JB0

Oddly, I feel the opposite way. Some subplots in Macross are truncated due to LACK of time.The only episodes I can call out as filler are Global Report and Phantasm. Make no mistake, I really LIKE Phantasm, I just don't see where it actually ADDS anything other than the Magic Bicycle of legend. While I think the post-war arc could be handled better if there was a plan from the start to do it(by the Triforce, the reopening of that love triangle just makes me want to punch Hikaru), I think in many ways that epilogue is what MAKES Macross in my book. I'd be very worried about it being truncated or deleted entirely in an attempt to slash out the excess. How about that one episode that consists almost entirely of Hikaru and Misa trapped in an alley talking to each other. Booooooooooring. Hey, why even introduce Kakizaki? He's going to die without doing anything at all. Total waste of screen time, let's just have Hikaru broke up about the death of some faceless mook that never even showed up on-camera. At BEST we need to kill Kakizaki the same episode he's introduced*. And man, why did it take so long for Hikaru to get over his pacificistic sissy ass, sack up, and start killin' bitches? Put him in a fighter plane from day one! Moral qunadries are for lame girlie crap with sparklie prettyboys! Eventually, you excise all the chaff, the deadwood, the filler, the empty space, and you're left with... a soulless husk of a show that doesn't have time to convince you any of these people are worth caring about, or that they're anything more than cardboard cutouts of the standard cliche characters. At best, the characters all feel forced, because development is rushed to fit into an abbreviated run. By the bullet points, it's just a leaner, sleeker Macross, but somewhere along the line, the soul was chipped away and thrown out too. Just because it doesn't advance the primary narrative doesn't mean it's filler. *That's a personal peeve of mine, shows introducing people, trying to convince the audience they MATTER, and killing them off all in the same half-hour episode.

Did I? Funny coincidence there. On-topic, I really do like the aesthetics of Tron: Legacy. Though I wouldn't be caught dead driving that bike.

Minor quibble. They DID have space carriers to attach to the ship. They're attempting to rendes... rendez... randay... MEET UP WITH and dock with ARMD-1 and ARMD-2 before the fold accident. The Zentradi shift their attack to make it impossible to meet up with them. Then Global attempts to duck into the atmosphere and fold behind the moon to get some breathing room, and everything goes REALLY wrong. Leave the revised mechs to Gundam. Let the VF-0 be our Katoki Version. Just my opinion.

You're a good man. The world needs more like you. Apparently XSeed lost their shirts on Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky. Was expensive to localize, and they didn't move very many copies at all. (Anecdotally, I can still find the collector's edition in large quantities locally, though your mileage may vary). Which is probably why we haven't seen more of the Legend of Heroes games. XSeed is run by fans, crazy fans even(they brought Korg DS-10 over, for pete's sake), but they can't really stay in business by bringing over sequels to games they lost money on. ... Where'd I stick my Bracer emblem? I'm in the mood to wear some nerd bling.

Correction: Kawamori designed one version of Sony's robotic pet Aibo. Not the original or most common ones, either. He designed a limited collector's edition version late in the product line. And wasn't the only person to have such a model.

To be fair, Aquarion is transforming planes. It's just a more Getter Robo style of transforming planes.Vision of Escaflowne had a transforming steampunk dragon, though! WITH A CAPE. Now, what's with the hating on MASK?

He did mecha design for Turn-A Gundam. Specifically, the title mech.Apparently, making a Gundam with a moustache counts as derailing the franchise. As opposed to making a bunch of vapid prettyboys driving super robots and playing war while spouting a bunch of inane, hopelessly naive, pseudo-philosophical drivel, which is A-OK!

Well, go back and say hi to Lucca after you play CT.

