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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Early model fold boosters like the FBF-1000A fold booster seen in Macross Plus and Macross 7 were single-use fold systems rated for a single fold jump of up to 20 light years. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-19 Excalibur and VF-22 Sturmvogel II explain these limitations as a product of the somewhat basic/stripped-down nature of the miniaturized fold system and its use of large amounts of low quality fold carbon in order to keep the cost of the unit down. Master File also suggests that this cheap and disposable fold system's design was the genesis of the first improvised fold bombs that led to the eventual development of the Dimension Eater by 2059. Later models like the FAB-1000 fold booster that was used by SMS and the New UN Forces in Macross Frontier were more advanced and capable designs using higher quality fold carbon that could be used for longer distances and multiple fold jumps. They could be recovered and reattached automatically, as seen in Macross Frontier.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    The hover tank is only supposed to be about 6 m tall. So yeah about 3 to 3 and 1/2 people tall. Still, look at the detail work there. Tekering is out here putting the official licensees to shame again.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    This is the page in question.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    I just love that the Forever Ensign Harry Kim joke is finally canon. 🤣
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Chronicle and Variable Fighter Designer's Note both print the same shots of the CG model of the VF-27 + Super Fold Booster. The one on pg212 of Designer's Note is MUCH larger and clearer, though, and in that one it's almost salmon pink IMO.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, very true... I guess I forgot how old-fashioned much of Japan still is since the firms I work with over there use more modern solutions (probably for our sake). 🤔 My brief confusion aside, 365 Days to the Wedding is quite a cute little romance/romcom series. I've heard from a friend there's a live action version too.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    And it'd actually be three minutes for everyone! One of the bigger logistical problems with fold navigation is the disparity between the passage of time aboard a folding ship vs. the passage of time in realspace and the way fold faults exacerbate it. The trip to Gallia IV in Macross Frontier episodes 11 and 12 is a great example. According to Leon, the Frontier fleet was close enough to Gallia IV to make the trip there by space fold almost instantaneous. The multiple mild fold faults between the fleet and the planet meant that Alto and Sheryl only perceived a short time traveling to the planet but it really took over a week to get there because the fold faults increased the disparity between experienced time and actual time to over 172 hours. Thanks to the Super Fold Booster LAI'd developed, Michael Blanc was able to make the same trip that took Alto and Sheryl over a week in a matter of minutes because fold faults were no longer an obstacle. (It's entirely possible there are career space pilots in the galaxy who are physically and mentally months or years younger than their date of birth would suggest due to the disparity between time in fold vs. in realspace and the way fold faults exaggerate it.) It's still way less problematic than other FTL methods with time dialation-like effects. WH40K's warp drives come with the possibility of arriving centuries or millennia late, arriving before you ever left, or if something goes really wrong, having that coffee you were brewing drink you instead. 🤣
  8. Seto Kaiba
    My feeling exactly. As long as the characters are engaging and the story is compelling, I'm good with whatever. 😁 That's a question every mecha title ends up asking... because there are a few standouts like Macross or Evangelion, but mostly everyone's just copycatting Gundam since the early 90's. One of the provisions of the agreement between them and Big West is supposedly that Big West won't use the designs of the original series in new works going forward. With "Lady M" now linked to the Megaroad-01 and Misa and Minmay, it's highly likely to become an orphaned plot thread for legal reasons.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Well, we did already have a Char clone in Macross II... Lord Feff ticks a lot of the checkboxes including having a custom red mecha with a horn and higher performance than usual, and being a space nobleman aligned with the baddies.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Acro Trip is... well... kind of a trip. It's the story of a young girl named Chizuko who is a positively rabid fangirl for her town's resident magical girl Berry Blossom. By coincidence, she encounters her idol's ineffectual villain Chrome in town one day and he attempts to persuade her to join his evil organization and provide some quality magical menace to keep Berry Blossom employed. It has a warped sense of humor to be sure. I'd say it's a bit like a non-ecchi version of Gushing Over Magical Girls, with a comedy emphasis instead. I'm having a lot of fun with it.