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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    They've finally driven him mad?
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Both my parents are Trekkies, though mercifully Klingon isn't one of the languages I speak. I had classes in real-world languages that are almost as useless, like Imperial Roman dialect Latin. None of that soft vowel Church Latin nonsense. Isn't it always? So, this one's got a bit of a story to it... Japanese military terminology is a bit on the old-fashioned side, as many of the country's modern military traditions are borrowed from western allies. This particular tradition was quite old before modern navies existed though, and actually shares an origin with the tradition of having the ship's captain have golden laurel leaves on his cap. Specifically, this is a tradition rooted in the Imperial Roman navy. A patrician (nobleman) who had overall command of a vessel was called a Magister Navis, or the "Ship's Master", and as a badge of his rank was entitled to wear laurels. Of course, as a good chunk of Europe had a massive boner for anything that smacked of the good old days of the Roman Empire, calling the commanding officer of a ship the Ship's Master or, later, "shipmaster" or just "master" became a well-entrenched naval tradition. The term wasn't solely a military one either, though its military usage persisted because it wasn't actually very common for the commanding officer of a ship to be a full naval Captain unless the ship was a large, rated ship with more than twenty guns. Movie buffs will recognize Master and Commander, a title related to this that referred to an officer who commanded a ship too large for a Lieutenant, but too small to rate a proper Captain and for which the commanding officer was trained in navigation. When the Convention of Kanegawa ended Japan's policy of isolationism by threat of force in 1854, many of these military traditions were picked up by cultural osmosis as Japan geared up to build a modern naval force of its own. So, 艦長 (Kanchou, lit. "Warship Leader") came into use as a title for the commanding officer of a warship without respect to an individual's actual rank. It's essentially the equivalent of an English "Shipmaster". Likewise, 提督 (Teitoku) is not a rank, but rather a title for the commander-in-chief of a particular force. Sometimes translated Captain General, the kanji's meaning is more like "Strategy Director". I like to translate this one as Fleetmaster, rather than Admiral. EDIT: Essentially, part of it is simply tradition... and part of it may be that they are canonically speaking English, and everyone knows what a mess Captain vs. Captain vs. Captain can be when all those have different meanings. Max's actual title is 船団長 (Sendanchou, lit. "Fleet Leader"), presumably because his rank is too low to merit being referred to as a full Fleetmaster. As a fun nested side note, because there are multiple points in this one: The fleetmaster in Macross Frontier's animated versions is not named Perry, his name is Pelliot, possibly a nod to explorer Paul Pelliot. Commodore Matthew Perry's name is spelled differently from his. His name in the novelization is Jean-Luc Tarkovsky, possibly a nod to Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky (and probably Jean-Luc Picard). In the novels, he is only the commanding officer for the NMCV-25 Battle Frontier, the fleetmaster is a General by the name of Kelvin Backflight. His actual military rank is Brigadier General. Yes, Bruno J. Global's rank at the start of Super Dimension Fortress Macross and Macross: Do You Remember Love? is Brigadier General. Max is indeed a Colonel in Macross 7... and every Macross 7 sidestory that involves an evil/corrupt New UN Forces officer will always have the big bad be a fellow Colonel so Max can't simply take them to task on rank alone.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    All in all, Star Trek: Discovery is REALLY feeling like a bad fanfic these days. I used to think its biggest problem was that it was trying very hard to be an action series instead of the contemplating science fiction that previous shows have been. This Mirror Universe arc definitely disabused me of that notion. Discovery would have been an eminently salvageable series if it had decent writers.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    ... ... ... OK, so now I'm left wondering what you actually HAVE read or seen. Even in Macross, the Zentradi were only really major players in Super Dimension Fortress Macross's story and the Macross: Do You Remember Love? adaptation of same. Macross II: Lovers Again was the only animated feature to treat them as the recurring menace they canonically are in the ongoing continuity. Zentradi stories are mostly confined to the no-export-for-you no-subtitles-for-you things like video games and the light novels. Robotech made them even less relevant, since in that version they only had the one main fleet, not thousands, and it was entirely destroyed in Ep27 instead of losing only about 1/3 of its forces. The New Generation indicated the Zentradi were functionally extinct c.2042, and via Prelude they might now be truly extinct c.2044, with Miriya being the last living example (if she wasn't killed offscreen during the attack on the SDF-3). Their presence in the comics was minimal, almost a bit part, and the novels made it an actual bit part.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    ... so you skipped basically everything? Not a strategy I disapprove of, mind, since it avoided exposure to worst of the absolutely sh*t-awful material in Robotech. The stuff I referenced was predominantly drawn from the Prelude comic, which spins off of the old Sentinels one.