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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Hong Kong? What shipping method did you choose?
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Well... this should be interesting. And to think, just the other day I was musing on how Star Trek: Beyond was an even-worse ripoff of the worst TNG movie, Star Trek: Nemesis.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Got my shipping notice from CDJapan late last night... FedEx is projecting delivery for tomorrow.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Got my tickets... I was worried there for a bit that work was going to try and stop me from going this year.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    As long as it's relevant to Southern Cross it should be OK... and the Masters Saga sourcebook most definitely is. A lot of stuff in the game's 2nd Edition got bumps to compensate for stat creep in Palladium Books's "Megaverse" games... the fairness and evenhandedness of which can be politely described as "heavily disputed". Admittedly there was also no small amount of grumbling over how Harmony Gold shot a number of fan theories down, most notably the notions that the TAF's Sylphid fighter was a variable fighter or that it had three distinct variants with different wing designs. (It just suffered from a lot of spotty, off-model animation in the Southern Cross series.) General consensus among the hardcore players was that the bumps the Southern Cross Army mecha got were rather less effective than those received by other mecha, making them less effective overall. Most people basically ignore them... and that includes the creators of Southern Cross. Officially, only one of them has a name and none of them ever received any kind of stats from the Ammonite design team that created them. Almost everything in the book for them is pure fanon. They were allegedly supposed to be more prominent in the show's third cour, but it ended up on the network's chopping block shortly after the end of the first cour so they never got there.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    By letting most if not all of the bad guys get away? The vast majority of the kills our heroes scored were on mind controlled soldiers, many of whom may have been civilian draftees. While there's no denying that there's rather a lot wrong with Windermere IV's Kingdom of the Wind, corruption didn't make the list. Two of the three ultranationalist leaders did die in a fire, and the third got shanked by his own right hand man, but most of them aren't really that bad. Misguided perhaps, and justifiably more than slightly pissed off, but they aren't evil. The New UN Gov't is mostly to blame for the conflicts, given that they seemingly did everything in their mortal power to piss the Windermereans off from diplomatic intransigence all the way up the scale to honest-to-goodness war crimes committed with banned WMDs. Heinz took about half of the ship home with him when his forces retreated from the second battle of Ragna. The bit that had the shrine and was connected to the ruins on Ragna was left behind and had been shot up a bit by Xaos's Macross Elysion, so there's not likely to be much threat from the Sigur Berrentzs anymore. Without that song shrine it's just an advanced battleship. It might not even be able to use some of its systems, since the shrine seemed to be necessary for the fault fold barrier to operate. My guess would be that the New UN Government will take the long view and wait until Windermere is on its knees begging for technological aid, then waltz in and occupy the place. I'd bet the Windermere conflict will be effectively a footnote in the next series, since it took place in a remote and economically unimportant region of the galaxy and it didn't really have any implications outside the Brisingr Alliance.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    The impression I got was more like a case of Grand Theft Plot... Grammier wanted to stop at having "liberated" the Brisingr globular cluster and bringing it under his rule, while Roid wanted to go a lot farther and pursue his instrumentality plot. When Grammier was ready to stop, Roid got stabby so he could manipulate Heinz into pursuing "Your father's real goal, honestly. Take my word for it."