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Nothing so far, no. That's how it started... with Sunrise creating the Future Century because it literally couldn't make Bandai's demands for the next series after Victory work with the existing setting... but that stopped being the case a good while back. The Universal Century timeline was already a lot of baggage to work with in the mid-90's when the Future Century and After Colony timelines were created. Now, the sheer volume of material and Sunrise's (now Bandai Namco Filmworks's) canon policy have made the UC so dense, tangled, and impenetrable that new UC titles simply aren't accessible to non-fans. 2002's Gundam SEED was the first time Sunrise created an AU specifically to have a stand-alone story that would make Gundam accessible to first-time viewers. That's been their AU strategy ever since. Macross has a much more loosey-goosey setting and no firm canon policy, so it doesn't really have the problem that drives Bandai Namco Filmworks to create so many AUs. Each new Macross series is as separate from the others as possible and the whole thing runs on broad strokes continuity that only references specific events where it absolutely has to, so there's no continuity lockout and any information about past events you need can be summed up in under a minute. From what we've seen in the news, that restriction applies to new titles developed after the agreement. (Though the Absolute Live!!!!!! Max is based on the Macross 7 design, and the Megaroad-01 is outside HG's licenses. The main sticking point would be the original trio who we saw two of in silhouette in the movie.) It was, but the Battle Astraea and its Siren Delta System were the lynchpin of the whole operation under the organization's leader Cromwell. With those three key components gone, the organization almost certainly fell apart similar to how other anti-government movements in previous titles did. It's basically a repeat of what happened to Latence when the Ravens blew up Macross 13. The whole organization just kind of rolled up like a windowshade thereafter. The Epsilon Foundation's still around, but the organization as a whole doesn't seem to be malevolent. It's like General Galaxy or Gundam's Anaheim Electronics. It's a huge, amoral corporation that's mainly interested in profit above all else and has a few employees who sell arms to both sides out of greed, sympathy, or simply for self-advancement. It happens at the climax of the movie. That big skull-shaped pod that the Galaxy soldiers bring to the Battle Frontier's bridge is their life support system. After Brera breaks free from their mind control, he shoots his way into the Battle Frontier's CIC and blows them up with his gunpod at point-blank range. It's basically the last thing he does in the film before the epilogue. So yeah, they're dead... in a "the soot that used to be them is all over the Battle Frontier's deck plating" sort of way.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Mecha-ude might be a strong new contender for "Worst Shounen Anime". The first episode left me thinking the series was lazy, overly derivative, and profoundly lacking in anything resembling original thought or artistic merit. The second episode is, if anything, actually worse. This is what you'd get if you asked ChatGPT to write a painfully generic shounen anime. It's a collection of overused tropes and shallow stock characters woven into a woefully threadbare with no real sense of direction or purpose. This episode attempts to explain the central conflict of the story, but all that the writers could muster in terms of ideas was "Rise up against this litigation-safe stand-in for Amazon.com to defend these dangerous self-aware macguffins from being studied!" No, really. That's it. 365 Days to the Wedding is an interesting little romcom about a pair of travel agency employees who... actually, hold up. Does this kind of manual effort in-person travel agency even still exist in the real world? With desk jockeys actually calling hotels and airlines and such to reserve bookings for clients? I thought that kind of thing went the way of the dinosaur twenty years ago when online booking became the new normal. This seems like it'd be really wasteful, expensive, and time consuming compared to booking online. Anyway... 365 Days to the Wedding is the story of two seriously introverted 20-somethings who work for a Tokyo-based travel agency. When their company announces that it will reassign one unmarried staff member from their department to be the branch manager of a new branch office in Alaska in one year's time, they join forces to avoid the unwanted reassignment by faking an engagement. Their efforts to fake it 'til they make it are unwittingly helped by their manager totally shipping it.