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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    I was quite surprised to see that there are actually theaters near me carrying it. I'll be buying my tickets tonight.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Finished Sengoku Basara: Judge End. Why does this exist? It's just worse in every way than the previous series. The animation quality's all over the place, the pacing makes it feel like the screenwriter has undiagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and there are so many unnecessary side plots about someone accusing someone of betraying them that it all just sort of drunkenly stumbles to the Battle of Sekigahara and then collapses in a heap without any real resolution. Mieruko-chan is... a thing that exists. It's well animated, but there's no semblance of an actual story here. It's just a girl living in a world that hired Junji Ito as production designer for the afterlife trying to pretend that she can't see the many horrifying ghosts who seem to have no agenda beyond trying to find someone who can see them. It's horror for Miko, the main character, but for the audience it comes off less as horror and more as Dull Surprise as ghost after horrifying ghost rolls up expecting to get some kind of reaction out of the girl with the world's best pokerface only to leave disappointed. My Senpai is Annoying offers some amusing slice of life comedy. It's really well-produced and engaging, if slightly generic feeling. Feels a bit like its trying to veer into romcom territory since the main character (a very short OL named Futaba) comes off as more than a bit tsundere towards her gargantuan senpai Takeda.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Ech... yeah, Skyward Sword suffered the same way a lot of Wii games did. The obligation to work the Wii's motion control gimmick into core gameplay created a lot of obstacles for the game design that the designers clearly struggled with. Having a "support" character even more unnecessary, useless, and obnoxious than Navi DID NOT HELP. Fi is just... why? Who thought that it this version of the Masters Sword should come with a digital assistant who talks like a robot was a good idea? I hated the game with a passion on the Wii. Even with Wii Motion Plus, the Wiimote never seemed to have anything more than scorn for my frantic controller-waggling and treated my movements as more like polite suggestions than directives. It made fighting that one boss - the creepy tongue guy whose name I forget - an exercise in controller-chucking frustration. At least there are better Zelda games on offer for the Switch. IIRC, A Link to the Past is in the SNES emulator they offer. I had a blast replaying that on my 3DS a while back.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    The UUM-7 micro-missile pod contains 15 Bifors HMM-01 micro-missiles racked in three sets of five, with all fifteen facing forward.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Jeez... I try not to think about 24. Bad times. 😅 By that point in my life, I'd finished my undergraduate degrees and was halfway into a Master's. That was the year the evil empire up in Redmond let me and like 1,500 other software engineers go due to the recession and I had to scramble to find another job while looking after my mentally ill grandmother and my engagement broke up. That was also the year I'd filed for my first patent, though I don't think it was granted until early the following year. That was an unpleasant year... and so were the next three. Company loyalty died with the concept of the Defined Benefit Pension. When companies no longer thought it was worth it to buy your loyalty long-term with the promise of a guaranteed retirement with benefits, the general attitude toward employment became a mercenary one where loyalty is rented by the highest bidder for as long as they're willing to pay and no longer.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, yeah... the UUM-7 missile pod is pretty big. The size chart in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Valkyrie Vol.1 makes it out to be approximately 5m long and a bit over a meter in diameter. Two of 'em side by side would be pretty much exactly the size of a large-ish four-door sedan. (The Chrysler 300 is 5.044m x 1.908m.) The missiles themselves are about 40cm in diameter and about 1.25m long, making them around the diameter of a 80L office garbage can but nearly twice as tall.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Watched my way through the available episodes of Banished from the Hero's Party, I Decided to Live a Quiet Life in the Countryside today. Pretty unremarkable stuff... basically the same series as Drugstore in Another World but without (explicitly) being an isekai. Starting Mieruko-chan now... the OP is surprisingly upbeat and cheerful given that the plot is basically about a girl who can see Junji Ito-esque ghosts wandering around in everyday life.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Started The Vampire Dies in No Time a bit ago... it's a mildly entertaining odd couple sort of comedy series about a vampire hunter who is guilt-tripped into letting a pathetically weak vampire whose home he accidentally destroyed live with him. Worth a watch for its unusual premise, though it's pretty conventional odd couple comedy otherwise. The opening is a rather visually appealing swing dance routine featuring the two main characters which actually works quite well with the art style.