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Seto Kaiba

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About Seto Kaiba

  • Birthday August 22

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    http://www.Macross2.net/m3/m3.html
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    MacrossMike

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  • Gender
    Male
  • Location
    Lagrange Terrace (a stable community)
  • Interests
    Anime (duh), Antique Firearms, Cryptography, Mechanical Design

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    In fairness, I'd still call Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX substantially more watchable than any of the Rebuild of Evangelion movies. GQuuuuuuX's main problem is that it has a potentially interesting premise that it just fails to deliver on. The series never takes the time to explore and do proper worldbuilding in its Alternate UC setting, several potentially interesting plot threads are teased and never explored or touched on in only the most cursory way, and the main characters aren't engaged in the main story in a meaningful capacity. These problems are all eminently fixable with a capable writer. The Big Reveal at the end of the most recent episode should be a Big Deal if properly foreshadowed... but it wasn't, so it just feels like an Arse Pull. At times, it's hard to believe the series was in development for over five years when the result is this messy and unpolished. Rebuild's main problem, by contrast, is its own pretentiousness. It's tries so hard to pretend that the original was doing something deep and complex and artsy not just parodying the many cliches of 90's mecha anime. They spent the better part of the last episode dumping dustbins worth of exposition on us. There's not much more they can usefully exposit on at this point without distracting from resolving the main plot.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, I've had a similar feeling about the series from a very early point. Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX doesn't bother to develop any of its main characters, it derails the development and motivations of the secondary ones who actually run the story, it drunkenly stumbles through a premise from a previous series and then frantically rushes through a bunch of familiar plot beats to tick off some obligatory appearances on its way to what seems set to be an uncharacteristic-for-the-franchise happy end. When you think about it, all Studio Khara really did here was give Mobile Suit Gundam the Rebuild of Evangelion treatment. The Beginnings movie is basically Rebuild of Gundam 1.0 and 2.0 which recap the original story and its different outcome, and GQuuuuuuX proper is Rebuild of Gundam 3.0 where a radically different outcome is depicted.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Oof... yeah, that sounds even more brutal than what we have to deal with here in the US, shipping-wise.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Mobile Suit Gundam-san Char absolutely would.😆
  5. Seto Kaiba
    The easiest way I've found is just eBay or Yahoo Japan Auctions via a service like Buyee. It can be a pain in the butt, but good quality secondhand copies of a lot of these books are surprisingly cheap... or at least not hideously painful. Then again, after more than 20 years of importing books and magazines and DVDs and Blu-rays and so on from Japan I suspect I have become numb to the insane cost of physical media in Japan. The short story collections are going to be one of the first subjects for my new book scanner, since unlike my absolutely ancient flatbed scanner it has built in OCR so I don't have to do all the transcribing by hand. (The Windows Input Method Editor and I are the most bitter of enemies.) Yeah, Aegis's VF-19A is probably the most iconic machine from the game. Enough so to appear in other games, get plamodels, several toys, etc. VF-X-related baddies seem to really lke the VF-22, possibly as a result. Manfred's signature VF-17 in the game notwithstanding, his cyber-ghost comes at Ozma in a VF-22S and Havamal's commander Ushio Todo also has a personal VF-22.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    This is also acceptable. Bonus points will be awarded if it comes with a campy musical number.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    In all honestly, while I am fully expecting an ending to GQuuuuuuX that lands with all the grace and subtlety of a seagull that got into someone's bottle of Everclear, I will proclaim the whole thing a smashing success if... Or, as a consolation prize...
  8. Seto Kaiba
    So, GQuuuuuuX is 12 and done... can't say I'll miss it. Char and Komori deliver some useful exposition about the true nature of zeknovas... Then we learn Char's real motivation... ... we finally learn the truth about the inscruitable Shuji Ito. Nobody really cares what's going on elsewhere, but... I have to say, I am 100% ready for the throwdown that is about to ensue...
