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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Putting aside the fact that that's not exactly movie-worthy... We're talking about a child who is more than 50 years old and is still essentially a toddler. The kid's unlikely to even hit adolescence in Din Djarin's lifetime. Remember a few posts back when I mentioned how there's really nothing left for Din Djarin and Grogu to do that wouldn't just be starting over? You just provided an example of my point. Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z are effectively separate stories. Kid Goku's adventures come to an end with the defeat of the second Piccolo and running off with Chi-Chi. That's the end of the conflict driving the story. Dragon Ball Z's story picks up five years later with a completely different conflict and a completely different context for basically everything the series had established up to that point. It wasn't a segue, it was a hard stop and a complete change of direction. Season three's ending was the payoff for all the buildup we've had in the three seasons of the TV series. The hero's quest is over. It's either gotta be a whole new quest, with new stakes, or it's gonna be something unnecessary that just feels tacked on... like Solo: a Star Wars Story. That was the problem. The story had what was every definitely an ending - and a happy one at that - and then because they couldn't bring themselves to make a clean break and develop new characters the Original Trilogy's cast had their happy ending invalidated in the name of unnecessary continuations. The franchise ground them down into miserable broken stubs of the characters they once were. Then Disney bought the franchise and threw all of that out... but only so they could speedrun that sh*t themselves and give us a very similar pack of miserable burnouts in the sequel trilogy. Sometimes... the best thing an author can do to their story is end it. Din Djarin's story came to a natural and satisfying end in The Mandalorian season three. There's nothing left in the story that merits a movie to resolve.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Happy to help. It seems likely that person assumed that Bandai had acquired Takatoku because Bandai ended up purchasing a number of Takatoku's molds when Takatoku's assets were divided up and liquidated by the courts to repay its creditors. It's not to say Bandai was uninvolved... their wholly-owned subsidiary Popy was the company who successfully gained exclusive access to Toei's Kamen Rider license, depriving Takatoku of vital revenue in the years before its bankruptcy.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    It's not a question of whether there's "room" for more... but a question of whether it makes sense for there to be more. The Mandalorian is a serialized story, not an episodic one. It's a single story rather than a loose collection of unrelated stories featuring the same characters. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and it flows from beginning to end based on its protagonist's interactions with the plot's central conflict. A story is all about the protagonist having a goal that they have to meet. Just because a character is still alive after their story ended doesn't mean there are more stories about those characters that are worth telling. (That point is something on prominent display in Macross, for example. Rather than drag the same characters back and force them into new stories after their own has reached a satisfying conclusion, it lets them go and moves on to tell new stories with new characters. We've had no shortage of examples lately that show exactly what a bad idea it is to try and force the return of characters whose stories are over... Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Star Trek: Picard, The Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi, etc.) The story of Din Djarin reached what is unmistakably a conclusion at the end of season three. He's always been driven by The Quest, but he's fresh out of those. He completed his quest to capture the child for the bounty, his quest to deliver the child back to its people, his quest to rescue the child from Moff Gideon, his quest to restore his honor after having dishonored himself on his quest to rescue the child, and then his quest to reunite his people and restore his people to their homeworld. What's left?