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Sengoku Basara: the Last Party has the action... but I'll be damned if the plot doesn't feel like a clumsily executed bait-and-switch. It's a 94 minute movie, and it spends the entire first hour building up Mitsunari Ishida as the story's villain. At about the 62 minute mark, they're building up to a big climax with a free for all battle and a final duel between Ishida and Masamune... It's over so fast that nobody in the cast seems to even think it's worth remarking on that a dead man whose skull had long since been repurposed as a sakazuki had popped out of the ground and started shooting people before another dead person wandered in from stage left and dragged them to hell. That everyone immediately goes back to what they were doing before has EXACTLY this energy: There's still like twelve minutes left on the clock when the dust has finished settling! They show snippets of the remaining grudge matches between Tokugawa and Mitsunari, Mori and Chousokabe, and Date and Yukimura... and then cut to a choreographed dance number instead of resolving anything. It's a nice, solid movie for the first sixty or so minutes and then the pacing just goes completely to pot. I can kinda see why Sengoku Basara: Judge End didn't want to build on that ending... it's a mess.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Goin' back to more shows of seasons past since this season's some weak sauce... Currently wrapping up a rewatch of Sengoku Basara with the second season OVA "Dragon and Tiger: Oath of Victory", and it has completely lost its fragile fingertip-only grip on reality. I just watched a scene where Takeda Shingen entered like a goddamn colony drop, bellowed a bunch of stuff about a contest, and then soared back into the sky as if he were Superman. I sympathize completely with Date Masamune's look of abject bewilderment. With only Last Party and Judge End to go, Sengoku Basara is, if anything, even weirder than I remember... though it's a bit disappointing that the series never really gets to explore the rest of the cast.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    If there's more recent news anywhere, it'll be on Tatsunoko's webpage for it... though it's inaccessible outside Japan and apparently to my VPN as well.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    In all honesty, I have no idea (WRT the toyline). The article itself is absolutely about Genesis Breaker, though. My intention was just to answer the "Whatever happened to the Genesis Breaker announcement?" question. The only mentions of Sentinel in the aforementioned article are one in the foreword, which states that [Genesis Breaker] is a "product project" inspired by the success of Sentinel's toy line and a few in the following interview talking about modernizing the designs. It's also referred to as a "spin-off episode" (スピンオフ的エピソード) of the same work (MOSPEADA) in the preceding sentence. There's a lengthy interview with Hideki Kakinuma about the development of the original designs, merchandising, and a bit about refinement of the designs for Genesis Breaker using modern art techniques and technologies, but not much that I can see about the actual status of the project. Nothing that I can see about a release date or media. The rest of the article after that is just a two-pager about the Genesis Breakers setting and story that paints a much darker picture of the setting than the original series did. There's definitely some story here, but all we've seen art/design-wise is the same three pics of Gate/Breaker-1's riding suit and ride armor. Nothing explicit about toys/models or timing for same.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    The last actual news, AFAIK, was a bit over a year ago... back in August 2020 in Entertainment Archive Alpha: Genesis Climber MOSPEADA File. That artbook had a featurette on it reprinting some of the 2007 Hobby Japan issue where Hideki Kakinuma reimagined some of the mecha from MOSPEADA and a two-page article on the setting which goes into more (and darker) detail about MOSPEADA's backstory than the series ever did and offers a (very) brief explanation of the title's significance and a little bit of additional detail. Tatsunoko's website for it may offer more information, but it's region-locked well enough to defeat my normal VPN tool...
  14. Seto Kaiba
    So... I've been doing a little reading and it looks like Hobby Japan are the first to offer some insights into the designs of Absolute Live!!!!!!. Probably the most relevant statement it makes is that the YF-29 is still very much the top dog of VFs, referred to therein as "The Strongest Valkyrie". Not unexpected, but worth at least mentioning given that someone was in here a while back with the unlikely hypothesis that the Kairos Plus was going to supplant it as the most powerful VF. On that note, the VF-31AX Kairos Plus isn't exactly described in glowing terms. It's referred to as a refurbished machine that applies spare parts from Xaos's VF-31 Custom Siegfried to the stock (trial production) VF-31A Kairos. The only improvements mentioned are the obvious ones mentioned previously: that the railgun pods have been exchanged for a larger one with more power, that the beam gunpod has been exchanged for a larger and more powerful one, and that the fold quartz used in its fold wave system and fold amps is larger than in the Siegfried (presumably meaning better output there). I'm guessing it probably has the same FF-3001/FC2 engines the Siegfrieds use, otherwise it'd be a downgrade rather than an upgrade. (Apparently the remodeling of the aircraft made it incompatible with the older model FAST Pack as well.)
