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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Hey now... I might be evil, even if it's more Guild of Calamitous Intent-evil than actual villain-evil (I'm trying dammit!), but the site's Chaotic Neutral at worst. I dunno... from my view, Frontier and Delta are actually pretty darn reserved about fanservice even compared to previous Macross works. They certainly cross fewer lines than previous shows. 7 has, for my money, refused to stop at taking the cake and absconded with the whole damned bakery. The "Dakedo Baby" ED's stills of a naked Mylene in the shower, Sivil's possessing women to get her leg over Basara, and the skirt-flipping kid aside, they had an entire OVA's B-plot devoted to Mylene being pursued by a bisexual producer and no less than three stories devoted to the idea that Max and Milia were cheating on each other (one of which took pains to make it sound like the audience was about to see her in the act). Played for laughs, with the exception of the Dynamite 7 B-plot being a very traumatic experience for Mylene, but still... (I haven't quite forgotten that The Lost Two Years indicates Zentradi found their way into the porn industry not long after the First Space War ended, or the novelizations removing the question mark from several different "They did?" moments in their respective TV shows. I fully expect the Delta novelization to follow suit... or should that be "follow birthday suit"?) It's possible they may have obtained someone through a recording agency while Delta was going on and simply didn't publicize it. They didn't exactly hold public auditions for Minmay or Basara, for instance. Or it's also possible they decided to go with something like Macross R where there isn't a prominently-featured singer. (Kawamori had hinted he wanted to do something like that before the Delta series was revealed.) EDIT: R did technically have a singer, but she was a retired singer who'd opted to change careers and become a pilot. The Delta continuation is, IMO, the least probable theory given Kawamori's avowed dislike of doing direct sequels.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Think I'd rather the people posting news about the proposed film used that than the seemingly ubiquitous Macross Pachinko Fever screenshots.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Your previous replies suggest your understanding is less complete than you believe it to be... but nobody's going to judge you for not liking these things. They will, however, be inclined to look at you funny if you make a fuss about them like they were something new or unusual. As I noted previously, these things are nothing unusual for a Macross series and many other titles both in the franchise and elsewhere contain much more overt sexuality than this.... something the people with complaints about Frontier and Delta gloss over or ignore with alarming consistency. Really now? Ironic indeed, given that many Facebook groups will tell you the exact polar opposite of that... that this site is a den of evil, grumpy oldtaku who hate Frontier and Delta with a passion. I guess that just shows that everyone's views are a little different.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Did anyone take the time to ask them awkward questions about the Robotech RPG Tactics KS? I'd imagine that should still be a fairly hot topic, considering.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    You're definitely not lending your criticism much validity with a list like this, though... but it does highlight a case of not understanding attitudes other cultures have on certain things. There is nothing sexual about communal bathing in Japan, for instance. In general, Japan isn't quite so prudish as America is though, which is something that often doesn't translate well for viewers in other countries. There's only one item on this list that's even remotely sexual that isn't played directly for comedy purposes... and that's the scene that establishes that Leon and Cathy are lovers. Most of the list would be considered fairly standard comedy tropes even in America, particularly the suggestively shaped food. Everything is someone's fetish, mate... there are over seven billion people on this planet and most anything you could think of turns someone's crank. It's usually better not to think about it. It's up to the otaku to make something else of it, that's why there's such a brisk market for things like doujinshi. ;-)
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Serious(ly in need of some quality time with a small army of clinical psychiatrists). So, odds on how fast the site gets hacked? I doubt Harmony Gold management was willing to pay for a setup with better security.