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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that's more a Farce Ghost. ... the most insane part is that, before Harmony Gold rebooted Robotech and disowned all the pre-2001 licensee-created material, that would actually have made sense in context. ("Protoculture" is commonly joked about as being magic flowers, but the "magic" part used to be mostly literal.) Carl Macek's own post-facto attempt to explain how "protoculture" worked basically amounted to a technology that produced power by extracting the life force from the seeds of the so-called "flower of life" while preventing them from sprouting and somehow converting it into mechanical energy... sort of a technological equivalent of "Cast from HP" using the magic flower's HP. The novels took that even further, by having the immense life force of those flowers basically being equivalent to Star Wars's Force, with a will of its own and all.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Blame the SF writers, fifty years on and we still don't have an agreed-upon meaning for the damn word. I cringe a little harder every time I see a new prototype post or release. On the one hand, I wanna say "bless 'em, they're trying", but on the other hand everything that I've seen of theirs looks kind of off somehow... and unmistakably behind the curve by about ten years in the quality department. The same kinda wrongness I expect when looking at an Evolution Toy production model up close.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, I'd say so. Macross 7 is not a show that lends itself to binge-watching. You can reasonably binge Super Dimension Fortress Macross, since it has enough variety (at least before the "Two Years Later" arc) to keep it interesting. Macross 7's first half is such an unbearably slow build-up to the actual plot of the series, and is so lacking in musical variety compared to the rest of the series, that it quickly becomes unbearably repetitive. The average viewer can only stand so many episodes where the Varauta forces go attack the fleet, Basara goes out to sing, gets yelled at by Gamlin for getting in the way, accomplishes sod all, and then grumbles about how they won't listen to his song. (And, of course, because he only has the one song "Planet Dance" and is probably the franchise's second most easy-to-hate character, it quickly goes pear shaped if you try to binge it.)
  4. Seto Kaiba
    The first time I watched Macross 7 I made the critical mistake of marathoning it... it's definitely not a show meant to be taken in doses of more than 1-2 episodes a day. Otherwise, the first half's painfully slow buildup gets incredibly frustrating in its samey-ness and it becomes a chore. One episode a day is what I'd recommend, really, if you want to get through it and actually enjoy the experience. (I'm currently in the midst of attempting to apply that same logic to my latest attempt to slog through Gundam SEED, and thus far it's actually working.)
  5. Seto Kaiba
    No, it is not. The proper romanization of バトロイド is "Batoroido" or "Battroid". No, it's your statement here that's just plain wrong. Officially, "Battroid" is a portmanteau of Battle and Android. Just as "Destroid" is a portmanteau of Destroy and Android. This isn't exactly a secret, it's even mentioned in the Animeigo DVD liner notes.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    This is one of those Zentradi things like the word "Gnerl" where the original source seems to have been lost to time... but it's undeniably official. None of the oldest artbooks give character name spellings in English, but the merchandise from the period often did. The weird part is that there's a lot of variation in spelling her first name (officially Milia, but often Millia or Miria) but they all seem to agree her last name is spelled "Fallyna" when it appears on boxes, in tampo print, stickers, waterslide decals, and so on. This goes back to the kits and toys coming out in ~1985, and seems to have become accepted enough to also be used in the official subtitles and so on.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    I'm now 20 episodes into Gundam SEED and I really haven't seen any of the instances of mistimed music alluded to earlier. That said, this show has an unreasonable number of flashbacks. It's not quite to Dragonball Z "Freeza's five minutes" levels, but it feels like if the characters stopped flashing back all the time this show would be at least 2 or 3 episodes shorter. So far, the most likeable character in the series seems to be a toss-up between Mwu La Flaga and Ramba Rommel... er... "Andrew Waltfeld".
  8. Seto Kaiba
    They use 市長 (Shichou, lit. "Mayor") for Milia and 大統領 (Daitouryou, "President") for Howard Glass. Presumably this has something to do with the reduction in New UN Government direct control over the emigrant fleets and/or the scale of their respective emigrant fleets. In one comedic episode of Macross 7 PLUS, Milia's sort of pitching herself and her amazing abilities as a soldier and administrator (and other merits) to the audience and ends by calling herself "Milia the President" (in conspicuous English). It is a bit of a slog, isn't it?
