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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    There are links to PDFs of the corrected pages on the Japanese Wikipedia article found here: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/マクロスΔのディスコグラフィ#CD I assume this is what you're looking for? Here are direct links: https://www.jvcmusic.co.jp/img/artist_top/A025373/booklet_04_20160708.pdf https://www.jvcmusic.co.jp/img/artist_top/A025373/booklet_08_20160708.pdf https://www.jvcmusic.co.jp/img/artist_top/A025373/booklet_09_20160708.pdf https://www.jvcmusic.co.jp/img/artist_top/A025373/booklet_10_20160708.pdf
  2. Seto Kaiba
    "Good" is wholly subjective... but it's a fair question nevertheless. Disney was still leaning on the familiar OT designs or variations thereof through the end of the sequel trilogy. My (cynical) assumption would be that they would continue to lean on the same designs to minimize risk (based on the new movie being set only a short time after the sequel trilogy) and save a new design for a major event like a new trilogy. Maybe they'll dust off an old design as "new" the way they did for Ahsoka's first season.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, ok. I guess credit for finally getting off the dime and moving the story forward a bit? There are certainly worse ideas than Top Gun: a Star Wars Story. With that timeframe it sounds like a refreshingly Jedi-free narrative, which is enough to pique my interest.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    OK, so it's a title card. Still feel like a further continuation of Din and Grogu's story is kinda unnecessary.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Well, that's vague... Are they remaking the 2001 Star Wars game by the same title? Adapt one of the starfighter-specific games? Just doing a story about fighter pilots?
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Finally got shipping confirmation on those light novels today... I can hardly wait to dig in. I know I probably can't hope for much from some of those - like the Macross 7 fleet VF-25s - but I'll take what I can get. Given that it appears in Master File, I wonder if it was something Kodachi came up with and Master File ran with or vice versa? Vol.2 of the movie novelization was published only a few months before the Master File was...
  7. Seto Kaiba
    I don't think there's anything deep or significant there. Char doesn't have any choice but to play the long game in GQuuuuuuX. His revenge plan progressed at the brisk pace it did in the prime Universal Century timeline thanks to the actions of the White Base/Pegasus crew creating opportunities for him. The ship never landed on Earth under Federation control, so Char was never able to manipulate Garma into the suicide run that killed him in the prime timeline. Dozle ironically still died at Solomon, but under different circumstances. Without the White Base crew turning the tide against Zeon on Earth and in space, Zeon's forces were not put on the defensive the way they were in the prime timeline so Degwin never opened the peace talks that prompted Gihren to assassinate him with the Solar Ray, so Kycilia never had to execute him for regicide, and thus Char never got his opportunity to assassinate Kycilia in the ensuing confusion. GQuuuuuuX's Char is a Char who never got a plausibly deniable opportunity to bump off a member of the Zabi family until the Second Battle of Solomon, where he tried to allow Federation forces to drop the fortress on Kycilia's base at Granada.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    This might serve as a good example of why one shouldn't judge a book by its cover... or its author. Master File's explanation of the New UN Forces history, produced under Kawamori's supervision, is more an attempt to reconcile an onscreen contradiction and is firmly based on official setting material. The contradiction in question being that we don't see the New UN Forces livery onscreen until (Ozma's flashbacks to) 2048 in Macross Frontier's TV series, but the New UN Forces were first mentioned in the post-war arc of the original Macross TV series some 37 in-universe years and 25 real world years earlier. Kodachi's explanation isn't really based on anything except the idea that the government imposed reforms on the military after the events of Macross VF-X2 and the fact that the NUNS livery is seen for the first time in Macross Frontier... even though we also see it in a flashback to events BEFORE Kodachi claims the NUNS existed.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    It's mixed with a bit of Gihren's Greed too. This isn't the first time there's been a Char's custom Gundam or a UC story where Zeon ends up winning the war.