Seto Kaiba

That's the whole IX Legion, you're gonna have to be more specific. 😛

Oh, well... there's their easy fanservice. Supposedly the Jedi believe the Sith have been extinct for over 1,000 years as of The Phantom Menace. Sounds like it will, yeah... though admittedly just being a Star Wars title seems to invite INTENSE scrutiny and criticism. Or maybe it's just a Jedi who goes bad without a Sith intervention? IIRC the venn diagram of "dark Jedi" and "Sith" isn't a circle... or at least, so I have been told.

Nice. It's hard not to feel bad for Sigismund in the Horus Heresy novels... or respect him for being one of the few people who made Abaddon the Despoiler sweat post-Heresy. Definitely a must have if I'm getting an Abaddon.

I suspect the response will be a rousing rendition of Pinocchio's "I've got no strings".

's probably the case for a lot of Star Wars fans, though as a filthy filthy casual I didn't really find any of the shows I've seen so far to be out-and-out bad. There have definitely been a few stories that didn't need to be told - like The Book of Boba Fett or Obi-Wan Kenobi - but they weren't necessarily told poorly. Disney Star Wars just needs to get away from fanservice as a plot device. Putting 100 years between themselves and the other stories should help a little, but the Jedi are far and away the worst offenders. There's a lot more to the Galaxy Far Far Away than the Jedi, and the Disney+ Star Wars shows made me want to see more of it without all the moralistic baggage the glowstick society brings wherever it goes. Indeed, I have not forgotten... but with a lightsaber on prominent display in the promotional material, it seems probable that this will be Jedi-heavy.

Hrm... I know I'm an outlier, but I've got mixed feelings about The Acolyte. On the one hand, that Star Wars is putting some distance between its new stories and the so-called "Skywalker Saga" films feels like a very good idea indeed. I feel like they could stand to go a bit farther out than 100 years, though. Google tells me the Republic was around for approximately 25,000 years. That's a lot of time to play around in, so it's slightly disappointing that The Acolyte is sticking close enough to the time of the films that the visual aesthetic doesn't seem to have changed any. Mix it up a little, guys! On the other hand, it's another bloody Jedi-centric story. I know the Jedi are the main draw for a lot of Star Wars fans, but I've always found them less interesting than the normal people in the stories. That feeling got a lot more pronounced in the wake of Rogue One, Andor, and The Mandalorian... all of which were able to explore much more of the Galaxy Far Far Away in a more nuanced way than the the Jedi-centric narratives with their moral absolutes. There's so much more to explore in the setting beyond the laser sword antics of a pack of ascetic space monks.

Do we know anything about what the story's supposed to be? As long as it's not messing about in the space between movies, that'd be a huge breath of fresh air.

The Mark II, Mark III, and Mark IV armors used by most of the Horus Heresy miniatures are the same armor used during the Great Crusade. The only real difference would be the paintjob and unit markings in most cases... the exception being the XVI Legion Sons of Horus, who changed paintjob AND heraldry after the Triumph at Ullanor. Swap out the green for white and the Eye of Terra for the Moon Wolf and you're there. The only miniatures that aren't pre-Heresy appropriate are those using Mark V and Mark VI armor, the ones with the big studs embedded in the pauldrons and greaves (Mark V) and the iconic "beakie" (Mark VI). Mark V was a catch-all for post-Istvaan improvements that literaly just bolted extra layers of armor to the plates, while Mark VI was developed before the Heresy but first put into use during it by the Raven Guard who helped develop it.

Hm... dunno if I'd go that far. The .hack// franchise definitely had far more of a cultural impact than any of those titles will have in the short run or the long run, it was more of an acquired taste where these shows are unimaginative and formulaic but intended for a very wide audience. It definitely popularized the "VR-MMO" schtick that has become such a staple of isekai and isekai-adjacent titles like Overlord, Skeleton Knight in Another World, Phantasy Star Online 2: the Animation, Gundam Build Divers, Sword Art Online, How Not to Summon a Demon Lord, etc. I know a lot of viewers struggle with .hack//SIGN because of how bleak and depressing it can be thanks to Tsukasa's circumstances, and I'll admit I suffered a bit of darkness-induced audience apathy for it myself. I guess that's why they tried to go lighter and softer with Legend of the Twilight Bracelet and such. Hokkaido Gals are Super Adorable! is trying to jerk the audiences heartstrings and not doing a great job as it nears its conclusion. The Will They or Won't They waveform has begun to collapse towards "Won't", with the main girl planning to... ... leaving just one week together with the luckless protagonist. It lacks impact because they haven't even reached the point of a confession never mind dating, and he has two other nearly identical love interests who aren't leaving. It's mildly enteratining but as romcoms and such go it's very much in "You tried" territory IMO.

