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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Hmm... Gladiator II could be a very interesting film indeed. I remember my Latin teacher had a lot of fun picking the historical inaccuracies (and accurate moments) in the original to pieces in class.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    To be fair, that's actually been pretty normal UC-era design practice for decades now. Especially in side stories. Build Fighters just stopped did away with any remaining pretense that it wasn't purely a tactic to sell the same kit to fans multiple times. Still... this VR movie seems like a real unnecessary addition to the Universal Century. I can only imagine how stilted it's going to be because of all the concessions it'll have to make to VR headsets.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    As of the most recent Macross title - the movie Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!! - the YF-29 remains The Strongest Valkyrie as of 2068. It's actually referred to in those terms ("the strongest Valkyrie") in the official coverage of the movie. Its thrust-to-weight ratio is actually 46.6755. When the Macross Frontier: the Wings of Goodbye movie was coming out, there was some inconsistent info with the specs but that's since been cleared up. Like the VF-27, it's quite a bit heavier than the usual Valkyrie thanks to its large size and its four engines. It's actually higher than that... 53.0847. It may only have two engines, but thanks to that and to being a technology demonstrator rather than a full combat-ready military Valkyrie its weight is quite low so even with those two FF-3001/FC2 engines it's more get-up-and-go than practically any other Valkyrie. It lacks any secondary weapons besides the monitor turret-mounted beam guns and assault knife. Nope, it doesn't have that. It has a system called the Fold Dimensional Resonance system, which is actually a better/more advanced version of the Fold Wave System that was designed to allow the YF-30 to traverse fold faults. Finding a way to traverse fold faults was the private obsession of Bilra Transport Co. (and SMS) owner Richard Bilra, and he funded research into new technologies that might achieve that aim. The Fold Dimensional Resonance system was the culmination of that research, performing the same basic functions as the Fold Wave System on the YF-29 while also allowing the YF-30 to break through extremely severe fold faults. The one time a YF-30 is known to have fought a YF-29 (specifically the Special Forces use YF-29B Perceval), the YF-30 did win... but that's as much due to having a better pilot as it is to the specs of the aircraft itself.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    UC is the most environmentally responsible part of Gundam... they recycle everything. Characters, mobile suits, the plot... Gotta respect the laziness... screw painting them with new color schemes, let's just cast the new toys in matte silver and knock off for lunch. Seems like Anaheim'll sell Gundams to anyone these days.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    The movie Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Do You Remember Love? from 1984. Fans abbreviate that rather long title to just "DYRL" or "DYRL?". But that's more a topic for the Movies and TV Series section. 😉
  6. Seto Kaiba
    It's actually kind of odd that we haven't seen a planet of machine life in Macross, come to think of it... Unless you want to count the Dyaus on Uroboros, but they're not so much purely technological as organic technology. I guess the ancient Protoculture's obsession with bioengineering that they got from studying the Vajra never put them in the position of creating purely technological life.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Yuuuuup. They have more multiple choice pasts than the Joker at this point. Just in case folks thought Macross's fuzzy canon was frustrating.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    That would be far less stupid than any of the origins for the Borg that have shown up in Star Trek's (thankfully non-canonical) expanded universe. Thankfully, it's unlikely to come to pass given that the Macross Galaxy fleet was either massively crippled or outright destroyed.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    One of the beautiful things about how Macross has been handled over the years is that every main series is written to be accessible to new fans who've ever seen Macross before, with the minimum amount of prerequisite knowledge delivered in brief expository blurbs either before or during the episode where it becomes necessary. So starting from the very beginning is not required to enjoy each series on its own. Watching from the beginning will get you more context about how the world of Macross has grown and changed over time, but that's more of a nice bonus than something that you'd need to do to understand what's going on in any main series. Of course, the community here will be delighted to answer any questions you might have and help you on your journey. 😀
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Welcome! We don't really have an "introduce yourself" section here... but we hope you'll enjoy the community nevertheless. 😀
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Starting another new one... Dahlia in Bloom: Crafting a Fresh Start with Magical Tools. Other than the thought that it seems like it'll be another "isekai slow life" title, I honestly have no thoughts on this one. The first episode isn't bad by any means. It's not truly good either. What it is is so unremarkable it fails to register on the critical spectrum. It's like white noise. I just watched it all the way through and I swear I can barely remember any of the story... which is actually pretty surprising in its own right. This show is like one of those cryptids that gives people short-term memory loss so they don't remember seeing it after they've seen it. My Wife Has No Emotion seems like another... questionable... title. If the summary is to be believed, this is the story of a lonely man who buys a household robot to cook and clean for him and decides to get his leg over it for... reasons? The entry level salaryman grind is a lonely one, sure, but I'm calling mental health services if anyone who works for me tries starting a romance with a home appliance. At some point, someone involved in the development and production of this series should have asked some serious questions about whether the entire premise is sexist to the point of being actually pretty offensive if you think about it even a little.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Given how he reacts while tearing it out of his own skull, yeah... it probably wasn't pleasant. Definitely not worth the trouble, if what happened to the population of Macross Galaxy is any indication. Having the internet in your head sounds like a great idea until you realize it comes with giving the corporate government the ability to tweak your senses. They start out using it to tweak your perceptions of the world around you to make the grim cyberpunk urban jungle seem a little less grim and the unpalatable synthetic food taste better... but by the end you're a meat puppet and might end up with company in your own head if they decide to install a second personality to help make you a better soldier. If you die, they might go full Universal Soldier and repurpose and reprogram your grey matter in a new body to make more cyborg soldiers. (Macross the Ride and the Macross Frontier short stories from Macross Ace suggest Macross Galaxy is not a nice place to live and a cyborg is not a nice thing to be.)
