Seto Kaiba
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IIRC, he hacked the ammo-loading system to have it put live rounds into one of Isamu's magazines... to sabotage the test and/or Isamu's standing with the program, since they could then point the finger at Shinsei's Jan Neumann, who's shown to be a hacker of respectable skill. 1. To frame Isamu for trying to sabotage the project... and get him kicked off said project. 2. The YF-19/VF-19's got three magazines for its gunpod at the best of times... one in the gun itself, and then two more carried behind its antiprojectile shield. 3. One or more of the magazines may have contained the standard test load. 4. Now that I don't recall if it was or not.
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http://www.macross2.net/m3/m3.html Never quite did get around to putting a redirect onto the main index page to bounce traffic to the M3 main page... you should find what you need under the SDF:M or DYRL sections.
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Well, there are some folks who do translate more than just the technical specs and that kind of thing... but they tend to focus on the old, out-of-print material either by personal inclination or in deference to that not-so-unwritten rule about books that're still in print. I haven't even considered tackling it, because I'm just not a fast enough translator to get through it in any reasonable span of time. EDIT: As far as "other stuff not covered", the non-narrative, non-mecha-stat stuff in Macross the Ride is, for the most part, just repetition of material we've had in a dozen other sources. Y'know, basic explanations of a bunch of things like the VF-25 variants or Super Packs or Destroids.
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Ranka's situation as per end of TV series
Seto Kaiba replied to Saruta's topic in Movies and TV Series
Nope, didn't miss that... but you have to consider her state of mind at the time. She'd already seen her one-sided crush locking lips with her rival/idol/mentor, been manipulated into being used as the latest weapon against the Vajra, and was living with the guilt of learning that Ai-kun was, in fact, the same type of alien who put her friend Nanase in the hospital and nearly killed her adopted brother on multiple occasions. I doubt her reasons for running away were entirely altruistic, and it probably didn't help that Alto clearly took exception to her leaving the fleet with Brera and a Vajra. You could read her motivations for leaving the fleet as an altruistic desire to stop the war, but you could also interpret them as a teenage girl running away from her problems under the cover of an attempt to do the right thing. Yeah, her agent doesn't exactly gain ground in promoting her, but Ranka demonstrates early on that she doesn't really have what it takes unless there's someone pushing her to do it. She uses Alto as her crutch for most of the series, and she has to be almost bullied into proving that she is even capable of performing in public by Michel. Elmo's efforts to promote her are, to an extent, a flop because of Grace's interference... but she never displays the professionalism we see in most other Macross idols. When she's forced to shoulder the reality of her world, she doesn't carry on and forge ahead... it breaks her completely. Ranka's character arc sort of stops prematurely... it never lets her "grow up" the way Minmay did. Contrast that with Sheryl who, with her star in decline and with the same "bum" agent Ranka had, manages to bounce back quite admirably and recaptures the spotlight without the resources that made her a megastar in the first place. When I say Ranka is a manufactured idol, I mean she's a girl who doesn't seem to really have the temperament to be an idol, who becomes one anyway because she's picked by someone with the resources to make it happen anyway, and who does everything for her to make sure she actually makes it. Sheryl was also handpicked and trained, but she shows the real spark of confidence to perform and the artistic merit to write her own material, and the determination to keep going and succeed even when she isn't being backed by a megacorporation. Eh... did she? She didn't get the role in the movie just because the director thought her song was great. She got the role because she could sing, and the girl who was supposed to play the role of Mao conveniently dies in a "freak attack" by a wild animal. It wasn't a song she came up with which got her the role either... it was one manufactured at the 117th Research Fleet by Grace and co. It probably helped that the director didn't think the song Sheryl wrote really fit the tone of the movie, but still... she didn't get it on her own merit, she lucked into it (though that may have been entirely orchestrated by Grace anyway). -
Well, it remains to be seen whether Macross Chronicle will place Macross 30 on its official timeline... but it does seem likely that will happen IMO, now that the game-exclusive YF-30 Chronos has been placed on the development "family tree" in issue 60 of Macross Chronicle. I'm not 100% clear on the mechanics of how the pre-existing characters got on Ouroboros myself, but it's some manner of fold-fault-induced space-time shenanigans stemming from the ruins on Ouroboros and the Ouroboros aurora that brought all of the previous characters there (seemingly without disrupting the timeline at all). Not anymore, I think... the villain of the piece wanted to use the unique space-time properties of Ouroboros aurora to change history, but his means for doing so seem to have been destroyed in the process of defeating him. I think Richard Bilra's bit about the fold network transcending time and space is more to do with zero-time fold essentially being lagless communication unimpeded by fold faults... which would enable him to search for Minmay without the crippling limits of a conventional fold communications system.