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Like I keep reminding you, neither of those things is strictly true. In Macross Frontier, the main villains are cyborgs whose consciousness inhabits multiple bodies at a time... making it very difficult to assess if one is truly dead. Grace "died" several times during in the TV series but Macross Galaxy itself got away, and several Galaxy executives were killed in the movie but there's no way to know if that was all of them or if it stuck... and Grace survived. (Never mind implications that SMS's owner, Richard Bilra, was in on the conspiracy... and we know HE didn't die.) In Macross Delta, both of the principal architects of Windermere's second war against the New UN Gov't were killed in the conflict. King Grammier VI was killed in the invasion of Ragna in Ep13 and Chancellor Roid Brehm was killed by Keith in the final episode. The only Aerial Knights who don't wind up dead are the ones inherently sympathetic to the New UN Government (Master Hermann, Theo and Xao Jussila, and Bogue Con-vaart). Prince Heinz can't exactly be held accountable since he's all of nine years old and has just been manipulated as his father's puppet, then Roid's. Then there's the economic and political ramifications of their actions I've outlined before... they're NOT going to have a good time after the war, even assuming the New UN Forces don't show up en masse and occupy their planet. Considering Gepernich's true form is a something akin to a spiritia black hole, it was definitely the lesser of two evils. Keeping the apocalyptic bioweapon sealed in a nice nonthreatening can is infinitely preferable to the alternative.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Odd that you would put it like that, considering the biggest talking point in the Robotech RPG's 2nd Edition was that Harmony Gold insisted that it would be required to comply closely with Robotech's official canon and wrote a fair amount of editorial power for themselves into Palladium's license for the purpose of ensuring it. It ended up a bit of a troubled production after a while though, due to changes in writers stranding at least one book in limbo and basically running out of material after four books.1 I've reviewed most of the books and found 2nd Edition to be an enormous improvement, accuracy-wise, over the previous edition where Kevin Siembieda was swinging blind and throwing in any old thing that crossed his mind to pad out his page counts. 'course that didn't really please the Southern Cross fans any. The Masters Saga book spent a lot of unnecessary pages on separate OCCs and MOSs for every individual specialist squad the Southern Cross Army had... including all of the ones that never made it into the Southern Cross anime. That stuff about Leonard being an incompetent military dictator is in there, as well as a bunch of other stuff that breaks a lot of commonly accepted fanon. They suck worse in 2E, due to Palladium's writers having to give them accurate-to-canon stats and the canon generally echoing OSM remarks about how badly designed and ineffective those mecha were.2 Now they're more like glass cannons, though at least the Bioroids got the same treatment that almost puts them in the territory in the anime where Jeanne took one down with an infantry-issue laser rifle. Their only real virtues are that they're invisible to the Invid and that their onboard fusion reactors last decently long between refuelings. It caused a fair amount of grousing when the book first came out, as the Macross Saga sourcebook that immediately preceded it made the Masters Saga mecha look even worse by comparison. The VF-1 had to be NERFed3 in order to keep it from being an out-and-out game breaker, and even in the aftermath of the NERFing it's still overpowered enough for it to be a serious competitor to the massively buffed Alpha.4 1. They still dragged it out for two more, but after the New Generation sourcebook they were basically out of material. The Genesis Pits book was little more than a glorified B-movie monster generator and the UEEF Marines book was an attempt to monetize the Imai Files as Robotech 1.5: In Vague Proximity to, but not actually, the Sentinels. Their license was revoked over the tabletop Kickstarter funding scandal before they could put out anything else, though reportedly they had at least two more books in development. 2. The TASC-01-SCF Logan in particular is abused by almost every Southern Cross publication, all of which seem to take pains to note how utterly ineffective it was against the Zor and how the TASC-02-SCF Auroran was a "too little too late" fix for the problem. Marie Angel's was apparently the exception to the rule. 3. The VF-1 Valkyrie's UUM-7 micro-missile pods from Macross: Do You Remember Love? were accidentally included because Palladium's research copied from Macross fansites that typically don't differentiate between the TV and DYRL? VF-1. They NERFed the SRMs in those pods down to a unguided mini-missile to avoid the VF-1 automatically outclassing EVERYTHING in the game, even though the same model of missile is a SRM in other launchers statted in the game. 4. Even after the NERFing it's still the fastest, most agile fighter out there on top of being invisible to the Invid, having autododge, getting a late service life upgrade that puts its armor up there with the Alpha's, having an autotargeting gun option, having multiple option packs with more weapons and armor, and being the only fighter with long-range missile capability.