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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Okay, a few episodes into The Witch and the Beast... and it's actually pretty darn good. I was right that it's doing kind of a Witch Hunter Robin-esque sort of story concept, but it has much more of an emphasis on action than on slow-paced character drama. That's not to say it doesn't do character drama reasonably well too. It's rather gory and violent when all is said and done, but there's some fascinating worldbuilding going on here underneath the "witch of the week" sort of dark fantasy detective story. The Witch and the Beast has grabbed my attention like no other title this season has.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    To be fair, it's not that there was absolutely no place for Destroids in the postwar New UN Forces. What ultimately killed the Destroid as a military concept was cost. The realities of space war stripped the Destroids of their main operating role and their remaining niche of anti-aircraft defense was largely eroded by more cost-effective alternatives like beam CIWS turrets and fixed anti-aircraft missile batteries. Macross Frontier's Cheyenne II operates in an incredibly specific niche as an air defense platform specifically meant to operate inside an emigrant ship so massive that the possibility of fighting enemy aircraft inside of the ship exists. As seen in Macross R, at least one emigrant government (Macross Galaxy) has tried to modernize the Series 04 destroids as of 2058. The problem is that, for all the expensive tech advancements incorporated into designs like the Super Defender, they don't seem to have achieved significantly better performance than the conventional alternatives. There are, as previously noted, cases where more specialized or exotic Destroid-like mobile weapons did give Valkyries a run for their money in specific circumstances that catered directly to their strengths in the 2050s... but that performance was highly situational. In the Cheyenne's defense, it was an earlier and less advanced Series 03 model using much less overtechnology than the Series 04 models that were considered the UN Forces first viable Destroid platform. It was built for war against other Humans more than against something like the Zentradi, and like the VF-0 it did pretty well for what was basically a developmental model being thrown into combat service on short notice. (Also, let's dial it back a wee bit... the aim is polite discourse.) In hindsight, it's funny how what they described as a potential upgrade for the Tomahawk and Defender is basically the Tomahawk II and Defender EX from Macross II.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Out of sheer bloody-minded frustration with the rather unsatisfying fare that I've found so far in this season, I picked up another new title in simulcast... The Witch and the Beast. Going in completely blind on this one... and it's off to a wild start if nothing else. Barely four minutes in and the not-even-properly-introduced protagonists have asked about the presence of a witch in... did they ever say where? Then all the train station windows blow out because of a 6+ story tall shark monster that's walking down the street that gets exploded by a witch who they then try to beat up before running away? There's a lot to unpack here. FWIW, the animation is simply gorgeous. Ooooooooookay... that escalated quickly. If you're averse to blood, gore, and grievous bodily harm in your fiction this is definitely not a show for you. It's rapidly approaching the Hellsing Ultimate level of bloody and gory by the time the first episode is over with things like amputations, impalements, and incinerations.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    ... none of that has anything to do with the topic, though. A lot of it is also not accurate. For instance, the acknowledged inspiration for the Defender is West Germany's Flakpanzer Gepard, not the Shilka or M42. Granted, Destroids were a thing in Macross Plus and Macross 7... but only decommissioned units that had either been repurposed as targets for live fire exercises (Plus) or sold off to civilians and veterans for use as heavy industrial equipment (7). Macross Zero did introduce new Destroid designs in the form of the Prototype Monster (Mk.IP), the ADR-03 Cheyenne, and the Octos. But that was period-appropriate for the story, since it's set in 2008 before the First Space War revealed that the Earth UN Forces completely misread how a space war would work and the idea was quietly abandoned. Macross Frontier reused the Cheyenne art assets from Zero for an anti-air unit that once again proved to be ineffective and whose main virtue was (no joke) that its wheels didn't tear up the pavement and the Konig Monster's not a Destroid. The Cheyenne II shows up again in Macross Delta where it's outclassed by even the humble Regult. The main roadblock to upgrading destroids isn't that it's not technically feasible... it's that the entire concept underpinning the Destroid design is wrong-headed. They were designed around the expectation that a war with aliens would be a classic "alien invasion" scenario. That's just