someone's got a bad case of Southern Cross. That's a terrible illness, we hope you make a speedy recovery by watching a mecha series that's actually good. Let's see... Mazinkaizer SKL has several gun kata sequences lifted right out of Equilibrium, which show up whenever Ryou has control of the SKL. (Made slightly goofy by the realization that he's miming that crap in the cockpit with a pair of arcade console light guns.) Lockon Stratos indulges in some gun kata-esque combat shenanigans when he's forced into close quarter combat in Gundam 00 since his fallback weapon for that sniper rifle was a matched pair of GN beam pistols on both of his Gundams. Macross II: Lovers Again had a brief sequence that was up that alley when Cpt. Nex upgrades to the Metal Siren during the last big space battle of the OVA. He starts out using a single gunpod but unlimbers the second shortly thereafter. It's a pretty short sequence tho. I'm trying to recall if there are any cases of the VF-22 using both gunpods at once in the Macross 7 series. Full Metal Panic! has some occasional sequences like that on the part of the real top-flight AS pilots, though I think the only one who goes two-handing is Mao and only when she's doing mecha paintball against Tessa in the first season. Most of their mecha combat is more acrobatic or actual mecha kung-fu tho. Stella, Sting, and Auel do some straight-up gun kata in Gundam SEED Destiny during their theft of the prototypes, but they don't do it in a mobile suit. Does Father Tres in Trinity Blood count? He's not doing it IN a mecha, but he IS a mecha... well, an android. ... I was thinking it, but I couldn't bring myself to actually say it. In other news, water is wet and the sun rises in the east. For these and other obvious facts, please like and subscribe. Video shows as unavailable in the US?
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Delta's dogfight scenes are only crap because they spend the whole goddamn budget on Walkure. A more balanced show is going to have better dogfights.
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