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Kawamori's just providing "oversight", so I wouldn't be surprised if he has Bandai Namco Filmworks marching to a similar schedule. It's effectively his franchise, after all. If anything, we should be hoping that Bandai Namco Filmworks is not supplying the writers for this exercise. The writers working on the Gundam franchise are so used to rote repetition of the same tired formula they they're all but completely incapable of writing original material. I'd much rather not see Macross devolve into a second Universal Century Gundam where the only thing that changes title-to-title is the proper nouns. If Bandai Namco Filmworks's Macross project is a new main series like we suspect it is, it'll be pretty much unconnected to previous works like its predecessors. That's how Macross avoids the continuity lockout problem Gundam has. Each new series is kept as separate from the others as possible and any required info about past events is either explained organically in-series or info-dumped at the start of the episode.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Ended up binging the first half-dozen episodes of Ron Kamonohashi's Forbidden Deductions. It's really quite good. The titular detective reminds me a lot of the himbo Sherlock Holmes from Dai Gyakuten Saiban/The Great Ace Attorney, and the overall vibe is like if Holmes had resolved to stay out of the spotlight by steering John Watson to the answers and propping him up as the real Great Detective. It takes a fair bit from Sherlock Holmes, albeit framed in a modern context, and manages to keep the course of each case pretty well obscured without violating Knox's ten commandments of detective fiction.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Yes, in Ep21 "Azure Ether" and Ep22 "Northern Cross". When Brera helps Ranka run away from the Macross Frontier fleet in search of the Vajra homeworld, his VF-27 Lucifer is shown to be equipped with one of LAI's prototype Super Fold Boosters. That's not the standard fold booster, which looks like this (the one Alto uses to get to Gallia IV) in Ep11: The one in your screen captures is LAI's newly-developed "Super Fold Booster" prototype that was first used in Ep12 "Fastest Delivery". What makes it so "Super" is that it uses fold quartz harvested from the Vajra instead of synthetic fold carbon. This lets it produce a much more powerful fold effect that can cross fold faults unhindered and fully shields the ship from the different flow of time in higher dimensions. So in practice, it's "faster" and immune to all the usual navigational issues a regular fold booster has to contend with.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Started Ron Kamonohashi's Forbidden Deductions... and I'm really enjoying it. It's kind of a buddy cop sort of show, with two detectives working together to solve murders. One's a newbie on the verge of getting kicked out of the investigations department due to being kind of a clueless meatheat and the other's a shut-in genius detective who stepped away from crime-solving because his weird habits are quite off-putting. It's very clever and fun and it's very well animated.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    The important thing to remember about any Tesla announcement is that any Tesla "new technology" demonstration is a carefully stage-managed sham meant to part the gullible from their money and nothing more. This is a half-step up from the previous scam, which was putting Human actors in robot suits like Chinese robotics firms got busted for doing in demos. These aren't autonomous robots, they're expensive, custom-made, remote-controlled props being remote-controlled by Tesla employees. As someone who's participated in benchmarking teardowns of the entire Tesla product range to date... I'll say right now Tesla is completely incapable of delivering even this meager level of performance in a production product. These aren't real products, and this ever goes into production it'll be a hilariously downgraded scam like the Tesla Cybertruck. (Remember, Tesla has been promising "fully autonomous" vehicles since 2016... something far less complex than an autonomous humanoid robot... and they've so far from being able to deliver it that they've been sued for fraud and false advertising over it with other OEMs delivering more capable solutions for less money.) It really isn't. These aren't even at the level of the Boston Dynamics Atlas from a decade ago... and those were actually autonomous for basic tasks. These are remote-controlled by people and can barely manage basic tasks like pouring drinks or maneuvering across a level floor. They're really not... just as much for practicality reasons as for cost reasons. Humanoid robots are hiliarously impractical at best. Bipedal locomotion is about the hardest form of propulsion to pull off with a robot because it's a lot less stable and requires a lot of extra hardware and software to manage. That increases cost and complexity and decreases operating time. Practical robot design is all about keeping the complexity down and having just enough hardware to do the job it's designed to do. That's why most robots are stationary arms with a few joints and a clawed manipulator, and why self-propelled robots typically rely on a wide, low base with treads for stability. Boston Dynamics developing a robot that can walk nearly as fluidly as a Human across an unobstructed and completely level floor is a gargantuan technical achievement. We're still a long way from a humanoid robot that can maneuver over obstructed or unstable terrain with the speed, fluidity, and endurance of a Human. We're even farther from one that can do so in remote operation, never mind one that has the strength, dexterity, and precision for more than basic tasks any unhandicapped Human could do. Robots capable of sustainably performing complex manual labor either by remote control or autonomous operation are likely a century or more away. Right now, remotely operated humanoid robots as a replacement for human direct labor is at the level of a very simple publicity stunt on the level of Tokyo's Avatar Robot Cafe.