Seto Kaiba

OK, looking at it from that perspective makes way more sense. Rather than being a badly-worded attempt to appear to be in control after bending the knee two years back, it's a badly-worded attempt to dissuade Robotech fans from looking into the new Macross series by awkwardly pointing out that it won't be Robotech II: the Sentinels by another name. I guess that's on brand for them, though it hardly seems necessary since what's left of the Robotech fandom seems deeply offended by the Japanese-ness of Macross's sequels on principle.

I'm just completely thrown by how he looks less than half his actual age. I've seen freshmen on the HS football team my brother coaches that look older than he does. Yeah, I'd hope so... they did an OK series of shorts on YouTube a while back, but even those were more focused on spectacle than horror. As long as they avoid trying to tie it into Prometheus and Alien: Covenant I think it'll be OK-ish. My main suspicion is that, since Alien: Covenant ended up being a narrative dead end due to poor reception, they'll try and use that as a springboard for this story since that ended with David, a ship of colonists, and his xenomorph embryos on their way to colonize a new world and that would be a pretty easy jumping-off point. I'd love to see more subtle, claustrophobic horror like Alien and Alien: Isolation. I suspect what we'll get is another cliche outing of the Too Dumb To Live squad exercising every slasher movie cliche as they become WY-brand xenomorph chow.

Yeah... I am heavily leaning towards predicting a one-season-and-done beautiful disaster of a series. I feel like Netflix's One Piece will land in "so bad it's good" territory because One Piece is inherently comedic and silly and they're trying to grim it up. Where they screwed up with the adaptation of Cowboy Bebop was that they tried to make a normally serious noir story lighter by injecting unneeded and unwanted comedy. Trying to grim up One Piece and make it into a serious action/adventure series should provide lots of fodder for unintentional hilarity. My one real complaint with the trailer is that... well... Luffy feels too articulate in this trailer. The Luffy of the manga and anime is the quintessential dumbass protagonist. He's got a dream he's chasing, but outside of that he's kind of a morally gray agent of chaos and idiot savant driven by an enormous appetite and severe ADHD. He runs on cartoon logic at most times, and his whims are frequently nonsensical even to the people who know him best. Manga and anime Luffy is a heroic cryptid who pops out of the woodwork to do the most incomprehensible or illogical things, befriend people seemingly at random, and then disappear after beating up anyone who threatens the people he decided were friends or are just stronger than him and dumb enough to flex about it in front of him. Live action Luffy feels more like a slightly exciteable standard action/adventure protagonist than the Leeroy Jenkins dumbass that Luffy is supposed to be. That said, they're clearly getting a bit ambitious with this one. If this trailer is to be believed, they're compressing all six story arcs from the East Blue Saga into just eight episodes if we assume Wikipedia lists the right episode count. We see snippets of at least five of those story arcs in this trailer alone: Romance Dawn Arc - we see Shanks give Luffy the hat and the Sea King that bites his arm off, Alvida and Coby, and Zoro joining the crew. Orange Town Arc - we see the first encounter with Buggy the Clown and Nami. Syrup Village Arc - we see Kaya's butler and the claws belonging to Captain Kuro and Usopp joins the crew. Baratie Arc - we see multiple shots of Baratie and someone who is presumably meant to be Don Krieg. Arlong Park Arc - we see the final fight between Luffy and Arlong and the destroyed Arlong Park headquarters of Arlong's pirates. The only one we don't see anything from is the Loguetown Arc, unless the detailed depiction of Roger's execution is from that. That's one hundred chapters of material that they're squeezing into eight episodes, with six separate major battles (Alvida, Axe-Hand Morgan, Buggy, Kuro, Don Krieg, and Arlong).

At this point, it's kind of a non-issue... not just because this alleged prohibition probably only applies to the original Haruhiko Mikimoto character designs from SDFM and DYRL? and not the aged-up redesigns from later titles, but because every single character in SDF Macross except Max and Milia's oldest daughter is on the wrong side of retirement age by the time of Absolute Live!!!!!!. There's 56 years of in-universe time separating the events of SDF Macross's final episode and Macross Delta's second movie. Komilia, the youngest character in the original series, would be 57. Max, Milia, and Minmay would be 75. Bruno J. Global would be 95. Claudia would be 83, Vanessa 80, Kim 78, and Shammy 77. At this point, the only way to have those characters be meaningfully involved in... anything... is to go backwards or do a time travel story like they did in Macross 30 and Macross Shooting Insight. Even Max's appearance in Absolute Live!!!!!! stretches credibility quite a bit as a septuagenarian super-ace. The VF-1 was 59 years and 4 generations old by the time it appeared in Macross Delta's TV series too. They haven't been honest about it since it was announced, why start now? (Though in all fairness, with the WGA on strike they probably can't get any more bargain basement story treatments to pretend that the project isn't dead on arrival.)