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As far as I'm aware (and that may not be very far!) there are no Macross 30 plot summaries anywhere (in English). There is a gameplay translation of the game available here on MW though... which my girlfriend found helpful enough that she was able to get all the way through the game without knowing a lick of Japanese. If space battles ain't your thing, no worries... there's only one at the very beginning, and it's a "supposed-to-lose" fight. At the very least, I can answer your inquiries about the characters. It's not Dr. Mao we get, it's the ~11 year old Mao as she was in Macross Zero... which does get played for a few cheap awkward moments between Sara, Mao, and Sheryl.
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Dunno if there's an official answer to that one offhand... I'm in the middle of a move, so all my art books are still packed. I'd guess that Macross Galaxy deliberately provoked a small-scale attack. The "portal" sort of effect actually goes back to the first episode of the original series... the visual used to depict fold jumps does change a bit depending on the budget. I don't recall seeing any in-series explanation for it, though the production reason is very likely a cost thing. It's cheaper to animate a ship just vanishing in a flash of light.
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Thanks Andras! I knew they'd done that before. My copy of the Squadrons Master File rolled in today... after a quick skim, I think I'm going to have fun with this.
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My guess would be (and I want to stress that it is only a guess) that they figured it out while they were researching the Vajra... that IS what the 117th was out there doing. They may have recorded it from fold transmissions while they were around the Vajra, or possibly detected an echo of it coming from another galaxy. (Or they may have pieced it together on their own after studying the Vajra distributed intelligence.)
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Huh... not the first time we've seen something like that done tho, is it? Didn't the Macross Model Hobby Handbook have some VF-1 hardware that was kitbashed out of Destroid bits?
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Ranka's situation as per end of TV series
Seto Kaiba replied to Saruta's topic in Movies and TV Series
I've always felt that Ranka sort of got shortchanged in the Macross Frontier love triangle... especially the ending, where Alto takes the "third option" of not choosing and Sheryl's reaction to being told "I won't lose to you!" is almost dismissive. To me, she just was a version of Minmay who never really got the chance to grow up and get over her typical teenage girl-ish bout of self-centered-ness. She doesn't really treat Alto like a love interest a lot of the time, he's more like the emotional crush she has for whenever she's feeling insecure or depressed. Sheryl forces Alto to come out of his shell, Ranka just forces him into a mentor role to her. Sheryl had a much better character arc, with her starting out as kind of an unpleasant, abrasive woman and gradually warming up to Alto. I think she should have gotten more character development, but I think she was always going to lose out to Sheryl in the end ("first girl wins" is a trope that applies in both versions) and she just wasn't as interesting as the more outgoing girl, so she got less attention in the story. She's sort of a subversion of Minmay too, in that she DOESN'T really meet with success through her own ability... she's a manufactured idol. -
Still waiting on mine... it's in customs. Thus far, I'm most interested in the VF-1L and the alternate FAST pack configurations.
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Well... Richard Bilra appears to be at least aware of the plot and O'Connor's aims, though apparently with his own motives. At the end, after the defeat of Grace's Vajra queen, it looks like he was planning to use Grace's resources to find the missing Megaroad-01 and Lynn Minmay.
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Off the top of my head, I can't think of any... IIRC, Model Graphix magazine had some line art of the VF-25 and VF-25 Super from a side view. Maybe in Master File?
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160km... why?
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Yeah, I'm not surprised... but the art in question appears to be from This is Animation 3: Super Dimension Fortress Macross (Part 1), page 92.
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Hm... I'm pretty sure the "additional micro-missile pods for use in outer space" are the drum-like things that hang down from the underside of where the wing glove was covered by armor. The bits closest to the beam cannon in that spread. They've got a paired fold-out hatch that reveals a bunch of micro-missiles.
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To me, the YF-29 has always smacked more of a Gundam-style "super prototype" rather than a super robot. Macross doesn't usually indulge in that particular trope, so when it did it seemed a bit odd to me... but I've never heard anyone attempt to lump it in with Super Robots based on appearance. It's armament isn't really what you'd call excessive (especially if you factor in the missile counts from Variable Fighter Master File for the VF-25's FAST packs). Design-wise and color-wise, it's just a bit less "subdued" than what we usually get in Macross, though it's nowhere near as over-the-top as the Sound Force VFs. I did like the subtle acknowledgement of the YF-29's origins as the SW-XA II in Variable Fighter Master File... the YF-29 in there is painted in the same color scheme as Kawamori's second Stealth Wing X design.
