Macross Δ (Delta) - Mission 23 - READ 1st POST

[Roy Focker]

After reading that poll and seeing Mikimoto as a character designer on Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress I decided to watch a couple episodes. Already half way through the series. Now that is a good series. There's good animation, great character designs, there's a large cast of strong supporting characters but the main focus is on the leads. Plots introduce in one episode are carried over to the next. There's plenty of action, drama and character development.

It is set on a train making a journey while being chased. Doesn't that sound familiar? It has been done a lot in anime. Macross does it often. That one ship or small fleet alone in space trying to escape restless enemies chasing them. That's where I thought the 2nd half of Delta was headed. They escape fish people planet with fish people refugees. Delta at this point could have featured them being chased by the Knights. Each episode features a different knight as the enemy of the week to be defeated by Delta team. Then towards the end instead of running they decide to turn around take the fight direct to Windermere. I guess that's what they did but instead of providing us more episodes of action and compelling drama. They gave us filler episodes where stuff sort of happened.

That Iron Fortress show appears to be doing everything right.

[David Hingtgen]

Is Kabaneri available on anything like Crunchyroll, or must it be watched through "other" means? (I do love trains, so trains+Mikimoto sounds good to me)

[TehPW]

Yeah, I also wondered about that. Far more efficient to search for people using thermal imaging (IR) technology, rather than search lights .

Living bodies against a snowy background are gonna stand out like a sore thumb!

I guess this actually fits my question: Whom in the audience is Macross Delta aimed at? Otaku? Chicks? Both? I suspect 'chicks' would most like not GAF about things like FLIR or other visual enhancement based systems...

[Big Irv]

Yeahp. So a Japanese anime written for Japanese audiences is doing phenomenally well in Japan.

Proof that Western (read: American) and Japanese audiences have vastly different tastes, expectations, and perhaps most importantly have wildly different requirements to suspend their disbelief. We're bitching about lack of real military tactics, strategy, and ham fisted storytelling that seems to drastically change tone midway through the series. Not to mention lack of Valkyrie action.

They're seemingly more concerned with character, style, music, and willing to either ignore the plot holes or or take them, and the plot items we're not shown, like the shifty NUNS guy vanishing, on faith.

Eastern and Western audiences apparently demand, and can tolerate, vastly different things. No surprise, but it is a surprise that we in the West complain about it so much. Kawamori is aware of us here, he likes and appreciates us, but he doesn't write or create specifically for us. One day perhaps, but Delta isn't it. Never will be.

Agreed. There's definitely a vast difference in taste. I'm giving away my age here, but Macross Delta's mystifying popularity is directly comparable to Ramna 1/2 series of animae. While hugely popular in Japan, it's easy to see why American audiences, aside from culture hipsters who claimed they got Japanese humor, just didn't like it at all. Even animae comics that followed the same story telling styles (Gold Digger, Ninja High School) tanked when readers felt there wasn't any real coherence to any of it. It really is a culture thing.

Edited September 11, 2016 by Big Irv

[Mr. Birler]

After reading that poll and seeing Mikimoto as a character designer on Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress I decided to watch a couple episodes. Already half way through the series. Now that is a good series. There's good animation, great character designs, there's a large cast of strong supporting characters but the main focus is on the leads. Plots introduce in one episode are carried over to the next. There's plenty of action, drama and character development.

It is set on a train making a journey while being chased. Doesn't that sound familiar? It has been done a lot in anime. Macross does it often. That one ship or small fleet alone in space trying to escape restless enemies chasing them. That's where I thought the 2nd half of Delta was headed. They escape fish people planet with fish people refugees. Delta at this point could have featured them being chased by the Knights. Each episode features a different knight as the enemy of the week to be defeated by Delta team. Then towards the end instead of running they decide to turn around take the fight direct to Windermere. I guess that's what they did but instead of providing us more episodes of action and compelling drama. They gave us filler episodes where stuff sort of happened.

That Iron Fortress show appears to be doing everything right.

This is very very funny lol . The second half of Kabaneri is really really bad, you will know it soon.

(But since there is Mikimoto's character design which make you feel feel nostalgic, you probably like it anyway! )

When Kabaneri was airing and Delta was at 1st cour, everyone agreed that Delta was far better. Someone even said that Kanaberi was one of the worst anime in that season.

Some good things about Kabaneri are character design and animation.

[Roy Focker]

Mikimoto character designs are good and so are Kawamori's mecha designs.

I sure would like to see more of Kawamori's mecha designs. If only there was an anime series currently airing that features frequent use of Kawamori's mecha designs.

[JB0]

You must not follow Western TV much if you don't think Western audiences do the exact same thing. There are lots of super successful shows over here that are riddled with plotholes. I think it's less about Japanese versus Western and more about specific demographics or groups.

Likely more about "old curmudgeons" versus "kids these days". Most of us are a decade or two older than the typical target audience for entertainment productions on either side of the ocean.

Compounding the problem, I believe most of us are here because we liked the original Macross, which was an unusual production even for the era.

[Heatwave]

Kabaneri wasn't completely bad. If it had just stopped introducing new abilities after the sword-wielding kabane, and just focused on the survival theme, it would have been great. Plus it gave us Yukina's muscles

On topic though, Chaos really needs to stop relying on the main cast to do infiltration. They really suck at it. They should have just tried to squeeze all the Walkure members in their 3 VFs and fought their way to the relic.

[Nazareno2012]

Likely more about "old curmudgeons" versus "kids these days". Most of us are a decade or two older than the typical target audience for entertainment productions on either side of the ocean.

Compounding the problem, I believe most of us are here because we liked the original Macross, which was an unusual production even for the era.

And of course there are people like me, who watch Macross primarily for the mecha.

[Seto Kaiba]

Okay, rewatching this one before I start my slog into 24 and 25...

It STILL bugs me that there's no obvious source for those searchlights on the Sv-262 CG model... I only hope they fix that in the Blu-Ray.

The longer this series drags on, the more I loathe the 2nd OP for the lie that it is. It has much, MUCH more mecha in it than the show itself.

'course there's the problem of Arad saying that Windermere intercepted them with much greater force than expected... apparently forgetting that they were only intercepted by two or three Drakens. These are the worst tacticians in Macross history, bar none.

In a way, I'm kind of bothered by Freyja being a Ranka fan since she's basically just a new version of Ranka that isn't a whiny useless doormat. (Hell, I'd go so far as to say Freyja's wasted on this series, and should have been in Frontier instead... whereas Makina and Reina are clearly just wasted screen time.)

Wow, the railgun holes Bogue gouges in the landscape are bigger than I remember... some of the hits have to be six or seven feet across. O_o

I love how it never occurs to Arad that 2/3 of their team, including the only two members of Walkure who are worth a damn, being captured is a problem or might reflect that their whole infiltration plan was a stupid idea.

I have to admit, the only good part of this episode is the reveal of WHY Bogue is so goddamn butthurt about humanity... he lost family in the destruction of Carlyle. At least one of his sisters.