Wait what? Okay wow, he looks like... 12 or 13 years old in that picture.

They've literally never been able to, so I'm not sure why that would be phrased that way. Of course, a lot of people seem to have jumped to conclusions without thinking it through and concluded that this somehow means that Macross sequels containing characters or designs that were in the original series are somehow going to still be stonewalled. That's obviously not the case given that we already know that those shows have been licensed and Big West is literally showing episodes of Delta that contain designs from the original series at their panel. When all the said and done, this is probably just another nothing burger Harmony Gold is misleadingly phrasing in an attempt to seem like they have some kind of control over the situation.

Well that bodes ill. I'll reserve judgment until it comes out, but my hopes aren't high... albeit because of the way the franchise has neglected subtlety and claustrophobic horror in favor of gore and spectacle, rather than because of this casting decision. Casting a kid makes me think it will probably draw a lot of it's inspiration from Aliens.

Or drops a ROM. Either way, I'm not so hung up on the original series that its absence will be a dealbreaker for me.

Yup... the news is absolutely full of stories of companies that thought ChatGPT and similar bots were going to replace call center workers and software engineers and artists and so on backpedaling hard when they realize that those generative AIs are little different to training a parrot to mimic speech. It doesn't actually understand, it just strings together words or patterns that are adjacent to the prompt until it gets something that sounds plausible. Like a student disguising plagiarism by exchanging every word in a sentance for a synonym. (That and generative AI art can't be copyrighted currently, so it can't really be commercialized.)

Given what's been said previously, the SDFM and DYRL portion appears to be a DLC... they may simply leave that particular DLC option unavailable to US gamers.

Just goes to show this is a perfectly normal scrolling shooter... when the choice of vehicle isn't strictly cosmetic, it's effectively just the difficulty selection. The more forgiving choice defensively has far worse offensive potential and vice versa. If the YF-29 is in this, it'll be a glass cannon for sure. Now if they really go old school with it, they'll lock you out of entire levels and possibly the game's ending if you choose a lower difficulty fighter than normal.

Without spoilers, Max's return kind of puts a damper on much of the rest of the movie... not just because he's a one-man scene stealing squad, but because he comes in with a dim view of the protagonists, validates that dim view, and then shows them up repeatedly in their own movie. The fans who thought critically, but not unkindly, about Delta already kind of knew that the protagonists were small-time operators even as mercenaries go and that the war they nearly lost was a bush league conflict at best. Absolute Live!!!!!! isn't shy about reminding viewers of that... but Max does so slightly less gently than a sledgehammer seating a fencepost. It honestly felt a little mean-spirited in places. More than that, there's nothing for them to do... the Japanese BDs and DVDs come with official English subs. Same as the previous film, and the home video release of the Macross Delta series.

It's been out on DVD and Blu-ray since last September. It's not a US localized release, but the Japanese domestic market release has official US/English subtitles on it. US localized releases are presumably pending now that there's no block on licensing and the main shows have all been licensed. https://www.cdjapan.co.jp/product/BCXA-1756 Max does indeed appear in the film. He was selected as a character to replace the Macross Elysion's captain Ernest Johnson after Johnson's VA Unsho Ishizuka passed away in 2018. You've probably seen a fair number of posts in the toy section about his new Valk for the movie, which is somewhat contentious since he's a supporting character only but absolutely curb stomps the protagonists despite being a decade on the wrong side of retirement age at this point.

