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Seto Kaiba

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Everything posted by Seto Kaiba

  1. Seto Kaiba
    Caught the latest episode last night... another frustrating disappointment from a series that seems to specialize in them. Eight episodes in, and the series really still has not done anything worthwhile with its main characters, its premise, or its setting. GQuuuuuuX's writers seem content to do the bare minimum with the main cast of Machu, Shuji, and Nyan. They seem to be far more interested in Steamed Hams-ing this other, vastly more relevant, interesting, and consequential story going on in parallel with GQuuuuuuX's story. No, we're not allowed to see it for ourselves... but they'll happily take anywhere from two to ten minutes out of every episode to have the Zeon secondary characters tell each other about it for the audience's benefit. A cynical person might get the impression that Machu, Shuji, and Nyan's story is an unnecessary addition because Studio Khara couldn't get Bandai Namco to agree to finance an anime based on a straight Gihren's Greed scenario.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    ... that one took me a second. Nicely done.👍 It definitely could've been worse. He could've been Val Kyrie or some such. I'm definitely curious to get into the part after that, since most of that section introducing Tom Kato is about his US Navy and later UN Forces service, but he mentions a testing accident that occurred during his brief stint working as an engine tester for OTEC where a 150m area of London was apparently compressed into a singularity.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    I haven't done the whole section, but I greatly appreciated the lengths they went to for a single absolutely dreadful dad joke. Y'see... that section is presented as a collection of anecdotes from its in-story author who participated in the VF-X test flights. He takes a moment in that section part, titled "The Right Stuff", to properly introduce himself. He's a Japanese-American from the great state of California, a CalTech graduate with a BS in Aerospace Engineering, a US Navy F-14D Tomcat pilot who served alongside Roy Focker in the Unification Wars, and later a member of the in-story Multiconfiguration Analysis Team under Col. Chiba. His family claims to descend from the legendary 16th century ninja master Kato Danzo AKA "Flying Kato". The name of this amazing Tomcat fighter ace? Tom Kato. UGH. 🤣
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... the obvious counterargument there is Borderlands. That too was an adaptation of a popular video game with a barely-there plot beloved for its visual aesthetic and gameplay in the hands of a respected production company with a somewhat uneven track record and an average (for an action movie) budget of about $113M. It should have been able to break even and turn a profit without breaking a sweat as long as it didn't lose the fans. A couple questionable creative decisions and dubious casting choices later... and the studio found itself $80M in the red as the not-so-proud owner of the third biggest box office bomb of 2024.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Some parts of that story are likely too unremarkable/mundane/boring to bother putting into a series too. For instance, the theft of the shuttle is probably a nonevent. Rebels steal Imperial shuttles so often in Star Wars shows that how easily and how often they're stolen has become a bit of an in-story running joke across multiple series. "How is it the Empire lets us keep stealing these things?" - Kanan Jarrus
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, yeah... I'm one of those people. I think we talked a brief bit about it during SDCon back before the COVID lockdowns. My translation of the Special Edition book is about 80% complete. I'd hoped to be done with it inside of a year, but free time became a rather scarce commodity a few weeks after that first lockdown and hasn't really recovered. 😅
  7. Seto Kaiba
    I've only ever seen copies of Special Edition and Vol.4 in person. I've managed to score a couple copies of Special Edition over the years on YJA and Mandarake and so on. Just a fantastic book, IMO. You can really feel the team's love for the series in the massive attention to detail they put into it.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Adapting a popular property with an extremely vague or borderline non-existent story just means the probability that the film's story will be harshly criticized by the game's fans for "getting it wrong" is almost 100%.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Just cast Jack Black as Let Me Solo Her and make the whole thing a comedy. It'll save a lot of trouble in the long run.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    The Too-Perfect Saint's latest episode is really... eech... let's just say it's stretching the limits of suspension of disbelief enough to resemble a slinky.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    The Gyan hasn't actually changed that much... they've stylized it a bit, but it looks like all they really did was round off the sharp corners on the MS-15B Gyan from [i]Twilight of Zeon[/i], lose the skirt, and sweep back the top of the conical head. It still has a lot of the original Gyan's odder design choics like the flared ankles, the scuba tank-style backpack, etc. It even has a similarly-designed spear and shield. Which is nice, IMO the 15B is probably the best looking version on the Gyan. This looks like it could be out of an episode of [i]Gundam Evolve[/i] instead of the incredibly overdesigned hot nonsense going on with the Gundams and Zakus that just look like someone said "How busy can we make this, visually?". Kind of says a lot that that this is one of the show's best looking designs thus far, and it also seems to be one of the ones their designer screwed with the least.