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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Finished Code Geass: Roze of the Recapture tonight... and I gotta say this is one I would NOT recommend. It's a very lazy, very half-arsed sequel to Lelouch of the Rebellion that just kind of mindlessly repeats plot points from the original series. The writing remains pretty bad to the very end, and if anything the fight choreography gets significantly worse towards the end as most fights devolve into high speed circling each other. Its big twist is... ripping off Mobile Suit Gundam F91 and Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny at the same time... the villain is basically Great Value Rau le Creuset and his master plan is the same on Iron Mask used in F91. When all's said and done, it's as beautifully animated as you'd expect a Bandai Namco Filmworks project to be... it's just boring as hell. None of the characters are developed, the mecha designs are all derivative and generic, the choreography's flat and lifeless, and by the end it just degenerates into a string of cameos by Lelouch of the Rebellion characters who seem to occupy every important position in the world outside of Hokkaido.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    The whole call might not've been scripted, but you still totally got fobbed off with a scripted non-answer. 😉 They just redirected your inquiry to an automated customer support web form that isn't even for that purpose and isn't monitored by an actual person. We already knew from Big West's announcement six months ago that the Macross titles are coming to Disney+ this year. Spamming a subscriber feedback web form with a title they've already licensed and announced release plans for isn't likely to yield any feedback at all never mind change a release date that can only be at most about 3 months out.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... maybe he's that confident (or overconfident) in Gladiator II. Maybe he's trying to pressure the studio into greenlighting Gladiator III based on hype alone before Gladiator II ever hits theaters. Maybe he's just George R.R. Martin-ing so he can secure some appearance fees to talk about what he'd like to do. Maybe he's just feeling insecure because Fede Alvarez stole his thunder and probably his franchise by making a better Alien movie than his last two attempts.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Disney+ has already licensed the shows, announced the impending release, and is in the process of rolling the shows out worldwide. You got a scripted response from a customer support person (or a ChatGPT voicebot) that has no knowledge of, or involvement with, the release process. A scripted response that's almost certainly meant as a non-answer to people asking why shows Disney+ hasn't licensed aren't available on the service.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Feelin' much better today, thanks. 😁 I've heard that you can mitigate migraine symptoms with potassium and salt supplements (or potato chips and bananas), so I've been experimenting with that a bit. Oh yeah, the technology was invented in 1961. It's basically the same principle at work in lasers using crystal gain mediums applied to fiber-optic filaments. By treating an optical-quality crystal like an optical fiber with laser-reactive compounds like neodymium and yttrium ions you can shoot a laser beam from a solid state laser diode down the fiber where it will excite those compounds to the point that they release photons, increasing the intensity of the beam. They use a type of dielectric mirror called a fiber Bragg grating to confine the beam and amplify the output. Essentially, it's a laser system where you can have a focusing/amplification barrel that is many MANY times longer than the actual physical length of the laser device because the optical fiber can be coiled, spooled, etc. to reduce the system's size instead of having to be laid out in a straight line. This also allows the final emitter to move and rotate without having to physically move most of the actual components because the actual gain medium is a flexible cable connected to a laser diode on one end. I did find one more interesting remark about VF-mounted laser weapons in the VF-22 Master File. The VF-22's rear-facing laser is said to be a lower-powered setup (8,000kW instead of the VF-19's 9,500kW) but what they sacrifice in power they make up for in extra range by being variable frequency lasers that can be tuned to compensate for power loss by switching to frequencies that are not absorbed by atmospheric gases and achieve ranges of up to 15km. It also mentions the use of free-electron lasers for the bidirectional laser cannons. Presumably the same tech is used in the VF-17.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    TBH, I don't see a ton of difference on that front... there's more texture to the faces, but the facial animation rigs don't seem to be significantly improved vs. what was used back in MS IGLOO. There's still a lot of lockjaw-style expression and the body movements still look very stiff and unnatural.