The original Southern Cross didn't really get a chance to get into it because the show's writing was a mess and it was earmarked for cancellation early into its planned broadcast run, but these kids are the first generation to grow up after humanity was forced to abandon Earth due to the total destruction of its environment via wars and pollution. They're living on a recently colonized and only tenuously self-sufficient planet that's only slightly less inhospitable than Hoth from Star Wars.* It's implied a few of them, like Jeanne, are there because they were either the people Liberte felt would be least missed in its own government and armed forces or who were so problematic that they ended up on the "ship out" side of "shape up or ship out". * No, really. Creator commentary from TIA10 says that Glorie's average temperature at the 40th parallel (think Japan, Turkey, Kentucky, southern Spain, Sicily) is -40 degrees C in winter... Hoth is -32 to -60 degrees C! The weather on Glorie is subfreezing for 36 years at a time. Hopefully the 18 year long spring is nice, because it apparently swings to 40+ degrees C at the same latitude in the 18 year long summer. None of the series materials ever really address why there's a military at all, never mind one with giant robot weapons, when humanity had encountered no aliens and live was by all accounts relatively peaceful and focused on just plain survival after having to abandon Earth because of the damage caused by unrestricted warfare.

Sara, Shin, and Mao. It's even diagrammed on the Macross Chronicle character sheets. So... how much of a head start are we supposed to give before we hunt the heretics for sport? 😛 It's Suzie-Aegis-Aegis's VF-19 isn't it? A difference as big as Camille being a boy's name too!

I wouldn't hold my breath for that. Bandai Namco Filmworks/Sunrise may be handling production of the animation, but it's a relatively safe bet the series concept and direction will come from Kawamori and that its mechanical design works will come from The Usual Suspects (Kawamori, Ishigaki, Hidetaka). "I want Macross, but without the things that make it Macross" will never not be the weirdest hot take from old fans. Macross has always been a love story first, and a war story second. If you ask Kawamori, the war story has never been more than a backdrop for the love story from the original series onward.

You're definitely in the minority there. From what I've gathered, that's kind of how the main Macross audience in Japan feels about Plus and Zero. Besides, if Macross didn't radically shake its formula up with each new installment it wouldn't be Macross anymore... it'd just be off-brand Gundam.

Not just because Kawamori et. al. have a preference for moving the story forward rather than revisiting existing stories, but also because Zero isn't really all that relevant to other works in the franchise. Its impact on subsequent works as a self-contained story is very small. That honestly sounds like it should be an in-universe b-movie. We know from Frontier that VF pilots have in-universe memes and in-jokes about things that have gotten characters killed in previous shows. This sounds like the Macross universe's version of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. It would actually be rather nice to get a more diverse look at the media in the setting, since almost all of what we've seen of it is dramatizations of the events of past shows, traditional arts, and the occasional conveniently timed TV news report. You know, that might be a fun idea for a future Macross series... a story about a movie or TV series crew producing one of those in universe works of fiction in partnership with the military.

Yeah, it's a shame that Andor did not get the love it deserve when it first debuted. It had to work a lot harder for what it got too, since it's the only Disney+ Star Wars series that's running on the strength of its narrative rather than the sheer quantity of fan service it delivers. As a casual viewer, shows like The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett have little or nothing to offer because they require their viewer to be invested in the expanded universe mythos of the Mandalorian people and of Boba Fett in particular. If you don't have that background then you're left wondering why they based two entire shows on a guy who has maybe 30 words of actual dialogue and is basically just a less inept stormtrooper. Obi-Wan isn't a lot different in that regard, since it's clearly counting on fans being very excited to see Ewan McGregor return to the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi in order to compensate for a plot that could best be described as unnecessary. Andor was able to do so much more with its story than any of the other shows because it's not wrapped up in established lore and instead is focusing on building a compelling narrative around new characters. I am so so glad that it's been nominated for an Emmy. Not just because it's richly deserved, but because I hope it'll set the series up as an example of how to tell a compelling Star Wars story without having to lean so heavily on pre-existing characters and events.

Glad to hear it. If any Star Wars series deserves an Emmy, it's Andor.

I don't recall there being any roadblock for Zero. Just for the original series and DYRL. I would assume that the reason a license hasn't been announced yet is because all of the licensees are waiting to see how the more popular titles in the series do before they get into the more niche and for fans only sort of material. Definitely not.

For merchandising, yes... since 2001. They picked up the merchandising rights to the movie from Tatsunoko Pro back then as a part of their effort to lock Macross sequels out of the West and put a stop to toy imports from Japan. On paper, they supposedly did it to protect the toy line Toynami developed to coincide with their reboot and relaunch of the Robotech franchise. If the release were a Japan exclusive, Harmony Gold wouldn't be able to do a damn thing about it. They have no rights there. The goal these days, however, is "Worldwide Macross". That means contending with the trademarks Harmony Gold has held in the US and formerly held in other markets to keep Macross out of those markets. It would not be impossible by any means, but it would be rather more legally fraught than just doing a new series since they would have to also go and deal with the trademarks Harmony Gold has on certain designs from the original series instead of just on certain key terms and the title.