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    I kind of figured the opposite... that they were bothering to show the fight in the trailer, so there was probably a lot more of it since it was being shown as a centerpeice of the next episode. My mistake, I suppose. That's not quite what I'm getting at. There's not really a sense of how much time has passed since the first episode, but Machu and Nyan have spent very little time with Shuji in the series thus far. What little they've had in terms of interactions has mostly been Shuji talking to/about the Red Gundam or watching him graffiti everything that isn't nailed down. It'd be one thing for them to both be so attached to him if the series had actually shown a developing relationship between them, but Machu and Nyan seem to jump straight from being strangers to a dangerous level of obsessed with him. Machu basically goes from treating him like a stranger to suddenly having a massive emotional breakdown over Nyan having seen the "kira kira" because it was just for her and him, to robbing the Pomeranians and threatening to shoot the team's sponsor to protect him... all in what's implied to be maybe a couple of weeks at most. It all seems to revolve around the "kira kira" too, which kind of suggests that this isn't natural... they're being brainwashed somehow.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Caught today's episode of GQuuuuuuX over lunch... it was pretty disappointing. Last episode sold us the idea that there was going to be a big, climactic confrontation between the Twelve Olympians and Pomeranians for first place in Clan Battle and a possible double assassination attempt on Kycilia Zabi. We get none of that. The Gundams don't even fight. The writing in this episode is back to being a hot mess... particularly when it comes to the two main girls weird obsession with Shuji, a personality-less character they've spent almost no onscreen time with. Their sudden devotion to him and willingness to both fight over him and kill for him comes off as downright psychotic. The new designs being introduced are getting progressively less fugly. However, that appears to be a function of Studio Khara's ham-handed designer having to divide their limited time across multiple machines and therefore not having enough time to ruin each classic machine to the same extent as the Gundam and Zaku. The Psycho Gundam Mark II looks fine and almost UC-like until it starts dropping its armor and becomes an off-brand Evangelion in a maroon banana hammock for some reason, but the Gyan and Hambrabi made it past Khara's designer seemingly without more than a very minor aesthetic overhaul.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Must be my apparent youthfulness talking (😅), but I'm not sure "kids" and "young" are words I'd use to describe the Star Wars: the Clone Wars fandom. Unless, of course, it were in a sentence like "they probably have young kids by now". Tales of the Underworld is aimed at people who were tweens and teens when The Clone Wars came out... almost 17 years ago. Musings on whether 30 really is the new 20 aside, the Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld series is very much a Star Wars series by and for the most die-hard of Star Wars fans. It doesn't really have anything for the casual audience because its stories are so heavily dependent on fanservice. Both stories feel like they were written more to pad out the Wiki pages for their respective characters than because there was anything worthwhile to do with the characters. Worse even than the usual Filoni fanservice-first halfassery.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    That "young crowd" is strictly imaginary. This is a spin-off from a 2008 TV series. Anyone familiar with these characters in their original context is likely at least in their mid-20s.🤣
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Watched Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld today. If I had to pick two words to describe it, those words would be "unremarkable" and "unnecessary". It's another Dave Filoni Star Wars animated title marked by all his usual creative excesses and his "fanservice first" writing style. Raspy-voiced Sith assassin Asajj Ventress and walking Western movie reference Cad Bane were clearly chosen becaue they were fan favorite minor characters in The Clone Wars and not because Dave Filoni and Matt Michnovetz had any story about either of them that was worth telling.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Supervisor Meero almost certainly believed the same was true of herself. That she was surely too loyal to the Empire to ever be arrested and sent to a space gulag. I can only imagine the vast numbers of people who might begin dreaming up false charges in order to free themselves from Senator Binks's company.🤣 Most of the Empire's prisons were Republic and/or Separatist prisons first... and probably went right back to being Republic prisons after the war. The only thing more horrible than that hypothesis is the cursed knowledge imparted to me by The Clone Wars... the terrible, forbidden knowledge that...