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    That'd depend on which of two contradictory takes you ascribe to. Macross the Ride's explanation is that the New UN Forces were a product of the military reorganization that occurred in the wake of the Second Unification Wars in 2051. Master File presents a different view that the New UN Forces existed from the same point as the New UN Government (2010) and that the areas around Earth simply held onto the old livery until the Second Unification War as a point of pride and a symbol of their Earth-first ideology. There's evidence for both versions, but as usual Macross loves a multiple guess past... but in both cases they supposedly basically went directly from the one to the other. Seven years after Macross 7 would be 2053, well after the NUNS mark was in use in either case Given that Sound Force were irregulars, and this manga basically features "Sound Force II"... well... it's probably just some personal mark or something. Well, they can't all be winners. Macross Ace at least had a lot to compensate for the occasional weak manga installment.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Honestly, this episode just leaves me thinking "Why couldn't you just use this art style for the main series and not the excessively twee style we got?" By the end of it... I'm just bored. This was supposed to be impactful backstory that shapes the entire setting and worldview of the series we're watching. Instead, it just feels like an afterthought... or maybe a bad fanfic by a Zeon fanboy. The whole episode can be summed up as "Zeon is invincible because Char got a Gundam". Did Anno forget that Zeon was already at the breaking point in September UC 0079 before the Federation ever got the Gundam? It's not like one of the major events of the war was General Revil escaping and giving a speech about it.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Started Classic Stars... a series that does such a bad job of explaining its own premise that I'm still not sure what it's actually about. The best part is, nobody else seems to know either. Its English wikipedia page has no real info, and its Japanese wikipedia page doesn't exist. (It literally just redirects to the stub article for the production company.) What little I can glean from this atrociously written mess is that the protagonist is a teenage boxing enthusiast who suffered a career ending eye injury, and in exchange for a very pricy surgery to restore his vision he agreed to attend an exclusive private school. What he wasn't told (or didn't pay attention to?) was that he was to attend as a music major not as an athlete and that he was to be involved in some kind of project to study emotions (or manufacture a boy band? I can't tell) using a massive holographic stage and pop songs based on public domain classical music. EDIT: No amount of context can make this make sense. At one point, a character says without a trace of irony "That's right! You can even punch people with songs!". F***ING WHAT. Nobody tell Basara. 🤣
  13. Seto Kaiba
    In the next episode? Probably... though it's a flashback so it's technically already happened several years ago by the time of GQuuuuuuX. Whether there will be a third one, or some other atrocity, will really depend on the direction the story goes. One thing about GQuuuuuuX's story that really worries me is the sneaking feeling that it's going to continue where Requiem for Vengeance left off in terms of trying to make Zeon characters sympathetic by avoiding the whole subject of their war crimes.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    The Gorilla God's Go-To Girl is... quite something. I'm not completely certain what, but it's definitely something! It's the story of a girl in a fantasy world who just wants a slow life and to be normal... only to find out at a coming-of-age sort of ceremony when teens receive a blessing from animal spirits/gods that confers special abilities that she's found the favor of the Gorilla god. So this petite little lass who wants nothing more than to fly under the radar finds herself all but drafted into the knighthood because her blessing confers MASSIVE (and unladylike) speed, strength, and resilience far beyond what the men around her have... catapulting her into a reverse harem sort of situation where she's got a few prettyboy knights all surrounding her. Once Upon a Witch's Death is also quite something. The story of a witch's apprentice in what appears to be an alternate Earth where magic is just a thing nobody really questions, who is told by her mentor on her 17th birthday that she's going to die in a year because of an inherited death curse. So this slightly bratty witch has to collect 1,000 tears of pure joy in order to concoct a magical solution that will prevent her from dying on her 18th birthday. Aside from its incredibly genki protagonist, it's pretty much just the protagonist going around causing Hallmark moments with magic. Nothing to write home about.