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Kawamori really is an incredible designer. It takes an astonishing amount of talent to come up with a transformation that's not only believable but can be translated to a physical toy or model with a reasonable level of fidelity. All the more impressive is that Kawamori is not alone in that regard when it comes to working on Macross. He has had the assistance of similarly talented designers like cockpit designer Junya Ishigaki (who also designed the Macross Zero destroids) and destroid, battle pod, and spaceship designer Kazutaka Miyatake. The Battle-class is Miyatake's work. There's a lovely section on its progression from the earliest concepts to the final design and transformation in Kazutaka Miyatake Design Works: Macross & Orguss that starts on page 47. He also has some commentary on the thought process behind Battle 13 in the VF-X section starting on page 81. There are a few references, but they're relatively low key compared to what's in the other media because the TV anime is meant to be maximally accessible with the bare minimum amount of continuity baggage. It is mostly on the level of sneaky fanservice there. Like Ernest Johnson and Grammier Neirich Windermere both having participated in the Second Unification Wars, though only Grammier's service is remarked on at any length. Its most profound impacts are in how it shaped the setting itself, which is more in the realm of the creator commentary track than the series proper. It's much more blatant in the novelizations, manga, games, etc. which are marketed more towards fans. The novelizations of Macross Frontier and Macross Delta practically have too many to name, like making Manfred Brando the sponsor of Mao Nome's expedition to Vajra space and the reason Ozma gets tossed out of the NUNS, Aegis Focker being Ozma's mentor and a student of Jeffrey Wilder, Manfred's Sound Jamming System using fold quartz, and an AI copy of Manfred's mind being an antagonist in its own right. Macross the Ride's antagonist faction, Fasces, is a literal Latence splinter fleet still fighting for the same goal. Macross 30 has a couple of 'em. The game's antagonists, Havamal, are a New UN Spacy VF-X Special Forces unit like the Ravens (the 815th Independent Squadron). Leon Sakaki's homeworld Sephira is the site of one of the Ravens missions in Macross VF-X2 as well. Two VF-X2 fighters are also available in game: the initial type VF-22 and the VF-19A Ravens type.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    This is true, but in all frankness I believe you're overthinking things here a bit. Personally, I don't buy the argument that dingy and desaturated means "realistic". I lived through the tyranny of "realistic means it looks like you're viewing it through a used coffee filter" in gaming and other entertainment and I want nothing further to do with it. In practice, it doesn't really matter if you paint your space warship bright and garish colors or flat gunship grey because without an external light source shining brightly on the hull you're only ever going to see it illuminated dimly by reflected light from large nearby objects (e.g. planets, moons) or illuminated only by its own running lights like the Macross at the very start of DYRL?. That's different in atmosphere, but in atmosphere people are going to notice the giant F-off kilometers and a half long super-carrier no matter what color it's painted. If realism were that important, Battle Galaxy wouldn't be painted magenta. Likewise, I don't think there's any concern with the Battle 7 potentially overshadowing other ships when it's on screen. It's going to do that no matter how you paint it, because it's simply the biggest damn thing in frame 99% of the time. It might be an issue if you had multiple Battle-class ships in frame, but only if it's not the "hero" one. I think there's a much simpler explanation that works on both Watsonian and Doylist levels: stylistic preferences change with time. Battle 7's comparatively bright and colorful design is representative of mid-90's anime, but can also be said to be the preference of the 37th Fleet at the time it launched in 2038. The Macross Gigasion was designed decades later in both Doylist and Watsonian terms, so naturally it more closely reflects the tastes of the period to which it belongs. My favorite example of this principle in action is the TNG episode "Relics" and the DS9 episode "Trials and Tribble-ations". They don't retcon the rather dated stylistic choices or bright, garish colors of Star Trek's Original Series from the 60's into something more in line with the more subdued neutral tones of the 90's shows, they simply acknowledge that (both in-universe and out) that was The Style At The Time and that stylistic preferences changed as time passed. Macross Frontier and Macross FB7 both flirt with the idea a bit, but not to the same extent. There is no reason for anyone to do that, though. Satelight's animators working on Macross Frontier and Macross Delta weren't superfans working on a fan film. They were professionals there to do a job. They have no reason at all to care about what was done in prior shows. They have a stack of animation model reference sheets, storyboards, and screenplays that spell out what to draw, how to draw it, and when. All the decisions about how things should look or what things should be in the story happen way before anything gets to them. That's the job of the various designers who work on development of the project. If an older design is being brought back and refreshed, they don't need to go back and look at the old animation because they have the animation model reference to work from. The master key to the art design. They can make any necessary tweaks using that as a starting point without the need to waste tens of hours trawling through old VHS tapes and DVDs. Not wishing to cause offense, but your results are not necessarily indicative of the outcomes that a professional animator would produce. And yes, many transforming designs involve a certain amount of "anime magic". It's just the cost of doing business. As far as I know, sales figures for Macross VF-X2 have not been made public. The game's events have been referenced so often by so many different Macross works from Macross Frontier onward that I can only assume it did pretty well for itself back in 1999 and in that limited 2002 re-release. Enough to justify Macross Frontier and Macross Delta and their spinoff works tying into it as heavily