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Seto Kaiba

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  1. 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.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    This is also acceptable. Bonus points will be awarded if it comes with a campy musical number.
  3. 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...
  4. 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...
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    C-3PO always introduces himself with "human-cyborg relations"... Did Anakin use the brain from a mechanical gigolo?
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    They do see a bit of use, but ultimately they're very very limited by the constraints of operating aboard a space warship instead of on the ground like they were intended. Your memory is playing you false there, I'm afraid. In the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series, Hikaru and Minmay are found when an enemy missile with a dud warhead is mishandled and breaks through the deck above into the space they were trapped in. In the movie version, the emergency bulkhead just opens up. It was, yes... but it doesn't seem to have achieved any kind of widespread adoption as it is only used by the Macross Galaxy Corporate Army and only on a trial basis. In multiple versions of the Frontier storyline, the Macross Galaxy fleet has a penchant for keeping older designs (or even competitor designs) in service past their use-by date as a weird sort of flex in favor of their parent company's products. In Macross the Ride they've tried to modernize the Defender and have a local spec of the VF-19C specifically to flex on Shinsei Industry by building a better VF-19. In the Macross Frontier TV novelization, they're using modernized VF-9s and VF-17s in their forces. Both cases, well... a basic beam CIWS system seems to have eaten their lunch thanks to lower cost and no ammo limitation. Same deal as the above, for most ships the same job can be done with a fixed launcher system. We've actually seen two dedicated police mecha in Macross 7. One is an armored car sort of machine that turns into something vaguely akin to a Zaku Tank armed with a bazooka, and the other is a twin ducted fan aircraft with arms and a deployable tricycle undercarriage for a body that can wield a gunpod. Ironically, the reason for their existence is given as the number of surplus Valkyries and Destroids which were making their way into civilian hands. Past 2030, though, giant Zentradi communities are quite rare. They're banned on Earth, and most emigrant fleets don't permit Zentradi to live as giants for resource reasons. The Frontier fleet is quite rare for allowing that. One could call it a very substantial and very blatant display of the fleet's immense wealth. It stopped being a Destroid, though... it became a glass cannon variable bomber due to its structural issues. The Cheyenne II already has a pair of large particle beam cannons slung under its rotary cannons. As of Frontier, they seem to end up in the New UN Spacy Marine Corps which has dedicated Zentradi units and seems to pull a lot of garrison duty to give them the structure they need in life. Eh... I'd call this half right? The Earth UN Government and Earth UN Forces were pursuing development of weapons based on alien overtechnology to construct a planetary defense against a hypothetical alien invasion. We know the requirements involved in development of the Battroid and Destroid were constructed around that premise rather than any possibility of use against other humans. The UN Forces reluctantly pressed developmental and prototype weapons into service towards the end of the Unification Wars as a response to Anti-Unification forces obtaining and employing OTM-based weapons themselves, some of which were developed not just for fighting aliens but also with an eye towards practical use against humans. After all, the UN Forces had a massive advantage in manpower and resources. Most of the Unification Wars was little peacekeeping actions to suppress minor regional disputes along ethnic, sectarian, or regional lines and even when those groups started forming their own Alliance they were massively, massively outgunned most of the time. The general public was already aware that aliens existed even before the Unification Wars started, so no such excuses would have been necessary. The United Nations made the formal announcement that the existence of alien life had been confirmed in June 2000. That announcement was quickly followed by the announcement that the nations of Earth had agreed to band together to form a world government. The Unification Wars started the next month. That the aliens used giant robotic weapons themselves was also not all that secret, since several combat pods were recovered from the wreck and extensively studied to reverse-engineer their technologies. The main point that was secret was that those aliens were expected to be 10m tall. They would probably have learned all they could, then chucked the ship back into space and sent it on a blind fold jump somewhere - anywhere - else in the hopes that the Zentradi would pass them by.