Seto Kaiba

Yeah, I got the autopay notification a bit ago... looks like preorders annihilated their inventory, it's already listed as "Backordered". Gonna be a good week for me... Chronicle #81, VFMF: VF-22, and my YF-30 showing up all at once.

Looks like HLJ finally got their copies of VFMF VF-22 today... it showed up in my Private Warehouse there. Anyone else got theirs?

Agh... that sucks mightily. If you need somewhere to park your site, you're welcome to as much space and bandwidth as you need on the M3 servers.

's probably not a good decision, on balance... better to kill the a-holes with kindness and let the moderators mop up. It has the added benefit of making you look more reasonable than them. Just going on my own experience with foreign films in... five languages now(?)... that's actually pretty rare. You can usually get the most basic level of the movie, but in order to really "get it", you need to at least be able to understand what people are saying. Not TOO much, because sometimes that can ruin the movie via bilingual bonus (like how Iron Man has some villains explain the whole plot at the start and the audience is expected not to get it because they're not speaking English). Personally, I've always been fine with endings that don't explain everything... so long as there's a feeling of closure about the whole affair, or at least the feeling that these characters have their own lives and their story goes on after our brief window into it ends. Western audiences, I think, are a little conditioned by sitcoms and comic books to expect stories to just go on and on and on... and that the conclusion has to be some big showy climax that wraps everything up and lets the cast quietly f-off to somewhere else and either deal with the consequences or live happily ever after. Done well, that kind of ending can be very satisfying. More often than not, that kind of ending is done poorly and feels like a cop-out (e.g. the Battlestar Galactica reboot, or, gods forbid, Lost... because we certainly were). Ending a story takes just as much, if not more, writing chops than starting one does... because you NEED that closure. To draw on some of my favorite titles as examples, you can have good endings that wrap up every little detail of the plot (like Outlaw Star or the anime "gecko ending" for Soul Eater), or ones that leave you hanging with the feeling of some greater mystery denied or a that your cast is going to need some time to cope with the consequences of their actions (like the endings of Big O or Needless). Then we've got the bad endings that either get so bogged down in obsessive tying-up of loose ends that the ending is a train wreck (the second season of Code Geass) or so unsatisfying and abrupt that you have to ask yourself "Did I just read/see that?" (like the ending of the manga version of Soul Eater). Macross usually ends up on the good side of things, whether they've neatly tied up the loose ends in the story with the feeling that it's very much over (Macross Plus) or the feeling that "this adventure is over, but their story is only just beginning" (like Macross Frontier's). The very worst offenders are the ones that reach a neat, logical ending and then just forget to stop... the most blatant offender that leaps to mind being Bleach, which has done that TWICE. There's a reasonable amount of meaning in the ending of the Macross Frontier movies, though it's the sort of faintly unsatisfying "the adventure is over, but their story is just beginning" type with the Vajra rescuing Alto from imminent heavy quantum annihilation while they mend fences with humanity. A lot of folks find the "the hero gets the girl" endings more satisfying, but sometimes that's not the most appropriate thing for the story. I think the Macross Frontier movies would've been poorly served by a "and they all lived happily ever after" ending, when the story got kinda dark in places. As wacky as Macross Dynamite 7 ended up being, that's not something that honestly shocked me. They were NOT subtle back in the Macross 7 about Basara being borderline asexual in his failure to notice ANY woman except the vampire-fanged space demon who wanted to eat his goddamn mind. Mylene spends a lot of time mooning over him, and he only notices her when she's around thirty seconds from lodging the nearest piece of furniture in his frontal lobe. When Sivil possesses Rex and Akiko, he's completely unmoved by their overly sexual advances... Akiko-Sivil comes on hot and heavy while they're alone, and all he notices is that she happens to be standing on his lunch, while Rex-Sivil is one good yawn away from showing off her huge... tracts of land... and he's only interested in noodling on his guitar. He's easily the most clueless Macross protagonist we've ever had. The way he left in Dynamite 7 made a lot of sense for the character... he didn't really see Mylene as a romantic partner, but as a fellow musician. Once she came into her own (in his opinion) and he'd already fulfilled his dream, it was "mission accomplished" followed by "exit stage right to make way for the next generation". He genuinely doesn't get that she's got the hots for him... and yeah, that's the payoff. He's helped her come into her own as a musician, and feels his work here is done. Done well, it can be a stimulating way to explore the setting of a large metaseries like Macross with the possibilities inherent in the other forms of media. Macross is really good at this. So's Gundam. You can have parallel stories set at the same time, even in the same place, without the two stories overlapping with each other because the universe is a BIG place. Macross 7 Trash is a decent example of this. Outside Macross, another example might be Louie the Rune Soldier... it's set in the same setting as Record of Lodoss War, but the tone and story are so radically different that it almost feels like someone's playing a nasty prank the first time you find out that they don't just share a setting, but that the two locations are geographically really close to each other. I think my favorite example has become the Horus Heresy series of novels for Warhammer 40,000... a huge amount of material that's both fundamental to what's done in the main story WITHOUT being a prerequisite to enjoyment of the main story, it builds the universe without building up an enormous list of "stuff you have to have read to know what's going on". Done BADLY, like Star Trek's reboot movies, Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles, etc., there's a lot of "disposable fiction" that has no bearing on, or relevance to, the setting and a fair few more cases where you don't get the whole story of the actual movie or series unless you also read a limited-edition comic book that most of the audience didn't even know was a thing. Star Trek didn't explain much about how Spock and the Romulans ended up in the alternate universe except in the comic, and Robotech made the villain's motivation something that was only explained in the limited edition comic book and never touched on in the Shadow Chronicles movie.