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    ... you sure you didn't watch a different show that someone had retitled? Macross Frontier did very little with fanservice of that type. The vast majority of what little there was was only played purely for comedy. Hell, there's more overt sexualization going on in DYRL?. There are dirtier shorts in 7. Klan Klan is the exception to the above, in that her fanservice was played not for laughs (most of the time) but put in place as a legitimate hinderance to her relationship with Michael Blanc. Now, I'm sure the fetish fuel aspect is also intentional, but it's generally not overt (the kind of thing the dojinshi writers exploit because the show doesn't). Ranka and Nanase though? Nanase's barely in the bloody show to begin with, and the few times any reference is made to her before she's injured it's for comedy. The series spends most of the run treating Ranka like a sheltered little kid, barring one hospital gown-related gag that was also played solely for comedy. The panty episode was ridiculous, but it was played purely for comedy... almost all of the fanservice was, even in Sheryl's case, and she was the show's Ms. Fanservice. It's weird how some people are reacting like this was Stratos4, where the fighters and sci-fi plot were a tissue-paper thin veneer over what was basically softcore lesbian porn, or Strike Witches, which I managed to get through precisely one episode of before becoming convinced that it was operating on a level of creepy that normally merits a visit from Chris Hansen and the FBI. Be careful with Zone of the Enders... a mecha crotch-shot there could put your eye out.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Weirdly, I heard about this from a coworker... which was a bit of a shock, as I hadn't been aware any of them actually watched anime. I've seen some teasers for it and it looks interesting, mostly one with characters I'm assuming are Trevor and Alucard training together. What I've heard of its actual content makes it sound like a spiritual sibling to Kouta Hirano's Hellsing manga and OVA series... lots of profanity, lots of blood and gore, and vampires as something to be properly afraid of instead of socially maladjusted prats with a body glitter addiction. Sounds like a good time, albeit not one with an especially complex or deep story. (I remember the game not-so-fondly from when I was a kid... old school Nintendo Hard.) IIRC this Castlevania series is written by Warren Ellis, so it's not surprising in the least that it would villify the church to an extent that some would consider... unnatural. This is, after all, the man who wrote Transmetropoltian and devoted multiple character arcs and several entire issues to having its main character deconstruct the various evils and abuses of organized religion in general (and a few fictional bland name equivalents of real-world denominations in particular) while periodically losing his cool and beating the stupid out of religious officials. He probably jumped at the chance to write a church militant getting its arse handed to it. ... and now my sinuses are full of Diet Coke. Do I even want to know the context of that? Does it even make sense in context?
  9. Seto Kaiba
    "Not directly" would be the most honest answer, I think. Cpt. Klan Klan's key character traits got redistributed to a couple different characters. To put it in trope terms, her status as Proud Warrior Race Guy, Token Girl Teammate, and the Meltran in the Painted-On-Pilot-Suit went to Mirage Jenius. Same as her (ultimately unsuccessful) red-and-blue romance with another soldier. Her status as a supporting Ms. Fanservice was inherited by Makina, though Makina's more like the show's equivalent of Nanase... the terminally underdeveloped character who exists only to tick off the last few boxes on the generic fetish checklist via gag boobs and a lesbian love interest, who is only relevant to the plot near the end when she's seriously injured by the enemy.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Harmony Gold, mostly. They made quite a bit of fuss on the official forums when that first came to light, with a few Hollywood gossip sites treating it like it was a done deal. Back then, the Harmony Gold brain trust were also (falsely) claiming that Warner Bros intended to make Robotech one of its tentpole franchises and were fast-tracking the movie into production. The site was abuzz with fake news about it for a very long time. There was one other director who was never approached about doing Robotech who the HG volunteers made a big to-do about having turned the movie down... it took weeks to set the record straight that he'd never even mentioned Robotech, he'd only derisively referred to robot movies like Transformers as "Robo-tech" and said he wasn't interested in making one. You seem to have answered your other question yourself before I woke up, so I'll let that be. Ask anyone who's been to one of their convention panels in the last eight or so years... they aren't exactly honest about the live-action movie's state of affairs. For years they were claiming (in their famously lame Powerpoint) that Kasdan, Millar, Gough, and Smith were ALL still attached to write, years after they'd submitted their story treatments and buggered off to do more productive things. Considering the franchise and likely source of the claims, it's amazing anyone is taking it seriously at all, let alone here. You'd think people would've learned by now that they're best described in terms from Shakespeare: "[...] they have committed false report; moreover, they have spoken untruths; secondly, they are slanders; sixth and lastly, they have belied a lady; thirdly, they have verified unjust things; and, to conclude, they are lying knaves." - Dogberry, Much Ado About Nothing It's totally relevant. Sony no doubt saw that and concluded, as if further evidence were necessary, that a franchise that couldn't even successfully beg a pittance of $50,000 from its devoted fandom to develop a pilot was only likely to end up as award bait at the Razzies. (The fact that Harmony Gold's own management wouldn't put up $50,000 themselves to have done with it probably raised more than a few eyebrows at Sony too...)