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe Director Krennic will arrange for Dedra to have an appropriately entertaining bunk mate to help the time pass more easily during her stay on Narkina 5. I can think of a few people in the Star Wars universe who would make ideal companions for her...
  19. Seto Kaiba
    The Gorilla God's Go-To Girl has finally decided to veer into romance... which I guess is a nice change of pace from the main girl bashfully shoving the main guy through the nearest wall with her super-strength every time he gets close.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, the power of dogsh*t-tier writing is a pathway to many plot developments some consider to be unnatural. That said, in Star Wars, I think we've only seen one person actually return from death and that was just recently. Emperor Palpatine and Mother Talzin both tried to avoid dying for real by using the dark side to turn themselves into the undead. Palpatine used the dark side to anchor his mind to his dead-and-rotting corpse like a classic voodoo zombie or a lich. Talzin used the dark side to turn herself into the galaxy's nastiest lingering fart, existing as a vampiric mist made of "magical ichor". Both of them needed to feed on the life energy of other people to regain a functional body and avoid dying for real. Boba Fett just pulls a "reports of my death-by-felching in a giant anus monster in the desert were greatly exaggerated" since he suffers a classic Disney villain "death" offscreen during Return of the Jedi. Dedra Meero... well... her ticket is likely to get punched in a less survivable, more verifiable manner.
  21. Seto Kaiba
  22. Seto Kaiba
    I've Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level season two has lost a lot of the wit and charm that made the first season enjoyable. All I can really say for it now is it's bland and inoffensive white noise. Classic Stars... yeesh. Seven episodes on and still as unintelligible as ever. On a lark I decided to check what its rating was in Crunchyroll's app, and it's barely holding onto a 3... which considering you have to REALLY screw up to get below 4 on Crunchyroll is pretty impressive. Can a Boy-Girl Friendship Survive? remains pretty watchable, if rather formuliac. The Brilliant Healer's New Life in the Shadows has not really improved in any way. It remains, as it has been, one of those isekai-adjacent, low-effort, generic power fantasy titles. In other words, the laziest kind of slop imaginable. For my money, this season's standout is The Apothecary Diaries S2. Just as enjoyable as season one, and with the promise of quite the explosive payoff at the end of a major story arc from the light novel.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Very excited for that. Strange New Worlds might not be the most groundbreaking Star Trek series out there, but it really does a fantastic job of recapturing that lighthearted cameraderie, that feeling of high adventure, and the sense of wonder that was such an integral part of the original Star Trek and its successors in the 80's and 90's. Even my parents, who are OG Trekkies, absolutely love Strange New Worlds. They've been eagerly waiting for news of when the new season would drop ever since I first got them to watch the series.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    I've seen video of him praising Andor's writing, particularly its handling of the Empire, at Star Wars Celebration Europe 2023. He seems to hold it in high regard, though in some other interviews he also seems to want to cling to Star Wars's kid-friendly roots as one might expect from a guy whose entire portfolio is spinoffs of a cartoon. That certainly seems to be the case. If nothing else, he's passionate about the job. That is... yes. That's it exactly.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    As much as I would love that, Tony Gilroy has indicated he's not really interested in a long-term commitment to franchise filmmaking and there is no way Disney is brazen enough to do a partial reboot on Star Wars so soon after rebooting it the first time in order to get rid of the unremarkable and unsatisfying but financially successful sequel trilogy. It sucked before... we're just going to be more aware of how much it sucks now that Star Wars has, by luck or good judgement, produced a series that doesn't. Going back to shows that read like Dave Filoni playing with his Clone Wars and Rebels action figures is going to feel like one giant leap backwards creatively, but it's far too late for them to recalibrate their creative process for Ahsoka season two or Maul: Shadow Lord, both of which are Clone Wars/Rebels spinoffs.
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