No worries, reply to it at your leisure. I keep weird-as-hell hours anyway. Macross is kind of a frustrating series sometimes if you don't have a grasp of Japanese... there's a lot of stuff out there that offers additional detail and even answers to some of these kinds of questions, but it's all in Japanese, which locks most western fans out but for the services of fan translators like sketchley (or myself, though I'm not nearly as proficient or prolific). With so much stuff out there to cover, non-Japanese-speaking fans and non-native Japanese speakers can sometimes end up missing out on a LOT, with a rate of releases that occasionally reaches "firehose-aimed-at-a-teacup" levels... to say nothing of the indifferent levels of quality and accuracy we get from fansubs sometimes. Like they say, "It's all there in the manual"... problem is, the manual's 2,560 pages long and written in a foreign language.

To be entirely frank and fair, it'd be hard to say that you've actually watched the movies because you didn't watch them in a format where you could understand what's going on... so a lot of people are going to think that your complaints are unreasonable on those grounds. As far as where this should've been posted... yeah, it really should've gone into the Newbie Questions thread or into one of the threads about the movies, but that's for the mods to fix at their discretion. Getting hostile just ensures that the mods will just close the thread instead of merging it. My advice, take a step back and a few deep breaths... then seek ye out a copy of the wholly legitimate English subtitled release of the films on Blu-Ray. IMO, well worth it. Eh... if you're not going to watch the movies in a format you can understand, you're going to miss things. Important things. In what is essentially a character-driven drama rather than a mecha-action series, you're going to miss a LOT of important things. What you ought to be frustrated over is not having had a subtitled version on hand when you watched it, because you'd be a lot less confused and upset if you'd gotten the whole story. I don't mean to be snide when I say this, but if you find shows that leave some loose ends or unresolved details in their stories, you will likely find a lot of anime to be unwatchable and frustrating. A lot of shows don't believe in trying to tie up every loose end at the end like an obsessive-compulsive in a shoelace factory. Happily-ever-after endings are kind of a cheap cop-out as writing goes... a story with complex characters tends not to have an ending so neat and self-contained if you're preserving the illusion that these are real people with lives of their own. It's never bothered me, so I've never had issues with the ending of the Frontier movies. Many Macross fans find the post-FB2012 "they disappeared" ending for Misa and Hikaru's story frustrating, because they're beloved characters. Zero, somewhat less so... "their story is over and they sailed off into the (metaphorical) sunset" is something Kawamori likes to do. It is, however, not really THAT pervasive in his work... and answers to these questions often exist in other sources. As far as Basara and Mylene go in Macross 7, it's hard to call it a love triangle when Basara barely acknowledges that Mylene is an entity distinct from the furniture. It's less a love triangle and more a polyhedron of one-sided infatuations. So Gamlin's into Mylene, Mylene's into Basara, Rex is into Basara, Basara's into Sivil (maybe) and his music (definitely), Gigil's into Sivil. Basara doesn't up and leave a love interest, he was never really presented as interested in Mylene at all beyond her talent as a musician... and leaves after he feels she's finally come into her own as a performer. Then he goes and spends a few episodes on Zola acting like a tit. Frontier is kind of the same boat... the movies actually do a better job depicting the romance between Alto and the girls, and is far more into the motivations of the individual characters. At the end of the series, Alto's still more into his plane than the girls (kinda the Basara ailment) but comes to the realization that protecting them is a motivation just as good (if not better) than flying for its own sake... and the three are free to pursue their relationships further without a war in the way. It's not an obsessively knotted-up ending but it holds water. In the movies, the characters motivations get more emphasis, so Alto actually does come to a decision at exactly the wrong time and ends up being rescued from imminent heavy quantum annihilation by the Vajra he'd just successfully established the beginnings of a mutual understanding with. It makes reasonable sense even if it's not wholly satisfying in terms of the sort of happily-ever-after romantic ending Disney has conditioned us to expect, and concludes the story reasonably enough with the beginnings of a friendly dialogue between humanity and the Vajra.

