Jump to content

Seto Kaiba

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    13279

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Everything posted by Seto Kaiba

  1. Seto Kaiba
    Nope! The TP you earn after you max out the tuning on a Level 1 blueprint craft continue to accumulate and can be used toward tuning the aircraft further once you get the Level 2 and/or Level 3 version built.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Hey all, I have kind of a random newbie question as someone who's only recently started to collect DX Chogokin VFs. (Curse you, Mr March... CURSE YOUUUUUUUUUUUUU!) 's there any consensus/recommendations on a suitable display case that can fit four or five normal-sized VFs and won't break the bank? I'd be excellent if it could fit the Macross Quarter. EDIT: Today is a bad spelling day.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Dunno. If I had to guess, I'd say Bandai killed two birds with one stone by keeping the YF-30 exclusive to Leon Sakaki in Macross 30 to make it special and give the YF-29 greater exposure than it got in Sayonara no Tsubasa by giving the rival and some of the more beloved legacy characters access to their own versions as late-game upgrades. Looking at it from an in-universe standpoint, I think it's probably because the YF-29 is still really new and there's at most a year between Macross Frontier's conclusion and Macross 30. You need some ridiculously huge pieces of fold quartz to build 'em as well (IINM, a piece in Great Mechanics.DX said it needed one chunk of ultra high-purity fold quartz around 1,000 carats?). The Havamal forces might've built theirs on the sly too... Either way, I'm cool with it... I like all three of the Macross 30 character variants more than the Alto version from the movie.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Eech... I'm sorry, I totally missed your second post where you clarified that. My bad. (Though you are right, I wasn't challenging you, I thought I'd missed an important tidbit that ought to go into my notes on the YF-29 for Mr March's use. Again, my apologies if I came off that way. I truly didn't mean to.) Yep! The YF-29B Percival is the signature mecha of Rod Baltemar, the Havamal ace pilot who fills the role of the main (player) character's rival in Macross 30. He's one of the last "boss" fights, a trench run-type level after the player (Leon Sakaki) gets his YF-30 Chronos. He's and some Ghosts are also the first fight in the game... pretty much the only time you use Leon's YF-25, and it's a "supposed to lose" fight. IIRC, it's New Game + that unlocks his YF-29B as a playable VF and his Havamal color scheme also becomes selectable on the VFs that aren't character-specific. That's the reason I wanna get it... I never really liked Alto's reddish YF-29 color scheme, but Rod's looks pretty good, and I liked him as a character enough that his YF-29B is totally a "MUST GET" for me.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    ... don't recall anyone saying that in the Macross 30 game itself, and the print sources only say that it's an improved version of the YF-29 used by the aces of Havamal, a rogue New UN Forces special forces unit who are the principal antagonists of Macross 30. Can you source that statement? Edit: My bad. Yeah, I'm definitely gonna get one of these to go with my YF-29 Isamu and YF-30. (Man, ever since Mr March helped me get a YF-30, it's been hard to turn down some of these... I was never a toy collector before.) Actually, it IS supposed to have a bayonet... that's Rod Baltemar's YF-29B from Macross 30, which does have a bayonet on the gun pod in the game's 3D model for the fighter.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Chronicle. Edit: Sorry... I really shouldn't try to post from my phone while in the lab. It occurred to me this morning that I'd given you a vague and useless answer. The specific source is Macross Chronicle Worldguide 22A (same # in both editions) "Super Dimension Restaurant Nyan-Nyan". The sheet has a "Related Matter" section about the Yocchan's (Yoshio's) having grown up in the neighborhood around Nyan-Nyan before and after the first space war, become its manager, and grown it into an interstellar restaurant chain. It's a very bare-bones explanation, but there you have it. As far as Kaifun goes, you'd think he would've eventually settled down and inherited his parents restaurant in the wake of being dumped by Minmay, but he stayed in the music biz and eventually moved to the Macross-11 colony fleet and became the manager of an unauthorized English-language Fire Bomber cover band... Fire Bomber American.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    *nods* Though he does, IIRC, become the one to take over Nyan Nyan and turn it into an interstellar restaurant franchise... (The show-which-shall-not-be-named does identify them as relatives in its version of events.)
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Same as the others... it's just a different paint job. http://www.macross2.net/m3/sdfmacross/variant-vf-1a-darkbird.htm
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Well... as I am reliably informed, the giant-ness of the giant tuna is not actually unrealistic... there really are tuna species that can get that large, up to 4.6m (15 feet) and can weigh over 600kg (1322lb). As far as Hikaru's survival goes... holding your breath the way he did is a stupendously bad idea if you plan to live through having jumped out into a vacuum (burst lungs are a real deal-breaker), but his flightsuit and helmet probably did a bit to protect him from vacuum exposure. You wouldn't exactly walk away from the experience unhurt, but it could be survivable.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    As far as I am aware, no official information exists... though I would assume the number would be roughly comparable to what the Stargazer was able to carry in Macross 7. That would be about thirty-six planes. Who's Henry?
  11. Seto Kaiba
    If anything, Mr March seems more miffed about it than I am... he was really hoping we'd get some clarity on the VF-22's gun pods and other hard details. It's weird that they felt compelled to invent a bunch of new, bizarre variants for this when they didn't even cover one of the official variants that existed in the time period... YF-21-1, YF-21-2, VF-22, and VF-22S, but no VF-22HG?
  12. Seto Kaiba
    I'm more disappointed that they didn't even make an attempt to give information on the VF-22's gun pods... this book is depressingly light on useful trivia. Lovely art, but with so few variants of the VF-22 out there in Macross proper, you'd think they could've spared more thought for the details.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Don't think we've been told that one...
  14. Seto Kaiba
    So... the one on the left is for Kamen Rider, and the one on the right is for a Gundam fan who's compensating for something?
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Well... we know her surname changed, at the very least, when Ozma adopted her. Ranka seems to be her genuine given name, if the series is anything to go by. Her mother was Ranshe Mei, so that's probably Ranka's true surname there.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Hm... going to have to grab that. Thanks for the heads-up. That art's been printed in a bunch of places before though.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Pretty sweet stuff there... I imagine it wouldn't be too hard to kitbash a proper YF-24 if they ever did a YF-30 Chronos kit. Parts from that and a VF-25 should be enough.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Nope, HLJ had it listed as pushed back to October for a few days... and then it suddenly jumped to Backordered for about an hour, then September Restock (because it'd come in and they'd exhausted their inventory filling preorders). So if you had it preordered on there, odds are it's sitting in your Private Warehouse. Mine's currently en route to me via customs in Memphis. So... a stretch, two-seater delta wing type? Don't suppose they named that one Jagdvogel, did they? (There was a modeler who did exactly that in the same old issue of Model Graphix that first mentioned a VF-19E.)
  19. 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.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Looks like HLJ finally got their copies of VFMF VF-22 today... it showed up in my Private Warehouse there. Anyone else got theirs?
  21. Seto Kaiba
    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.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    '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.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    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.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    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.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    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...
×
×
  • Create New...