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Fun fact! The VF-11 was almost a combiner. You can see the early gattai version of it in the Shoji Kawamori Macross Design Works book. The main cockpit with the canards was going to be one part, and where the rear-facing laser cannon is was going to be a second cockpit for the larger second plane. None of which I am aware, it's a Sega Dreamcast game.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... even when they depicted the actual crash, it looked identical to the post-retrofit SDF-1 Macross from Super Dimension Fortress Macross. Kinda makes you wonder what they did to restore the ship in this version, besides possibly slap a new coat of paint on it and make it a little less corpse-y. One thing we can rely upon is that, as a Robotech property, whatever resolution the comic comes up with for its limited run is virtually guaranteed to be a cliched mess that'd send a real writer in search of the pepto-bismol. My guess would be that, as Harmony Gold has basically zero interest in what you'd call "continuity management", the Titan Comics Robotech comic will not be considered an official alternate timeline or anything like that. It'll probably fall into the same category as all the other comics that aren't directly tied into the Robotech animated continuity... namely, the unenviable status of "well, that's a thing that exists... but it's not part of Robotech proper". Titan's Robotech limited series is a pretty transparent "get something out to distract the fans from the lack of progress on Robotech's animated continuity" affair, now that it's become largely public knowledge that the Shadow Chronicles sequel is canceled and they had that disastrous Kickstarter flop with Robotech Academy and ended that with a ragequit.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    It's a very safe bet that this comic will not feature repeats of the stable time loop... for the simple, straightforward reason that this is a limited-run comic. The time loop thing is probably just a way for them to avoid having to discuss the Robotech Masters, Invid, etc. since they know that there's little to no money to be had in a comic adaptation of the latter sagas. Go back a couple pages to the teaser images that showed Roy and Adm. Hayes in his Halo knockoff body armor exploring the wrecked alien starship. They discovered that it was a ship from Earth full of dead humans literally almost right away. One of the first things they found was a computer that was still in working order, and which spoke to them in English. They also found the corpses of the entire bridge crew, complete with dog tags. (The comic implies, with all the subtlety of a half-brick to the skull, that the thing that prompted Hayes to swear Roy to secrecy was the discovery that the corpse he examined was his own daughter.) Maybe they'll break the stable time loop, but either way the series is reportedly not going on past the "Macross Saga".
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, Mythbusters did rather conclusively prove that it's possible to polish a turd... but in the final analysis all the polish in the world can't make it any less sh*t. That's what rational fans are looking at the Macross Delta: Gekijo no Walkure movie as: a superficial improvement to something fundamentally unpleasant. Considering Walkure was basically supposed to be carrying Macross Delta, it's still rather surprising that there's so little for the series. The lack of character development across the board is likely an explanation for it but it doesn't really diminish the impact of the sheer lack of fan material from the series. Even the characters of Walkure in the series don't seem to be popular enough to muster a decent volume of fanart.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    If you're going to drop acid, at least bring enough for the rest of the class.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Bah, practice your foreign languages petaQ! The guide I linked to does have a visual translation of most of the standard menus from the Gefion, the Gefion's hangar deck, the Hunter's Guild, and the standard City menus. Once you unlock your first Super Pack and discover the super moves, it becomes a bit less onerous... especially when you get the Double Strike Pack for the VF-1 and realize you basically have a Valkyrie that can do the kamehameha now. The Itano circuses from the VF-0's Ghost Booster and the VF-1's Super Pack are pretty nice too, tho. (Seriously. Goku would be proud.) If I had a penny for every case of a HUD saying "ROCK ON"... and who could forget the TV tagline about Ranka from the Frontier TV series: "Images in Dairy Life". It really is helpful that things like liner notes started spelling this nonsense out in English for us... tho it did feel like it added some seriously unnecessary punctuation in the names of the Aerial Knights. Yeah, Boquomouxy isn't likely to be topped anytime soon as "most absurd proper noun". (That's the factory satellite that makes the Quel Quallie theatre scout pod.) Do give his blog a look, he's working piecemeal on several novels at once right now including the ones for Macross Delta and Do You Remember Love?.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Word.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Divide's been like that for so long it's practically Space Ireland. That's basically just Latence vs. the New UN Forces...