  4. Seto Kaiba
    It was a modular pallet system. The bays were designed to accept a standardized weapon pallet that could be loaded with different configurations of weaponry like reaction weaponry, long-ranged missiles, medium ranged missiles, or micro-missiles. The YF-21/VF-22's internal bays are the same.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    TBH, a lot of the Reddit post in question feels like wishful thinking rather than anything grounded in fact. #3 in particular feels a bit... overdramatic? Harmony Gold's mismanagement of its own Robotech franchise had little real bearing on Macross until around 2001 when they filed for the trademarks they used to block Macross licensing in the west from 2001-2021. Big West had basically a free hand to distribute Macross sequels outside Japan until that point, but the hairshirt budget and razor thin margins of most western anime distributors at the time meant that certain titles (Macross 7) were too expensive to obtain because of how much the music rights cost for such a heavily music-driven series. Harmony Gold was only really able to interfere with Macross Zero, Macross Frontier, and Macross Delta... but it didn't exactly stop audiences from watching them (fansubs) or buying merchandise direct from Japan. It did lead to Japanese home video releases having official English subs, though, starting from some of the Frontier re-releases. The idea that Macross outpaced Gundam is a bit silly in general terms. Gundam is the 800lb gorilla of the mecha genre and there are few properties out there that could match its brutal assembly line pacing in putting out new series, movies, and OVAs. Lately, they're churning out multiple titles a year. In comparison to Gundam's mass production of media, the Macross franchise is something more... artisinal? It's the product of one weirdo and his mates who put out a new title maybe every five years or so. That new title might just perform well enough to eclipse Gundam in the short term, but only in the short term. It's the difference between a sprinter and a distance runner. (It probably also helps a bit the occasional Macross series is usually a break from the formulaic tedium that Gundam has imposed on the genre as a whole.) WRT Bandai and Takatoku in #5... that's not even accurate. Bandai didn't acquire Takatoku Toys. Due to a combination of circumstances including the loss of licenses from Toei and having sponsored several TV anime properties that didn't do well, Takatoku Toys declared bankrupty in 1984. The company was dissolved during its bankruptcy proceedings and its remaining assets were divided up among its creditors. Their Macross license was profitable, but it wasn't enough to stem the bleeding from the loss of Toei's licenses and the underperformance or outright failure of its Sasuraiger, Dorvack, Orguss, and Galvion lines. At least one of the fabs they outsourced work to did end up being acquired by Bandai after it ended up in rough shape following the loss of Takatoku's contracts, but that's borderline unrelated.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    ... but those are two ways of saying the exact same thing, though. You just said "No, except yes". For a story to work, it has to have events proceeding towards a conclusion. A sense of direction. It may be a figurative, rather than literal, destination but the story has to be going somewhere in order to progress in any way. The Mandalorian's third season ties off almost every plot thread in Din's story. He's been redeemed in the eyes of his people, he's brought the Mandalorians together and back to Mandalore, he's defeated his people's nemesis for the last time. What's left for him to do that isn't just starting over?
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Bartender: Glass of God is developing more or less in the direction I expected it to. It's one of those character dramas where the protagonist is less a character and more a walking plot device that, by some minor act, causes the episode's focus character(s) to have a complex emotional realization or breakthrough. In this case, all he really does is wait for an extremely vague drink order from troubled customer du jour and then serves up a hyperspecific cocktail tailored to their exact situation and then explaining its symbolic link to the situation. I'd hoped for more from this one, but eh...
