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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    When it comes to One Piece, it's basically the equivalent of "a wizard did it"... he's the wizard scientist who did it. Normally, yeah... One Piece has avoided a lot of that in two ways: The first is a historical period called the Void Century... The second is the enigmatic genius Dr. Vegapunk... Pretty much all anachronistic tech in the series can be attributed to one of those two origins... and backwards places are simply isolated by problematic geography. (The world of One Piece is INCREDIBLY messed up.)
  2. Seto Kaiba
    ... yeah... so... about that... there is no explanation. Those are just a thing that exists. This is a world where they had two-way radio in the Age of Sail thanks to telepathic snails. Why do they change to look like whoever's calling? We don't know, it runs on cartoon logic. Normally the explanation for any anachronistic technology would be "blame Dr. Vegapunk" but there's no evidence he's even involved.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    As someone who does translations on the side... it's not that suspicious, especially if they've acquired the various extra features from the Japanese home video releases and are translating those too. Not to mention however much additional material is being made for things like liner notes and extras. Not to mention it's all probably got to go through two layers of legal approvals now... one at HG and one at Big West.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    All right! It's the weekend and I'm going to sit down and see just how bad One Piece really is. Over lunch I saw a news piece attempting to claim that One Piece broke the curse of bad anime adaptations, and my gut reaction was naturally "Bullsh*t", but we'll give this a fair shake and see... OK, not gonna lie... I am weirdly disappointed that the opening narration isn't using the one from the One Piece anime that gives the gist of the story's premise. The narrator in the anime is always rather overdramatic too, but the narration about how the new age of pirates began with the valediction of Gold Roger in which he told the crowd assembled to see his execution that he's left his treasure, which has everything the world has to offer, in one piece and that it was up for grabs. This new opening narration is so much more generic and uninspiring. Luffy's quirky so he has to break the fourth wall? Go **** yourselves Netflix. OK, I have to give them points again for something... That said, it's ****ing weird seeing Alvida with actual human proportions. I guess they backed down to avoid causing a stir, but in the original work Alvida was grotesquely obese, hideously ugly, and quite sensitive about both... whereas this version is merely a bit chubby. She's also missing most of her bad boss tendencies. The set design is absolutely amazing though. Just absolutely amazing. You can really tell where the money went. I love that they faithfully reproduced Alvida's club from the anime for the actual fight though. But I was right when I assumed at the outset that Luffy's devil fruit powers were going to look like absolute crap. Really, there was no chance that they were going to actually look good/impressive because it is a REALLY cartoony power set that kind of calls for late 90's The Mask-grade CG. ... and it's back to the flashback... Nice easter egg though... the music in the tavern is "Binks's sake", a song that becomes very important MUCH later in the story. Can't say I care for this version of Luffy getting his powers though. They also kinda bungled the bandit's confrontation with Shanks... especially since it's one of the story's most hilarious-in-hindsight "Bullying a dragon" moments. So, I knew this was a compressed adaptation... but we're not even thirty minutes into the first episode and they've already got rid of Alvida and are introducing Buggy, Nami, and Axe-Hand Morgan? I hate to say it feels like we're rushing but we're RUSHING. Wow... Helmeppo looks even worse than I expected. The bob cut he had in the original was bad, this is just... instead of looking like a spoiled brat with questionable fashion sense he's a ridiculous hat away from looking like a pimp. It's like they spent all the money on the set design, CG ships, and fight choreography and forgot to hire anyone who knew how to write or act. The over-the-top acting is probably meant to be that way... and it's absolutely faithful to the original work where everyone is so hammy the production can't be called kosher... but combined with the loving rendered ships and sets it combines with Luffy's sh*tty CG to make the whole thing feel like a paradoxically bad FMV video game. One Piece can't be called a serious story by any stretch of the imagination, but it feels like two separate teams are working at cross purposes here. The set design and prop teams were clearly told they were doing a pirate story and were going to play it laser straight and realistic, while the writers and actors