  14. Seto Kaiba
    They updated his uniform, but that's about all... they kept his goofy-ass bucket helmet.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Basically, yeah... but Flash Back 2012 wasn't trying to tell a story. Flash Back 2012 was, for all practical intents and purposes, just a longer version of the epilogue for the Super Dimension Fortress Macross series that ended up cut in the storyboarding phase due to a runtime issue. It doesn't really tell a story, it's a music video that recaps a few iconic scenes out of the differing versions of the First Space War narrative. Macross Delta: Gekijo no Walkure is more like DYRL?, an alternate retelling of the TV series story... which is gonna be REALLY jarring if it ends up a two hour Walkure concert.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    They may be able to take a miss on large parts of it, since they've already strongly hinted that the whole thing is a stable time loop that omits all of the later Robotech material derived from the original Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross and Genesis Climber MOSPEADA. My money's on the destruction of [Boddole Zer/Dolza]'s flagship catapulting the ship back in time to crash on Earth in 1999. No Two Years After arc or anything like that.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Unfortunately I'm going to miss it... thanks to some irresponsible gits at work there's a spending crackdown, so I can't finagle a business trip that'd let me see it in theaters this time. The delay to see it on home video shouldn't be more than six months or so though.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Daily practice is the key, especially when it comes to memorizing hiragana and katakana characters. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6r3Sy1LnkpxSGJxOUR4VFVac0k/view?ths=true This is the really good one that my friend used. It's not the most intuitive guide in the world, but it's hands-down better than any other I've seen. For most, the biggest issue I've seen complaints about is the way the game uses a Japanese button layout, making X cancel and O accept, where the opposite is true for western games. Once you get used to the menus, you'll hardly need the guide except for the "10 bear asses" type fetch quests. Yeah, you didn't get very far then... that's like, the end of chapter 2. 'course for the longest time it feels like the only VFs available are the Sv-51, VF-0, and VF-1. It's not till much later that you finally get a VF-11B. The character model VFs you can unlock have slightly better stats than the regular ones, but nowhere near as good as the stats of the ones the NPC allies get that you can't fly until New Game+. (Probably for the best, since in New Game+ you can field multiples of any craft you have, and Alto Saotome's VF-25F was kinda the Disc One Nuke if not for the fact that the ally AI isn't the sharpest.) It was pointed out a while back that "Reon" is how it's spelled, in English, in the official guidebook to the game. Many of us are nothing if not sticklers for the official line. Personally, I'd recommend giving a try to a Windows Store app called MangaBlaze. Search a couple of the usual suspects through that app and you should be able to read several fan translations of Macross manga titles. Macross 7 Trash is a sidestory to the Macross 7 series, concerned mainly with an extreme sport called Tornado Crush, which I can only describe as being to speed skating what the Australian rugby league is to American football... a version that's more mixed martial arts competition than the actual game. The main plot concerns a leading athlete in the game being manipulated by a retired ace pilot to help put a stop to a rogue Colonel's plan to weaponize Zentradi civilians as supersoldiers using a technology his mother developed. Macross R is the shortform title of Macross the Ride, same as Macross Frontier gets abbreviated Macross F. That's a relatively short one (just two volumes), but I don't think anyone is tackling it at the moment. The most prolific translator of novels is @Gubaba, the translations of which he posts on his blog. My proficiency level is only recently developed to the point where I'm willing to tackle whole books, but I'm starting with the old Sky Angels book instead, as that's been out of print for so bloody long that NOBODY is going to piss and moan if I make a full translation available. Still, I expect that'll take months to finish.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Wouldn't be Macross's first gattai... the Zentradi had a triple combiner in Macross M3.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    That's basically what I'm expecting... a two hour Walkure anime music video with a barely-there version of Macross Delta's already painfully flimsy and insubstantial plot that serves only to set up each new song. EDIT: I have to say, after all the fuss and noise about how popular Walkure supposedly is, there's very little in terms of official publications, doujinshi, and fan art for the Macross Delta series. I'm honestly surprised that the disparity is so huge compared to Macross Frontier. Almost a literal order of magnitude difference at the least.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Well, when your cup runneth over with popular legacy characters who are all owned by a potentially litigious, far more successful rival business you don't have a lot of options. You either have to make them all totally unrecognizable so they can be used freely, keep them confined to works where they can be used safely, or get rid of them. They redesigned the few they couldn't live without ("Rick" and "Lisa"), and everyone else got either killed or put on a bus for legal reasons and to make way for the new cast who fell hilariously flat. Yes, please... don't make us witness self-harm like that.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    No, that is a perfectly sensible question that anyone would ask when confronted with an advance in technology. "Can this only be applied to new developments, or can we apply this to improve things that we already have?" Also (see below) a question that was examined in-universe in some depth during the development of the YF-24. As far as I am aware, no official comment has been offered on the subject of the VF-22 being either compatible or incompatible with an Inertia Store Converter. I'd be shocked if it wasn't compatible... given that it was designed from the prototype phase on up to accept the less capable fold carbon-based version of the same tech all along (the Inertia Vector Control System). Great Mechanics DX 9 explicitly notes that the feasibility of upgrading the VF-19 with Inertia Store Converter technology was examined as a potential alternative path to the then-problematic YF-24 program and the conclusion was that it was possible. The New UN Government opted to keep its YF-24 program going instead of retrofitting VF-19s with ISC systems, for economic reasons. (This was a terribly unsubtle nod to US 5th Gen fighter development, which proceeded in defiance of all common sense and military advice because damnit, they created JOBS.)