  15. Seto Kaiba
    So, the only times we're shown a regular Northampton-class launching fighters are in Macross 7 PLUS's episode "Spiritia Dreaming" as seen below... ... and during Operation Stargazer when the Stargazer launched VFs in reentry pods from its missile launchers like so: Of course, the problem with the first one is that it's really hard to tell where the hell that hatch is, exactly. It's clearly on the underside of the ship, rom the angle, and the panel line running down the middle of the match suggests that this hatch is along the ship's centerline. That, combined with the fact that we can see the nacelles where the frigate's primary weapons are housed, suggests it's on the underside along the centerline of the ship between the sensor dome and the lip of the engine nozzle.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    It's a typo... in Bandai Monthly Making Journal. Both the initial teaser in the November 1991 issue of Animage and subsequent coverage use "VF-XS". The name "VF-XS Valkyrie II" was used for several different designs as development of the series went on, it started out as the name of the proto-VF-2SS and eventually jumped to the design that became the VF-2JA and one or two others before vanishing entirely. Yes, both articles are from relatively early in the OVA's development when the series concept was for a setting 300 years after the First Space War (c.2312) instead of 100 years from the then-present day and 80 years from the end of the First Space War (2092). Beam cannon, but yes.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not. As limited as the VF-4's appearances in official setting Macross works are, the VF-4 is a fan favorite design hailed even in-universe for its beauty. (That was a backhanded way of throwing a Macross II reference into the main timeline, acknowledging that the so well-regarded for its beauty that it's nicknamed the "Siren"... its name in the Macross II timeline.) The VF-4 Master File was, IIRC, also the first one to be teased in another volume of Master File... several years before it actually came out.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Probably, yeah... I just hope we don't have to wait through another few half-arsed books before we get it. The VF-4, VF-22, and VF-31 books were a conga line of disappointment and half-arsery.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    IIRC, Robotech usually only uses the Early Bioroid Type I and II and the Middle Bioroid Type I and II because those are the ones that actually appear in the series proper. Since Robotech fans are slavishly devoted to the "original 85", they tend not to deviate from it. It took a few minutes to remember who that even was...
  20. Seto Kaiba
    There is a yellow Bioroid glimpsed in the opening... but good luck identifying the model. It only appears in a few frames, since it is obscured by the right leg of the Spartas and then an explosion.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Chronicle's Mechanic Sheet for the Glaug (SDFM Zentradi Mechanic Sheet 02A) indicates the legs are still attached. "The booster is installed in such a way that the Glaug's legs are stored inside the booster." It is not a separate mecha, it's just a Glaug with a booster pack bolted to its butt.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    I'm still waiting for a VF-171 Nightmare Plus Master File... they've covered every major model from Shinsei/Stonewell/Bellcom (VF-0, VF-1, VF-4, VF-11, VF-19, VF-25, VF-31) but only one major General Galaxy design (VF-22).
  23. Seto Kaiba
    All in all, that kind of naming can be done relatively easily and made to look consistent... Apart from the Macross, the pre-war UN Forces seemed to favor naming their space carriers after famous naval warships or classes of naval warship (e.g. Invincible, Enterprise) or after heads of state of the Unification Government (Harlan J. Niven, Robert A. Rhysling). The space destroyers seem to be named after significant figures in the development of spaceflight technology (Oberth, Goddard, Tsiolkovsky). After the First Space War, the New UN Forces seem to be quite fond of naming their ships after various prewar municipalities... often either historically significant in their own right or ones where classes of historically significant ship were named for them. The Uraga-class is named for Uraga, a historical port town now a part of Yokosuka in Kanegawa. Some of its sister ships are named for similar municipalities like Aberdeen or Keflavik. The Guantanamo-class is named for the port town of the same name home to the infamous military base in Cuba, and several of its sister ships are also named for harbors like Maizuru, Mamoi, etc. You get a couple odd birds in the mix that are seemingly named for famous people or places where famous battles occurred (or the ships named after them) like Vella Gulf, Vandegrift, or Belleau Wood. The Northampton-class is presumably named for the US Navy's cruiser by the same name, and seems to have kind of an anything goes lack of a naming convention, with references to Bologna (the city), Glendale, Amagi, etc. IMO, the logical port of call for naming something like the stealth cruiser would be other infamous classes of escort. Since the stealth cruiser is a modified Northampton-class frame, it'd make sense to name it after the real world cruiser class that was also a modified Northampton-class... the Portland-class. Or the New Orleans-class, the successor to the Portland-class which brought the second-most-decorated warship in the US Navy in World War II (USS San Francisco). Even Master File mostly sticks to that convention, with the occasional head of state popping up on the Uraga-class (e.g. CV-339 Bruno J. Global) and most being named for places like Altamira (VF-1 Vol.2), Grand Forks (VF-19), etc. Yeah, it's kind of a big gap... though Macross Delta in general is pretty detail-sparse.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Every now and then they decide they really like something from those books and incorporate it into the official setting. The Macross Chronicle sheets for the QF-3000 Ghost, SF-3A Lancer II, and some details for the ARMD-class are taken almost whole cloth from the original Macross tech manual book Sky Angels.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Very little. It also mentions the carriers that make up the arms are Enterprise-class, though that's no more official than anything else in those books. They do self-disclaim as not official setting material, so everything in 'em needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Yeah, that was a fan publication... circle FANKY's Battleships of the Galaxy.
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