  11. Seto Kaiba
    It's not a myth that the show was planned as 1 cour and a movie. It changed in preproduction, not production. (During the scripting and storyboarding of the first few episodes, IIRC.) By the time they went to actual production, it was 2 cour. You're right that it isn't really a viable defense of the appallingly poor writing in the show's second half... Delta's plot was appallingly thin and unoriginal even before that point anyway. Roid is Grace 2.0, Keith is Brera, Freyja is a better Ranka than Ranka is...
  12. Seto Kaiba
    That's exactly my point... they made a great big fuss claiming he'd been tapped to direct it, but in truth all he had done was talk to them about it informally. He had never actually agreed to direct the film, let alone signed a contract. Nic Mathieu and James Wan were never hired to direct it at any point either, it was the same fake news stunt they pulled with Sylvain White. The same fake news stunt they're now pulling with Alex Muschietti, who credible reports suggest will be working instead on the second half of the planned duology adaptation of Steven King's It. They were pushing similar fake news with writers, claiming people who'd handed in their story treatments and left were still attached to the project.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    So, for legal reasons, "Failure is the only option". They can neither use the original designs nor develop derivatives of same for animated or live action works.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    IIRC, Sylvain White was the first director to have the misfortune to allegedly be tapped to direct the proposed live-action Robotech movie. Like Nic Mathieu and James Wan, it was evident pretty soon after that he'd only been approached about it on a strictly informal basis and listened politely to the pitch without committing to anything. Smart money says Andy Muschietti is just the latest member of the club of directors who read the pitch, thanked them politely for coming to him, and filed it in the nearest bin as soon as they were out of eyeshot and is now wondering why they're telling the world he's directing it. Pretty much every piece of news about the proposed film has been fake news... like how they were telling everyone that Lawrence Kasdan, Alfred Gough, Miles Millar, and Tom Rob Smith were had all been attached to write for the film when in reality they'd only submitted story treatments they were paid for and then gone off to do other things.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    No, I hadn't forgotten... in fact, it's a nice illustration of my point about it being a largely forgotten gimmick. Star Trek: the Next Generation had 176 episodes and 4 movies. In that span, there were just four actual saucer separation events and the possibility was only brought up a handful of times when it wasn't actually used. Half of the uses are in Season 1, and all but three mentions are before The Best of Both Worlds Part II. (One in Season 4, one in Season 5, and one in First Contact.) Outside of the Enterprise D, only one ship has ever been shown executing a separation... the USS Prometheus, a one-episode wonder from Voyager's 4th season. EDIT: If the Discovery turns out to have the capability, hopefully they'll make more use of it than the Enterprise D did... there should be less obstacle to its tactical utility in the period STD is set in, since that was before Starfleet went back to using the warp core as the power source for the phasers. (They had switched over to using the impulse reactors starting on the NX-class.) EDIT 2: ... I just now realized that bit of dialog in ENT's "Silent Enemy" is a stealth callback all the way to TMP, explaining why phasers weren't using the warp core until the Constitution-class retrofit.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Well, we'll find out of the Discovery and/or Shenzhou are made from Chinese fireworks like the Enterprise D or the sterner stuff of the TOS era sooner or later. Given the focus on special effects, I'm sure we won't have to wait more than one episode to see someone beat the hell out of either.