were clearly told to be as cartoony as possible. The end result is downright surreal. ... and again, Luffy is way too coherent and articulate. Inaki Godoy at least seems to realize what kind of show he's in and is 100% not taking this seriously. The sheer amount of "I forgot I had superpowers" going on here for Luffy is kind of impressive. I guess the CG is just too expensive to use on a regular basis. I'm also unaccountably disappointed that Morgan wasn't crushed under his own statue like in the original. They also left out some rather important character development in a few places... ... and then the episode ends with one of Buggy's men explaining the theft of the map to Buggy, who vows to steal it himself. All in all... as of the end of the first episode, it's not terrible it's just all over the place. "Indecisive", in a word. It feels like the creative team working on Netflix's One Piece were really struggling to reconcile the original One Piece's heavy emphasis on comedy with its nature as an adventure series about pirates. The original work is unapologetically comedic 99% of the time with attack names full of puns and overreactions and idiot behavior. Here, it sort of flip-flops frequently between pure comedy and pure seriousness in a way that doesn't feel quite natural. Like channel surfing back and forth between James Bond and Johnny English. It's kind of the opposite problem Cowboy Bebop had, where they kept trying to inject comedy into a serious noir story... in One Piece they don't know how to make the comedy that is supposed to be there work with the parts of the story that aren't inherently comedic in nature. It's not So Bad It's Good, So Bad It's Awful, or So Bad It's Exiting The Critical Spectrum at Velocities Exceeding C yet... but it's not good either. It's... mediocre? Unremarkable? Inoffensive? Like, it's very pretty but it doesn't leave much of an impression. EDIT: Next episode is presumably going to cover the fight with Buggy the Clown... and as he's my favorite One Piece character I really am somewhat anxious about that. Partly because Buggy in the original is an ineffectual comic relief villain until Impel Down when he becomes the poster child for Imposter Syndrome, and partly because this version of Buggy seems to be going for a "scary clown" angle ala Heath Ledger's overhyped Joker.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    In my experience, people who default to "rule of cool" tend to paint with far too broad a brush and miss that it's far more often being done for practical and/or symbolic reasons by the art staff. Why are the Stormtroopers bright white? It's partly because "gloss white is futuristic" was in full force at the time the first film was made and their helmets are meant to be stylized skulls, which is Rule of Cool in part, but it's also symbolic. Their sterile white armor and stylized skull-faced helms were meant to be evocative of their role as fascist enforcers (the armor is literally referred to as "fascist white armored suits" in the script for A New Hope*), and as the Stormtrooper name implies they're both shock troops and political enforcers. Their armor is not meant to be camouflaged... it's meant to be high visibility so that it can be feared. Their presence is meant to intimidate like their namesake. For the same reason, Char's custom Mobile Suits in the original Gundam are painted not just red but their own unique shade of red not just because's a "Red Baron"-type ace, but to make his Mobile Suit recognizable among the otherwise identical-looking Mobile Suits of the same type and so that the red of his Mobile Suit wouldn't blur into the red portions of the Gundam or other designs in the animation. Zeon's whole aesthetic is modeled on WW2 Germany's, and designs introduced after the Zaku were given other colors besides the Wehrmact officer green in order to make them easier to tell apart, especially since the first one Tomino was forced to introduce when they switched to a borderline "monster of the week" format was the very similar looking Gouf. Where Southern Cross is concerned, however, it's really more like... "Rule of Lazy Reuse". Even toned down, the Arming Doublet's samurai armor aesthetic doesn't really fit with the design aesthetic of the rest of the series. They spent a lot of time on it when they were developing the series as Science Fiction Sengoku Saga and either couldn't bear to toss the designs and/or didn't have enough time to make a new design that would actually mesh with the show's style. The color schemes aren't really "rule of cool", it's just what they've ripped off. The Bioroids are different colors because they're styled after the Principality of Zeon's main Mobile Suits from Mobile Suit Gundam like the Zaku II, Gouf, and Dom, and that shows though not just in their concept, sound effects, and color scheme, but even in things like the external energy conduits and the late period Bioroid Type I "inheriting" the Dom's cruciform visor. Similarly, the Spartas is red, white, and blue because it's modeled on the