Nuts to that... I want the bloody VF-4/VF-3000/VF-5000 book they teased us with a cover for in one of the previous books. My poor Lightning III never gets enough love...

Those are just the same Sound Booster that Milia nicked from the Jamming Birds VF-11D Customs, right? The shorter one in Master File's teaser images looks like the regular Sound Booster, the longer one kind of puts me in the mind of those long-range booster packs instead... this is going to make for very interesting reading. Only six pages for variants though, so it looks like we'll get something more like the VF-0 book variants-wise. I'm not sure if that's a bad thing or not.

Hrm... I had honestly forgotten about that. That's from the M7 episode "Which one do you love?" right?

Seeing the VF-22 with wing pylons is weird enough... but FAST packs?

Unless they go the same route they did with the VF-0 book, and cover only the known variants while padding the book with other material. Still, I'd love to see more in-depth material on the VF-22's hardware and the VF-22HG from Ride in particular.

Considering this is the first (and likely only, considering the VF-17 was touched on in the VF-19 book and the VF-171 in the VF-25 book) General Galaxy fighter to be covered, and they've set the timescale as far forward as to be three years and change after the end of Macross Frontier's events, it's looking like a safe-ish bet they'll throw some VF-27 in there to pad it out, the same way they threw the SV-51 into the VF-0 book to pad that one. Not many VF-22 variants out there (that we know about), so the VF-22's successors and contemporaries are fair game. Whether it'll actually come out on September 18th like they say... well... that's a whole other matter. I've had my preorder in for ages though, so here's hopin'.

Hrm... first time I've ever seen a VF-22 with underwing pylons. Also, 2063 is this one's perspective? Hrm.

Yes, it's a VF-1 Riders display.

Alas, that's no YF-24 in there... it's actually a custom VF-25 captioned "VF-25 Messiah Valkyrie / Legacy". 's just a VF-25F with a cropped delta wing. EDIT: A lot of those craft there are Master File squadrons or variants out of Macross the Ride, the VF-25S to the right of the Messiah Legacy is a VF-25S from the SVF-440 Dullahans (a squad out of the VF-25 Master File), and you can see the VF-19ACTIVE Nothung, Paladin Prophecy, VF-11B Nothung II, and VF-4SL Lightning in those as well.

Well... the YF-25 Prophecy first "appeared" in Macross Frontier: Itsuwari no Utahime, though IIRC the YF-25 only showed up in the two Macross Frontier movies as background filler. It showed up in the first movie as a toy in the background in one of those promotional gigs Ranka did early in her career, and once later on in an establishing shot in the Macross Quarter's hangar. The serialized novel-slash-Macross Frontier prequel/side-story Macross the Ride and the Macross 30 video game turned the YF-25 into a main character mecha... being one of Chelsea Scarlett's "mid-season upgrade" mecha in Ride (in those colors) and Leon Sakaki's starter mecha in 30 (in a teal color). (Leon's version is sort-of visible in the attached picture... it's the one to the right of Michel Blanc's VF-25G.)

So, since SoftBank usually misses the mark by a few months, it's a Christmas release?

No sir, they are not. While Palladium Books has accidentally used the DYRL cockpit variant line art in their books in both the old and current editions of the Robotech RPG, they've never included stats for the Strike Pack. The current ("2nd") edition did mistakenly include those UUM-7 micro-missile pods that first appeared in DYRL (reportedly the result of lazy editorial copypasta, albeit NERF'd to keep it from totally overpowering the "Alpha"), but only the VF-1 Super and Armored Pack have stats in the books. They do offer mecha modification rules in one of the other source books, but something with that many non-standard options is going to handle like a cow in a supermarket cart and break down the minute someone so much as sneezes in its general direction. Or some Macross fan taking a not-so-subtle potshot at the "alternative" Super Pack arrangements from Variable Fighter Master File: Squadrons of the SDF-1 Macross. There is one in those books presented with two NP-BP-01 boosters up top and two more on the wings. We've got plenty of sarcastic folks here on MW who'd totally take that up to 11. Still... it's downright Orky. NEVER ENUFF DAKKA!