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's probably because Big West made Macross II: Lovers Again without the involvement of Kawamori... though several other staffers from the original Macross series and DYRL? were involved.
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Nah, not s'much war and fighter planes as love stories set against a backdrop of interstellar war. My advice would be that, if you're not averse to 80's animation, start with the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross. If you'd prefer a more modern starting point, Macross Frontier is also extremely accessible to new fans and doesn't really require that you have foreknowledge of the previous stories.
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Really? My reaction would be the opposite... because the Macross II songs are portrayed as being extremely popular. Didn't that one singer Mylene met (Alice Holiday?) have one in her repertoire, and she's supposed to be a singer who always has her singles make the top 10? Whether the Jamming Birds are a "take that!"... well, that's another story.
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Actually, I've done both... you might have noted I'd only said that the consistency of it was enough to make you wonder. ... and you have to admit, the sheer volume of Macross II music that shows up in City-7, from the radio to live performances by pretty much every other musician in Macross 7, would be enough to make anyone noticing the connection wonder at the in-universe status of Macross II. Especially considering that II was a sequel to DYRL?, and DYRL? is a "movie-within-the-universe" that also makes an appearance in Macross 7. That is officially isn't doesn't do anything to diminish how bizarre it is. EDIT: Edited the first sentence for tone. It's been a long day, and it came off as rude in hindsight. My apologies.
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Well... I'd say it's less a "may not be true" and more an Obi-Wan-style "certain point of view" thing. Irony of ironies, there's a fair amount of circumstantial evidence that suggests that Macross II: Lovers Again may be EXACTLY THAT to the main Macross timeline. The girl who performs "Banana Moon of Love" in the first episode of Macross II (or someone who has the same appearance) shows up a few times, and almost every non-Fire Bomber song in the series is pinched from Macross II. The consistency of it makes you wonder if, from an in-universe standpoint, Macross II: Lovers Again is a hit movie or TV series. You got a lot of catching up to do...
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Depends which version of the Macross universe you're talking about... and, on top of that, who you're asking. Kawamori himself is a bit airy-fairy about the whole affair, because he doesn't want to worry about anything more than the "broad strokes" of the past story when developing something new... so he doesn't end up hogtied by the established stories the way Gundam's UC timeline has been. He's also sometimes tried to cut a dash between the two versions of Space War 1 and said that the true version of events is actually somewhere in the middle... On the other hand, the Macross Chronicle encyclopedia and other print sources tend to be more definite about what happened, and when, why, and how. It's takes more of a "flexible continuity" approach that favors the series versions of any particular Macross title, but exhibits the now-typical pattern which Macross titles follow, where stuff from the movies ends up existing in the timeline anyway... but possibly not in the context that they appeared in the movie. (Like how the DYRL version of the VF-1 is supposed to be just later production blocks of the VF-1, or the way series and DYRL aethstics are sometimes seen side-by-side as in Macross 7's in-universe filming of the "Lynn Minmay Story", or Macross Frontier's Longest Birthday episode. Then you've got the DYRLverse to which Macross II: Lovers Again belongs... where the creators of that OVA and its prequels made their work into a continuity that was firmly defined (ala Gundam). That now stands as a "parallel world" continuity to Macross proper and has a fair amount said by its creators about precisely what the status of the stories that belong to it is. That version has DYRL's version of events as the more accurate of the two... As far as the main Macross timeline goes, that could probably be written up as artistic license... since the animation quality was a lot higher than the series to which it was originally an epilogue. Either that or they're drawn older for symbolic purposes to show they've matured... I'm sure you could find as many explanations as they are people to ask. Not necessarily... you've got a fair few other Macross titles, like Macross 7, Macross 7 Trash, or Macross 30 that all seem to point to Minmay really having written/performed Do You Remember Love? before she disappeared in 2016. Of course, many of those also fall into that aforementioned "mixes series and movie aesthetics" the-truth-is-somewhere-in-between category mentioned above. (Like in the Macross 30 story, where Minmay, Hikaru, and Misa have their DYRL appearances but Kamjin is clearly series Kamjin instead...)
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Nope... the US version wasn't cut, except for the Macross II the Movie edition which removed the ending credits from episodes 1-5 and OP from episodes 2-6. The Manga Ent. DVD version of the "movie" edition included a clean version of the Ep1-5 ED as a "music video". I think most of the instrumental stuff from the Macross II OST 2 is just background music they made but never really found a use for...