as they have. It's been referenced in anime, other games, light novels, audio dramas, and even model kits. Regardless, I don't think the measure of success of Macross VF-X2 necessarily means anything WRT the Doylist explanation... a simple desire to make the new Battle-class in the new story visually distinct. Macross VF-X2's dev team had a story that called for an "evil" Battle-class, so they took the basic design and made it bulkier, spikier, redesigned the bridge to look more menacing, and gave the whole thing a darker and more ominous-looking paintjob of purples and dark greys. Similarly, when the time came to make Macross Frontier in the mid-2000s, the story called for a "hero" Battle-class and a "villain" Battle-class, so they needed to update the Battle-class design to mesh with the 2000's visual aesthetic and to produce a single base design they could customize to make the heroic Battle Frontier and the villainous Battle Galaxy. Nope... and I am intensely annoyed about it. The obvious Doylist explanation is that it's CG model reuse and they forgot to remove or change the hull number while they were adding bits to it. When it comes to a Watsonian explanation, we're stuck with a lot of assumptions. The obvious answer is that the Battle Astraea is another ship from the same design generation as the Battle Galaxy and/or that it was upgraded with some of the same kind of technology used in Battle Galaxy when Cromwell's crew disappeared with it and had the Epsilon Foundation refit it. Why its hull number is the same as Battle Galaxy's... that's anyone's guess.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    I'd suspect they went with the more subdued palette for the Macross Gigasion because she's supposed to be a newer ship. After all, when they reference older eras in Macross media they often keep the original paint jobs or reference them directly. Such as the bright red VF-1X++ Ranka uses for her performance of "Love is a Dogfight" that hearkens back to Basara's Fire Valkyrie, or the fairly bright blue Max uses for his YF-29. Macross the Ride is practically a master class when it comes to "how bright can we go?". Macross 30, of course, faithfully preserves a lot of the older paintjobs. Even Master File suggests that legacy units like Macross 7's Emerald Force faithfully preserved their brightly colored paintjobs into the 2060s. Bogue's bright red Sv-262 in the second Delta movie is arguably the most recent case. One important thing to remember is that the animators working on a Macross series are not going to go back and analyze old animation in minute detail the way you have. They're not going to bother with it at all, in all likelihood. Even if they did, they would almost certainly not care at all about the kind of minor inconsistencies you've been analyzing because those kinds of minor errors just the cost of doing business to them. Particularly back in the era of 100% hand-drawn animation. Deadlines are tight, budgets are tighter, and "looks good" is often "good enough". What they would do is go straight to the animation model reference sheets - the line art and color keys intended as guidance for the animation staff - and use those to draw/model and color the design. It's unlikely they would bother to consult any other source as those sheets are the primary guidance for animators. The 3D modeled Battle-class ships we see in more recent Macross stories like the Battle Frontier, Battle Galaxy, and Battle Astraea look different from the Battle 7 because they are part of a newer and more advanced generation of Battle-class ships. That idea wasn't dreamed up for Macross Frontier, either. That actually goes back to Macross VF-X2, around nine years before Macross Frontier came out. The Battle-class Macross 13 (Battle 13) that is Latence's final weapon is said to be the first of a new generation of Battle-class ships with more advanced technology than those before it. (This point is important enough that it's actually written directly on the line art itself as well as provided in-story.) The Battle Frontier, Battle Galaxy, and Battle Astraea are even newer models than that, and all three of those have been heavily remodeled to suit the needs of their respective forces as well.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Not sure why y'all seem so certain that Kycilia kneecapping the Principality of Zeon's armed forces isn't 100% her plan. There's no way she did not know exactly what she was doing in destroying Gihren's personal fleet and A Baoa Qu. What her endgame is isn't clear, but it's a very safe bet that her use of the Yomagn'tho to destroy A Baoa Qu is Just As Planned.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    C-3PO always introduces himself with "human-cyborg relations"... Did Anakin use the brain from a mechanical gigolo?
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Should the second Battle 7 ever put in an appearance in a future animated Macross story, I kind of suspect they will reuse the Battle Frontier CG model for it the same way that they reused Battle Galaxy for the Battle Astraea but keep the more vibrant color scheme used in a lot of the line art. It would be nice if they went back and made an accurate-to-the-90's-animation Battle 7 model, but that's probably more effort than they'd be willing to put in for what would surely be a cameo appearance at most. The Macross 7 fleet has put in a minor cameo before, but only in the novelization of Macross Frontier.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Aside from a thoroughly understandable "Gihren can f*** right off", we don't know what Kycilia's actual motivations or desired endgame are yet. She may actually want to undermine Zeon's power.
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