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    So... I was laid up in bed with a nasty migraine today and ended up going down another overtechnology rabbit hole when left to my own devices. In this case, laser weaponry. Master File initially doesn't have a lot to say about OTM laser weapons, but some of the later volumes like the ones for the VF-19 and VF-25 drop some details about the specific laser technology being used. The VF-0 volume actually has something VERY interesting to say about what they replaced. Official setting materials have said for a long time that the UN Forces originally wanted a conventional cannon for the Variable Fighter's coaxial gunmount, but that they couldn't find a way to make it work with the aggressively limited space inside the monitor turret of the VF-1. As you know, the fictional company Mauler that makes laser and beam weapons in Macross is the setting's version of real world firearms manufacturer Mauser (now a division of Rheinmetall). The VF-0 Master File names a very real Mauser product as the original planned weapon for the VF-0's monitor turret: the Mauser BK-27 revolver cannon. It's said that the VF-0's RoV-15 laser cannon was designed to be as close to the stopping power of the BK-27 it replaced as possible. The lasers that replaced the Mauser/Mauler BK-27 27mm cannon are multi-wavelength fiber lasers that combine up to six separate laser wavelengths into a single beam using a doped fiber optic cable as the gain medium. They apparently lack a final focusing lens or a proper cooling system to allow them to operate with maximum flexibility in space and atmosphere at the expense of range... which at least neatly explains why laser weapons, which should be the most accurate and longest-ranged of all the weapons on offer, are typically only used at short ranges.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Crunchyroll announced their Fall 2024 simulcast lineup: https://www.crunchyroll.com/news/seasonal-lineup/2024/9/18/fall-2024-anime-crunchyroll The highlights thus far announced include: A new Dragon Ball series, Dragon Ball DAIMA. A long-overdue third season of Re:Zero, anime's attempt to weaponize depression. A second season of Shangri-La Frontier 365 Days to the Wedding A second season of As a Reincarnated Aristocrat, I'll Use My Appraisal Skill to Rise in the World A fourth season of Blue Exorcist, continuing the previous season's re-railment back to the manga's plot. A second season of the Ruroni Kenshin reboot Seven titles in the lineup have yet to be announced at this time. The Summer 2024 simulcast season's slowly grinding to a halt... and it's still pretty darn unremarkable. Caught the final episode of Pseudo Harem today, and it remained as cute-but-insubstantial as ever right to the end. Failure Frame's penultimate episode kind of lost me again. It's a pretty standard isekai overpowered protagonist shenanigans with stakes so low an ant could use them as a limbo bar. Very excited for the Overlord movie that just came out... Overlord: the Sacred Kingdom. It fills in the two-volume gap in the anime's fourth season between the trip to dwarf country and the destruction of Re-Estize. The trailers looked pretty promising, quality-wise. Lately, I'm kind of wishing for a fourth season of Ascendance of a Bookworm. The English translation of the light novel's 33rd and final volume dropped a week or so ago, and I've started reading it over from the beginning. I definitely wish the anime extended past the end of volume five where things REALLY get nuts.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    It's a six episode series, so it's borderline OVA territory. It's a UC story, so it's hardcore playing it safe. UC takes no risks and pushes no envelopes. It's pretty much the fanservice embodiment of mindless self-indulgence. I'm actually kind of disappointed in the action scenes we've seen in the trailer, since they compare unfavorably to the last One Year War CG side story we got. Those Type-61 tanks on the Federation side are practically crawling up to the Zeon front line when in MS IGLOO 2: the Gravity Front we've seen those things are so fast and so nimble they can just about tapdance and have no problems taking out Zaku II's with adequate range. Kind of expecting, having seen that, that there's going to be some hardcore jobbing on both sides to try to build tension because they've already given the game away that it's the Gundam that's going to REALLY mess these Zeeks up.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    It's literally just Samsung's "We have that too" proprietary version of the Google Translate/Google Lens OCR feature, called Samsung Interpreter. It was added to a number of Samsung phone and tablet Android 14 builds a few months back. It shows up in the notification shade as one of the optional quick panel buttons. Quality-wise, it's actually slightly worse than Google Translate and really isn't worth it if you already have the Google Translate app. Both applications still do a pretty terrible job, but they're getting better by degrees.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Of course, one always has to be careful drawing comparisons between different fictional settings because so much is often left deliberately vague and subjective assessments of performance depend heavily on the quality of the enemies in the series and their tech level. Valid comparisons can only really be drawn where there are objective measures of any given design's capabilities... and there are certain settings that are simply SO over-the-top that any comparison becomes a bit silly. I will explain in detail why this is silly in a spoiler tag so nobody has to wade through my ranting if they don't explicitly make a choice to do so. Drawing comparisons between different franchises with vastly different worldviews and concepts of scale is going to yield pretty silly and often one-sided results even when there's objective data for comparison. (Thankfully it's not as bad as, say, trying to compare to Five Star Stories where the tech level is bonkers enough to have semi-perpetual motion generators producing petawatt-levels of power and beam weapons able to destroy planets carried by regular mecha.)