Hard to say... as we've never seen those ships in their original form. IIRC, the first time we see beam weapons like that is in Macross: Do You Remember Love?. There are a few shots in the original series - esp. in Burst Point - where it looks like the Zentradi might be using the same technology but it's hard to tell as they could just be missile trails but it seems to be more of a Meltrandi thing. The Mardook had the same tech in Macross II: Lovers Again though it's only properly visible in the final scenes of the OVA when the Mardook fleet turns on Ingues's mobile fortress. The Meltrandi Chlore branch fleet in Macross 7's unaired episode Fleet of the Strongest Women has a few ships that are shown using the same kind of beam gun too. I'd have to check, as my recollection of the scene is not perfect, but I think the Macross Galaxy fleet escorts used beam weapons of the same type in the second Macross Frontier movie when they were shown bombarding a Vajra hive. It's likely something of a "premium" feature, since it requires not just the elements to fire the beam but also to project a spatial distortion to twist the path of the beam, so it's not surprising it's an uncommon feature on Human ships that generally prioritize cost-effectiveness for mass production and stealth.

Well, Joytoy didn't make me wait long at all did they? 😁 Fantastic rendition of Heresy-era Horus Lupercal. I wonder if they'll do a pre-Heresy version in Luna Wolves colors too? It'll sure as hell open my wallet if they do. Now THIS gets me excited. Primarchs aside, First Captain Ezekyle Abaddon was pretty much the MVP of the Great Crusade and the Horus Heresy... before also going on to be MVP of the Long War. It was a bit of a shame that he was Too Awesome To Use for much of the Horus Heresy novel series, only really getting to shine in flashbacks to the Ullanor campaign and in the Siege of Terra itself. Even with his limited appearances, he's definitely way more interesting in the Heresy era than the depressed jobber he was in the Black Legion series or as the Chaos Warmaster gargling generic threats. I'll be very excited to pair him up with Imperial Fists Captain Sigismund and a Garviel Loken if they roll one of those out.

One which isn't known for anime and is the origin of the stigma that animation is only for kids? Plus the license would've almost certainly had to have come via Sony, whose subsidiaries have the distribution rights. 😕 ... now that is a potentially bizarre idea. Macross Delta for Kingdom Hearts IV? lol

Hasn't it generally been conceded that we shifted into some weird parallel universe around the time someone shot that one gorilla? Are they, though? This is really a strange outcome. I think most of us were expecting Macross to land on the Sony-owned Crunchyroll service, not just because of its dominant position in streaming anime but because most of the companies involved are owned by Sony directly or indirectly. Sony bought Funimation in 2017, and merged it with Crunchyroll after buying that in 2021, and then Crunchyroll bought Macross distribution licensee Nozomi Entertainment in August 2022. It makes you wonder what the heck happened that, after all this effort to get Macross licensing under Sony's banner by hook or by crook the streaming license landed at Disney...

Is it even necessarily HG they have to convince? IIRC, Animeigo's Robert Woodhead once commented that the issue with DYRL? licensing was that nobody knew who for certain had the international rights after the attempts to localize the film in the 80's. HG has basically delegated all things Robotech to Funimation as of a few years ago too.

That's the last service I would have expected. I would have expected Sony's Crunchyroll to be the ones to get it, since Funimation is now part of it and carries work by the companies that licensed the various titles for the West.

Continuing the wrapup of the 2024 Winter season... The Strongest Tank's Labyrinth Raids is one of those copycat titles that doesn't really feel like it has, or even wants, an identity of its own. It's not an isekai story, but it follows a lot of the same tired "my VR MMO became real!" tropes with the characters consistently using video game terminology and occasionally having hit points show up on the screen for some reason. There is the vague implication that... It can't seem to make up its mind which direction it wants to go on, which makes the story a bit messy. At the very least, the protagonist's siscon tendencies were quickly dropped from the story. The animation work is... not great. It's never better than mediocre, but it frequently dips into the terrible when there are action scenes with a lot of motion. Banished from the Hero's Party S2 is much the same. It's one of those fantasy stories that isn't an isekai title but copies a lot of tropes from them even when it doesn't necessarily make sense to. The first season was a fairly generic riff on the already well-trodden ground of "I'm living a slow life in a fantasy world as a pharmacist" schtick that a dozen or so titles in the isekai genre had already beaten into the ground like a tent peg. Season two is actually taking the story somewhere interesting... in a rather desultory way. It builds on the previous season's minor subplot involving the "blessings" - a sort of talent or compulsion believed to be imposed by the setting's gods that pushes people towards a specific (and not always desirable, safe, or healthy) path in life - and how people balance that with free will. It's still not a very good series, but there's some signs of potential there in season two that weren't present in season one. 7th Time Loop: the Villainess Enjoys a Carefree Life Married to Her Worst Enemy is very much in the otome game isekai style though like a bunch of the other titles I've followed this season it also foregos the isekai aspect in favor of having the protagonist be reincarnated in the same fantasy world they already lived in. It follows a lot of the same otome game tropes with a cast full of pretty boys and the protagonist using her knowledge of future events to derail the previous romance plot and avoid various Bad Ends she's already aware of. It doesn't feel as compelling as some of those titles, I think in part because the protagonist only has the knowledge of a repeating seven year period in the same world. It has much less of the comedy that usually comes with the premise too, partly because her chosen romantic partner is completely deadpan 99% of the time. It's not bad, but there have been several better examples of this same kind of story in the last few seasons so it doesn't really stand out. Villain-san's Day Off never really went anywhere or did anything with its premise. It almost doesn't have a story. It's a tokusatsu series villain who, in his off hours, lives an utterly unremarkable daily life in Japan. I guess it counts as a "feel good" series, with what little it has apart from daily-life being the comedy of a tall, frightening-looking man's over the top reactions to ordinary inconveniences and pandas. I feel like they could do more with the premise. Especially since Villain-san's interactions with his fellow villains are pretty funny and his interactions with the tokusatsu hero team off the clock are just as out there. It's OK, but it feels kind of insubstantial.

