jenius

C'mon, it can't be worse than Star Wars Episode 1 can it? I still love Star Wars. I still watch Episode 1 every now and then (Dude, that Darth Maul duel kicks!). I'm not gonna get too heavy into a few diehards feeling let down. Let's face it, anything we've waited on for 20 years is gonna let us down. Edit - To vs Too, the battle continues.

I did a rant on this not too long ago. Yamato is putting out new product so they're avoiding reissues as to not compete with themselves. Seems like we'll see one of each Zero they plan on making before we see the 0S reissued again. Then again, if the stand alone ghost really can connect to any Zero released to date (which I imagine it can) they might want to put more Zeros on the market to sell more Ghosts.

I think the current snowball of issues is more related to the people who got there's early have now handled there's extensively enough to notice all the little issues combined with people just getting there's and finding issues. There are far more 19s in peoples hands now so there are far more issues to be discussed. It doesn't seem like Yamato made tons of them (they're already sold out at many places) so I can't imagine huge variances between production runs.

I don't own one but I've done lots of research on them and here's how it shakes from what I've read I think the quote above should be tempered by the following comments: 1) The Toynami Voltron DOES look much better than classic renditions. They took a lot of the blockiness away from the lions and gave them their lion shape back. 2) The Toynami Voltron is MUCH more poseable than the old Voltrons. I own the old Voltrons and you can do almost nothing at all with them. Even if the Toynami isn't this uber exciting action figure toy it's still heaps better than the old ones and I remember pics on MW even showing this off. IIRC the durability questions of the Voltron aren't an issue of the Lions individually. Each lion was said to have good heft and feel very sturdy (and can actually be posed on their own well in comparison to the old bricks with legs). What concerned people was the connectors when the Lions went into Robot mode. I guess people were scared because the pieces that actually connect are all plastic. This is where it'd help a lot if I owned one because I think those pieces have to be plastic or else you'd rip the finish off the metal after a few transformations. The big bummer of the Toynami seemed to be that some people felt it looked too thin in Robot mode and that it doesn't have all the cool gadgets of the old big Voltron (trap doors that reveal weapons and such). I loved my big Voltron because of those weapons and the shooting heads when I was child. So now what you gotta understand is that you're going about this all wrong. Don't buy one Voltron or the other... buy them all!

Don't give Yamato so much of a free pass. We know for a fact that Toynami tried to fix the price on their MSRP and don't think just because we love Yamato they aren't engaged in any similar shenanigans. Even if they're not, some retailers would just keep their profit margins the same so if Yamato upped their price 30% then the retailer would still want their additional X% and Yamato could easily figure out what the end price would be for us customers.

Didn't Godzilla actually endorse the Toynami Voltron? If so, I'd say that says a lot.

meh, I still think the 1/60 is equally meh to Toynami's MPCs. The 1/60 looks better in every mode but it's also more prone to falling over, losing limbs, making me bleed, a PITA to transform, funky in GERWALK, the paint chips off and the screw covers are an almost instant loss. I'm actually staring at three 1/60s right now (hell of a Friday night) and let me reiterate, looks-wise they stomp the MPC... but in all respects they are worse as an actual toy. So, I say equally meh. Thank Yamato for the 1/48 though huh!

The problem with the 1/60 with armor though is you can't twist the legs anymore!

It's my understanding that not every Gundam story is very good either. Still, the point was that Gundam is a hugely bank-able franchise (most bank-able anime EVER if I'm not mistaken) so any comparison of it and Robotech is just harsh. Robotech being a loosely knit fabric of three distinct shows adapted into one and never marketed successfully, Gundam being the absolute phenom that has made Bandai oodles and oodles of dollars. Believe me, if you were an exec anywhere and someone said to you "Hey, let's make a new Gundam" the wheels would start spinning in your brain a lot faster than they would for "Hey, let's revive Robotech!" You can't expect Robotech to get nearly the budget of a Gundam project. Even if Bandai TRIED to run Gundam into the ground they would probably fail... Robotech is in a much more precarious position. Honestly, I don't think many of us know how anime financing works. I don't know if CGI is more expensive or cheaper than traditional anime. I do know that HG can't possibly have the funds Bandai does so I know not to expect anything visually in par with something Bandai would make. That said, I think HG should have known that all along and focused in other directions. Keep the story good and only the most shallow of us will still gripe about the animation. Again, I still watch the original Macross from time to time, the animation certainly isn't what keeps bringing me back.