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Kinda... according to Yutaka Izubuchi, who based the ReGZ on Koichi Ohata's earlier designs for a mass produced Zeta Gundam, the ReGZ is a simplified Zeta Gundam with the transformation system cut out, and the ReZEL developed from it is basically the ReGZ plus the Methuss's transformation system. I dunno, I think the Zeta's transformation is pretty good... and it was heavily inspired by Macross's VF-1 Valkyrie. A lot of the other transformations are pretty underwhelming, true. Transformation design is hard, and there aren't many designers who can really do it well like Kawamori. It really is impressive just how influential the VF-1 Valkyrie proved to be. The 10th Anniversary feature in B-Club that talks about all the different mecha anime that credit Macross as an inspiration is basically a who's who of late 80's and early 90's mecha anime.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, yeah... that was a theory about the Battle Astraea that was discussed here and elsewhere when promotional material for the movie gave us our first look the film's mechanical designs. Since it was obvious at a glance that the Battle Astraea was a reuse of the Battle Galaxy CG model from Macross Frontier's TV series with fairly minimal modifications, a bit of pre-release speculation was that the anti-government organization Heimdall might've taken the wreck of the Battle Galaxy and restored it to use as their flagship. When the film came out, that theory was jossed and we learned that Battle Astraea was a completely separate and unrelated ship that Cromwell commanded in the NUNS 7th Fleet before he went rogue to hunt Lady M. He and his crew disappeared with the ship and its disappearance was eventually written off as a fold accident before she reappeared with a bunch of new upgrades as the flagship of the anti-government organization Heimdall. The first VF-1 Valkyries entered military service at the very end of November 2008. They effectively missed the "official" end of the Unification Wars in 2007 and the de facto end of the Unification Wars in 2008. Outside of video games like Macross 30 where much of the franchise's "back catalog" of mecha are up for grabs, I can think of two very specific cases where a VF-1 is said to have encountered a SV-51 in combat: The first is in the sixth and final volume of the incomplete manga Macross the First. The flashback arc of the manga depicts a never-before-mentioned fourth defensive battle of South Ataria Island on Christmas Eve 2008. Anti-Unification Alliance remnants basically carried out a suicide attack on the island as a distraction for an experimental unmanned SV-51 to take out the SDF-1 Macross and the island itself with a thermonuclear reaction bomb. Most of the VFs used in that battle were VF-0's from the Asuka II's sister ship Graf Zeppelin II, but partway through the battle Roy sorties in his newly issued VF-1 to intercept the enemy leader. The second is a passing mention in Variable Fighter Master File: VF-0 Phoenix that completely ignores the above. In the story section SV-51's Final Air Battle starting on page 107, the final paragraphs describe a "distant finale" in the following year where an Alliance pilot named Kilis Dakurd who'd defected to the UN Forces after being defeated in the battle in the main section of the narrative scored the last known confirmed kill of an SV-51 in air combat. He had been assigned to a VF-1 squadron based at Grand Cannon III in Africa and in June 2009 a badly maintained SV-51 attacked his unit and was easily shot down by Dakurd. His after-action report noted that the SV-51 was in no shape to sustain combat and looked like it was looking for a place to die. Dakurd is noted to be one of the few pilots to have scored against both a VF-0 and a SV-51.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    From what I can see in newer sources (e.g. Master Archive), the ~20 trial production Zeta Plus units that were delivered to Karaba make up the majority of the production volume and several of those units were broken up for parts instead of being used due to lack of spares. (Considering how often its many configurations are said to have been unsuitable for mass production for cost reasons, or SO unsuitable for mass production due to cost that they were never actually built... it seems unlikely that it was ever truly a production model until the simplified ReGZ and ReZEL.) I was actually thinking of the simplified GUN-EZ mass production model... I completely forgot the Hexa exists. Earth's substantial military prowess owes a lot to Earth's massive technological and industrial base. Not only is Earth home to the headquarters/head offices of many of the