Gundam and GM, and they tried to go the Macross route in making it easy to tell which model was the hero's with head variants... and then did such a crap job animating the series that most people don't know there are three different heads for the Spartas because the differences are too subtle to make out and indistinguishable from the show's frequently off-model animation. The only one who really got subjected to "Rule of Cool" was Marie Angel, who got an orange Logan despite frequently being the only Logan pilot onscreen, just to make her stand out that much more. "Rule of Cool" is a thing... but it's easy to mistake deliberate practical or artistic choices for it if you're not paying attention. *As provided in The Art of Star Wars, edited by Carol W. Titelman, Ballentine Books, 1979, on page 18.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    A bad adaptation of a classic is somehow worse/more offensive to the eye than a bad adaptation of a regular series or something new. That's why Netflix's Cowboy Bebop got absolutely CRUCIFIED by the reviewers and audiences alike. If Cowboy Bebop had not been so beloved and timeless, the Netflix adaptation would just have been a bad TV show instead of downright criminal.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Come on fan editors... I'm waiting. Oh god, I kinda wanna play hooky and just binge this beautiful mess while it's fresh... Not surprised they dumped it all at once. That's kind of been Netflix's particular thing. Instead of drip feeding it like Disney+ they just toss it out all at once because they KNOW their service is for binge-watching... bless their hearts.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Which is also ironically not painted... the glossy appearance is actually a clear laminate vehicle wrap protecting the dull yellow ablative armor emulsion coating the bare composite armor and frame. It's purely functional. That it happens to look like a tacky gold spray job is purely coincidental. Though, as I said, there's really no reason to try to camouflage a giant robot. There are few things in the world more conspicuous (or more noisy) than a chunk of metal the size of a house that's decided to go for a walk. Anime's preoccupation with giving them fancy paintjobs can be, to an extent, forgiven because low observable stealth just doesn't apply in this case. It seems unlikely that Southern Cross's creators actually understood this point, though... as the paintjobs in the series are a bit too Gundam-inspired to be the work of an original thinker.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    TBH, I don't think the argument that the Southern Cross Army is a useless chocolate box regiment tracks with anything in the series... They're way too heavily armed to be just a peacekeeping force and a way to keep bored teenagers out of trouble. They have a purely military space fleet, three or four separate Army air services, a half-dozen terrain-specific specialist teams, an armored cavalry corps, and even reserve formations. That isn't a for-show army, these people are armed like they're wishing a mother****er would. Which makes no sense, because there's literally nobody for them to be beefing with. Yeah... as I said, there's not a lot of point in trying to camouflage an 18m tall 80t robot. You might as well paint it in bright colors to scare the enemy and make it easier for units to coordinate when radar is off the table, or just because that's the color of paint you had. Of course, Southern Cross did it because they were ripping off Gundam and there's no actual rhyme or reason to it there.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    One Piece is one of the biggest cash cows around... it's only natural Bandai would put an amount of effort commensurate to the return behind it. No shame in that... One Piece is an odd title and a difficult title to get into for some because of its unique art style and the incredibly bizarre way the story presents itself thanks to its manic agent-of-chaos protagonist. I wouldn't call myself a fan, but what I will say is that Oda has built a deceptively deep and complex world for his story... it's easy to get lost in it. Especially now that there are over 1,000 chapters and episodes. It's kinda a "what you grew up with" thing... Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z was pretty much THE shounen title for the older millennials, thanks to being one of the anime titles that you could actually find on public access and cable. One Piece has kinda become the 800lb gorilla of that, since it's been airing continuously since 1999.