Definitely. Xenogears is actually my favorite graphical mode for the era: sprites for characters on top of polygon backgrounds. It really leveraged the strengths of both styles. Very few games did it, though(Star Ocean 2 is the only other one I can think of offhand). But polys for special effects wasn't uncommon in sprite/tile games, and often provided a rather striking effect(see: Symphony of the Night save points). On the other hand... giant robots.And the one thing I'd complain about is that the Super Dimension Gear Yggdrassil IV only shows up for about thirty seconds in the entire game. Chrono Cross is largely unrelated to Chrono Trigger... until you get to the end-game and suddenly it's highly relevant.On the other hand, Cross name-drops several CT characters in an unrelated context for reasons I'm still unclear on, so playing CT can actually ADD as much confusion as it removes(Glenn and Magus are not Glenn and Magus, and probably not even related). Hilariously, the game blocks you from naming Serge after Crono or any convenient variant. It does NOT, however, block you from naming him after people who are actually RELEVANT to the plot. On the THIRD hand... why the crap have you NOT played Trigger yet? It's one of the best JRPGs around, and an audivisual masterpiece on top of it(one of the few games I've just stopped playing to listen to the music for a while). Though on the fourth hand, Chrono Cross is no slouch either, though I'm admittedly one of the few that feels that way. It even knows how to be (relatively) subtle at times, which was never really Square's forte. My single favorite sequence in the game is when the party catches up with Lynx. Without making any overt spoilers here, several visual cues through the map ratchet the tension up progressively higher, and it all culminates with a single line of dialogue that manages to take all that tension and congeal it into a huge ball of certain dread the instant before the crap hits the fan in a highly unexpected way. When the game gets things right, it gets them VERY right. But on the fifth ha- you know what, this analogy stopped working about two paragraphs ago. Both games are great, whether played as standalone or in sequence. Chrono Trigger is BETTER, but I think Cross takes a lot more flak than it should just because it couldn't live up to five years of ever-more-impossible expectations for the sequel to a game as highly-regarded as Chrono Trigger. ... And when you're through with both of them, go play Xenogears, if only so you can say hi to Lucca in the tutorial area in the first town. Lucca is the best, and her absence in the REST of Xenogears is even worse than the travesty of a slideshow known as disk 2.

The fold time differential actually mattered to the captured by the zentradi arc, in the end. Since they were gone for much longer in real time, their return was a much bigger deal. I believe they'd been declared KIA by the time they showed back up. And Hikaru missed Minmay's debut, continuing the long chain of missed chances, bad timing, and misunderstandings that prevented their relationship from really going anywhere. And I'm pretty sure that's why they bothered to explain it at all, though it wasn't be the first time they did something just so they could inject "hard" science-fiction into the series. Not really. Trek retcons are as irrelevant as the original continuity they edit was. They have no real effect, since Trek has no real continuity. When you get a franchise that DOES have a continuity, it matters. And my grumbling about the fold fissures is part that it directly contradicts implications in prior works(that there's a constant difference in the flow of time), and part that it removes something that actually makes a lot of sense(a parallel universe with a different value for c also has a different constant for the base rate of time) and replaces it with something that makes less sense(a parllel universe with a different value for c has the same base rate of time, but you can hit a pothole and lose a week). It's like how Star Trek changed from using lithim, a real material with known properties, to regulate the warp reactor to dilithium, a fake material with no known properties, to increase believability, since they were doing things with lithium that made no sense. Only if they did it in reverse. AFTER the properties they were changing had mattered to the overarcing story that Trek didn't have.

I'd watch it.... Okay, I wouldn't, but I'd laugh my rear off at the art. In fact, I already have.

I explain it with frustration. Fortunately, all but the broadest parts of Plus are irrelevant to the franchise as a whole, so OVA VS movie discussion only shows up in Plus-specific discussions, and everyone is usually reading from the same book. I've ignored most of Frontier, so ... apparently I can. Speaking of Frontier, I could probably rant for weeks about the fold fissures Frontier said were responsible for fold time not being equivalent to real-time. Stupid retcons: No remakes required. *blinks*I hadn't even factored Robotech into the equation yet! That's the biggest source of head-to-the-wall repetitive circular discussions the franchise has right now, and no amount of remakes will change that for some time. I am generally against remakes, though, even ignoring the frustration of bad remakes and good remakes with large changes. I view them, in general, as a waste of perfectly good effort that could be expended on something NEW. There's only a few places where I thought one really needed to be done, and they were because the work had a great premise but fell flat in execution. Macross didn't fall flat in execution, even if parts are, shall we say, less than perfect. I give the newest Star Trek movie most of a pass, because Star Trek's never been much for continuity anyways(exception for late Deep Space 9). It's easy enough to take it as just another episode with some more ridiculously conflicting back story. Vulcan has no moon, Vulcan has two moons, the moon has no Vulcan, and I have no cares.