not how space warfare works in the setting. Zentradi main fleets glass enemy planets from orbit and have no interest in capturing territory for the meagre resources of a single planet. They were hastily repurposed as anti-aircraft defenses aboard the Macross, but that only worked because the ship was HUGE and the situation was dire. Ships built later are much smaller, and the same job can be done far more cheaply by the conventional anti-aircraft emplacements that replaced Destroids in that capacity. TBH, that's only really reflective of the fact that the Tomahawk was designed exclusively for land warfare while the Valkyrie is an aircraft. Being slightly faster on the ground while walking won't do the Tomahawk any good if the enemy's bombarding the planet's surface from orbit. That was the whole problem with the Destroid concept in-story, they were designed and built for a land war that was literally never going to come.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    That's not exactly a typical reaction in sci-fi. Your usual sci-fi viewer will generally assume some kind of sci-fi shenanigans are in play when something like that happens... and/or that they're only seeing a portion of what's going on when you're dealing with a spaceship the size of a small town. (It helps that, in Macross, the process of rebuilding the city took a solid month not a few days.) That's not really unique to younger viewers... that's a pretty normal viewer's reaction to sci-fi. The genre comes with the implicit understanding that implausible shenanigans will in fact ensue in the name of entertainment, and audiences generally roll with that unless the story is so badly executed that moon logic is required to join up the dots. This is actually a great example. Everyone sitting down to watch a superhero move takes it as read from the outset that implausible things can and will happen because superhero stories are inherently about implausible things. Whether the hero's power comes from literal magic, super-advanced technology, or just being a space alien that can do things the garden variety human can't, the audience takes it in stride because that's an underlying expectation of the genre as a whole. Warner Bros and DC's Superman movies don't struggle because people can't or won't suspend disbelief for Superman doing Superman things. That's more a fundamental issue of Superman being the quintessential boring invincible hero and consequently an unrelatable flat character. Indeed... and that's part of what makes them relatable to the audience. Macross was made for an older teenage audience, so the main cast is three teenagers who are simultaneously grappling with transitioning from youthful innocence to the world of adult responsibility and with hapless, fumbling, teenage romance. We might look at it and say "wow, they're making unhealthy life choices" but... well... teenagers do that. I'm sure most of us have done at some point. Of course, they're also running on Japan's cultural standards from forty years ago which may seem odd or unhealthy to an audience that was not raised with those cultural standards. It's a product of the time and place where it was made, and almost anyone going to watch is going to understand that fact and likely not be that put off by anything that goes on in the series. Especially if they're familiar with anime in general and understand the basic premise that Japan's cultural standards are not the same as American, or British, or wherever we may happen to be from. (Now if you want to see an anime where a character is ACTUALLY simping for their love interest, I can name a few... but it's terribly undignified and I can't honestly recommend any of them as enjoyable.) Now that I understand... though it is at least justified by the official materials that explain what was going on during the timeskip. Their relationship seems like it was in a holding pattern because it basically was while they were assigned to different places. Hikaru spent a good chunk of that time up on the moon flying patrols of near-Earth space. Never felt off to me, but then I've had the foreknowledge that she probably started looking after his place while he was away on assignment as a favor. (It's also an old cliche in a lot of Japanese romance stories... a real popular schtick in love triangles and harem titles where one participant is the childhood friend/girl next door.) That's... not atypical relationship behavior for the unmarried at any age. The regrettable attempt to reconnect with the ex is a proudly undignified tradition that predates the written word and knows no boundaries of gender, nationality, creed, or anything else.