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    It's really happening! I can hardly wait... a once-in-a-lifetime beautiful disaster is about to unfold, and by the gods I shall have a front row seat and popcorn at the ready. It comes and goes. It's much more common very early in the series since the first few story arcs mainly involve Luffy finding the core members of his pirate crew and convincing them to join him. All of the members of the Straw Hat pirates are motivated to join the crew in order to pursue a particular dream or ambition of theirs that they're eventually convinced becoming part of Luffy's crew will help them achieve. It gets much less pronounced as the story goes on, mainly since the gap between crew members joining expands from tens of chapters to hundreds. Luffy's the only one who really goes on about their dream with any regularity, and almost never more than the single sentence declaration that he's going to be king of the pirates as a sort of boast in battle. The story does sometimes go into exposition dumps that touch on the dreams of antagonists as a prelude to them being defeated, but that's generally only for the sympathetic ones. For the most part, Luffy's just an agent of chaos and the crew are people who were caught up in his wake as he rampages across the world like an unstoppable titan with ADHD and FAR too much sugar in his system.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Bright colors on a giant robot are kind of forgivable... because no amount of low-viz gray is going to hide an armored fighting vehicle that's at least as tall as a two-story house if not bigger. Even more so if it's being used in space, where realistically that paintjob wouldn't be visibly 99% of the time and the craft would only be identifiable by running lights or any illumination sources built into it. Not to mention if EVERY member of a unit has a wild paintjob, there's no easy way to pick out the leader. Gundam is often pointed to as an example of pointless ornimentation, but for the most part it only goes as far as bright colors on prototypes or ace units... which are justified for practical or propaganda reasons. (Prototypes are sometimes painted bright colors to make them easier to track by eye during testing.) There are occasional moments of non-functional bling, but they're nowhere near as common as folks make out and tend to be applied to whole units rather than individual officers (e.g. the gold trim on all the Sleeves MS's). Southern Cross was absolutely trying to be a (mostly) serious sci-fi/mecha anime like Gundam or Macross. It comes off as somewhat less so because it was cancelled with barely half the story in the can, and because its protagonist is such a ****ing moron thanks to the writers trying to write a compelling female character and getting no farther than "marriage is a woman's happiness" that they were borderline trying to replace her with a man before the series was cancelled. If there were no other nations to actually fight, the military would probably be abolished as a massive waste of taxpayer money. Why there's still a military in a post-apocalyptic world where wars played a major role in rendering Earth so uninhabitable that humanity had to abandon it and there aren't any rival governments is one of the major plot holes in the Southern Cross series concept that its lazy creators never bothered to fill. Definitely not, lol. No such event occurred in Southern Cross... and in the Robotech version's official setting, the Southern Cross Army was a death-of-career posting where the Earth Forces dumped the real military's rejects, washouts, etc. that the military felt would be least missed in an actual battle. Not the sort of force that society would consider knights in shining armor. Perhaps "Turds in a tin can", given that their equipment is also explicitly poor-quality junk for which development was motivated by spite (and corruption) in Robotech's official setting. They're far more Delta Farce than Band of Brothers... esp. since Robotech took the Army's leader from a curt and officious but generally reasonable commander to being an incompetent megalomaniacal jerk and xenophobe. TL;DR: Robotech Southern Cross Army gets NO respect in canon.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    To an extent. The brightly colored "Ace custom" paint jobs are largely a thing of the past, having mostly been used by the Germans in both world wars and the Japanese in the second world war. The US Navy does have certain brightly colored aircraft even in this era of low observable stealth, though those units are typically reserved for the commander of the air group on a given carrier. It's not so much a ace pilot thing there as a mark of status for the pilot with the most seniority. Low observable stealth kind of ruined that. Brightly colored squadron markings were at least a thing prior to that point, though individual ace paint jobs were not. You see this reflected in fiction in a similar manner. The protagonists tend to not have the custom paint jobs, or when they do they're more subdued than the flamboyant paint jobs used by the enemy aces. Char Aznable's signature red mobile suits being perhaps the most iconic example... as well as what Southern Cross was blatantly ripping off. There was, briefly, something like a modern example of a pilot becoming feared on the basis of their reputation. That would be the so-called "Ghost of Kyiv", though that pilot ultimately turned out to be an urban legend based on conflating the exploits of several different pilots and outright exaggeration rather than an actual person. Before that was revealed to be a mythical person, it hearkened back to a rather more dramatic era when high achievers on the battlefield would find themselves saddled with the occasional outlandish title. The closest we get in the modern day is particularly units that have a fearsome collective reputation like Delta Force, Seal Team Six, The US Army's first infantry division, the Jolly Rogers, Black Aces, and the like.