It would be fair to say that Delta had all the right pieces to be successful... it had great character designs, great mechanical designs, one of the biggest and most interesting settings yet written, some absolutely fantastic music, and high quality animation. The writing just did not seal the deal. IMO rather a lot of the writing issues can be traced to the sheer size of the cast. It was easily three times the size of a usual Macross cast, so there just wasn't any opportunity for the writers to develop many of the characters and still advance the story. Having five main pilots, five members of the idol group, and then six enemy pilots (five if the twins only count as one) meant there just wasn't enough screen time to go around. With the series also functioning as a promotion for the idol group's live concerts, they put more emphasis on Walkure than was strictly necessary. Some writing choices combined in ways that were probably unintended as well, like the setting being a backwater and the way the PMC the protagonist work for loses most of the battles in the show's first half combines with their opposition to authority to make them look like incompetent jerks. (Admittedly, incompetent PMCs is kind of truth in television but they were probably supposed to come off as cool rebels doing the right thing instead of as contrarians losing because they couldn't stand to do what they were told.) Considering the prevailing legal situation, I would not say there is no hope... just that it is very unlikely because it would require much of the series and its merchandising to go through HG's approval process due to the use of designs from the original series like the VF-1. If that were the case, the results should have been very different from what they were. Were recency bias a major factor, we would expect to see Delta place much higher than it did given that the two most recent titles at the time were the Macross Delta TV series and its first movie. They placed 6th and 9th overall. We would also not expect to older shows and movies placing above newer ones, never mind both of the two oldest titles in the top five. DYRL placed 2nd, Macross 7 placed 3rd, the original series placed 5th, and Macross Plus placed 7th and 8th. The third most recent title, 2012's FB7, is the lowest ranked of the lot at 16th. Likewise, we would not have expected Basara, Minmay, and Roy Focker in the top five characters if recency bias were driving the results... Nor would we expect to see four different versions of the VF-1 on the list of top 10 mecha or the original version of DYRL at the top of the songs chart. The TL; DR here is that the results don't bear out your attempt to handwave them away as biased.

If only it were as well written as one. There is a certain amount of that there, especially for the very oldest shows works, but it gets a lot more even as the works get newer... more like +/- 10 or 15 instead of +/- 50. The Macross Frontier titles have some of the most even distributions across the 20-29, 30-30, and 40-49 demographics.

Eh... it's no different to the other explicitly-scientific shining BS in Gundam. Just badly explained. Jeez... with this topic it feels like the Macross Delta threads where I had to keep reminding folks that "No, it's not magic or magical girls... it's not even new, this is all tech that we've seen before." ... "surprised" is true, though not all surprises are necessarily pleasant ones esp. with the Japanese audience's tastes differing somewhat from the western audience's. Mind you, Thunderbolt's edgy writing got the same kind of mixed reviews Macross Plus and Zero did and Hathaway's Flash owes its "old school" style to being a direct-to-streaming adaptation of a thirty-four year old light novel rather than an original development meant for broadcast. A story written today is not going to have the same tone or sensibilities as something written in '89. Macross Frontier did a pretty brisk trade outside Japan when it came out and was generally well-received by Macross fans. It's no accident that, when they started releasing Macross toys outside Japan, the first Worldwide Macross edition DX Chogokin was a VF-25. The promos for the Macross Shooting Insight game that's coming out soon also pretty heavily favor the VF-25 and Frontier. Macross Delta was initially received with quite a bit of enthusiasm because of Macross Frontier, and while older fans soured on it a bit because of issues with the writing it still did a pretty brisk trade among the younger viewers. I know that, going to SDCon, I've seen quite a lot of Macross Delta cosplay. Walkure seems to be especially popular. Frontier and Delta especially seem to be much more popular with women than previous installments, with the Grant Vote results for those shows being almost even with slightly more women than men as opposed to the sometimes 80 or 90% male votes for previous titles. Considering the success they've had, I think it's safe to assume Macross is going to continue building in that general direction.