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    's definitely a mixed bag, opinion-wise... but I feel like several of these are unduly harsh "hot takes" or simple failures to acknowledge context. TBH, I probably also wouldn't use Super Dimension Fortress Macross to introduce someone to the franchise unless it was something they'd shown a direct interest in. It's showing its age. That said, I think a lot of what you're complaining about is pretty trivial stuff that even casual anime viewers wouldn't really bat an eye at given the age of the series. This is a borderline nonsensical criticism though, IMO. Macross was written for a high school-aged audience. I guess that would make it "young adult" fiction if we were desperate to categorize it. That said, Macross is science fiction... almost anyone watching it is not expecting gritty realism from it. The genre pretty much demands a modicum of suspension of disbelief to facilitate the more fanciful or scientifically-unrealistic aspects of the narrative. Especially given that it's robot anime. That in and of itself demands strained realism. No, he's not. Hikaru Ichijo is a relatively normal 16 year old boy who spends the early parts of the series nursing a crush on the pretty girl (Minmay) he met and got close to during a few days they spent alone together. He and Minmay spend a good chunk of the early series giving each other mixed signals like the awkward teenagers they are before their jobs start to make things difficult for them and rivals emerge in the form of Misa and Kaifun. Pretty typical stuff for a Japanese teenage romance story, y'know? He's not desperate for her attention or putting her on a pedestal... he's just as indecisive and awkward as she is, that's where the tension comes from. She isn't either, to be frank. Misa's also a relatively normal awkward teenager. She's got some emotional baggage the other characters don't because she's the daughter of a prominent family and therefore tries to maintain the family reputation and because her first love died tragically in an infamous massacre during the Unification Wars. She's indecisive and inexperienced in love because, hey, she's spent the last couple years throwing herself into her work to avoid unpacking the love life-adjacent trauma. (This is also a Japanese series, so some of that passivity is simply cultural differences.) Robotech made the characters several years older than they were in the original story, and I feel like that often skews people's expectations of the characters in Macross. Kaifun is such a useful hate-sink, though... and he does serve a useful purpose in that he gives a voice to the civilian population who are, by that point, pretty stressed out after a good few months in space being shot at. He makes the other characters question their role in the war. That's especially important for Misa's development, considering that she's used her duty to hide from her feelings, her repressed emotional trauma, and so on. He's a one-two punch that reminds her of her trauma and makes her question the duty she's used to hide from it. You're 100% meant to hate his guts, but he serves an important purpose in Macross's anti-war narrative. This has some decent perspective, though. A lot - and I mean a LOT - of the hate for Minmay comes from Robotech. Its rewritten dialogue and the fact that her voice actress was a pretty awful singer didn't endear her to the audience, and changes and cuts made to simplify the story removed some of her character development and made her seem selfish, bratty, and stupid. All in all, she's a victim of the budget and of the effort to de-emphasize the romance aspect of Macross in favor of playing up the space war side of things. Never mind the subsequent flanderization she'd suffered at the hands of the Sentinels materials... which frankly could be called "character assassination" with a straight face IMO. Macross's Minmay is a pretty typical teenage girl with big dreams of being a famous idol singer like her aunt. Her portrayal's a lot more positive and nuanced. She's shown to be quite the proficient singer and songwriter, having already landed an audition at a major label at the age of just 15. She maintains a sense of humor even under pressure, and can joke at her own expense. She weathers a near-death experience in wartime and goes on to nevertheless chase and attain her dream and discover the less glamorous sides of being an idol. She's as romantically indecisive as you'd expect from a teenager and she sends Hikaru a lot of mixed messages as a result, but in the end she's still a good person who legitimately cares about Hikaru and is doing her best in trying times even when the burden of morale is unceremoniously dumped on her shoulders.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    I don't recall if I asked this one before... but now that it's on the brink of production, this thought keeps nagging at me. You guys probably remember this reveal from about a year ago of the MY24 Dodge Charger Daytona SRT BEV. It's the first of a whole new platform (and series of platforms) from the post-merger FCA and Groupe PSA. One of the most divisive features among the design team was, well, this... In a bid to appeal to more traditional muscle car enthusiasts, the electric Dodge Charger's going to have a simulated engine sound. I know there's definitely a lot of resistance ot the idea of EVs as potential muscle cars, even if 900hp is within reach for the higher-end systems like the Banshee variant. Would the simulated engine noise and potentially simulated automatic/manual shift behavior make an electric muscle car more appealing? (NGL, I'm personally in the camp that thinks the simulated engine noise is a bit silly...)