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, Southern Cross is a mockbuster whose writers never bothered to come up with justifications for 90% of what goes on in its story or design works... Even so, Liberte and Glorie's armed forces supposedly descend from modern military traditions... and let's just say that the idea of requiring your military's leaders to make obvious targets of themselves by wearing the fanciest hat and/or blingiest uniform on the battlefield was, coincidentally I'm sure, started to go out of fashion in the mid-19th century right around the time rifled muskets brought an end to Napoleonic tactics with their substantially better accuracy at range. Wearing a "shoot me, I'm an officer" sign on your bonce was determined to be a pretty poor life choice almost three centuries before the series is set and I can't honestly imagine why anyone would question that wisdom.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Not s'much, no... first and foremost, the Arming Doublet's job is to protect its wearer from the fact that Glorie is a profoundly unpleasant place to live. A few specialist models are meant to protect against more immediate environmental hazards like drowning or decompression, but most are just excessively stylized body armor meant to protect from small arms fire and the fact that Glorie can't decide if it wants to be Tattooine or Hoth and spends 18+ years at a time being one or the other. (The experience of living there is basically 18 year-long Death Valley midsummer followed by 55 years of winter broken up into two 18 year long Northern Minnesota winters with a Northern Finland winter in the middle for good measure.) It won't stop anti-armor or anti-warship grade laser weapons any more than a kevlar vest and trauma plate'll stop a 120mm anti-tank round... making the decision to put the tank's driver in an exposed position a rather questionable choice at best. It also won't do much if you get thrown from your vehicle, which happens quite a bit in the series since there's apparently no restraints in the Spartas's cockpit! Y'know, they never actually address what "Sniping Clapper" mode is for, officially... "it hovers" is as specific as they get. That said, Walker Cannon is not long-range artillery, it's a medium-range (visual range) direct-fire cannon and anti-aircraft gun according to the few official statements on the topic. It's not capable of long-ranged bombardment because its weapons are all lasers. It also doesn't really walk. Despite the name, Battle Sniper is actually meant for close-ranged combat only. (Welcome to the land of nonindicative names... that the word "clapper" comes up as often as it does makes me think Glorie's population needs to be using more protection when finding ways to pass the time during decades of winter.) Certain Southern Cross fans perpetuate the claim that the Arming Doublet is a powered suit, but thus far I have found exactly NOTHING to corroborate that... the claim seems to come from Robotech. Of course, the most glaring issue is that the heavily stylized nature of the Arming Doublet and the Southern Cross Army's odd preoccupation with bling as a status symbol on the battlefield means that decapitating a unit by eliminating its leaders is as simple as aiming for the idiot with the fanciest hat. Most variants keep this relatively low-key and make either the mengu (facial armor) fancier or add a fancier kabuto maedate (front crest), but the α Tactics Armored Corps stupidly put a swan on every Lieutenant's head and military police lieutenants get a giant multi-handspan crescent like they're cosplaying Masamune Date.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    One remark I found while I was doing a bit of additional checking... apparently their fixation with jellyfish as a snackfood came from Kawamori being on a diet and snacking on dried squid in order to reduce his sugar intake during development.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    AFAIK, it hasn't been said who on the show's staff came up with all of the details of the various worlds that Xaos and Windermere visit in the course of the series. Kawamori probably came up with at least a general outline, but the details were probably workshopped by the show's writing team incl. scenario writer Toshizo Nemoto, Ukyo Kodachi, and others. The motif they chose for Ragna and Valette City in general is real world Malta and the Maltese islanders, though the floating shopping district is said to be modeled in part upon Dubai in the UAE. The Protoculture reengineered the local life forms into something resembling their own body plan, as they did on Earth and many other planets. The Brisingr globular cluster is implied, in the series, to have been the Protoculture's last known holdout before slipping into extinction and it seems they created several species in that region either hoping one would inherit their will or at least as some kind of valediction.