  13. Seto Kaiba
    No, it's still there on the previous page... I can see it. The same implant and mind-control tech, really... The same implant that allows Brera to be controlled by the Galaxy Executives is also what allows him to pilot his VF-27 by thought alone... when he tears it out of his head at the end of The Wings of Goodbye he has to switch to using the backup manual controls in his VF-27's cockpit and eject the armored canopy cover so he can see out. It makes sense... after all, if you can already bidirectionally read the pilot's thoughts and send data back to them to allow them to "see" via the aircraft's sensors and so on, you can alos manipulate their senses for other purposes and potentially introduce thoughts through the same feedback system.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    We've got to be careful with our terms here. To call something "production ready" means that the design is complete, fully validated, and ready to enter mass production as-is with no further changes. A "production ready" YF-21 would yield a production VF-21 that was functionally indistinguishable from the prototype, similar to how the VF-19A is essentially identical to the final YF-19 prototype. Development of the YF-21 never reached that level, though. General Galaxy's design team took the data collected during the competitive testing phase of Project Super Nova and what they were able to learn from the loss of the YF-21-2 prototype during the Sharon Apple Incident and went back to the drawing board. They revised their next-generation VF's design extensively enough that the first prototype based on that revised design (YF-21-3 according to Master File) was issued a new design number and became YF-22 (YF-22-1) instead. It was that new YF-22 prototype that was developed to production readiness and eventually entered production and military service as the VF-22. What it takes to make the YF-21 production-ready are the changes that made it the YF-22 and then VF-22. The YF-21 didn't necessarily have the same design issues the YF-19 did. Granted, both did have issues with their thrust-to-weight ratios in excess of 10:1 putting extraordinary strain on the pilots, but the more conventional aerodynamics of the YF-21 and VF-22 make them more stable and less inclined to the kind of maneuverability control issues that plagued the YF-19 and VF-19. It also had the Inertia Vector Control System, which could to an extent protect the cockpit from high g-forces during maneuvers where it was active as a side effect of its operation. It didn't need the same kind of extensive redesign as the VF-19... and the extensive redesign it DID need it got when it made the jump from YF-21-2 to YF-22. If the issues with the Brainwave Control System that promped that redesign from YF-21 to YF-22 never existed, there wouldn't be any need for a later major rework of the design like the VF-19 got. What ultimately killed the YF-21/VF-22 in the official setting was that neither of its problems - the unreliability of the brainwave control system and the high price tag - were entirely fixable. That insane performance came with an equally insane price tag, and the brainwave control system's instability came from the fact that the human brain just isn't anything like as precise or stable as the concept required. Switching back to conventional controls was General Galaxy's only way to produce an aircraft pilots could actually rely on, but the development of a thought-based control system did continue in the form of the implant system that would be used on the VF-22HG Schwalbe Zwei and VF-27 Lucifer, which solved the reliability issues at the source by computerizing part of the pilot's brain and interfacing the Valkyrie's computer with that. Instead of the Valkyrie trying to accurately read the pilot's brainwaves through their skull, the implant could read the neural activity directly and connect to the flight control system over a more reliable short-ranged wireless data link.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Without any other changes to the story of Macross Plus? It'd just be the same VF-22 we got in Macross 7.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    For anyone interested, there's some relevant commentary on Kawamori's design process WRT the Macross Plus Valkyries and esp. the VF-11 and YF-19 in Macross Shoji Kawamori Designer's Note starting on pg284. The YF-19 initial/early design actually had a VF-11-like transformation and the wings stored on the back instead of on the hips (see pg294). By the "preparatory draft" iteration dated August '93, the wings had moved to the hips (see pg297) but it still had a relatively conventional VF-11-like transformation and appearance. Kawamori's commentary on page 359 suggests the transformation was redesigned twice to achieve the desired appearance.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Also starting The Ossan Newbie Adventurer, Trained to Death by the Most Powerful Party, Became Invincible. I am really REALLY missing the days when titles were short and punchy... that is a ****ing mouthful. OK, I thought the OP sounded familiar and kinda tokusatsu-y... that's Akira Kushida! He did the OPs for a bunch of different toku shows, and in robot anime he did the OPs for Xabungle and Godannar. This one might actually be pretty fun, if they can stick with the comedy. It's very much in the mold of Mashle and One Punch Man. I received two... haven't read either in full yet. Kinda ricocheting around the house doin' chores and setting up two more work PCs.