  8. Seto Kaiba
    If they do this right, it could be the first real definitive artbook that Macross II has ever had. 😁 So much of the art was scattered in random magazine articles in Animage, Newtype, and B-Club. The print quality of the Bandai Entertainment Bible books always left a bit to be desired, and This is Animation Special 5 kind of crammed a lot of the minor designs into a page or two at the very end. Even if they don't get the more obscure stuff, I've still got a good feeling about this one.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Not just French, her character started out as literal Joan of Arc.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    While I was looking at a question about printing, I had another thought about something that may or may not wind up in the artbook. I'm very curious to see if the artbook will have anything for Macross II: Lovers Again's two video game tie-ins: Macross 2036 and Macross: Eternal Love Song. The games are often overlooked despite being canon to Macross II: Lovers Again's parallel world timeline because they were for a console that never took off in the west (NEC's PC Engine) and they're only really referenced in one artbook (Entertainment Bible 51) and official magazine coverage of the OVA. The games had original Haruhiko Mikimoto character art and a number of original mechanical designs that never got decent prints in artbooks. If they have access to that content as well, the Alus Edition Kickstarter's artbook could be the first book to actually print much of that art.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Has anyone here given Amazon Prime's Hazbin Hotel a whirl? Slightly greedy ad-free markup aside, I just finished watching the eight episode first season and found it to be surprisingly engaging. The premise was unusual enough to get my attention from the word "go", and the songs are surprisingly well written. If it weren't for all the profanity and occasional cartoon gore or the fact that it's set in literal Hell, you could almost mistake it for a standard Disney musical.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Just finished catching the latest episode of Metallic Rouge. It's flip-flopped back to not really giving a damn about its "Are Neans people?" schtick again. It's animated in a very stylish way, but I can't help but feel that the writing really doesn't sell the package. Rouge is still hunting these random rogue Neans for some random macguffin that seems to be stored in their chests and there's no real buildup to the fights. It's just a lot of pointless wandering around and shallow drama before one of fifteen random background characters reveals that they're the hidden robot master and a five minute long fight scene ensues. It's no fun guessing which one it'll be because there's no apparent connection between their screentime and who it turns out to be. I'm guessing the robot clown man is the next big fight there, since the robot circus is in town and where's the best place to hide a tree but the forest? Still a bit baffled by Bang Brave Bang Bravern. It doesn't really seem to have a plot. Or any semblance of direction. I'm not even sure why I'm watching it, to be honest. It's... not really fun, I'm just sort of waiting for it to pick a lane and either decide it's going all-in on parody, all-in on serious super robot nonsense, or try to pivot back to real robot. It's like someone is trying to hit every single super robot cliche by jackknifing wildly from trope to trope at breakneck speed. One thing I'll say is that this latest episode is painful for the viewer in a more direct sense... the new mysterious girl "Lulu" is limited to saying just her name, Smith's name, and that ear-piercing screech small children do. It actually gave me a bit of a headache. It is rather nice to see its protagonist actually get a moment of peace and quiet after basically being hazed by Bravern nonstop for the last two episodes.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    It'll be interesting to see what makes it into the artbook. I'd assume they have access to all of the production line art that's been published in B-Club, Entertainment Bible, This is Animation Special, and the like... but IIRC they were also trying to get ahold of art from western-only products like the Palladium Books RPG and possibly the non-canon Macross II: the Micron Conspiracy comic. I hope they were successful there. Say what you will about the game system (or the publisher), but those old Palladium Books RPGs did have some lovely cover art.