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    It was literal robot horse space fantasy - or, rather, an "in space" version of heavily mythologized history - midway through its development under the title Science Fiction Sengoku Saga. That's the reason for the design of the body armor and the goofy ornate helmets. They're heavily toned-down versions of what was originally a sci-fi take on ou-yoroi. I'm not sure that necessarily connects to the Spartas's lack of any real protection for its driver, though... since that aspect was removed in the transition to a mecha series.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    You're assuming they're doing open auditions. There's no guarantee they're doing that... prior to Frontier, the norm was for them to contact the partner label and get a short list of already-signed newbie performers. As of 2060, he's still bumming around the galaxy as he was in Macross Dynamite 7. He sent his guitar tracks for the Fire Bomber reunion album in over the galaxy network.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, unless you have a dedicated gaming room or something similar 5.1 is a pain to pull off and doesn't really produce noticeably better immersion than a high quality 2.1 setup. My first gaming rig, back in the days of SLI, had a 5.1 audio setup but I always struggled to find a decent placement for the two rear speakers that didn't require taping cords to my carpet... and even then I was defaulting to headphones most of the time to avoid bothering my neighbors. I'm sure someone probably makes a 5.1 setup with wireless rear satellites by now, but I've yet to find a solution that really beats my tacky-as-hell 2.1 Logitech G560 speakers with the lights and my G935 headset. On a quasi-related note... since I've put together a new gaming rig for the first time in quite a few years, how're you all handling cable management?
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Currently starting Classroom for Heroes. This... this is pretty awful. The title put me in the mind of a knockoff of My Hero Academia, which would be pretty tedious on its own, but this is another one of those tedious isekai-inspired "school for adventurers" type comedy titles that can't think of a joke better than "Look how quirky we are". It's like the unwanted child of Combatants will be Dispatched! and any of a thousand "reincarnated hero tries to live a normal life and fails" fantasy comedies. Never mind, it IS another tedious "the reincarnated overpowered hero tries to lead a normal life and fails" story... complete with the usual excessive level of fan service.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Undead Girl Murder Farce continues to be an unexpected delight with its latest episode. I am truly, truly hoping this series gets renewed for another season... though it did get rather unexpectedly gory in the most recent episode. In fairness, can it be called unexpected when is one of the principal antagonists? I have to say, I wasn't quite expecting that
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Are you used to using on-ear or over-ear headphones there? YMMV, but when I switched to remote work at the start of the pandemic and my gaming PC also became an office workstation, I found over-the-ear headphones with a firm but narrow ear cup made a huge difference in preventing or reducing the frequency of those headaches. The ones I had the best success with in terms of long-term use were the Logitech G935s. They've held up pretty well for me... the only issue I've had with the pair I got back in like '18 or so is diminished battery life, but the battery's replacable. (The one downside is the rigid foam traps a lot more body heat, so it gets a bit sweaty under there after 4-5 hours.)
  24. Seto Kaiba
    As both @azrael and I mentioned, we don't have any actual/official timing info. What I described is the approximate timing they've used the last two times (Frontier and Delta)... but there's no guarantee that Big West will stick to the same schedule with Sunrise doing the animation production. If they are, we're looking at another 2-3 months before we get any real information about the series in terms of when and where it's set.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    No, it can't aim forward on those models. It's specifically a rear facing weapon meant to cover the fighter's blind spot. Many of them, especially the later models like the 19, 22, 25, and 31 have a fixed forward-facing gun or pair of guns that do the same job.
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