We're into the home stretch on the Winter 2024 season... The Unwanted Undead Adventurer remains one of the less dull, but still not particularly interesting, titles in the season. It's story hasn't really done anything to grow beyond the now tired and overused isekai trope of the protagonist being reincarnated in a fantasy world as a monster and working to evolve their monster form towards a human appearance to go back to a normal life. The trope itself is marginally more tolerable without the usual isekai trappings - Rentt is reincarnated in the same fantasy world he already lived in - but it still feels like extremely well-trodden ground thanks to several high-profile isekai titles like So I'm a Spider, So What? and That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime. The only thing that really makes Rentt stand out is that he's actually reasonably pleased to have Come Back Strong and intends to use his superhuman abilities to chase his life's dream of... ranking up as a generic fantasy adventurer. The series also echoes the same basic tropes of isekai with Rentt having the makings of a harem already together even before the start of the story proper, with multiple women being willing to overlook that he's a cannibalistic monster because it's him. After the first couple episodes, when Rentt resumes working as an adventurer, the story loses what little sense of direction it had and he's just another murderhobo with questionable sartorial choices in an obviously D&D-inspired western fantasy setting. Eleven episodes into The Wrong Way to Use Healing Magic and the story still feels very amateurish, underdeveloped, and lacking in original thought. If nothing else, the writer of the original light novel - Kurokata - has a bright future writing for Capcom's Resident Evil series. From start to finish, it feels like someone C.S. Goto'd their fanfic for another series. The characters are thinly written and cliched, there doesn't seem to be any actual reason for the conflict driving the story, and the one antagonist that's been introduced so far is a basic axe crazy Black Knight who just happens to be weak to only the protagonist's technique... It's bland and lifeless and terminally lacking in imagination. At the end of the day, it feels like the output of an AI prompt to write a statistically average isekai series. Tales of Wedding Rings is just a form letter ecchi harem anime with an action excuse plot. It is what it is, and what it is is borderline unwatchable. Mashle's second season follows on from the reasonably strong first season and remains pretty entertaining, if One Punch Man-style comedy is your thing. It's still committed to its bit as a parody of Harry Potter, though it's gradually pivoted more and more towards being a standard shounen action series with each episode of the second season as the story's antagonist moved away from inter-house conflict as the obligatory magic boarding school to a government kangaroo court and then the setting's off-brand Voldemort "Innocent Zero". It definitely feels like it's running out of ideas, though... and there's only so long Mash can continue doing physically impossible things like punching music out of the air before the conceit that he doesn't have any magic has to be dispensed with. Blue Exorcist: Shimane Inquisition Saga really should have been a compressed filler arc in the manga and the anime. It was one of the weakest story arcs in the manga, focusing on a character who spent the entire story up to that point making themself as unlikeable as possible and an antagonist who was a teaspoon-shallow card carrying villain with no real motive besides "be as evil as possible at all times". It's being made years after interest in Blue Exorcist faded, and feels really skippable in terms of how little substance its story has and how it's sandwiched between two more important story arcs. It's a 3/10 hard skip at best unless you LOVE Blue Exorcist. A Sign of Affection remains one of my standouts for this season. In isolation, the romance story is nothing particularly remarkable and the art style definitely speaks to the author having very specific tastes. It's the sensitive and clearly well-researched treatment of the main character's deafness that really sells this one. It gets invested in the problems that the deaf have in social and professional situations and the difference that it makes to have people willing to put in the effort to make them feel welcome and supported. It loses a little of its tension with the teased relationship starting relatively early in the story, but it remains an interesting and unconventional take that's managed to hold my interest for the entire season.