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Being a (mercifully) short limited comic, the Robotech: Invasion series and its Mars Base One mini-comic side story flew under the radar even for most Robotech fans. The DC/Wildstorm comics did very little to promote themselves except for the Shadow Chronicles tie-in comic. It is a bit like watching a train wreck, isn't it?
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Seems unlikely, IMO... they're pressed for time in the movie, and with the show already a horribly unbalanced one, it's more likely the VF-31 will be the technical cameo. Seriously though, Wright's VF-22 had such a minor role in the actual series that it's likely to end up omitted entirely in the movie version.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    I'm certainly finding the HD remastered edition of Mobile Suit Gundam SEED significantly less unwatchable than the SD American broadcast edition, and since all my TVs are widescreen the letterboxing doesn't bother me much. 100 x 0 still equals 0.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Based on the available information, Var syndrome is a condition that emerged very recently in the New UN Government's sphere of influence, with the first identified cases being after the Vajra war ended in September 2059. The discovery that the disease was influenced by fold waves occurred sometime in 2062, along with the first efforts to suppress it using fold song. Berger Stone's explanation that humanity caught the fold bacteria from the Vajra doesn't pan out, which combined with other evidence suggests the fold bacteria responsible for Var syndrome have been part of the human microbiome for tens or even hundreds of thousands of years. If that's the case, then it strongly suggests Var syndrome would be a very rare or nonexistent condition unless deliberately triggered by consumption of food products that contain the ingredients for seidznol or the use of inimical fold song. (Xaos didn't yet know about the combination of apples and bottled water when they linked only the incidences involving high levels of fold waves to Windermere.) That was 2065, just two years before the events of Macross Delta... when he was an officer in the local New UN Spacy garrison on Aifheim. As he and others note when they discover Windermere's apples-and-water scheme, both Windermere Exdel "Galaxy" apples and the bottled water from the ruins had been extensively consumed by the NUNS prior to halting imports from Windermere IV.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    What all did they change in the HD Remaster of Mobile Suit Gundam SEED besides the music? (Remember, I've only previously attempted to watch the series in its painfully bad, edited-for-TV American broadcast release.) With the best will in the world, I would have to argue that's a fair description of the Gundam SEED as a whole based on what I've seen of the series thus far. It feels like the show's pitch meeting was "Let's remake Soldiers of Sorrow but everyone has a Gundam and nobody has any positive character traits."
  14. Seto Kaiba
    ... so I was understating it when I guessed you meant it was going to get a whole lot worse? Watching this is enough to kinda realize that Gundam Musou 2 spoiled very little when I played it earlier this year and did the Gundam SEED and Gundam SEED Destiny campaigns. (I have to say, though, I am oddly looking forward to firing the game up on the PS3 and brutally beating the stupid out of Yzak, Athrun, and Kira.) Today's lunch break "entertainment" (torture) is PHASE 15: Burning Clouds of Sand.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Keep your hopes low and your expectations lower still, otherwise you're likely to be disappointed. Problem is, that's inconsistent with the depiction of the Protoculture - even by their own intelligent constructs - up thru the end of the Macross Delta series. The Protoculture haven't been depicted as a race of abusive precursors, they're more along the lines of "brilliant but absentminded". Several times now Macross titles have featured things the Protoculture made in an attempt to solve the problem of their civilization's collapse and burying them after realizing actually using them would be a terrible idea. Like their Evil-series super-Zentradi that became the Protodeviln, the Fold Evil with the ability to alter history on Uroboros, or the Star Shrine system's Gundam-esque design intent of eliminating conflict by giving everyone fold wave telepathy. (Aeolia Schenberg must've been a Protoculture.) Their wish, as expressed by more than one of their surviving constructs, was for their creations to live together in peace... not for them to be able to micromanage their creations as slaves. The prevailing in-universe theory is that it's because the Brisingr globular cluster was one of the Protoculture's last settlements in the galaxy, while Earth had been inside a region of space controlled by the Zentradi Army for aeons. Probably Earth, its society developed to a much more advanced level than the other sub-Protoculture species, and if the theory of the Brisingr cluster being the last Protoculture settlement is true, those sub-Protoculture species are later creations than humans who were engineered during the height of the Protoculture's civilization. The Birdhuman is explicitly based on the Vajra Queen. If there's any similarity, it's probably because the Sigur Valens was also based on the Vajra. The obvious problem with that theory being that Var syndrome isn't actually part of the system's function, it was something that Windermere IV cultivated in an attempt to make it easier for them to mind control people using just the Wind Shrine aboard the Sigur Valens. The Star Shrine was able to link the minds of everyone in the galaxy, including those who had no contact with Var syndrome.