aceoftherebellion

VF-2SS, Metal Siren, Any one of the various M7 badguy valks, Ghost X9. Then I would be happy forever. That's all I truly need to see.

I've said before that even if they do a v2 YF-19, I probably wouldn't buy it because I'm happy with the YF-19 I already have, and I'm still sticking with that, but I am SO HAPPY to see Arcadia pickup the baton and keep going with it here that I'm going to celebrate this along with everyone else. YEAAAAAAH!! I've been saying all along that all we were doing was circulating baseless rumors anyway and that we needed to wait for more information. I'm just thrilled that this information is something so very sweet.

/Singly manly tear It's beautiful...

Another great episode, guys! I'm very amused to hear that I wasn't the only one really pushing for the Valkyrie II to win in that facebook contest...

This is a day late, but I want to point out that Cybergundam was already called out for just posting rumors and has no more information than anybody else. Don't take his post as anything other than idle speculation.

I don't think we've heard anything from Bandai except for the RVF-25 and the Canon Fodder 171. I'm still waiting to hear about that Vajra toy they promised, too...

We all buy a lot of Bandai toys until we find out more about what's going on with Arcadia, probably...

My best advice is to go googling for some good tutorials on the best way to do this. Clear stickers don't perform as well as waterslide decals, but sealing them under a clear coat should definitely help, especially if you take the time to trim down the sticker's border. Best of luck to you with this!

Yes, actually! Generally speaking a clear-coat will help stickers to stay adhered, and it can even help disguise the edges. That's also why clear coats are virtually required for water-slides, for that matter. If you can apply a proper clear-coat, it will almost certainly help.

The problem I have with the 'yamato is secretly bankrupt' theory is really that there's no evidence of it whatsoever. I can't even dig up information supporting that searching in Japanese. I did see something suggesting that Yamato's site might actually be down as a result of hacking/vandalism, but I can't confirm that and I admit that my language skills aren't really good enough to say for sure that's what I was reading one way or another. I will say that from what I saw, 2chan is about as confused about all of this as we are, though.

Jenius- All of those theories would make 100% perfect sense and be the most likely if this were an american company, but in all the time I've watched Japanese toy companies/Japanese business practices in general, it's very different from what I understand the business climate and culture to be like overseas. Maybe that's a misunderstanding on my part, but shuttering buildings and changing names to dodge creditors does not seem like the sort of business practices I'd expect an overseas firm to employ. If that were the case, it's likely that they would have filed some sort of legal protection/some sort of bankruptcy claim that could be found pretty easily, and that doesn't seem to be the case at any rate. It's still far too early to be jumping to conclusions- any conclusions, including those that might seem like obvious possibilities from a business standpoint. We simply don't have the information available to start making assumptions like that.

I'm going to assume it's when you spend all of your disposable income on variable fighters and spend most of your free time on a macross message board.

Usually battroid, but I'm a bad man that likes to play with and frequently transform my Valkyries, so all three modes tend to see a lot of shelf-time

Looks fishy to me. I last time I saw prices that randomly set was a shady smoke shop...

Yes and please. I cannot stand peel and stick stickers and never use them. A sheet of waterslides would be an absolute godsend as far as I'm concerned. Keep the sticker sheet too for those who prefer it, but a second set of waterslides for each release would be lovely.

WELL PLAYED, SIR. WELL PLAYED. Honestly thought, this really shouldn't be a surprise. I agree that it's sad to lose the Yamato name, but that's just sentimentality. We knew Yamato was turning over to Arcadia. The Yamato site going dead isn't really a reason to panic. Especially given that it's been down for all of what, a day now, for all we know a server blew. That said, this changes absolutely nothing. Why would a company that's already announced that they're turning over to a new title that already has it's own website keep the old one? It's expensive to keep a website running. It probably really doesn't mean anything one way or the other. We're all assuming the worst because of a lack of announcement or press releases, but this isn't a big US based company like Hasbro that makes a new press release every week. It's a smaller company in a different corporate climate. They're not likely to make an announcement at all until they have something to announce, and even then it's likely to show up in a magazine or an event or something before we even hear about it. We really just need to wait and see.

I knew it had to happen sooner or later, but it sure does feel like the end of an era.

Have we had any reports of anybody actually breaking theirs? I haven't heard of it, but that doesn't mean anything...