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Do they even dub songs anymore? I don't really do dubs anymore, but last I recall the practice of re-recording or outright replacing songs was largely abandoned by the mid-1990s because it was expensive and the distributors increasingly felt it was unnecessary for most audiences. The only distributor I recall doing it past that point was 4Kids.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Chronicle Episode sheet for Macross 7 Ep18 "Falling Little Devil" offers the viewpoint that Gamlin took Milia's VF-1J into combat for two main reasons: To protect Mylene, who had led him to the hangar where it was stored because she was intending to do literally that same thing herself and he wasn't about to let her put herself in danger. To soothe his own battered ego, as he was feeling thoroughly depressed and useless after he and Cpt. Kinryu were shot down in the previous episode and his wingman and friend Physica was shot down and killed in the episode before that. It is fun that said Episode sheet has a section devoted to calling Gamlin unlucky and noting that going out to fight in a Valkyrie without a pilot suit was a stupidly risky move and that he could easily have died.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    That is likely the case, yeah. Official publications for Macross Delta spare almost no thought for the VF-171s used by the Brisingr Alliance New UN Forces. The CG model used in the animation is the same one used for the basic (Block II) VF-171 Nightmare Plus that was the New UN Spacy's standard fighter in Macross Frontier, with the only changes being a new texture applied to the model that replaces the original blue colors with khaki and some minor changes to the exterior markings. Bandai's Mecha Colle model kit for the Macross Delta VF-171 identifies it as "general aircraft, frontier space specification" in Japanese and "standard model - rim world model" in English. The Macross Delta VF-171s are definitely not the EX model or a derivative of same as they lack the signature bubble canopy, downward-tilted nose, and EX-Gear of that special model. Based on the reuse of the CG model and its description as a "frontier space specification" of the standard model, it can be reasonably concluded that they're a locally-produced version of the same standard Block II VF-171 that was the main VF of the New UN Forces at the end of the 2050s in Macross Frontier.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Honestly, it's incredibly weird that the VF-1 is still being used as a training aircraft in the Macross Delta series. By 2067, the VF-1 is a 59-year-old platform and it's three to four generations behind the current model VFs that the military and PMCs are using. That should make it effectively useless as a training aircraft for combat pilots because its performance and technology are so far behind what the aircraft they would be flying in combat have. Xaos may have been using them for Hayate's training specifically because he was an unqualified pilot with minimal experience and crashing one of those is a heck of a lot cheaper than if he crashed a VF-31. It's probably not standard practice to use those for training. In 2059, the VF-1 is used as a training aircraft... but only in civilian flight schools like the Macross Frontier fleet's Mihoshi Academy where students are getting their basic pilot's licenses. SMS trains pilots directly on the aircraft they're going to be flying, and the New UN Spacy probably does the same assuming there are training versions of the VF-171. When we see Gamlin training in Macross 7 PLUS, The aircraft he's shown training on is a VF-11C Super Thunderbolt... the aircraft that was the standard military fighter used in the 37th fleet. Then once he joined the special forces, he moved to a VF-17D Nightmare. Odds are he never touched a VF-1 prior to borrowing Milia's.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    I'd say The Mandalorian season three already did a pretty decent job of laying the groundwork there. They already had two or three episodes in there devoted to showing just how incredibly dysfunctional and doomed the New Republic already was just a few years after Return of the Jedi. They don't need to hammer that one home any further. It feels to me like they were already reaching pretty hard bringing Gideon back for a third go.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    I know I'm terribly late to the party as I'm just finishing up season three... but really, what's left to tell story-wise for the movie?
  14. Seto Kaiba
    True... though, if anything, that's a Reality Ensues moment. Gamlin was trained on the VF-11C Thunderbolt and VF-17D/S Nightmare. Both of those VFs are at least two generations newer than the VF-1 Valkyrie and have considerably higher performance. He hopped into a VF he'd never trained on, and discovered it had about 1/5th of the performance he was used to. Like someone whose daily driver is a Dodge Charger SRT Hellcat who finds himself driving a Toyota Prius while on holiday. You KNOW she's never gonna let that go. If Gamlin and Mylene ended up married, you KNOW she'd blackmail Gamlin with that every chance she gets.