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Quite apart from the total lack of anything resembling a plot or characterization, there's the problem that the threat your typical Invid poses to an average Zentradi soldier is hilariously insignificant. Let's look at this in a human scale for a moment. Your standard Zentradi soldier at human scale would be a person approximately 200cm tall (6'7.5") and somewhere on the order of 133kg (300lb) in peak physical condition. He's got hardshell body armor and an infantry rifle with armor-piercing ammunition. At that same scale, the Inbit Iigaa is roughly the size of a miniature poodle but rather less of a threat. If you don't count the spiked corners of its shell it's only 0.4m (15") tall and weighs a whopping 45kg (99lb). The full-size Iigaa is fragile enough to be brought down with the equivalent of a 9x19mm or light anti-personnel rockets. In human scale, the Iigaa's shell is so brittle it could be killed easily with a BB gun or bottle rocket. Its only weapons are a pair of blunt claws that are barely two inches long and have little chance of doing more than bruise. The bigger, meaner Grab is no better off, in scale it's roughly the size of a three year old (1.02m/3'4.5") and weighs 68.8kg (152lb). Its only weapons are four claws that are bigger but just as blunt as the Iigaa's, and could maybe give you a cut or a bigger bruise if you got hit really hard on bare skin. The poodle's literally a bigger threat in either case, since at least it has teeth and can bite in addition to scratching. See why this isn't a fight? The worst the Invid have to offer is the equivalent of a dwarf with brass knuckles and brittle bone disease. Even en masse they aren't really a threat, when they can be easily killed by stepping on them or kicking them. Guns of any stripe would be overkill, like using a rifle meant for big game to deal with a racoon problem. Armored fighting vehicles with fully automatic cannons officially takes the level of overkill to comical. The Invid are only dangerous when they've got a massive numerical advantage, and that isn't a card they could play against the Zentradi who never go anywhere without their 7 billion best mates. A totally one-sided war story is just BORING... doubly so if both sides are made up exclusively from interchangeable extras.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Last night, @BlackRose and I rewatched Star Trek: Into Darkness... and while we can definitely say that it improved not at all the third time around, it's surprising in hindsight how much of an influence Into Darkness clearly had on Star Trek: Discovery. (A drinking game was proposed, insofar as taking a drink every time one of the characters said or did something that was obviously stupid even in context... but reinventing suicide as a group activity was deemed a poor way to spend the evening.) Overall tone is, I think, where Into Darkness's influence is most evident in Discovery. The optimism in previous prime continuity Star Trek is almost entirely absent in favor of Into Darkness's grim, fatalistic attitude towards war with the Klingon Empire. Commander Burnham and Admiral Marcus would get along famously, since they both seem to agree that the Klingons not only can't be trusted but that a preemptive strike is the only way to deal with them and NOBODY seems to really question this until it's way too late. Lorca and Marcus would get along pretty well too, since their militaristic attitudes foreshadow the obvious reveal that they were Evil All Along and are thriving in a Federation that's a stone's throw from deteriorating into outright xenophobia. Aesthetically I admit it's not until I rewatched the film that I appreciated exactly how much DNA from the Dreadnought-class USS Vengeance can be found in the Crossfield-class in Discovery. The smooth curves and soft angles are entirely replaced by hard, threatening edges. The usual off-white starship hull paint favored by the Federation is instead replaced by a darker, more ominous hue. There's the funny business with cutouts in the saucer section going on as well. The engineering hull even looks like it's shaped similarly, if you discount the absence of traditional nacelle pylons on the Crossfield-class. The security personnel even wear black including black starfleet deltas like Section 31's. It's massive and has a suspiciously small crew for such a large ship. Now, more than ever, I'm convinced Discovery is not a prime timeline show. The Crossfield-class is something that makes way more sense as a parallel program for the Dreadnought-class.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Same here... helped by the fact that, on my second go 'round, my Japanese was good enough that I could skip the godawful subs that I had watched it with the first time. They were pretty terrible. I'm glad the fansubs out there for it now are of substantially superior quality compared to that old mess. (Gladder still that new shows are getting official subs...) It'd be nice. There seems to be some interest in Macross R still... I noticed they did some egg machines of the VFs from that. That was a pretty incredible side story, IMO... with a shocking number of tie-ins to other shows, games, and stories.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    The Robotech adaptation of Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross made most of the characters a good deal less awful... but Claude Leon/Eli Leonard was the exception. They took him from being a hawkish, stubborn, inflexible general who could be unreasonable at times to a rabid xenophobe on steroids who thought suicide missions were an appropriate response to dissent among his advisers and would hurl his troops into unwinnable fights and berate them for not winning later. Either way, he was bad enough at his job that he was absolutely an asset to the Zor Lords/Robotech Masters. On 1st Ed., I take it? 2nd Ed. made the Masters Saga a fairly unpopular prospect since the character generation was a big mess in that sourcebook and the mecha were pretty terrible as dictated by canon.