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    So, two points here... both of which make it worse. The O'Neill cylinder-type space colonies used in Gundam's Universal Century (and other timelines) typically have a population of several million people, not thousands. Those people aren't usually alive by the time the colony is launched as an improvised ballistic projectile. One of the many, MANY war crimes perpetrated by the Principality of Zeon during the One Year War was the use of poison gas to indiscriminately massacre the populations of entire colonies in the Federation-aligned Sides. Island Iffish, the colony from Side 2 that was used in the original colony drop ("Operation British"), had its population gassed to death with GG gas as part of Zeon's preparations to convert the colony into a ballistic weapon. Just in case the audience needed to be reminded that the Principality of Zeon's forces are Complete Monsters, the previously backstory-only massacre was animated as part of Mobile Suit Gundam: the Origin's fifth episode showing how unbothered those Principality forces planning and carrying out the massacre were. (Ironically Stardust Memory depicts the rest of the Zeon forces as being disgusted by this after the fact, to the extent of deliberately leaving the forces responsible for it behind during the retreat to Axis.) As for the goal of colony drops... well... it's usually a terror weapon, meant to cause mass death through both the impact and the environmental damage caused by such a huge object impacting Earth's surface. The Zabis were arguably the most reserved of the lot, aiming only to destroy Earth Federation Forces HQ in a massive nuke-proof underground complex in South America. Delaz's forces tried to cause mass starvation by dropping a colony on central North America to destroy farmland, the Titans were trying to destroy a factory-city (Von Braun) that was supporting the AEUG, and both Neo Zeon and Char's New Neo Zeon were trying to destroy the Federation capital (wiping out Dublin, Ireland and Lhasa, Tibet in the process.) Char's endgame was different, though... he wanted serial colony drops to render Earth completely uninhabitable rather than just win some war. Char wasn't a cyber-newtype. Mind you, this timeline's Char might be more insane than the one in the main UC timeline. Zeon didn't lose the war, but he sure as hell did. He wasn't able to carry out his plan to arrange the deaths of the entire Zabi family under the cover of the One Year War the way he did in the prime timeline. According to promotional materials...
  16. Seto Kaiba
    I don't envy you that... I hate working in Photoshop/GIMP. It's been a dog's age since I read that one, since I stopped following it after Macross Ace ended serialization. Did it have anything interesting tech-wise, besides being one of the few appearances of a VF-9?
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Thanks. I keep forgetting to grab this, so I appreciate the efforts to keep it available despite the best efforts of Mega.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, I know... he's done a lot of great translation work. I really wish the mods here would let him come back to the community because he is a great contributor to the fandom. I've got some of his translations of older works like My Fair Minmay, The Lost Two Years, and The Plundering Fleet on my tablet. One thing I really love about the fan community working on translations is we each kind of have our own little areas of private practice that just sort of organically popped up and we're spread out pretty well to cover the most ground we can. No formal agreements or anything, just a bunch of people who love Macross doing the best they can to share as much of it as possible with the fandom spreading out across as much of it as we can according to our own personal inclinations. 😁 Several novels are on my to-do pile, but they've always been a lower priority than the technical materials to me. Now that my day job is finally returning to something resembling work-life balance after... jeez like four or five years of constant OT... I've finally had the time and resources to knuckle down, finish the renovations on my hobby space, and get all the equipment upgrades I wanted to really dig into my hobby properly again. (Distractions from other light novel titles notwithstanding... there was a good long period where my girlfriend had me binging multiple light novel series with her, like Overlord, The Ascendance of a Bookworm, Goblin Slayer, and lately The Apothecary Diaries. Gundam has been a bit of a distraction too, since I also got all the Master Archive books for the UC setting while I was getting the Master File books for Ace Combat, Full Metal Panic!, and Patlabor.)