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    The Banished Former Hero is, I think, the first title in my Spring 2024 simulcast lineup of 18 shows and counting that I'm ready to say isn't worth watching. It is, as I feared, pretty much a form letter "the overpowered protagonist is overly overpowered" type series that really doesn't seem interested in doing anything to develop its cast of characters or trying to take the formula in any new or different directions. A good 1/3 or so of the last episode is watching someone watch a blacksmith repeat the same dozen or so frames of animation as they beat on a sword on an anvil. They couldn't even be bothered to animate the sword being worked on, so said character is beating on what looks to be a completely finished sword that's only hot in one small spot. I started I Was Reincarnated as the 7th Prince so I Can Take My Time Perfecting My Magical Ability and... well... it's basically more of same. Apart from the first 90 seconds or so where the protagonist is revealed to be a commoner who was executed for some nonspecific crime, it's basically been a one-joke series where everyone overreacts to how overpowered the reincarnated-as-a-kid protagonist is. I'll stick with it a bit to see if it develops at all, but right now it's one note. Re:Monster found a way to make its previous dalliance with the... ... worse. The latest episode has a mass suicide in it for seemingly no reason other than so the protagonist can show that he's less evil than the adult hobgoblins by refusing to allow them to abuse a new batch of captives they brought home. Other than that, this episode is basically just more of him hunting monsters and eating them to gain new RPG skills. It's definitely not what I'd call a riveting viewing experience. It's about as entertaining as watching actual riveting, to be honest. I'm starting Vampire Dormitory, which recently joined the simulcast schedule. This one is also unhelpfully starting with an attempted suicide, albeit a mercifully unsuccessful attempt that doesn't result in any physical harm because... Gotta hand it to 'em, they are not messing about when it comes to getting right to the premise. They promised vampires and dormitories, and they've already delivered vampires within the first 90 seconds. I just hope the dormitory doesn't arrive by similar means, or someone's going to find out how the Witch Witch of the East felt after Dorothy's house fell on her. I think the premise might need a bit more thought, as it basically amounts to: I know that's probably not what the author was thinking, but that's what it basically boils down to... and that realization makes the whole bit that follows intensely weird and slightly off-putting. I'm also starting As a Reincarnated Aristocrat, I'll Use My Appraisal Skill to Rise in the World. The title doesn't really leave much to the imagination, about the genre or the premise... but let's cross our fingers and hope for the best. It's a genuine isekai this time. The protagonist is an unremarkable salaryman who died of a heart attack in his apartment's doorway only to discover he'd been reborn in a fantasy world. The premise is pretty much exactly the entire synopsis... with the first episode being just an introduction to his standard JRPG appraisal skill and him using it to help a boy from outside the country land a job as a soldier after detecting his incredible skills. It's actually not bad. Especially once it unexpectedly decided to tackle the subject of racial discrimination.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    We have a bit more than that... we have things like normal operating mass, main engine thrust, number of verniers, and some statements about generator output. But yeah, there's not a ton of fodder for like-for-like comparison.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Macross II: Lovers Again isn't non-canonical, it (and at least its two prequels) are an official "parallel world" (alternate universe) timeline since 1994. That said, the technological development of the Macross II "parallel world" timeline is rather different to what was later defined in Macross Plus and later titles. The pace of new model development is more consistent across the whole timeline, and therefore slower than the early portions of the ongoing Macross timeline. There's also more emphasis on Humanity reverse-engineering and applying lessons learned from the study of Zentran and Meltran overtechnology. The Valkyrie II series VFs - the VF-XX, VF-2, VF-2SS, and VF-2JA - were developed in the Macross II timeline's late 2050s and 2060s based on new overtechnology captured from an unnamed Zentradi Main Fleet that attacked the emigrant ship Million Star and then the Sol system in 2054. All of the Valkyrie II series VFs apply lessons learned from the study of Zentradi battle suits. The refinements adopted into the next-gen VFs included substantial improvements to armor and structural materials, to actuators, and to the thermonuclear reactors and generators that provide thrust and power. These improvements were first tested on the VF-XX Zentradi Valkyrie in 2060. They were then adopted