Possibly even pushed back to the 18-month release of Super Street Fighter VS Tekken Turbo Arcade Edition!

To be fair, when the THX remastered yaddayadda home release came out in the 90s, Lucas said it was the last time the original theatrical cut would be available EVER in any form whatsoever.... GRANTED, he wound up releasing DVDs with Laserdisk rips to spite people, but still! Anyways, even IF a remake could be guaranteed to go right, it still takes away from chances for a NEW Macross production, and adds confusion to the franchise. First and DYRL are arguably ignorable, given DYRL's abridged nature and First's being comics instead of cartoons. A new TV series going back over Space War 1 wouldn't be ignorable in the same way. And as far as not taking the old ones away from us... I've got experience with that on the video game front. I'm still sick of having to explain that I mean NES Ninja Gaiden and not XBox Ninja Gaiden, fine game though it is. The horrid abuses of my beloved SegaCD Lunar games have left a corner of my heart dark, black, and cold and most people only KNOW that franchies from the PS1, GBA, or Althena forbid, PSP version of things. And EA can take Deus Ex Syndicate FPS and shove it up their butts, I was sick of hearing of THAT one before it even came out. It may not take AWAY the old one, but it can take away FROM the old one. I ask: Do you WANT to have to explain which version of Macross you mean when you're talking about the Space War 1 story arc? We've already got three different versions of it to deal with(SDF, DYRL, First)(No, I don't actually know how First goes, I just assume it's not a straight port of SDF or DYRL). And if the new one goes wrong, will you really be able to pretend it never happened with people reminding you of it every time that period in the franchise comes up? Don't beat the dead horse. Do something new instead.

No, he's reserved for Street Fighter VS Tekken Turbo, which comes out 6 months after the original version.

Oh, I misread that TOTALLY. I thought it said A quarter of a century, lining up more or less with the original toy/media franchise. BIT of a difference between 25 years and 75 years.Yeah, I gather WW2 ie exactly WHY they don't want to be associated with war and violence. Especially since they were actually MAKING military hardware in WW2, and it goes without saying which side they were making it FOR. I considered making a similarly snarky comment too, so I dunno WHY I misread it so badly.

I'd rather not see a remake. There's too much temptation to change things while you're in there, either because you're George Lucas and can't leave well enough alone or because it's more marketable some other way.

Well, they never actually LICENSED Bumblebee. He just HAPPENED.Ah, for the days of yore, when everything wasn't trademarked and everyone was just a tad less lawsuit-happy.

Because there's an ever-increasing danger of Optimus Prime "accidentally" running over Micheal Bay. My understanding is VW is very much against having anything to do with Transformers. They don't want to be connected in any way to anything violent or war-like, and Transformers is a violent franchise ABOUT war. The fact that it's a robot space war is irrelevant, apparently.

"Film director Michael Bay together with Paramount Pictures has confirmed ..." Ugh, is Bay involved again? I can't believe I thought he was a good match for the franchise at one point.

"As you play, new attacks and gear will be unlocked for you to enhance your gaming experience." Seriously? They added a levelling mechanic to freaking Lazer Tag? Does this sound even remotely like a bad idea to anyone else? Maybe I'm wrong, but I thought the point was always that the best player won and everyone had a good time, not that everyone was grinding to get better weapons and armor so they could take their friends on.

As so many have said before me... Congratulations!

You know my copy of Mac2 has any scene that doesn't involve Ishtar in her emulator uniform edited out, right? This is not punishment.

I WILL have that Shockwave, even if I have to kill for it.

The BEST Valkyrie, right there.