megacorporations on the bleeding edge of military and civilian technological development, it possesses (as far as we know) the single greatest concentration of manufacturing capacity anywhere outside of a Zentradi main fleet. The Sol system is home to more than twenty factory satellites seized from the Zentradi Boddole Zer main fleet in 2010-2011. Even one factory satellite is a gargantuan amount of manufacturing power, and most emigrant planets and fleets don't even have that and make do with Human-built automated or conventional factories. It's how they were able to build these massive emigrant fleets so fast. To date, I believe we've had mention of two independent Battle-class ships used by the Earth and/or central New UN Forces. The Macross 13/Battle 13 that appears in Macross Frontier's novelizations as a not-so-secret defense flagship of the Earth New UN Forces under the command of General Kim Kabirov, and the Battle Astraea that belonged to the NUNS 7th Fleet before its commander (Cromwell) went rogue and disguised the theft of the ship as a fold accident. Battle-class ships are rare, with most fleets having only the one, and independent Battle-class ships seem to be a recent introduction in the 2050s. (Esp. given some accounts like the non-official Spica Shock where the central NUNS had borrowed the newly completed Battle 7 instead.) It'd mean upgrading the VF-11's engines, since the thermonuclear reaction burst turbine's greater output seems to be required to meet the power demand of the barrier. Wouldn't be the first time... after all, the ancient Protoculture's solution to the Zentradi struggling with the Queadluun-series battle suits wasn't to scale down the suit's performance, it was to build a better pilot!
  15. Seto Kaiba
    In a way, it's kind of impressive that they've managed to make this more detailed and yet it still doesn't look like much of an improvement over MS Igloo from... 20 actual goddamn years ago. It's literally been 20 years since MS Igloo.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    "Varying levels of success" in that case still being single digit numbers of one-off test units that never made it to mass production. I think the single largest lot mentioned was the six Zeta Plus A1s that were delivered to Karaba, and most of those were subsequently converted into one-offs. The only one to actually reach true mass production was, IIRC, the ReZEL... which is not even really a Zeta Gundam derivative. It's a tarted up ReGZ, which was another overpriced flop that saw only a tiny number of demonstrators produced despite basically being the GM version of the Zeta 1. (I think the only UC title where Gundams are truly mass-produced as a main MS is Victory... and even that is watered down a bit subsequently.) We've nominally had that... in Macross 7, with the 37th fleet VF-11s fighting the Varauta Fz-109s that were basically Gen 3.5 equivalent at the very least. That's one area where the novels, manga, and games excel. Like showing the Macross Galaxy Corporate Army uses a mixture of older models in normal duty including upgraded VF-9s and VF-17s, and even some build-under-license VF-19Cs. On specs, I doubt anything short of an upgraded VF-19 or VF-22 can match a 5th Generation VF in combat because their acceleration performance is so much higher and they're not maneuver-capped by the pilot's g-limits the way their 4th Generation predecessors are. Isamu's VF-19 Custom from Sayonara no Tsubasa is said to have extremely high maneuverability performance, though that owes quite a bit to its unstable flight control program and its frankly insane pilot. We did get to see Alto take on Ozma using a VF-171EX, which is basically a 4.5 Gen vs a 5th Gen... though Ozma's machine was operating with lower than normal mobility thanks to the Armored Pack it had equipped and it still won despite both being extremely talented pilots. I'm not surprised we haven't gotten to see a stock VF-24 directly in the animation. After all, the Central NUNS are basically the Biggest Stick. Exactly what they get up to is never specified, but they apparently don't get involved in tiffs between emigrant governments because their bad behavior in the Second Unification Wars (Macross VF-X2) led to major reforms that put them on a much shorter leash and prevents them from interfering in politically difficult conflicts like that. The few times we've seen representatives of a central New UN Forces unit they've basically been Power Overwhelming. Colonel Todo's VF-X Special Forces unit more or less took over an entire planet with a single squadron and an extremely well-executed Bavarian fire drill. Cromwell went off the radar with a single Battle-class and, after picking up some