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    There's been a few isekai titles now that've just ripped off parts of Overlord and made them their entire story. Skeleton Knight in Another World was probably the most blatant of the lot, basically just making its entire premise a copy of Overlord's Dark Warrior Momon arc. The Strongest Magician in the Demon Lord's Army was a Human seems to be borrowing a lot in little ways, the protagonist Ike being a skull-faced mage in an inhuman force who's actually human all along, hsa a big red orb on his chest, a serpent staff, hangs around with a succubus, etc. while governing a town of regular humans with his inhuman forces is basically just the immediate aftermath of Men of the Kingdom. The really blatant one is a nod to Overlord's infamous and awkward first episode grope, with Ike's commander inviting him to feel her up the same way Albedo did.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Starting Failure Frame: I Became the Strongest and Annihilated Everything with Low-Level Spells... which TBH I am getting pretty tired of shows where the title is a full sentence or a literal paragraph that explains the entire premise. Punch it up a bit guys, seriously. I think I made it all of about four minutes before I started having to pause the first episode because the characters are just so incredibly unlikeable. Making every single character except the protagonist a sh*thead is also not exactly a winning strategy. This one's clearly intended to be an underdog power fantasy like The Rising of the Shield Hero... but nowhere near as interesting.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Caught the end of Demon Slayer's Hashira Training arc... and it really impressive how consistently good this series has been. I've heard they plan to do a movie trilogy to wrap the story up, and I hope it's as lovingly animated as this season finale was because GOD DAMN. The trap Ubuyashiki lays for Muzan at the end of the season is so lovingly animated it's probably a strong contender for the most detailed, most technically impressive explosion ever animated. Just... wow. You can see individual snowflakes vaporize, that's how detailed they went with this. Just 15/10 gorgeous animation for the season finale. I'm actually a little impatient for the movies now, after a finale like that. Not finding a lot that's up my alley in Crunchyroll's Summer '24 simulcast season. Starting with The Strongest Magician in the Demon Lord's Army was a Human. Not impressed with the animation in this one. It's got that same problem Overlord had where characters (esp. monsters) switch back and forth between being relatively low detail CG models and traditional animation with all the grace and subtlety of a clutchless 8-to-1 downshift. Overlord at least kept it confined to background characters and monsters, in this one it's done for EVERYONE. It feels like it's taking an awful lot of pointers from Overlord too, come to think of it... and a couple overt references.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Y'know, thinking back on it, I think Macross 30 is the only time we've ever actually seen the YF/VF-19 use the wing root laser guns in Battroid mode.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Watching the new episode of Code Geass: Roze of the Recapture... and so far, it really is just a speedrun of the original Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion plot. It's beautifully animated. I really cannot stress enough that this is an A+ animation job... but the story is just so blatantly unoriginal and so lazy that it keeps pulling me right out of the story. They make only the most token effort to make the obvious replacement characters more than carbon copies of characters from the original. The Neo Britannians were hit especially hard with this, since they're a lot less nuanced and varied than the Britannians in the original were. Most of them are just axe crazy killers drunk on power without a reasonable authority figure anywhere in the chain of command to put a more human (or less insane) face on the regime and highlight that they're not monsters but people doing monstrous things as part of an oppressive system. Fanservice is cranked up a fair bit higher than the original too. You could count on the women in the original to mostly be sanely (if ornately) dressed... here, it's like the "when your parents walk in" half of the meme. Multiple resistance members are dressed in a manner that's more appropriate for going clubbing than fighting a war and one of the knights has an outfit I can only describe as looking like a low-budget "sexy drum major" Halloween costume.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    I don't think there's a specific purpose to it, other than accommodating the transformation designed for the YF-19. The leading edge of the wing root connects to the body at the same place the front of the intakes do, So having the wings attached to the hips just kind of worked out that way. To attach the wings to the backpack would have required someone usual stuff be done with the transformation to Battroid vecause of how the center torso is formed.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    That's right out... part of... ... is that the Jedi fundamentally can't form deeper relationships like that because their creed forbids personal attachments. As a result, ...
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Because the trilogy of Star Wars novels in which he appears as the main villain are held, by fans, to be some of the very finest writing the Star Wars Expanded Universe ever had. Having read them, I fear that says far more about the dismal quality of the Star Wars Expanded Universe than it does the quality of the so-called "Thrawn Trilogy". But yeah, zombies and mind control and Hollywood voodoo are not "Good people" powers... and they're basically the powerset of the Witches in Star Wars, so the witches can never really get past their status as card-carrying villains similar to the Sith Lords. Like, I fully expect we're going to learn, after Master Sol's big confession, that the Witches were actually up to no good and were probably allied with Smilo Ren.
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