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Exactly. If your enemy is in the middle of making a series of unforced errors, by all means let them finish. We know that the Principality of Zeon's economy is swimming in wartime debt to the point that they were laying off career soldiers like Black Tri-Stars and selling off "war surplus" mobile suits to the Sides. Now we've learned that... Kycilia has done a lot of the Federation's work for them. Her hostile stance towards her brother Gihren over suspicions that he assassinated their father kept Zeon's military divided along factional lines and working against itself for five years and helped push the fledgling nation's economy to the brink. Now she has... Kycilia (and Nyan) may have inflicted more damage on Zeon in the space of a single afternoon than the Federation did in the entire One Year War. That's quite the achievement... bettered only by the sheer horror of what the Yomagn'tho is.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    The Federation didn't give up completely, no. They essentially voluntarily withdrew from space to rebuild their forces after successfully ousting Zeon's forces from Earth and then fighting Zeon to a stalemate in space without the technological superiority they had in the prime timeline. They successfully defeated Dozle Zabi at Solomon and tried to wipe out Zeon's headquarters and logistical support center at Granada by dropping Solomon on it, but the zeknova foiled that plan and so they put the war on hold. The Federation Forces withdrew to Earth, and have been focusing on rebuilding. We know from earlier episodes that they've been covertly developing their own newtype corps at the Murasume Lab in Japan and field testing them in Clan Battles via the Twelve Olympians team and a shell company run by the Murasume Lab. They've developed at least one working psycommu weapon (the Psycho Gundam), and they've also created this timeline's version of the Titans seemingly for a future offensive against Zeon. Of course, the Federation may also be taking a "wait and see" approach to Zeon. With the remaining Zabis fighting amongst themselves in the wake of Sovereign Degwin's death and Zeon's economy collapsing under the weight of its war debt, the Federation may have just been biding its time until Zeon implodes on its own.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Even in the original Macross series, the Destroids weren't able to do the jobs they were designed for because they ended up in space aboard the Macross instead of planetside on Earth waiting for an invasion that wasn't coming. Macross Plus, Macross 7, and later titles simply did the logical thing and replaced 'em with more compact and efficient point defense guns and launchers. Destroids may be cheaper than a Valkyrie, but they're also far more limited. They're either groundbound or stuck in specially designed bunkers on the outside of a handful of rare ship classes that actually support them like the Macross Quarter-class or the Macross Elysion-type. With most of Macross Delta's combat taking place either in space away from ships or in the air over population centers and Protoculture ruins, working them into the story would be difficult. And it would take a certain je ne sais quoi out of the story if their antagonists were shot to bits by a ground-based anti-aircraft machinegun during their flashy maneuvers. Yup, that's the one.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    I had no real use for it. The animation is high quality, but the barely-there main story is not helped in the least by making every single character a maximally unlikeable total bastard. It feels impossible to get invested in any of the cast or their fates when everything about who they are and what they do seems calculated to make them as easy to hate as possible. It's all edge and no point, like a pizza cutter.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Thus far, only two attempts to modernize existing Destroid lines have been mentioned across not quite 60 years of in-story time. Only one of which was successful (the Cheyenne II). No mentions of any new model development for the New UN Forces or PMCs in all that time either and we know the military's decommissioning and selling off the First Space War machines to civilian users for conversion into heavy construction equipment. WRT Ceres Base, I'd assume there are old, possibly formerly mothballed, Destroids stationed there because the base is incomplete and it's one of the few spacecraft large enough to have Destroids maneuver inside of it safely. Presumably once the base comes online, they'd replace the Destroids with static point defense guns and missile launchers like all of the other New UN Forces ships and rely on Valkyries for local area defense. Given what we know about tactics in Macross, there's not a lot of value in basing defenses on a planet's surface. The thousands of remaining Zentradi main fleets are the main threat at large in the galaxy. Their usual MO is to blast their way to orbital supremacy and then simply flatten enemy surface targets from orbit like they did to Earth in the First Space War or to Spica III in Variable Fighter Master File. That's why the New UN Spacy's defenses are organized around avoidance first and foremost using active and passive stealth technology, and then around keeping enemy forces away from orbital space with various defensive fleets and orbital defense stations. Destroids on the ground aren't much use against an enemy that's never going to come down there to fight. That's almost certainly why the Al Shahal NUNS is only able to muster token resistance to the Var-affected NUNS Marines on the surface. Their defenses are mainly up in orbit, so what they had on hand while the space defenses were occupied by the Aerial Knights was the Valkyrie units that'd been rotated to surface postings and the handful of air defense destroids that'd probably been configured for remote operation in static emplacements until things went south. Maybe