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Apart from the fact that that's not how black holes work, there are three major problems with this idea right off the bat: Macross 7 already did a story involving confronting remnants of the Supervision Army. They fought its founders, the Protodeviln, and a "v2.0" of the Supervision Army in the Varauta forces. That would be a death sentence. The 1st Large-Scale Long Distance Emigrant fleet had a population in the tens of thousands, only a few warships and a few hundred VFs, and the Megaroad-class has basically zero combat capability. The Supervision Army operates on the same scale as the Zentradi main fleets. It would also just be a lazy retread of the original series plot. Max and Milia's "romance" in the original series was a subplot in someone else's story. Namely, Hikaru, Misa, and Minmay's story. Excluding the Macross M3 game, Max and Milia have never really been main characters in a Macross story. They've a recurring pair of supporting characters who have never really been the focus of the story. They come in for a subplot here and there but mainly because they're fan favorite secondary characters... like Sgt. Johnson in Halo, Reg Barclay in Star Trek, or Vegeta in Dragon Ball Z. I have a feeling that's more "just you", given the complaints that drove actual changes to the sequel trilogy. Then why are you here, commenting nonsense on a topic about the next Macross series? Seriously. But apparently not Macross's themes... given that you seem fixated on "gritty" war and mass death. Macross's themes are music as communication, love triangles, and war being based on preventable failures to communicate that, once resolved, bring peace. ... no, we didn't. 🤔 I think I see the problem, though. With an assertion like that, it's likely your view of Macross is actually your view of Robotech's "Macross Saga" and not actual Macross. In Macross, the Unification Wars (plural!) were a series of small regional conflicts that sprang up in various unstable regions around the world after the United Nations announced the existence of aliens and plans for the formation of the Earth Unification Government. Basically a lot of little Desert Storm-y fights over things like territorial disputes, ethnic and sectarian beefs, and so on. There was some organized opposition to the Earth UN Gov't from the so-called Anti-Unification Alliance, but that was mostly just skirmishes. Nothing even close to national warfare. The only use of nuclear weapons was the Anti-Unification Alliance's use of a reaction warhead against St. Petersburg in 2006, which led directly to the Alliance's collapse and the end of the Unification Wars because it absolutely annihilated support for their position. No... it's never been that. In fact, it's always been about how conflict comes from misunderstanding or failure to communicate. @snakerbot has a pretty good summary of the truth of the matter. To fill in the gaps... Macross II: Lovers Again was a story about an encounter with an alien race so desperate to preserve its own culture in a hostile galaxy that it turned to militant xenophobia, and the war ended when they were confronted with the reality that there's more to life than simple survival, that there's beauty in other cultures too, and that coexistence is not a threat to their way of life. Macross Delta was also a story about how xenophobia (and particularly nationalism) can drive conflicts by creating hate and fear, how breakdowns in communication can lead to confict, and that the desire to understand each other can bridge those gaps from both sides. (Even the villain was anti-conflict in it, his endgame was a galaxy-wide hive mind that would prevent conflict by forcing everyone to understand each other telepathically.) Even in the original series and DYRL?, Humanity's victory is only possible because they partner with those Zentradi whose exposure to Earth's culture had given them an interest in life outside of military duty and a forever war. The thing that led to victory in both cases was that Humanity and the Zentradi's representatives put the guns down and started talking. That's how they partnered with the Vrlitwhai, Laplamiz, and Quamzin branch fleets in the original series (and came up with the Minmay Attack) in the TV series, and how they came up with the Minmay Attack in DYRL? using the sheet music they got from Boddole Zer himself. In both cases, the war ends as a direct result of both sides sitting down and talking. It's not "Earth vs. the Universe", it's "the Power of Communication vs. Conflict".
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Tokyo-style Elf (localized as Otaku Elf) is a fun little comedy series. I rather like the titular elf, Elda. The way she's drawn is extremely expressive and it makes her reactions very entertaining.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    It's been a very long time since I last watched a series as intensely frustrating as The Bibliophile Princess. It's a mystery to me how anyone could write a story where the main character is so passive that they're effectively entirely uninvolved in the actual story. Things happen in the story - political intrigue, attempted assassinations, personal drama - but all of it happens offscreen because the titular character doesn't do anything except sit around and occasionally be in the right place to overhear things out-of-context and get upset. It also seems like the few things the protagonist did that actually contributed to events all happen in a timeskip in the first episode. It reminds me a bit of The Irregular at Magic High School in the sense that it feels like the original story probably had a huge amount of internal monologue which never made it into the anime. As it is, it could have been an interesting series if only it'd followed someone other than the cast's least interesting character. HiDive's catalog is pretty darn slim... I feel like I remember it being bigger. Gonna go backwards again and hit Otaku Elf next.