by the VF-2 series that entered production in 2072 and further improvements were made for the VF-2SS in 2082 and the VF-2JA in 2086. The main metric most fans look at for comparing VFs is usually engine power or thrust-to-weight ratio. In those terms, the VF-2SS and VF-2JA are about comparable to the main (ongoing) Macross timeline's 3rd Generation VFs like the VF-11. The VF-2SS is said to have approximately 3x the engine power and generator output of the VF-1, which given the operational mass puts their thrust-to-weight ratio between 6.43 and 8.67, or a bit more than the VF-11 to a bit less than the VF-17D respectively. Mind you, thrust-to-weight ratios approaching 10 are more or less the limit to what a Human pilot can actually take unassisted. Gamlin was shown to struggle a bit to draw out the full potential of his VF-17D/S, which is 9 or 10 depending on model, and the 4th Gen VF-19 and VF-22 are noted to have had very few eligible pilots because they were beyond even 10. The 5th Gen VFs are over 30, which gives them incredible acceleration and maneuverability performance that they can only achieve because they have a means to cheat those excessive g-forces away using inertia capacitors. The two areas where the Macross II VFs are seemingly more advanced than their main timeline counterparts are in the adoption of AI wingmen and railguns. From a late 2030's update to the VF-4, Macross II VFs were using funnels and bits (yes, like Gundam, but computer controlled) as autonomous wingmen to protect and improve the firepower of VFs. The VF-2SS notably deploys with five bit wingmen that provide fire support and defense. They also make extensive use of railguns for gunpods and larger cannons. In the main timeline, railguns are still a relatively new feature for VFs as of the 5th Gen and the ones we've seen aren't true railguns so much as railgun-assisted conventional cannons which employ both a chemical propellant and a linear accelerator.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Since I don't watch dubs, it didn't occur to me until I saw Big s's post... Zethus is probably referring to the way Netflix picked up the Neon Genesis Evangelion license years after it was abandoned following the collapse od ADV Films, and/or the new translation and dub they produced for it that fan consensus seems to hold is vastly inferior to the one done under ADV Films. So I guess the answer in the first part would be yes... it's similar to how Netflix picked up the Evangelion license. In the second part, not so much. It's already been confirmed that Macross II, at the very least, is going to be released with its original English dub in addition to subtitled Japanese, and presumably that'll be what Disney+ uses as well. It wouldn't make sense to do a clean translation of the OVA for the home video release and have the streaming service do a different clean translation at the same time.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    A new season of The Irregular at Magic High School... honestly I recall thinking this one was pretty darn tedious, especially after I learned a huge part of the story was just straight-up missing due to the adaptation removing Tatsuya's internal monologue. Hopefully the new season will be a little more coherent.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Kind of... One of the problems with developing stories that bridge the sagas of Robotech is the difference in capability between eras and forces. It's not just a disparity between the tech levels of the original shows either. Robotech II: the Sentinels was the first title to establish that the Defense Forces after the Macross Saga (the so-called "Army of the Southern Cross") are actually made up of the recruits who failed to meet the minimum standards to join the Expeditionary Forces. That aspect got played up further after the franchise reboot in '01, with the ASC's leadership being depicted as corrupt and occasionally outright treasonous and their equipment was canonically made out to be poorly designed and of inferior quality as a result of being proprietary developments made after the Expeditionary Force monopolized all the best engineers. So they only ever get to show up as a resentful redshirt army (like this comic) or as traumatized veterans of a losing war (like in Prelude). They're pretty much only in this new comic to make Rick et. al. look good by comparison. It'll be interesting to see if the prototype Spartas gets some jobbing in or is actually useful for something. That's plot armor for ya... Vince takes a hit and he's wrapped up like he's halfway through putting on his mummy costume for Halloween, Rick takes a hit and he just has a bandaid on the bridge of his nose like a stereotypical delinquent instead of spending a week picking polycarbonate shrapnel out of his face. (But I can't get past how the two minor characters on the right have the same exact face...)