Gundam sells itself... Robotech does not.

Hopefully Yamato waits a long while on the VF-19A so that they can find out a bunch of little tweaks to make people a bit happier with it. I know plenty of folks are stoked with the YF-19 as it is but for those who will be buying both it's nice to know that the second item is an actual improvement and not just a simple re-paint.

The Sentinels would just be an extended transition piece. By starting at the end of the third war you can transition quickly into something entirely new. The Sentinels never would have been anything entirely new. The Sentinels made sense in the time it was being made. It would have sold more existing toys. The time when the Sentinels was necessary has come and gone and Robotech's only hope now is to get to new ground. So, segue with the Shadow Chronicles OVA then get somewhere new with new bad guys and hopefully new Earth mechs and hopefully new heroes (with plenty of cameos from the old favorites).

My, the honeymoon seems to rapidly ending with the YF-19. I'm kind of okay with GERWALK being a bit sloppy... let's face it, the design of the 19's GERWALK is entirely sloppy to begin with. I've also found that sloppiness in GERWALK often leads to better pose-ability in GERWALK (the VF-0S is a nice example of this). Battroid though, that thing being sloppy is just sad. When I first picked up my 1/72 VF-19A out of its box I thought "crap, this piece of junk is broken" because nothing clamped the chest down. To hear it still works this way on the 1/60 makes me sad . So with the breaking parts deal when transforming, is there a part everyone should immediately loosen the screws on to make transformation easier or do you not even see those screws until you've managed to transform it?

I love the "a lot worse" link to Jar Jar!

Didn't Graham say March? Or maybe it was the March issue of some mag...

So I'm handling my 0S and I drop it and catch it and in the process I must have bumped the backpack just a hair up higher than I had felt comfortable doing before and voila! No more sloppy backpack and nothing was broken at all. I'm not recommending others try this though. I'm gonna go ahead and pre-order the standalone ghost but it won't be delivered until the shin comes in also

The subs are understandable and better then some others I've muddled through. The biggest problem is the characters names... they seem to change the names of the characters quite often. I think in one episode the names change half way through. It really seems like they just gave the show to like 5 different people and told them to subtitle their own chunks and didn't do anything to make sure anything would be coherent the whole way through. Even the term for what the two major characters are changes a few times. It sounds worse than it is though, you'll know who the characters are and what makes them special without the words/names always being the same.

Do you own a 0S? 'Cause, I like my 0S and all, but if you're saying a 19 feels more sloppy that gives me more than a little reservation.

Note: Your 1/60 will not have a gunstrap.

ridiculously cheap

There are very few items in the Macross universe that work well in a 1/48 scale. Macross favors very large items (just like the original bad guys themselves) so 1/60 is a much more sensible choice for most future releases. Someone once listed the items that made sense in a 1/48 and I think it was like three fighters long with only the VF-11 making sense at any scale between 1/60 and 1/48. Basically, you go with a 1/48 if you want the ultimate representation of the VF-1. You go with a 1/60 if you want toys to play with in line scale-wise with likely most future Macross toys. The fact so many MWers want a re-issued 1/60 that isn't so lame and that most people who disagree with that thinking only do so out of economical or selfish concerns (and that's not to say I don't entirely empathize with them) ought to tell you the prevailing opinion on the 1/60 VF-1.

LOL Kyp, that almost looks like the type of picture someone takes of their pets.

Mospeada had an OVA too

It's my understanding that you can kinda force the CM figure in but not close it up if you do. I don't own one so I've never tried. I think you'll be alright, there are lots of joints on the Q-Rau that start off super stiff (but can get loose pretty quick). Sounds like it could have just been part of the toy settling a bit. Other than getting loose I haven't heard of many people breaking Q-Raus.

From an RT perspective I hope this is a necessary transition piece. People wanted a series that connected firmly to the original. Shadow Chronicles, if nothing else, does that. That ties things down a bit because you can't have all new mechs, all new spaceships, and all new characters when you're trying to build the gluing piece fans are clamoring for. So, here we have the transition piece that will hopefully need RT to somewhere new where it can develop into something of its own. Maybe SC will start as being some terrible amalgamation and end up being a half decent series. If it ends here it's just gonna be that amalgamation and lead to no where.