next-gen unmanned fighters, essentially took over an entire star cluster in just days with a single ship. I'm not sure there is such a thing as a "stock" VF-11MAXL. What little is said about it has indicated that it's not so much a true variant as a catch-all designation for a series of one-off custom machines based on the VF-11B/C and built to order for specific top ace pilots. There are supposedly less than a dozen of them in existence, though it's not clear from the material if that means just in the Macross 7 fleet or in general. Either way, vanishingly tiny production numbers for a machine that's explicitly custom made for each pilot. A lot of Mylene's VF-11MAXL Custom is said to be expensive custom hardware, so I'd assume that was one custom option she requested. Quite a few of the parts are said to have been custom-machined to Mylene's request by the an ultra-high end luxury car company.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    The production 5th Gen VFs are all based on the YF-24 directly or indirectly, with less capable or different local technology substituting for the more advanced Earth tech that the central New UN Forces and New UN Gov't decided not to share in full. On paper, the VF-24's supposed to be the most powerful 5th Gen production VF. Moving the YF-29 and YF-30 to 6th Gen frames a number of statements made about them in a slightly different context, particularly statements about the YF-29 being "developed to surpass the YF-24" and "The Strongest Valkyrie". Pretty much all of their performance improvement vs. the 5th Gen designs is tied up in their use of fold quartz and fold wave resonance effects. It's let those designs leapfrog ahead of production aircraft performance-wise, at the expense of basically being something that can't be mass-produced... yet.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Hopefully Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!! will remain Macross's one and only flirtation with that kind of thing. It's not quite the same as what Bandai Namco's Gundam franchise does with its ongoing and infamous love affair with the Super Prototype trope. In fairness to Gundam, though, that distinction is also a borderline technicality in the case of the YF-29, YF-30, and VF-31AX. The Gundam franchise's Super Prototypes are not really prototypes. In the UC, many are simply overengineered technology demonstrators meant to showcase and evaluate new technologies that might one day make their way into a different and much more economical next-generation Mobile Suit design. Others are simply one-of-a-kind showpieces the creators of which built to be The Biggest Stick with no regard for practicality or mass production whatsoever. The Macross franchise's few borderline Super Prototypes are (mostly) intended as real prototypes and aren't intended to be "Super". The VF-25 and VF-31 are simply a next-gen production model that hasn't yet entered mass production, while the YF-29 and VF-31AX are (on paper) actual prototypes meant to be developed into a next-generation main VF and mass produced. The YF-29 was a prototype that had reached a high level of completion, practically production-representative. The VF-31AX is, at least per Variable Fighter Master File, an early experimental prototype made by converting an existing previous-gen aircraft where the conversion was rushed and incomplete and done under duress. For both, the main thing that prevents them from advancing to production status is a supply chain issue. They can't secure a large or steady supply of the ultra-high purity large fold quartz necessary to construct Fold Wave Systems. They're still basically handled the same in-story, though... so the distinction doesn't matter as much in-story as it does on paper. I'd love to go back to something more like the original series or II where the protagonists and the background characters are all flying the same machine. Standing out by being THAT GOOD is way more impressive when you're not using a massive specs advantage to do it.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Hrm... that is a very well thought-out reason. I'm intrigued, and will reach out to the distributor directly to inquire as to whether any content has been stripped or reduced in quality vs. the Japanese release. I kind of question the math there, though, since it seems to be assuming that the video and audio stream will be continuously at the maximum rate for a Blu-ray (48Mbit/sec). Given that anime is given to a lot of static frames with minimal changes, I kind of doubt that'd be the case... esp. considering live-action 1080p bitrates tend to be closer to 25-30Mbit/sec. That would yield a size that'd fit on one dual-layer Blu-ray (about 36GB).