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Pretty much, yeah. The only way to make those old comics and whatnot fit together was to do some serious mental calesthenics... and what fandom doesn't obsess over the minutae of the series they love? Yeah, it looks like arse... but really, talk about your downgrades. I'm pretty sure what he said to Leonard to get that was "I'm suicidal but I'd like to die in battle. What can you do to help?" That he presents that as an innovation when the Spartas's - and all other Southern Cross Army units - canonical in-universe reputation is closer to The Alleged Car is interesting in its own right. Maybe its reputation hadn't yet begun to precede it, though you'd think having to borrow it from the United Earth Washout Corps might be warning enough. He's mad because his buddy wrecked an expensive prototype of the best fighter humanity EVER had in Robotech and came back with a prototype of the single worst mecha humanity ever developed in Robotech like it was some kind of achievement. It's like he totaled a borrowed Lamborghini Aventador and tried to replace it on short notice with a riced-out Ford Pinto.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Not sure what situation you mean, specifically. I'm referring to the practice that's basically the norm for anime on streaming, broadcast, etc. and used to be the norm for streaming in general. That is to say, that the studio that produced the series and owns the copyright on it will license it to one or more distributors in other regions. Those distributors will localize it (sub or dub it, edit it for broadcast regs, etc.) and then in turn license it to one or more TV networks or streaming services that air the series. The network or streaming service does not own the series, they're just borrowing it from the catalog of works that the distributor has borrowed from the studio in exchange for royalties and a cash downpayment. Disney won't own any Macross series on their service. They're just buying permission to stream it on their service for a specific period of time from the distributors who licensed the shows from Big West back in '21.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... I'd expect that they'll be subs-only when they debut since most of them haven't been dubbed before. Production of any dub(s) would likely fall on the various distributors who licensed the titles for global distribution like Nozomi Entertainment and Animeigo... and they might not even bother given that subs-only is basically the norm for streaming anime these days. If they were going to Sony Crunchyroll, I'd expect a dub to follow eventually months or a couple years after the fact because they do their own via their merger with Funimation. Given how proprietorial many distributors are about their stables of voice actors, I wouldn't even begin to hazard a guess at who'd get cast for who.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Re: Monster... this one, I'm a bit frustrated by right out of the gate. It's isekai, and given its premise my first inclination was to accuse it of being another one of those lazy copycat isekai titles like Skeleton Knight in Another World which "borrowed" its premise from a subplot in an already-established series. Specifically, it's very similar to So I'm a Spider, So What? and particularly Kyouya/Wrath's portion of the story, though it has some shades of Kumoko's early portion too with the whole gaining new powers by eating what he kills. It might actually be the other way around, though. Re:Monster's web novel started serialization four years before So I'm a Spider, So What?'s web novel did. At this early stage, Re:Monster feels very generic as an isekai title. There are some problematic aspects to its plot buried in the little details, but most of it is unremarkable thus far and it all feels like things we've seen before in So I'm a Spider, So What? and That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime. Maybe it'll find its feet and go somewhere interesting, but it doesn't seem like it will from what I can find.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    To be frank, I really don't think so... it's something similar, but not that specifically. It's one reason I wish Robotech would stop doing side story comics like this latest Robotech: Rick Hunter miniseries. Robotech's story is already a very narrowly focused narrative where nothing happening outside of the immediate proximity of the TV series protagonists really matters. Making ever more side stories and interquels with inconsequential stories where the conclusions are either foregone or simply don't matter in the greater scheme of things doesn't do anything to advance the story or grow the setting. The franchise has been in a holding pattern with nothing noteworthy going on for over seventeen years now since Shadow Chronicles flopped. At least let the licensees do something with the setting besides run circles inside the ringfenced plot of a forty year old TV show, y'know? No matter how much the Robotech: Rick Hunter miniseries builds him up, Zeraal really can't be anything more than a speedbump because this is an interquel set between the end of the Macross Saga and the start of the Sentinels arc. He can't seriously hurt or kill the protagonists because they're Saved by Canon due to being main characters in stories set later down the timeline and he can't really do anything significant to the Earth since the timeline has no major conflicts in the period between Khyron's death and the departure of the SDF-3. He can run to the end of his leash and bark, kill some redshirts, and that's about it. He's a toothless foe because the ending is a foregone conclusion. So all the comic really does with the setting is reaffirm that the Southern Cross Army are a redshirt army of xenophobic dirtbags ... and that didn't really need to be reaffirmed IMO.
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