I'm not sure it's a question of estimating the total number of Robotech fans out there as it is the number who are willing to drop a significant sum of money on a toy from Robotech's least popular saga. I'd be particularly wary of using Robotech Academy as a means for estimating their numbers too, because you got some folks who flatly refused to pledge regardless of their love for the "original" Robotech series due to the distasteful way they were throwing Carl Macek's name around, and quite a few folks who'd pledged with the intent of withdrawing their pledges at the last minute to ensure failure (an unnecessary gesture, to be sure). A lot of Robotech's fan base is what you'd call the "casual" fans who might buy the show on DVD once or twice, and might look into the comics if something particularly catches their eye (almost invariably Macross-based material). They're not the market Harmony Gold and Toynami would be depending on for an MPC Spartas or Auroran. The market for something like a MPC line based on Southern Cross designs is the a proper subset of the relatively few fans out there who are willing to pay the rather lofty prices demanded for the somewhat sub-par Toynami offerings... namely, those rare fans who don't think Southern Cross is an unholy mess. There's a fair amount of antipathy towards Southern Cross and the Masters Saga of Robotech in evidence... on Robotech.com in particular, the Southern Cross Army had the reputation of being a bunch of incompetent idiots who dropped the ball at the worst possible time and allowed Earth to be invaded twice in quick succession. That's part of why Toynami seems to think that making Masters Saga MPCs is not a safe investment. Tommy's capitalized on this sentiment to actually make a number of cheap shots canon... like turning "Commander Leonard" into a confirmed rabid xenophobe, traitor, saboteur, spy, and a terrorist leader responsible for hijacking a starship and nuking a vital planetary defense installation.

Not being a toy collector, I could not honestly offer an informed opinion myself... but the opinions I've heard from people who are toy collectors suggests to me that your take is probably accurate. (The build quality fiasco over the Shadow Fighter helps too.) Most folks weren't, general consensus is that the disaster that was the "Maia Sterling" MPC Shadow Fighter was the last straw for the Toynami MPC line... both because almost nobody cared, and because the build quality was terrible enough for Harmony Gold to issue a recall. Thus far, Toynami remains adamant that the potential return-on-investment for Southern Cross merchandise is so small that the most likely outcome would be them ending up upside-down on the design, tooling, and manufacturing costs. Considering there's very little love for the Masters Saga, and equally little love for the post-legitimate Macross design MPCs, I don't think they'd have guaranteed sales of more than a few dozen.

Yep. The Auroran (chopper), Spartas (tank), and Logan (ugly lozenge-shaped VF) are the three main mecha for the series... the only other Glorie forces robot to get a name was the police robot that Jeanne knocks over with her hoverbike early on (the Garm, possibly named for the dog who guards Hel's gate in Norse mythology). The other, minor, background robots that show up in the OP and as filler here and there don't transform and don't even have names... IIRC, only one of the many background filler non-variable fighters has a name, though there's some contention among those who care enough over whether it's supposed to be the "Sylphid" or "Shrewfield".

Except for the Zor bioroids and the various specialist Southern Cross Army mecha (all but one of which don't even have NAMES), pretty much.

But not half as entertaining as the game itself... for me, the massive number of bugs and shoddy execution were totally what sold the game. It was like wandering onto the set of someone's unauthorized Alien b-movie. I got at least one laugh for every penny I spent on the game, so IMO money well spent (at discount rate, but still...) EDIT: Yes, I bought it AFTER I heard what a trainwreck it was... the reviews were so hilarious I just had to experience it for myself. I'd be afraid of Alien: Isolation though... it's got the warning label right there in the bottom right corner.

Might have something to do with sales of the New Generation MPCs being so appalling that they cut the limited runs down to just 5,000 before canning the whole line. They weren't selling, and with MOSPEADA fans able to get their hands on stuff via a direct sale from Japan, it's no surprise why. Thus far, I don't believe Harmony Gold and Toynami have reversed their stance that there isn't a viable business case for making any Southern Cross toys... sales haven't exactly been fabulous for their New Generation/MOSPEADA stuff, what with them not yet sold out of those dreadful New Gen MPCs even after cutting the production runs by 66%, so they don't seem at all inclined to try their hand at Robotech's least popular saga. Southern Cross fans are, I'm afraid, probably out of luck there. That's looking like a "when hell freezes over" option...

The ADV set didn't... it didn't even give episode titles, just two screenshots from each episode and the episode number. Animeigo didn't really give synopses either, unless you count the occasional staff commentary on aspects of an episode's story.