aceoftherebellion

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.

This is a dangerous hobby on your wallet. Hope you are prepared to build a small homeless shelter with the boxes you get from Yamato!

...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.'

From the point of view of us gaijin consumers, it's tempting to say yes, but that is an extremely unrealistic and childish position. If one can take a step back, suspend the frustrated fanboy range, and look at it logically from Bandai's point of view, the answer is clearly "why should they?" Don't get me wrong, I'm as dissapointed by the way they've (mis)handled every renewal release, in terms of units produced, since the 25F as just about everyone here, and missed on the RVF-25's miniscule pre-order window... but I realize that we're not the target market (blame HG for that), and having to sleep in order to go to work the next day when these things go up (blame the 12 hour difference -- I'm in the NE-USA) doesn't help either.

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.

That looks amazing. I'm still so blown away by the whole idea of ready-manufactured plastic on these printers. It's like we're living in the future or something!

Really, the less people panic about trying to get ALL OF THE PREORDERS, the easier it will probably actually be to find one anyway. Things work funny like that... Still, good luck everyone! hopefully everyone who wants one here is able to get one!

*yawn* what a pleasant surprise.

Relax guys I just used to cg argument because it sometimes seen as the messiah for all things mecha.

I'm sure if the script requires a gun-pod there will be a gun-pod no matter what.

CG model follows script or something.

Well it's 13:21 in Japan I just wait a few more minutes.

No worries, man! It was just an interesting topic I happened to have some knowledge of, since I've taken some classes in 3D animation and rigging.

As for the preorder window... Honestly at this point it's almost comedy. How does it manage to get worse every time? It must take some serious EFFORT to be that shitty.

That is SO COOL. That lit console screen effect? ALL OF MY DO-WANT. ALL OF IT.

Plus there's the fact that I'm sure in this case it was entirely intentional. The scene required Luca's valkyrie to have a gunpod, so they used a model rigged with a gunpod. Whether his Valkyrie is actually equipped with one or if they just used one for that scene is ultimately irrelevant as far as the animation staff in that case would be concerned. They'd just be doing what the story-board called for.

I mean, it's not like people are going to come in and nitpick every last scene, right?

All jokes aside though, as Chonocidal said, just because they're using 3D models now doesn't mean that they just have one CG model for every mech. They'd be using many, each rigged (set up with joints and vector information) for specific types of scenes. There's no guarantee at all that anything is going to be entirely consistent across all models used for filming. It's a different kind of animation, but it's still prone to just as many accidents and errors as any other type of animation. Let's say, for example, they want 'robot A' to be in gerwalk mode for this specific movement, but they only need to do it once so they don't have a dedicated model for that? No problem, just skin this model of 'robot B' that was rigged to do that so that it looks like 'robot A' and call it a day. That sort of shortcut is extremely common in CG animation. That's not necessarily what they did here, but it's a good example of how you might get things like that.

tl;dr, CG animation isn't a magic wand that makes animation errors and shortcuts go away.

Looking at it again, he also couldn't make up his mind on that illustration. The striping on the nacelles is chocolate, while the engine vector/feet things are slate grey, so it looks like he couldn't make up his mind on what color it was either. Really though, that's just a one-off illustration for those binder inserts, so I wouldn't take it as anything more than that anyway. Especially since, as said, it's hardly his best work.

He has been known to make mistakes, as well. Like the one illustration where he got the markings on Hikaru's VF-1S wrong and had to revise them later...

I remember reading somewhere that Planet Zola was UN colony, or something like that. Also, I think I saw the lineart for the VF-19p in the Master File book that had the UN Spacy logo printed on the right wing.

I'm probably one of the few that loves the VF-19 in all its versions. I totally agree that it's a great mold. My favorite out of all of Yamato's offerings.

My understand is that it wasn't a colony world so much as a recently encountered 'friendly' world that had recently been contacted and brought into the fold as a part of the U.N. government, with their planetary defense force working under the U.N.Spacy. If they weren't a part of the U.N.Spacy, it seems unlikely that they'd have been supplied with a unit as new as the VF-19...

Tenjin's art is amazing but it's not the end-all be-all. He's just another artist offering an interpretation, after all. I'd go off of what I see in animation before I took production or promo-art into consideration personally, especially when building/painting models or toys.

Exactly that. Don't get me wrong, I don't dislike Docker or anything, I thought he was kind of a cool character, but his VF-19 is pretty much dead last on my list of 7 mechs to buy... and I'd only be getting it to set up group-shot photos with Basara and Gamlin valkyries. I mean it's a pretty enough robot... I like the blue and all but eh.

If they did it as another web exclusive like the VF-4, units made to order, they wouldn't even need to worry too much about unsold product. That's the one thing that really makes me hopeful about seeing one someday. Don't let us dream in vain!

Touche, good sir!

On a whim I went over to look at the color lineart on the Macross Mecha Manual, and that uses the same colors in two out of three pictures (...but not gerwalk). I don't recall if that particular set was custom lineart or if it was official, but hey.

It takes effort to put in animation errors when you're working with CG Models, it's true... But where there's a will, there's a way!

Hidden inside of an animation error until it's needed, maybe? All giant robots come with extra storage for plot devices...

That's not really how colors work. He's right, just went to look and it's definitely a chocolate tone. If it were a shift in color hues, the entire fighter would take on a warm-tones look. As in, the entire frame would have to be bathed in warm light for grey to appear as a brown, and in all of the frames we see the VF-4 appear, that's not the case. In fact, the background in those shows is mostly cool tones, a lot of blue and purple. If it was a case of the colors being 'washed out' (I.E., light oversaturation) if anything it would make the real thing MORE brown.

You gotta love color-matching for animated media, huh?

LOL, Looks like opinions on 7 are as Mixed as ever. Personally, I love Basara and am much more interested in his red Fire Valkyrie and the Zola fleet version than I am in either of the Emerald Squadron production versions... But this is what was awesome about Yamato, they made all of them so it's easy to just get the ones you like.

I think it's just a case where any design is going to have fans who love it and anti-fans who just strait up don't like it, so I'd say 'fair enough'.

Sure would love any quality Macross II toy, though. That's another easy case where so many people might think it's just not appealing but I think that's one beautiful spaceplane and robot

As I mentioned in the other thread, so far ALL story missions are 100% voiced. ONLY hunter guild subquests are text-based without voice. There is a LOT of voice in this game. Its almost like a tales game in that respect.

That's fantastic, that makes this game an absolute must buy for me! I was already excited about this, now I'm on edge of my seat. Thanks!