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Considering how minimal the effort they seem to be putting into the Macross Delta movie is, they're probably waiting until after the movie has been out for a few weeks to start blitzing us with information.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    They've stopped just short of stating it in plain, simple terms... but they've pretty thoroughly ruled out every other option except the Mardook being a surviving group of Protoculture descendants.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Considering the Var syndrome problem seems to have been caused principally by Windermere IV's deliberate efforts to trigger the disease and control the afflicted, the problem will probably go away with the end of Macross Delta. At that point, fans would be well entitled to ask Kawamori if he's taking the piss when he says he hasn't seen Macross II... because ancient Protoculture survivors using songs to create a brainwashed army with controllable berserk aggression with an eye toward destroying that which they find displeases them or is incompatible with their culture is basically a quick description of the Mardook and their raison d'etre.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    The ghost dude, who is presumably the Robotech equivalent of Macross's Riber Fruhling. Misa has several trippy hallucinations about Riber during her short visit to Salla Base in Macross the First. You are correct that in the original Macross version, Mars Base Salla had been deliberately abandoned by the UN Forces and the fleet returning the base personnel to Earth was ambushed and destroyed by the Oberth-class space destroyer Tsiolkovsky on 8 September 2005, killing a total 3,055 people. (Hunting down and destroying the hijacked destroyer was what made Global famous and probably got him a job commanding the SDF-1.) The event badly-drawn Britai is referring to in the Robotech comic above is in a sidestory mini-comic that was included in the DC/Wildstorm Robotech: Invasion comic in the faint hope that having some Macross Saga stuff might prop up sales. It told a version of Mars Base's abandonment that was very different from Macross's. That comic, entitled Mars Base One, depicted an unrecorded-in-history conflict in which a single Zentradi medium-scale gunboat found the Sol system years before Britai's fleet. The ship folded into Mars orbit and attacked Mars Base, and the base commanders ordered an evacuation which was brought rather abruptly to an end when the evacuation ship was destroyed and the Zentradi ship was destroyed in turn by a prototype Grand Cannon system, leaving Riber the sole survivor of the base and stranded on Mars indefinitely... at which point he wanders off into the Martian desert to die for no clear reason despite having working radio systems, a crapload of food and supplies, and life support that'd last years.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    I have a sneaking suspicion that is a "it's about to get a whole lot worse". Well, I already know Kira's memetic status as a godmode sue of the very worst order... my old buddy @Jack Verse is a huge fan of Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, so I've picked up a few things by osmosis over the last fourteen years or so.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Sorta? In fiction, the definition of the term "android" is not as formalized as the definition for "robot". Most authors fall back on one of two key points to differentiate them: An android is a robotic construct with a self-aware, autonomous artificial intelligence capable of independent thought and action, while a conventional robot uses a "dumb" AI that simply follows preprogrammed instructions. An android is a robot made in the human image, either undetectably human-looking or very close to it, while a robot is visibly artificial and/or looks nothing like a human or humanoid. Star Trek: the Next Generation did a lot to popularize the notion of androids as fitting both of those categories. One way in which the definition of "android" is used more flexibly is that is that some authors have extended the definition to mean wholly-artificial self-aware automata that are based on, or composed entirely of, biotechnological or biological parts. Sort of like a cyborg, except it was built from scratch as a mixture of organics and technology instead of being an organic being altered through the replacement of parts with machinery. These are sometimes called bio-androids. A bio-android might have a bio-technological computer for a brain, a composite material skeleton, all wrapped in vat-grown flesh and blood, or it might have a machine brain and