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Word of advice for 7... take it in small doses. The Macross 7 TV series takes a while to hit its stride, as the first twenty episodes are all character development and buildup for the start of the actual plot. I would advise against marathoning it, since those episodes can get rather repetitive and if you watch more than one or two episodes a day the song "Planet Dance" quickly becomes The Most Annoying Sound. Once it gets going though, it's quite a bit of fun... and I say that as someone who used to be one of the show's most strident critics. It's kind of like Macross's answer to G Gundam, you'll enjoy it much more if you don't go into it expecting seriousness. But yes, every Macross series has its virtues... some are just harder to see than others. That's why a lot of folks here are hoping for a return to classic form for its more obvious virtues.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    In all honesty, I'm not sure it actually is an agenda on the studio's part... "forced" or otherwise. I'm inclined to suspect that the studios, being equal parts lazy and greedy, are simply trying to make casts more closely resemble audiences to broaden their appeal. America's a diverse nation all on its own, and these studios have their eyes on worldwide profits too. I doubt there's any socio-political agenda behind it. I think the "diversity agenda" issue is more a question of certain groups with political agendas doing enough projecting that we could use them to show Powerpoint slideshows. We obviously can't dig into that topic too deeply without delving into the current state of politics and the politics of race in the US right now... Having seen how Star Trek develops its characters from development notes, after TOS there weren't many cases of characters where the writers had a specific race in mind when developing them. That state of affairs isn't likely to have changed much in Discovery. It's not quite the blind development that was used in Alien (where no references were even made to gender), but it's pretty close. You'll find WAY more references to female characters having "strip queen" bodies than you will to being any particular race... but that's got Gene's grubby fingerprints all over it. The only ones I recall being explicitly written as a particular race or nationality from the start after TOS are Jean-Luc Picard (as a Frenchman), Harry Kim (as "Asian" of no specific ethnicity), and Chakotay (as a Native American based on some legendarily bad advice from a new age quack).
  16. Seto Kaiba
    I would assume so? I mean, $300 is $300... 30 orders doesn't have to mean 30 people.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    The Facebook spam I alluded to in the "No Love for Southern Cross?" thread a day or so back... lots of enthusiasm coupled with a gleeful disregard for niceties like proper fact-checking or contextual appropriateness. I'm not sure I'd call Wikipedia vandalism an effort worth supporting... Having beheld the "quality" of the work in question... that's a great big "NOPE". I had never seen a "translation" with a legitimate, unexaggerated 0% accuracy rating until 1st Border Red Devil brought me some of her work and asked me to check it against the original document. It turned out to be text paraphrased from a Robotech fanfic rather than any kind of translation of what was actually written in the Southern Cross advert in question. She's also responsible for starting the false rumor that the reason Southern Cross was canceled was that its toy partner went bankrupt rather than because its ratings were bad. Said toy partner was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Bandai that was folded back into Bandai over a year before Southern Cross aired and continued to function as an operating division of Bandai through at least 1986 until the toy divisions were merged in a series of reorgs and mergers that produced the current Bandai boys toy division and Bandai's subsidiary PLEX corporation.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    One of the few convenient things about collecting Southern Cross stuff is that the demand is so low that markups are nearly nonexistent in most categories. I was able to score a few magazines with articles about the series for less than their original cover price last year.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Yup... entirely too many fans in too many genres mistake "The End of the World as We Know It" for "The End of the World". It's one of those reactions that's as old as fiction itself. Let's wait until the Macross Delta: Passionate Walkure Blu-ray drops to see if there's anything else they ought to be apologizing for.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Well, according to the product listing for the Limited Edition Blu-Ray, the extra features are: An AR card for use with Uta Macross. Staff and cast audio commentary Promotional footage Karaoke videos Picture dramas A "Making of" feature A greeting from the staff and cast
  21. Seto Kaiba
    That's just Robotech's creative staff pandering to the fan majority. Claude Leon was a massive jerkass even in the original Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, and the Robotech adaptation didn't soften him all that much. Robotech fan antipathy for him and for his command, the Southern Cross Army, has always been pretty open. If you're going to retcon one of your show's existing characters into a villain, why not go for the one who's already established as a bad boss and militant xenophobe who isn't above sending his subordinates on suicide missions for arguing with him? (It doesn't help that the Southern Cross Army has a memetic reputation for incompetence among fans of Robotech... their failure to defend Earth literally falling under "You had one job!" territory. It kind of snowballed after a while, especially once HG tapped fans to provide stats for their official "Infopedia" and some remarks about the SCA's mecha being badly designed made the cut... likely because the Southern Cross print materials aren't shy about admitting the SCA's mecha do kind of suck. Especially the Logan.)