It's unlikely to be the second one, since it's SOP for the localization distributor to claim a copyright on any parts of the localization they produce themselves... like remastered audio or video tracks, subtitle scripts, dub audio tracks, etc. HG can't have been in the dark about that because that's the genesis of their copyright on The Other Series. That's also why the Macross II kickstarter had to acquire the rights to the English dub audio tracks from the 90's release. It's not automatically included. It's also a safe bet that they knew in advance Animeigo intended to do a remaster, because that would probably have been a part of the license agreement in the first place. The most likely explanation is that HG just cheaped out, as they did with so many other things.

Pretty sure it was just that HG didn't want to pay up for access to Animeigo's remastered/cleaned-up audio tracks... and they either figured audiences wouldn't care, or hoped that ADV Films would do the job just as well. I've always privately suspected that Animeigo got the license because Harmony Gold believed its own hype and thought it'd never sell. When it sold well, they suddenly wanted it in the hands of their main distribution partner, probably because of more favorable license terms.

Crunchyroll started announcements for its Spring 2024 lineup. Not a lot stands out so far... there's something that looks like an off-brand Godzilla called Kaiju No.8, a third season of Konosuba, another cour of Mushoku Tensei, a Saint Seiya series, a third season of The Irregular at Magic High School (or "It's not incest if we genetically modify you so much you're not technically related anymore." ), and the inevitable slew of isekai shovelware. HiDive's new app is finally working. It's actually a huge step up. Way too freaking late, but a huge step up from what they had before. For now, I'm digging through my backlog. Lupin III Part V is as good as I remember it being, though the inexplicable pink jacket breather episode in the middle of the first arc is odd to say the least.

It was one of those quiet, moody, action-dramas that were big in '02. Its exposition was often on the subtle side and buried in relatively slow-paced conversations between various characters separate from the action.

In a way, it's actually kind of impressive how everyone working on Metallic Rouge except the animation team is completely phoning it in. The most recent episode (#10) is really blatantly stalling for time... The Witch and The Beast is wrapping up the "The Witch and the Demon Sword" arc... I had high hopes for this series based on the first story arc, but it's turned out to pretty weak on average. There's been almost no exposition about the main characters, and otherwise it's basically just a monster-of-the-week format with slightly more emphasis on action (and an arsehole protagonist) than Witch Hunter Robin.

My weekly watch group is starting Kaguya-sama: Love is War season two and Lupin III Part V... both excellent shows I'd highly recommend. Honestly, Kaguya-sama: Love is War is what I'd call the best romcom anime of the last ten years or so. It just seems like that one never has a dull moment, though with three seasons and a movie any further development heads into the parts where things get dramatic in an unfunny way. Lupin III Part V is another trip and a half... blue jacket, AKA modern Lupin, still just feels weird considering most of the iconic Lupin stories are set in the 60's (green jacket) or 70's (red jacket). Lupin's new signature gizmo, an AR monocle that he uses to hack things like video cameras, is an odd bit of future tech but no weirder than some of the nonsense he's had in the past.

It's Japan, a certain amount of social drinking for work is expected... and those long hours and late nights the animators do surely mean a fair amount of caffeine... ... but I think the best/most probable explanation I've heard anyone pose was over on MAHQ/MechaTalk. Specifically, that Studio Bones seems to be using Metallic Rouge as a sort of elaborate demo reel to showcase the capabilities of its animation staff and that the kind of threadbare story is an excuse plot crafted to get them from one animator friendly set piece to the next. That'd definitely explain why the series is visually very impressive but narratively a complete train wreck. Watched some more of The Foolish Angel Dances with the Devil... and I've completely lost track of what's going on with this one. This latest episode was just one huge exposition dump, and it's clearly dumping things that are supposed to be important and shocking but the series has done so much nonsensical screwing around that it doesn't really feel like important and shocking revelations. It feels like an excessively dramatic distraction from the antics of this dumb*** couple. Hokkaido Gals are Super Adorable! is still a cute but kind of generic romcom. The will-they-or-won't-they is leaning heavily towards "will" right now, though it still has a bit of an issue in that the three female leads don't feel particularly distinct since they all have essentially the exact same appearance but for their hair. (I guess the mangaka has a type.) I've basically given up on 'Tis Time for Torture, Princess. Dungeon Meals is still a damn solid series, though. Kinda weird that now, of all times, after the cast have been eating all kinds of horrifying monsters that explicitly or implicitly eat people the series decides to actually mention food safety when Laios gets sick from eating uncooked meat that contains parasites.

But why is it happening?