  20. Seto Kaiba
    OK, I'm curious... why is that an issue/dealbreaker? Macross Zero is only five episodes long, and each episode is only about 30 minutes long. The advertised total runtime is 158 minutes. For perspective, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is 157 minutes. It should fit neatly onto a single dual-layer Blu-ray with plenty of room to spare.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    The Summer '24 simulcast season is in the home stretch... and it's been pretty darn uneventful. The Strongest Magician in the Demon Lord's Army Was a Human ended the other day and in a fashion as unremarkable as everything else about the series. Calling this series "dull as dishwater" might honestly be doing a disservice to dishwater... My Wife Has No Emotion also ended recently... and quite honestly it never once stopped being massively, MASSIVELY cringeworthy in every single respect. It didn't quite cross the line into being so appalling that I dropped it, but there's no entertainment value to be had here. Pseudo Harem had its penultimate episode yesterday, and if I had to describe it I'd say all 11 episodes thus far have been the TV equivalent of eating cotton candy. It's sweet and light, but ultimately insubstantial. It has a lot of cute and funny moments but its story had little-to-no feeling of direction or progression. It's not so much a story as just a string of incidents. Failure Frame has actually developed into a watchable series over the last six episodes. It's nowhere near the high bar set by its genre's major players (Overlord, KonoSuba, Re:Zero, and Yojo Senki) but it's head and shoulders above the low-effort isekai and isekai-adjacent shovelware infesting most of the broadcast schedule. No Longer Allowed in Another World was initially kind of funny and audacious, but it hasn't really gone anywhere interesting with its running joke and the seven "Fallen Angels" (isekai'd folks) who embody the seven deadly sins are pretty flat characters so far. So much so that the protagonist even lampshades how uninteresting Gluttony's one is, being just a bored rich kid looking for stimulation. Ossan Newbie Adventurer's 10th episode has more or less closed the door on the possibility of the season going anywhere interesting, since both of the competitors who'd been built up as Final Boss-type opponents for the season were knocked out of their fighting contest already. It's fun, but it's a pretty mediocre 5.5 or 6/10 sort of story. Wistoria: Wand and Sword is back to just kind of being a trashfire. It's one of the most visually distinctive titles in the season lineup but its story is so painfully by-the-numbers that the audience doesn't feel smart for spotting the thread ahead of time. Dahlia in Bloom: Crafting a Fresh Start with Magical Tools dropped its penultimate episode today. Honestly, I'm inclined to wonder if this is just a REALLY badly done adaptation of the light novel and not simply a bland story. There are times where it starts to remind me a lot of Ascendance of a Bookworm, particularly when the protagonist has to learn about the many euphemisms the nobility use as her business starts catering not to regular civilains but to low ranking nobility. Other times, I just have to wonder if there's actually any conflict in the story at all. Its weakest point might be how indistinct the visual designs are. The sameface is strong with this one. There's one moment in the latest episode where Dahlia's love interest is sitting in a meeting with the other knights and the person sitting to his left is an Identical Stranger with the exact same character design and uniform who can only be told apart because his hair has a slight blue tint.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    One of the details I often find myself nostalgic for from older Macross titles is the "hero" Valkyrie being the same model as the "cannon fodder" Valkyries. Giving the protagonist(s) a unique Valkyrie was central to the premises of Macross Plus and Macross 7, so it was a lot easier to excuse. What Macross Frontier and Macross Delta's writers did was pretty forced. Macross Frontier handled it a bit better, I think, since SMS was explicitly recruiting top talent away from the New UN Forces. Even then, it made them look kind of dickish when they made scornful remarks about the Frontier NUNS being unable to fight the Vajra effectively while the main difference was SMS using trial production next-gen Valkyries designed to fight the Vajra while the NUNS made do with the previous-gen mass production unit. IMO it didn't become intolerable until Macross Delta, where the Xaos PMC division talks all kinds of sh*t about the local New UN Forces despite their most elite unit being four washouts from those very same local New UN Forces and the one real advantage they had being a monopoly on Walkure (to the detriment of everyone and everything else including their own objectives) rather than their next-gen Valkyries. I'd love to see Macross get away from PMCs, and get back to the protagonists using the same models as the rank and file like in the original series and II... it says more about their skill if they're outperforming the background characters in the same model as opposed to one with twice or more the performance. (That said, I do adore the VF-31A's design...) Or the writer just never bothered to consider the size of it and went with "Rule of Cool". EIther way, it was a nice inclusion the same way it was in Macross the Ride. (As a taller chap, I have a lot of sympathy for the Zentradi in terms of the lack of ergonomics in their mecha... I've had to pretzel my 2m tall arse into a Fiat 500e for work before, and it gave me an immense feeling of empathy for those poor Regult pilots.)