I haven't heard of anything, but I don't know if that's any different from the usual difficulty people seem to have in getting Yamato to issue replacements parts, since even in the best of circumstances they only ever sent replacement parts to those living in japan anyway. Who knows.

...So that's why they keep insisting on shipping everything in boxes that are two sizes too big! They were just trying to be thoughtful, help a bro out a little...

I think the real trick is doing all of your research, and it seems like you've been doing just that. Most toys have at least one or two known issues, but as long as you know what you're going into from the outset, you can usually avoid them or preemptively fix the problem or something to that degree. I've only recently started buying these myself, but so far so good!

Honestly, we've been enjoying nothing less than a total Macross renaissance the last few years. There has never been this many high quality goods available as quickly as these goods have been available. We can grumble about the quality of some of Bandai's toys and their relative scarcity, but just a few short years ago having this much stuff available? I don't think many of us could have even imagined it. Bandai is even making completely unimportant side-mechs like the VF-171? We might get a toy of a video game exclusive mech soon? It took yamato upwards of a decade to make toys available of some of these mechs. Bandai has made toys of relatively comparable quality available immediately. That's a hell of a turnaround from how things were for this fandom before they went all in on Frontier. It might be annoying that it's hard to get these toys at the prices we want to pay but to say they're mismanaging the brand is pretty short-sighted. I know it's easy to get spoiled but let's look at things a little more objectively here, really.

The way I understand it, Bandai's business model relies exclusively on batch production. They produce so many of product a in their factories, then immediately switch to product b, then product c, etc. They produce all of a given thing that they intend to produce at once, then sell that off, and occasionally produce additional batches as the need arises.That's definitely how they do model kits. I don't know if that's how they do toys, but if I suspect it's probably similar. A made to order approach wouldn't jive too well with that approach to production. I could be wrong about that one, but it makes sense from what I've seen of their production schedules.

Bandai has no real reason to cater to a foreign market they have no licence to where the show they're selling merchandise for has never even legally aired... The 'local market' is their whole market as far as they are legally concerned. At best, we're going to be icing on the cake. The problem here is less Bandai's marketing strategy and more 30 some odd years of what is probably the worst foreign license mismanagement in the entire anime/manga industry. Otherwise known as 'thanks again, Harmony Gold.'

All of this. And there's other aspect to this that I think all of us fanboys like to conveniently ignore, as well. The biggest is simply that those of us who dedicate so much of our lives to following every aspect of this series that we even practically live on a message board for it... will still never make up more than a fairly small percentage of overall fans and customers. That's got some implications. The renewals vs. the originals? So many of us on here love to complain about these things but at the end of the day, I think most of the more casual fans (heh, casual fan buying $150+ toy, I know, but work with me here) really and honestly don't care that much about the differences. Bandai pretty much produced these renewals to answer to a very vocal subset of fans who demanded it, and that was actually kind of awesome of them. I mean, I know a lot of us are mad that they didn't 'give it their all the first time' or whatever, but honestly it's not like they attempted to fail. Their first toy WAS almost certainly their best effort, and it was only after feedback from that that they could perfect their concept to the renewal level. (You know, after the Lucifer AND Durendal helped them work their bugs out.) It's actually kinda awesome that they went back and redid their first one for those of us who really cared, but at the end of the day, in their home market? They're already quadruple dipping for things like the VF-25. (The version 1 had no less than three retail releases that I'm aware of.) Yeah, plenty of us here would buy every single one of those, but there's pretty much NO WAY their entire market would do the same. Producing limited quantities of the renewal pretty much makes PERFECT sense from a business perspective, taking that in mind. I don't think we take into account as much just how much of a poison pill unsold merchandise is to a big company like Bandai who has so many other licences and goods to store at any given time. Stored goods mean lost money. There's overhead on storage and things like that. Unsold merchandise costs actual money, compounded daily. From their perspective, why would they do this any differently? Yeah, they probably could sell more, but the thing is? They WOULD have already done their market research to come up with the optimal production range to sell all product and not have left-over and turn a profit. Whatever number they release of any given thing is exactly what they intend to release of a given thing, and they are always going to have damn good reasons for those decisions. We just kinda need to take off our fanboy hats and step back and look at the bigger picture sometime, I think. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying dissatisfaction isn't justified or anything. We are fanboys, that is what we do... But logically, I understand why it is how it is.