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Gave Let This Grieving Soul Retire a whirl... and it's pretty tedious.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    The Healer Who Was Banished From His Party Is, in Fact, the Strongest is j-fantasy at its most unremarkable. It's not unwatchable or even really bad... it's just generic. Really generic. There are times I swear I could see the barcodes. This season definitely has a lot more interesting titles than the previous one, though. I've added a bunch more today including Nina the Starry Bride, MF Ghost, Yakuza Fiance, Ron Kamonohashi's Forbidden Deductions, and Acro Trip. Gonna give a few of those a whirl this afternoon. 😁
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Not to mention that particular SMS branch is not only located in one of the wealthiest and most economically prosperous emigrant fleets... it's overseen directly by the founder of its parent company Bilra Transport. Richard Bilra is a man with "sponsors an emigrant fleet's cross-galactic voyage to pursue his personal interests" irresponsible levels of literal and political capital. Nope. They seem to exist wherever it's narratively convenient for them to do so... regardless of whether it makes sense or not. One trend I've noticed in their appearances in various official media and Master File is that SMS seems to be almost anywhere that's reasonably well-established. Their presences are all on major emigrant fleets like Frontier and Olympia and on emigrant planets that've established themselves pretty well already like Uroboros, Sephira, Eden, etc. Xaos seems to operate in the more remote regions of the galaxy. They have a major contract with the Brisingr Alliance, the mutual defense and economic pact in the remote and isolated stars of the Brisingr globular cluster, and their few other appearances are on remote and underdeveloped or sparsely populated worlds. We don't have enough information on the Elysion-type or its support carriers (semi-officially the Enterprise-class via Master File) to say for sure. The popular hypothesis is that the Elysion-type is an older, transitional design between the "first generation" Macross-class and both the newer Battle-class and the bleeding-edge Macross Quarter-class being trialed in 2059. Essentially, that the Elysion-type is an older, less advanced, and less expensive warship that was possibly either acquired secondhand from the NUNS or simply built to order using a large percentage of the company's funds. (Xaos seems to be operating on a very tight budget, given that they're shown to be effectively out of cash and unable to afford fuel and ammunition within days of being chased out of the Brisingr cluster. At one point in the TV series, they note that it'd take their entire yearly operating budget just to retrofit the Elysion to remove the Epsilon Foundation tech from it.) I haven't heard the part about the NUNS protagonist, what I recall from the liner notes and a few interviews in publications like Great Mechanics was that the series was originally planned to be one cour plus a movie, and that it was expanded to two cour in development.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    'bout eight minutes into Tying the Knot with an Amagami Sister and I have completely checked out. It's definitely giving a "minimum effort harem comedy" vibe.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not going to get my hopes up. Isolation was a masterclass in horror game design. The dev team had a rock solid story concept and a finely honed understanding of how to create and manage tension. It was polished so close to perfection that I honestly don't think there's anything the dev team could add to the formula they created that wouldn't simply detract from the horror. I'll be thrilled if I'm wrong, but I doubt lightning is going to strike twice.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Started The Stories of Girls Who Couldn't Be Magicians today. The visual aesthetic of the series is very bright, but not offensively so and the art style is quite pleasant. Many of the backgrounds and objects in scenes are colored and textured like they were done with colored pencils rather than inks, which lends the whole thing an oddly pleasant storybook aesthetic. It's the story of a girl who, after meeting a mage one night when she was young, decided to study her entire life to become a mage herself and then failed to gain admittence into the magic program at the school she applied to. It's a little bit shoujo, a little bit slice of life... but weirdly charming for what it is. The only thing that bothers me is I'm not sure anyone in this series except the one mage girl at the start knows how hats work. (The uniform includes something styled like gakusei-bou, but only the girls seem to wear them and they're worn off to one side at like a 45 degree angle and with the brim pointed down... which just looks weird.)