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Yes, I made the same point... though, as I noted, that cut-down release without the extra features and "bonus" goods usually comes out a few months to a few years later once the initial release with the extras sells out. I wouldn't say it's driven by FOMO given that the edition isn't that limited, the "bonus" goods are mostly cheap low-effort merchandise like posters or art cards, and the existence of subsequent releases without that extra content are basically a given. It's just an upsell to people who liked the series enough to buy it right away. Or in this case, to fans who have been waiting literal decades to get Macross on home video in the west. It's still within the normal price range for a western release and a 50% discount vs. buying the Japanese edition of the same box set... never mind the shipping cost. They don't suck any worse than any other distributor, so stop whining about it.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Games and novels tend to be much less restrained when it comes to incorporating a large number of different mechanical designs into their stories. IMO, there are few titles that demonstrate that principle quite as effectively as Bandai Namco's adaptation of the Mobile Suit Gundam UC light novel into an OVA. The huge number of niche, background, and MSV designs that narrative included ended up turning the OVA into an obscure gunpla free-for-all. Macross Digital Mission VF-X, Macross VF-X2, Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy, and Macross the Ride all include practically every major model of Variable Fighter that existed in the setting at the time they were created. I guess it's easier to pull off if you don't have to draw them at all or you only have to model it once and can just reskin it thereafter. If we do get an adaptation of the Second Unification War, I imagine it'll probably have a much more limited selection of Variable Fighters in use to spare the sanity of the animation team. IMO, Absolute Live!!!!!! is probably the weakest new Macross title of the last 25 years. It's an unnecessary story that doesn't really add anything to Macross Delta as a whole or to the greater Macross setting. It's pretty telling that the limited coverage the movie got in official publications also treats the film's events as pretty unnecessary and its new VF as cobbled-together trash. The terms of the distribution agreement between Big West and Harmony Gold probably put the kibosh on future Lady M shenanigans, since the movie created the Megaroad-01 connection and using the original cast is apparently off the table. Ah, yeah... I'd expect it's pretty cramped in there for a giant. Then again, Temjin supposedly flew one in the novelization of Macross Frontier... poor bloke's on the big side, so he must've been INCREDIBLY uncomfortable. Either that or he's just used to folding up like a pretzel. Pretty much everything after the Second Unification War is affected by the war... because that's what led to the devolution of more autonomy to individual emigrant governments, the reorganization of the New UN Forces to diminish the immense authority it once wielded (and abused), and of course contributed to the trauma that the game's villain carries which is driving his desire to hit the Reset button on history. The broad authority delegated to the VF-X Special Forces to suppress anti-government forces and terrorists is what lets Colonel Todo and Havamal carry out as much of their plan as they did in secret and leverage local resources to arm the Bandits.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    It's actually more like $80 because of the automatic and optional discounts. Mind you, that $80-90 is actually a pretty typical asking price for a complete season box set of a new anime series nowadays. Western distributors seem to have got the Limited Edition bug, so every new release seems to have to be a Limited Edition set with extra features from the JDM release and art cards and other "bonus" goods and they seem to all average around $75-95. It's not Anime Limited, it's everyone. They're ALL doing it. My Dress-Up Darling is $89.98 plus tax, so's Re:Zero season 2, SPY x FAMILY, Your Name, and Mieruko-chan. Overlord IV's $94.98. Weathering With You is $79.98. Jujutsu Kaisen is $99.99! Oshi No Ko is $129.99! Even if you wait for the cut-down box sets that have none of the extra features, the asking price is still easily $40-50 for newer titles. It feels like Japanese physical media prices have finally started to creep their way into the western market. Ouch. 😵‍💫
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