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Nacelle ejection is mentioned twice in TOS, once in "The Apple" and once in "The Savage Curtain" (thank you Memory Alpha). Would've been something useful to have on later ships, considering how often TNG-era ships seem to explode once a nacelle is compromised... which is weird, given that Reliant had an entire nacelle blown clean off in Wrath of Khan and seemed barely inconvenienced by it. I recently rewatched Star Trek: the Motion Picture when I got the whole batch on Play, and there was nothing in the original theatrical cut or director's cut about a saucer separation. There was a scene planned near the end where the refit Enterprise would separate, but it was scrapped in the storyboard phase and the only artifacts remaining from it are Andrew Probert's sketches. The Discovery really does look like it ought to have the capability, from the shape of the hull... I don't think I'd be too put out if it did, as long as it was used intelligently instead of becoming the forgotten gimmick the Enterprise D's was until Generations.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Mikumo Guynemer, the purple-haired leader of Walkure in Macross Delta. It's not an exact classification, but she's something like a bio-android. She's flesh-and-blood, but she's designed from the genetic level to be a bio-technological user interface for the Star Shrine.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Reminds me of one of the dorms I lived in at university... They swear blind Star Trek: Discovery is in the prime continuity and a prequel to the original Star Trek... which makes the (re)use of a design meant to be the Constitution-class's successor a little odd given that Discovery is meant to occur BEFORE the original Star Trek. (IMO, it's taking "Cosmetically-advanced prequel" a little too far for comfort.) Hm... not sure if it's actually canon, per se. Star Trek as a whole normally considers only what's in the show itself to be canon. The Star Trek writer's "bible" did mention saucer separation as a possibility in some of its revisions, but the concept was never mentioned or used in-series. There were a few mentions of being able to eject the warp nacelles in TOS though. They didn't have a visual concept for saucer separation until McQuarrie drew it for the rejected Planet of the Titans feature, and again when Probert did a storyboard sequence showing a saucer separation of the refit Enterprise for Star Trek: the Motion Picture that ended up being dropped before filming. It almost happened in Star Trek III but Gene Roddenberry got overruled and the whole Enterprise was blown up instead of just the saucer. Based on what I've read in The Making of Star Trek and a few other books, the concept for saucer separation wasn't an emergency measure. It was originally drafted as a gimmick for the ship that would enable the saucer to be a separate, sublight-only starship for exploring solar systems. The later McQuarrie and Probert concepts were for a saucer that could separate to land on planets for exploration and then return to space and reconnect to the stardrive section. The idea was binned for the same reason it was in TOS... the VFX shots for landing the ship were simply too expensive. The idea of saucer separation as an emergency measure and unrecoverable landing didn't come along until late in the development of Star Trek: the Next Generation. Even the Enterprise D did not originally have the capability, it was added late in preproduction. The original plan was to have a smaller captain's yacht-style lander instead. TNG also originated the idea of it as a way to save a part of the ship from a disaster aboard the stardrive section, and the unrecoverable landing. (The first hard evidence for earlier ships having the capability is in Generations... the MSD at the back of the Enterprise B's bridge shows a battle bridge and Enterprise-D-style latches.)