nervous system puppeteering an organic technology body of organs, blood, and bone, or it may be composed entirely of organic technology programmed at the genetic level to fulfill a certain task. Some good examples of bio-androids in anime would include: Mikumo Guynemer, obviously, who is a cloned human with legacy genetic codes left behind by the Protoculture that contain an autonomous program that enabled (forced) her to operate the Star Shrine. (The wholly-biological type programmed at a genetic level.) The version of Commander Boddole Zer in Macross: Do You Remember Love? arguably qualifies, as he was a sentient and wholly organic/bio-technological living computer in approximately humanoid form. Melfina VSD02C from Outlaw Star. A bio-android with an artificial bio-technological brain and artificial skeleton wrapped in vat-cultured flesh and blood with some artificial and some cloned natural organs. Meifon Li, the protagonist of the Outlaw Star spinoff Angel Links is the fully bio-technological type, a wholly artificial lifeform made of biological technology from a wrecked alien ship of unknown origin, who was programmed to live and grow normally as if she were the child the android was to replace until she found the target that she was supposed to assassinate. The Innovades (fake Innovators) in Gundam 00, and arguably Team Trinity, who were biological and bio-technological, living, independently sentient terminals for the quantum supercomputer Veda with technological augmentations enabling them to function more effectively in space for long periods. The Angeroids in Heaven's Lost Property are principally biological, artificial constructs that are fully sentient. War Prince Nataku in Gensoumaden Saiyuki may also qualify, as he was an artificially-created combat organism that his "father" Li Touten created by using technology to modify reengineer his own genes to grow the perfect warrior-son in a cloning tank. They're all over Tenchi Muyo!, with Ryoko Hakubi being the most obvious one: a genetically engineered, artificially cultivated "child" made by fusing Washu's own genes with an inorganic lifeform called a Mass, with a mind that is at least partly a pre-programmed computer. Ryo-Ohki and Fuku may count if you waive the part about looking human (which they rarely do), as they're organic technology sentient constructs. Doll and the other artificial humans from Isekai no Seikishi Monogatari also count, for much the same reason as Ryoko. Mackie Stingray (but only the version in Bubblegum Crisis: Tokyo 2040) is one as well, being a bio-technological Boomer in human form with a brain based on Sylia's own. The Ilia probe from Star Trek: the Motion Picture also fits the definition, as an organic technology probe created from the pattern (but not the actual body) of the recently deceased Lt. Ilia. Dragon Ball and Dragonball Z's use of the term "android" is one of the most famous questionable translation choices in the history of the American anime industry. The actual term used is 人造人間 (lit. "Artificial Human"), and among their numbers were a mix of true androids (e.g. No.16 and No.19), and cyborgs (e.g. No.8, No.17, No.18, No.20 AKA Dr. Gero). This questionable choice by the translators is so famous that even Dragonball Z Abridged felt the need to throw a few jokes in about it.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    As someone who took Latin in school, I'll try not to be offended on Virgil's behalf. Yeah, that's the one bit that doesn't quite fit. Aether and Hemera make sense because, depending on which scholar you read, both were either the children of Chaos directly or his grandchildren via his children Erebus (darkness) and Nyx (night). Elysion doesn't really fit the obvious convention since it's not a deity itself but a place where those chosen by the gods go after death. It may fit better on a less obvious level, since Elysion is occasionally described as a realm existing in perpetually sunny day (Hemera) and cooled by strong winds of the upper air the gods breathe (Aether). Someone on the show's staff seems to be a fan of Hyginus.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Do the battles in Mobile Suit Gundam SEED ever stop being one-sided? I'm 13 episodes in, and it's feeling more like New Mobile Report Gundam Wing in here with ZAFT's four GAT-X series machines effortlessly spanking legions of Earth Federation mobile armors and shrugging off fire from multiple capital ships like it's nothing. Once Kira and the Strike launch, the fights are just one-sided going the other way.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Looks like Titan Comics decided to rip off the Mars Base Salla sequence from Macross the First for their comic...
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Chronicle's Mechanic Sheet(s) for Alto's YF-29 Durandal do suggest that to be the case... an increase in performance vs. its production-level contemporaries is specifically noted under its Fighter and Battroid sections. Outside of possible confrontations in Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy, that's probably the only time the VF-27 ever squared off against the fighter whose specs Macross Galaxy illegally obtained via L.A.I. to complete it.
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