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    That Megaroad-01 disappeared in 2016 has, yes, been a part of the setting since the late 90's... though I don't believe it was definitively made official that she vanished in July 2016 until Macross Chronicle came out in the wake of Macross Frontier in the late 2000s. Kawamori always avoided the subject of what became of the ship after its disappearance, citing that Macross: Flash Back 2012 was the coda of Hikaru, Misa, and Minmay's story and that their departure from Earth aboard the Megaroad-01 was them sailing off into the proverbial sunset at the conclusion of their story. Their disappearance isn't even treated like some kind of enduring mystery for subsequent generations. Ships just sometimes go missing due to fold accidents and it's treated like an unfortunate statistic. It wasn't until the most recent movie, Absolute Live!!!!!!, that the Megaroad-01's fate was revisited and it was a huge anticlimax... The obvious answer being "the love triangle in question is already resolved". The problem with this premise being that, like Hikaru and Minmay, Misa's character arc is over... there isn't really a direction for her character to develop in now. She was already a confident military officer in the original series, and she overcame her romantic difficulties with Hikaru in the original series. All things considered, isn't it rather ironic to make this argument given that Star Wars fans are also quite unhappy with the new trilogy for mindlessly recapitulating the story arcs of the original trilogy and for overriding the happy ending of same to drag the original characters back into action long past their use-by date? Macross has found consistent success over the years by making each new installment a self-contained story and moving on to a new part of the setting with new characters when that story reaches its natural conclusion. That, plus its broad strokes approach to continuity, has allowed it to continually reinvent itself and take new approaches to its premise in each successive title without being chained down to what was popular forty years ago, burying new viewers in prerequisite viewing, or wearing out its welcome. I suspect what we can look forward to another fresh installment set somewhere different from previous works, with its own characters, set pieces, and local flavor.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    We already know it won't be... both because Big West apparently agreed to stop using the first series designs in new works as part of their global distribution deal, and because the story would be a hilarious nonevent. After all, Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!! revealed the fate of the Megaroad-01. It sailed uneventfully for four years from 2012 to 2016 and then it vanished after it... I'm not sure today's audiences, or any audiences, would thrill to watching the original series characters muse on whether the ship's recycled water has started to look and taste like Dutch lager after half a century.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Wait... so it was wearing the Z'Gok like a mascot suit?
  20. Seto Kaiba
    For the first time in a while, I'm firing up the HiDive up to look at what I had in the queue there. This season's simulcasts from them is the very image of "nothing interesting", so I'm going back to one of last season's offerings in The Bibliophile Princess. The title and summary make it sound like it's a copycat work inspired by Ascendance of a Bookworm, albeit without the monomaniacal emphasis on making books and more emphasis on characters. The animation is quite high quality for what it is, though the story comes up pretty short in terms of wit, charm, or really anything to hold the audience's attention. It's not bad... it's just bland. Villainess Level 99 isn't doing anything particularly interesting either... just the usual isekai invincible protagonist flexing on the normals unthinkingly. 'Tis Time for Torture, Princess hasn't done anything interesting either. It's the same joke over and over. The Foolish Angel Dances with the Devil is still doing unremarkable school love comedy stuff. Hokkaido Gals are Super Adorable! is also doing the unremarkable school love comedy stuff. 7th Time Loop is managing to be slightly more diverting but still hasn't really done anything noteworthy with its story. Villain-san's Day Off is still a moderately amusing slice of life series that's still mostly just the incredibly threatening-looking main character overreacting to mundane things. All in all, I think the only two series this season out of the twenty-something I'm following that actually have me excited for the next episode are Mashle and A Sign of Affection. Kinda disappointed by that. Normally I find at least 3-4 and I don't usually follow this many titles either. I think the one I find most disappointing is Metallic Rouge, which is such a transparently cynical attempt to do "cyberpunk/post-cyberpunk by numbers".