  23. Seto Kaiba
    After Delta, I'm setting the bar somewhat lower. I just want decent writing. Beyond that, I'm up for whatever.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, proficiency in Japanese is a bit of a bear... I've seen estimates that it takes something along the lines of 2,500 hours of practice to achieve basic proficiency. Have you tried the guide posted here on MacrossWorld? My buddy @Jack Verse got through all of the Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy game using that and he doesn't speak a lick of Japanese. Most of the missions amount to "fly to the location marked on your HUD/map" followed by either "and explore the location" or "defeat all enemies there", though there usually isn't any difference between those two options. The Hunters Guild quests are somewhat more frustrating since they usually fall into one of three basic categories: Fly to location X and trigger an event by getting close to a big floating icon and hitting O, then kill all the things. Obtain X many Y goods and deliver them to any Guild location (usually just spawned pickups on the worldmap, sometimes special items that show up as different-colored item pickups on the worldmap). Deliver X goods to Y location (same as the above, except the item is basically handed to you and you have to fly it to a specific guild location.) The Vanquish Races are the ones I found most frustrating, but that was just because I don't seem to be very good at them. To this day, I've never managed to beat the ones that provide the FAST pack sets for the YF-19 and YF-21. There are fan translations of some of them. I know Macross 7 Trash got a full fan translation, even if the scan quality is iffy and the romanizations inconsistent. @Talos wanted to work with me on a full translation of Macross the First, but that project never got off the ground because of our mutual work obligations. I know partial translations have been done for Macross Delta: the White Knight of the Black Wing. Yes, Maj. Gilliam Angreat (NUNS) is the CO of the 727th Independent Squadron VF-X Ravens. The VF-X Ravens were founded in 2036, and he assumed command of the unit after being promoted to Major in 2043. He was offered a promotion to the staff office directing the VF-X units in 2045, but turned it down to remain in the field. His immediate superior is Col. Wilbur Garland (NUNS), the staff officer who is responsible for all of the VF-X units operating in that region of the galaxy. He and Gilliam graduated the NUNS VF pilot training school together in 2031, served together in the 28th Long-Distance Emigrant Fleet escort detail, and were both selected for the new special forces pilot training program Scarecrow in 2034. Col. Garland is also THE BAD GUY, being the front man for Latence in its hijacking of the New UN Spacy Earth defense fleet's Macross-13 flagship and also dumb enough to have a villainous BSoD and get back in the cockpit of a Jamming Sound-equipped VF-22 after years behind a desk so Aegis could shoot him down and kill him. Cpt. Aegis Focker joined the VF-X Ravens in 2050 after being transferred out of the Beneb system New UN Spacy defense force's Angel Wings squadron. He briefly becomes commanding officer of the VF-X Ravens after Gilliam goes missing in the field in 2050, before being reunited with him in January 2051. Depending on whether you get the bad or good end, Gilliam is either defeated by Aegis or Aegis and the rest of the Ravens defect to Vindirance and operate under his leadership again. Yep, it's noted in the novels that an AI personality named Manfred is present and involved in the conspiracy by the Galaxy Executives. "Survived" might be a strong word for it, though, as Manfred most definitely died in the biological sense. Whether the Manfred data entity in the Macross Galaxy fleet is the living mind of Manfred Brando or just a digital copy of his mind isn't clear. Either way, something of Manfred Brando did not die with his body when his VF-17S was shot down. Vindirance is only technically an anti-government organization in Macross VF-X2. They're not really opposed to the New UN Government or New UN Forces in and of themselves, they oppose the literally militant Earth-supremacist faction Latence which was increasingly influencing the policies of the New UN Government and New UN Forces. Latence was pushing the New UN Gov't on Earth to expand its authority over the emigrant fleets and colony worlds, to exert more military force to suppress pro-autonomy movements in the colonies, and to grant more power and authority to the military with an endgame of the military controlling the government rather than vice versa. As the commanding officer of an emigrant fleet escort group, and the husband of the emigrant fleet government's chief executive, it makes sense that Max would be among Vindirance's backers in the New UN Forces. He's a soldier acting to oppose a nationalist faction inside the military that's trying to seize control of the legitimate democratic government from within and corrupt it into a militant nationalist state that rules with an iron fist in the name of "defense". Ultimately, he did the right thing, Latence was foiled, and the resulting greater autonomy granted to the emigrant fleets took the wind out of the sails of a lot of serious anti-government movements, resulting in more peaceful times for the New UN Government. Really, you could sum it up by saying that Macross VF-X2 is more or less Macross's own riff on Zeta Gundam... Latence are the Titans, the anti-colonist suppression group who become increasingly evil and brutal as time goes on, while Vindirance is the AEUG, the secret paramilitary group created and supported by the military to semi-clandestinely oppose the brutal actions of the suppression unit.
  25. 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?
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