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, well... neither title is particularly inspiring. Star Trek: Destiny is marred by sharing its name with a terrible trilogy in the relaunch novel 'verse about the Borg's origins. Reliant would be an odd twist... since Picard's earliest-mentioned assignment as an ensign was to USS Reliant. I'd call it a week after the cast is revealed... though hopefully the (over)reaction will be significantly more muted than it was for Discovery. 'course, hopefully whoever ends up cast in the Picard series will engage their brain before commenting on their role to avoid stirring things up. Eh... that didn't stop a lot of folks on both sides with Discovery. There was a lot of fuss and noise on the subject, with folks railing against "forced diversity" and other such nonsense, claiming that CBS was ticking off checkboxes on some kind of mandatory minorities checklist. It died down a bit after the series started airing and Michelle Yeoh's character got fridged in favor of Jason Isaacs, but it's a topic that still crops up from time to time among Discovery's most vocal critics. (Weirdly, the folks griping about diversity on Discovery seemed to have ZERO problem with previous casts. One of my former coworkers still sends me 'round the twist by complaining about Discovery's diverse casting and in the next breath saying he wishes they'd done more with Mayweather and Sato on Enterprise... there's just no rhyme or reason to it.)
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Only after they discover Earth and are exposed to human culture... prior to that, they're not only just clone soldiers but literally have no frame of reference for anything outside of military affairs. Remember, Harmony Gold summarily disowned all licensee-created materials created prior to 2001 when they rebooted the Robotech franchise. None of the stuff about Breetai being ancient and one of Zor's bodyguards is canon. He's just another interchangeable clone commander whose only real significance is that he was the one who found Earth first, just like in Macross. Well, yes and no... the Invid can adapt and evolve, but only with direct intervention by the Regess, a practice she didn't get into until after the Robotech Masters devastated the second Invid homeworld and which didn't produce any meaningful changes in her Invid until after she arrived on Earth. So, theoretically they could... but canonically they didn't. Mind you, old and current lore tends to suggest the Robotech Masters didn't so much fight against the Invid as roll up, flatten their planet from orbit after taking what they wanted, and then knock off for lunch. They wouldn't have been able to offer any real fight regardless, since they didn't employ ranged weaponry widely until after occupying Earth, they're armored with crepe paper and wishful thinking, and they have exactly one starship with actual weaponry. You can't have massive ground battles when one side didn't bring weapons, or massive fleet engagements when only one side has an actual fleet. That's why old Robotech material basically ignored the Invid's backstory in favor of focusing on the Tirolians... they're boring.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Have they actually confirmed a title yet? CBS has registered trademarks on two: Star Trek: Reliant and Star Trek: Destiny.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Well, thank goodness it's not you they're marketing this comic to... Robotech is used to failure, but "canceled after one issue" over a story even Robotech fans don't want would be a new low water mark for the franchise. Please apply for the Creative Director position at Harmony Gold at your earliest convenience. With your Magoo-like creative vision, they could finish flying the franchise into the ground by year end! You wouldn't know it from reading the comic... but I guess there's little immediate difference between a good writer phoning it in and a bad writer actually trying. Programmers have a saying "Garbage in, Garbage out". If your input is bad, you won't get good output. Robotech's plot wasn't exactly a fantastic story to begin with, and attempting to take it into "gritty" and "hardcore" territory was more than enough to put it into "garbage" territory. It's a bit like saying you'd rather have Stevie Wonder as your chauffer instead of Ray Charles.
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