  21. Seto Kaiba
    A fair question that deserves a serious and straightforward answer. In short, while there are a variety of mobile suit and mobile armor designs in the series the conflict generally revolves around both sides using Gundams. This is something of an issue for visual storytelling when neither side has a particularly distinctive visual aesthetic as a result. Prior Gundam titles had a pretty good understanding of the need to have a consistent design aesthetic for the "hero mecha" and another for the "enemy mecha". That's why, despite being Federation elite forces, the Titans of Zeta Gundam use a blatantly villain-coded mecha like the HiZack and why every time the Zeon side actually gets a Gundam (save for the stolen GP02) they inevitably retool it to match their aesthetic like the Sinanju and Gerbera Tetra. With both sides using Gundams, the action can become confusing much more easily because it's not immediate apparent who's on what side and to have so many variations on the same basic design leaves them all feeling a bit samey... not just in terms of the stolen ORB Gundams but also the various upgrades that the two main characters get that seem like the same mobile suit but with ever increasing amounts of wing pieces attached. Yeah, it's Orb technology... but why redesignate it when it's something Orb basically developed and there's nothing actually different about it except for that they made the phase shift armor pink? I'm familiar with it... though Gundam as a whole typically follows the same real-world-inspired designation conventions used in Macross and many other mecha titles. (Goodness knows I've waded through enough of it while fielding questions on other Gundam titles... the wild rabbit holes you go down trying to find answers to questions like "Where is the Zaku II B?".) Vaguely different equipment, sure... but both appearance and performance-wise they're not really distinct. It doesn't really feel like a different design... so much as they went back and made the wings busier each time, like Katoki-san was offering design advice. It's possible to show that kind of evolution while giving each successive model its own particular flavor and make them immediately distinguishable. Like Amuro's RX-78-2 vs. his Nu Gundam. Or Char's Zaku, Gelgoog, and Rick Dias. Uso's Victory and Victory II. The Exia and 00. The Wing Gundam and Wing Gundam Zero. You get the idea. (I wonder if this is why SEED Destiny's gunpla sales slipped so much compared to SEED?) The examples you're citing from Macross don't really fit the issue for the most part... the YF-19 and VF-19ADVANCE are a bit of blink and you'll miss it fanservice explained as a weirdo deliberately customizing a VF-19EF to look like the much older YF-19, YF-21 and VF-22 are a prototype and its production version so they're meant to look alike. I'll give you the VF-31AX... that is a fair example, since the outwardly discernable differences are limited to the shape of the wings and some other minor details and it was meant to be an upgrade. (Though the one book to talk about it spends most of its time taking the piss out of it, so maybe TPTB realize it was some weak nonsense?)
  22. Seto Kaiba
    I wish I knew... it's like the writers wanted to write a post-cyberpunk story but couldn't think of a single original idea or even an original spin on an existing idea. Instead, it's just sort of a halfhearted version of I, Robot mixed with a bit of Rockman X or Android Kikaider. The protagonist, Rouge, is basically a female version of Rockman/Mega Man X hunting 8 9 7 6 off-brand Mavericks around Mars for reasons that have yet to be explained. It can't seem to reconcile this with its desire to also do the I, Robot/Measure of a Man thing about whether a self-aware robot is "alive" and therefore a person. The problem is that whole schtick only works if the robots in question are outwardly inhuman in appearance or expression. Metallic Rouge really fails to sell it because the Neans are too Human. They look perfectly human except for the occasional odd skintone and weird circuit markings, they clearly have Human emotions and are capable of independent thought at the same level as Humans. The Neans are treated almost universally horribly for no reason. It seems to be something put into the story simply because "the rights of AI" are form letter post-cyberpunk fare.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    To be honest, I'm still not seeing it... the angle the line art is drawn at makes them look chunkier than they are because you're getting the front and the left side and the design itself is awfully busy, but the proportions look pretty close to what's in the animation IMO. The line art definitely doesn't make them look impressive, but then again the pose can be the difference between a mediocre shot and a great one. (Is farting clouds of theatrical glitter just a thing all Gundams do now?)
  24. Seto Kaiba
    ... as opposed to the publicly available magazine and globally available website it was already printed in? 🤣 Touched a nerve, did I? Oh dear. In all seriousness, the lack of visually distinct designs is one of the most common criticisms leveled at Cosmic Era titles in general, not helped at all by both sides using Gundams. I can't recall a point in Macross where painting a VF different colors was enough to give it a different model number, for instance. (Like Cagalli's MBF-02 Strike Rouge, a GAT-X105 Strike Gundam painted pink.) Come to that, the many different versions of Kira and Athrun's signature Gundams aren't terribly distinct from each other either. I've watched SEED and SEED Destiny multiple times and I couldn't for the life of me tell you the difference between the Freedom, Strike Freedom, Rising Freedom, Mighty Strike Freedom, etc...
  25. Seto Kaiba
    It's not a leak if it's official promotional material being run in a magazine... But also... it's Gundam SEED. Much like how the entire cast share maybe 3-4 faces and body types, the Mobile Suits all look the ****ing same because 80% of them are the same Gundam with different paintjobs and slightly different accessories. Looking at 'em, I feel like these are just the same designs we saw on the official website last year.
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