  24. Seto Kaiba
    I'm glad to hear that they didn't attempt to modernize Ranma 1/2... some titles really need to be in their native timeframe to work as well as they do. Started the second season of As a Reincarnated Aristocrat today, and it picked up exactly where the previous season left off. It jumps right back into the civil war plot that started at the end of last season, with a war council of the region's nobles debating what to do about the opposing faction in the succession crisis kicked off by the assassination of the provincial governor. The art quality is just as good as last season's, and the writing continues to evade virtually all of the isekai genre's usual blatant wish fulfillment pitfalls. No superpowered protagonist, no harem nonsense. True to its title, Ars is making his way in the world as a capable of but average leader by finding talented subordinates using his appraisal skill and then trusting in the skills and expertise he hired them for. In a way, it's quite a refreshing change from the genre's staples. It's standing on the strength of the character writing. Gave Mecha-ude a whirl, and... well... it's pretty much a shounen anime form letter. If I had to use one word to describe it, it would be "nondescript". The story is just another one of those "generic Japanese youth finds a clingy macguffin and then has to join up with other users of clingy macguffins against the evil organization that wants the clingy macguffins for themselves". The art style is "every shounen anime of the last 10 years that isn't Jujutsu Kaisen, Bleach, or One Piece". The way the titular robot arms are integrated into people's clothes makes it feel like it wants to be family friendly Kill la Kill but has none of the personality.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Well, the new simulcast season has officially started. So far, I've got seven titles bookmarked. The second season of As a Reincarnated Aristocrat, I'll Use My Appraisal Skill to Rise in the World is probably the one I have the highest hopes for. I've also decided to give Let This Grieving Soul Retire, Mecha-Ude, 365 Days to the Wedding, Goodbye Dragon Life, Re:Zero S3, and I'll Become a Villainess Who Goes Down in History a try. Have you ever had one of those moments where you judge a book by its cover and then read it only to discover you were absolutely correct? That's what I'm having at about 4:16 into I'll Become a Villainess Who Goes Down in History's first episode. Isekai titles already suffer from a punishing lack of variety, and the otome game-based ones doubly so due to a lack of diversity in storytelling. This is definitely more towards the shovelware end of the isekai quality spectrum and it makes little secret of its copycatting My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!. The closest it seems to want to come to putting its own twist on it is having its protagonist want to become like the villainess in the game (and fail from earnestly trying too hard) instead of trying to avoid it (and succeeding too much). Kind of avoiding starting Re:Zero season three yet... that story has always been a little too dark even for me. I'm glad I'm not a shounen anime fan, because it sounds like those people are PISSED right now. My Hero Academia apparently ended recently with an incredibly unsatisfying end... Now Jujutsu Kaisen is under fire for its own terrible conclusion, which has the mangaka being accused of both stalling and character shilling for the villain... Both titles are being branded as having "The Worst Ending Ever" right now... better hope Eiichiro Oda sticks the landing with the ending of One Piece in the not-too-distant future, or there might be riots.
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