that's why they struggle to hit anything in the episode... hasty switchover from unmanned to manned operation and/or out-of-practice pilots. We see a fair bit of that in Macross 7's 15th episode, "A Girl's Jealousy". In that episode, the citizens of City 7 bring out their privately owned Valkyries and Destroids for a carnival that's a low-key recruitment drive for an ad hoc defense force. There are a number of privately owned VF-1s in the crowd, but also several Destroids that have been disarmed and modified as various kinds of construction equipment. There's a Spartan that has both hands replaced by drills, a Defender with a vertical drilling rig fitted, a Tomahawk with what appears to be a massive pair of dozer blades, a Phalanx with a massive cement mixing drum and trowel, etc. Of course, some of the Destroids ended up being used as literal target practice as seen in Macross Plus.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    As much as I love Gundam, I've found the writing in the last few installments of Gundam to be pretty darn underwhelming. I'm not one of those fans who enjoys those all flash and no substance titles like Thunderbolt or SEED Freedom. I'd rather they take a few years between titles to come up with a really compelling story to tell instead of churning out a new series every year. Telling amazing stories is something they're eminently capable of. They've just been green-lighting a lot of mediocre nonsense lately.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Whether the ISO survived through the surviving engineers who formed all of the post-war companies or simply was reformed after the war ... I'm just going to leave this here because it's true either way. https://xkcd.com/927/ Sincerely, A guy who sits on like five standards committees at the SAE. (AKA "Part of the problem")
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Just the liner notes and series glossary. No hard specs or anything of that nature, just a few sentences of description about how it's a scaled-down work use Destroid that's popular among civilian operators and about basic design features like its roller-equipped feet, extendible arms, and more construction machinery-esque cabin. Official coverage of the "Destroid Works" (or Work) from Macross Frontier describe it as an unarmed version of the military's Cheyenne II. It's the same basic machine, the Works version simply omits the weaponry and weapons-related systems like the large radar in favor of high-precision manipulators, high-viz paint, and warning lights since it's meant to be used as general purpose heavy machinery. Indeed. We can be confident the Cheyenne II and Destroid Works are the same size because we're told they're the same machine plus/minus combat systems, but all we know about the Workroid is that it's "smaller".
  21. Seto Kaiba
    A shame... I know the goal was always to go for 5 seasons, but it's still disappointing to see this one end. If any recent Star Trek series deserved seven seasons it was this one.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    I'd rank it even higher than that, personally... but that's mostly a reflection of my own disinterest in the Jedi as a concept. (I'll always find The Chosen Hero of Destiny far less interesting than The Guy Angry Enough To Do Something About It in the hero department, there's so much more agency in the latter character.) One thing I did not appreciate when I first saw Rogue One, but came to understand after friends coerced me into watching The Clone Wars and Rebels... Not liking Saw Gerrera is 100% the correct and intended reaction.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... whether it is or not is beyond me, and I'm not going to judge you for it regardless. I've personally never cared for The Multiverse as a creative concept. Too often, it's an excuse for lazy storytelling. Creators can use The Multiverse to raise the stakes mindlessly without a care for the consequences and avoid having to properly develop new characters because they can just plug existing characters into these alternate reality stories. I'd agree that GQuuuuuuX has not really made effective use of its Alternate Reality premise. It feels like there wouldn't really be much to prevent this exact plot, minus the Rose of Sharon, from being ported to the main UC timeline as a post-Victory series after renaming some characters.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Not s'much. Destroids were practically abandoned as a concept after the First Space War. The only "new" models we've seen are modernizations and retrofits of pre-war 03 or 04 Series units like the Cheyenne II or Super Defender. The only commonplace one seems to be the Cheyenne II, partially (possibly mainly) via the unarmed Destroid Work model and the scaled-down Workroid. Yeah, it's a smaller derivative of the Destroid Work that's not meant for hazardous conditions. It's said to be quite popular as a piece of heavy industrial/construction machinery, though. Given that Hayate starts the Macross Delta series as a dockworker handling freight at the Shahal City spaceport and he finds Freyja inside a shipping container that had just been offloaded by a ship coming from Windermere IV, that that those containers are meant to be the same containers Hayate is handling day in and day out seems certain.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    I wouldn't call Rogue One a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination. I'd call it probably the single best movie outside of the original trilogy.
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