  20. Seto Kaiba
    The problem is that while she's physically an adult, mentally her development is skewed such that singing is about all she knows... she has no social awareness beyond professional interactions with Walkure, to such an extent that she doesn't even know how to eat with other people in the final few episodes. That makes it bloody creepy that the show keeps trying to make her The Sexy One like Sheryl was in Frontier, when she doesn't seem to be mentally equipped to understand being provocative. It's mentally squicky in the same way that Stig Bernard's dead goldfish replacement girlfriend was in MOSPEADA. On a character level, it was doing OK until about halfway... but the actual plot was still a mess. There's no feeling that anything Xaos and Walkure did had any real impact on the outcome of the war until the last episode or two. They'd show up, get their clocks cleaned by the Aerial Knights, and either draw or get defeated, and even the draws played into Windermere's hands. The characterization took a dive the minute they tried to make Messer sympathetic posthumously. The guy was a certifiable jackass, and for Xaos to treat finding Messer's secret Diary-of-how-much-my-coworkers-suck like proof that he really cared fell so flat I don't even have a smart-arse simile for how flat it fell.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Someone at Project Aces is probably fuming quietly... considering they did exactly this as DLC for Ace Combat: Assault Horizon in partnership with Macross.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Delta, I think, had the potential to be a much better show than it ended up being. The setting was unique and interesting, the reasons for the conflict were thought-provoking, the main trio was solid, the mechanical designs were solid, the music was great... but the plot meant to string all that together was a train wreck of lazy writing and lousy pacing. The villain's plot didn't even come out until the show was practically over, the huge cast left individual characters flat and undeveloped (ironic, in Makina's case), and they reused too much from previous titles. Roid's plan being the same one Grace had in Frontier wasn't even the laziest of them... that'd have to be Mikumo. You can sum up her entire character as "Sheryl Nome by way of Mina Forte", and the reveal that she's only 3 made every piece of art they did for her retroactively creepy as hell. (Maybe the reason we haven't seen Lady M is because she got busted by Chris Hansen on To Catch a Space Predator.)
  23. Seto Kaiba
    ... trying to get into the running for Understatement of the Century? Macross Frontier wasn't perfect by any means, but it hit closer to the mark than any other Macross series to date in my opinion. If it'd been maybe two or three episodes longer to give them more time to build up to the climax, and the love triangle had been more balanced instead of favoring Sheryl so heavily, it would've beyond exceptional.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Apart from the bolt-on armor affixed to the anti-projectile shield and the armored covers for the intakes, the VF-25's Super Pack doesn't really offer any kind of tangible improvement to the VF's defensive ability. The VF-25's Armored Pack, however, offers something on the order of a 4x improvement thanks to its ASWAG advanced energy conversion armor. I think that is the key difference behind the decision to purge the Super Pack before entering atmospheric flight and Ozma's habit of retaining the Armored Pack. It's definitely not intended for flight, but the Armored Pack can brute force itself around in a limited fashion (more or less entirely in GERWALK) to be a passable heavy ground unit.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    ... they do look a bit like corn cobs, don't they? Without the addition of the large LLM-03A micro-missile pods, the TW1 Tornado Pack's armament is relatively light compared to the other FAST Pack options the VF-25 has. It's got the big damn TW1-HPC/M25 twin heavy quantum beam cannon turret, eight BLM-02S micro-missile launcher systems in the wing body (six dorsal, two ventral), and two BLM-02S launchers on the conformal fuel slush tanks mounted on its legs/engine nacelles. All told, rather a less impressively missile-spammy affair than the Super Pack or Armored Pack, but scary all the same given that it can be used in atmosphere relatively unhindered. The weird bit is that the TW1-HPC/M25 heavy quantum beam cannon is indicated to essentially be completely independent of the Valkyrie, with its own dedicated thermonuclear reactor, condenser, and coolant loop, an unusual break from previous designs where the gun was either powered externally using generator output from the VF's compact thermonuclear reactors (e.g. VF-1 Strike Pack, VF-2SS Super Armed Pack) or running off a battery or capacitor built into the pack that may or may not use a connection to the VF's power system to continuously recharge (e.g. VF-11 Full Armor, VF-25 Armored Pack, VFMF VF-25 Strike Pack). Apparently this led to the TW1-HPC/M25 having an aggressively low continuous operating time of less than five seconds at maximum output and a theoretical maximum of just 5 minutes, though it can be converted to a MDE beam weapon which dramatically increases the stopping power. Yeah, it was a pretty minimal set of upgrades focused mainly on improving the craft's existing fold wave functions, since it already had a pretty excessive built-in armament of a hundred micro-missiles and MDE beam cannon turret. The only actual fixed parts of the Super Pack are a bolt-on energy conversion armor module for the shield and the wingtip pods containing fold wave projectors and micro-missiles. The rest is all fuel tanks and disposable rockets for space use.
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