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Ugh... well... I've put it off long enough. Time to actually give this hot mess called GQuuuuuuX a whirl. Ever since I watched Neon Genesis Evangelion for the first time, I've always felt Hideaki Anno is one of the worst and most overrated creators in anime. GQuuuuuuX is doing little to change that view. This show has two main problems: The story is basically just a route from Gihren's Greed. The art style is a really REALLY poor fit to Gundam, both in terms of the excessively busy mechanical design ala Evangelion and the cutesy art style used for the characters.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Unlikely, IMO. Amuro was no genius or technological savant, he was just a reasonably computer-savvy teenage kid. He built and modified Frau Bow's Haro when he was 13. It's very doubtful that he did anything to that Haro that a competent engineer couldn't also come up with. The Haro in the series may have been customized by someone else, or the manufacturer may have upgraded the kit as technology improved. Even if we assume that Amuro was not among those who perished in Char's attack on Side 7 and was able to lead a normal life thereafter (which seems unlikely given that his father almost certainly still died and his mother was estranged and living on Earth, so he would be left living alone) he would still only be 21 years old at the time of GQX. That would mean at most he would be just graduating from college, not someone already well-embedded in a corporation's design department. If she didn't perish under other circumstances during the One Year War, odds are she's a part of the Newtype unit in Kycilia Zabi's Mobile Assault Force.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    TBH, that doesn't necessarily imply anything about Amuro's fate or future in this timeline. A lot of Gundam fans tend to forget that the Haro in the original Mobile Suit Gundam series was not something Amuro created. It was a commercially available kit robot sold by a company called SUN. Frau Bow's Haro was a standard Haro kit that Amuro bought, built, modified into a "pet" robot, and gifted to Frau Bow to cheer her up after her dog died. It wasn't until Amuro and White Base gained fame in the wake of the One Year War that SUN sought out Amuro and acquired the specs of his improvements to the Haro. Since the One Year War played out differently, it's likely that consignment of 4,800 Haros that was mostly lost in the war in the main timeline wasn't... and the kit robot enjoyed a wider user base.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    The Sodon. Either deceased or basking in a life of irrelevancy, since he never got into the Gundam in this timeline.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    It does make a certain amount of sense that a profoundly violent high-energy and high-gravity event like the collapse and explosion of a high-mass star might produce a material that is in some way connected to gravity as a force. Doubly so if Master File's view of fold carbon and fold quartz is correct and the stuff is essentially a stable crystal made from higher-dimension gravity particles.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Definitely one of the weaker episodes... between this being yet-another "Lady Lishu is bullied by her own ladies-in-waiting" episode AND another "Maomao investigates reports of a ghost" episode, it's definitely not a particularly strong story. Started Can a Boy-Girl Friendship Survive? today over lunch. It's got a lot of energy. A LOT. Every character in this is extremely energetic. The protagonist is a quiet guy who wants to make jewelry for a living, and his best friend (the girl of the boy-girl friendship) is an astonishingly genki girl with no sense of personal space and a terrible sense of humor who enjoys teasing him. As teenage will-they-or-won't-they's go, this one's actually pretty believable in that they give off strong "No way, he/she's like a brother/sister" energy. It's quite fun so far.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Fold carbon is one of those things that has implicitly been around for a while, but was explicitly explained when it finally became relevant to the story. Explaining it was necessary for the story of Macross Frontier because the plot revolved around a sort of unofficial gold rush for a better kind of fold crystal, and allowed them to also explain how/why human-made fold systems, reaction engines, beam weapons, etc. have gotten dramatically more capable over time despite Zentradi technology being static for millennia. Most fold carbon in use is synthetic. We're told in Macross Frontier that it does occur in nature as a product of supernovae. While the Vajra are shown to mine naturally-occurring fold carbon for Queen forms to refine into fold quartz, the Protoculture developed the technology to create as much synthetic fold carbon as they needed to drive their expanding interstellar empire and its monstrously huge military. Humanity's first encounter with fold carbon was with the synthetic fold carbon found in the ASS-1's systems, and from that they seem to have worked out how to reproduce the stuff on their own. The Protoculture eventually worked out a method to synthesize fold quartz too, something Humanity has been hard at work on. Frontier-era and later materials have used improvements in Humanity's synthetic fold carbon process as a way of explaining how systems that use super dimension spatial theory like fold systems, gravity control systems, reaction engines, etc. have gotten smaller, more precise, and more capable over the years despite all having started from analysis of the essentially-mature Zentradi equipment. It seems likely that, since the Galactic Whales are living beings with fold capability, they're biologically synthesizing or at least purifying fold carbon to a level higher than what a Human ship or fighter might be using at the time of, say, Dynamite 7. Thus making those "natural" fold crystals desirable as engine parts. As far as we know, it reached all the way to the Brisingr Globular Cluster and Windermere IV on the edge of the galaxy. King Grammier is said to have participated in the Second Unification Wars somehow. We never really get a sense of the Brisingr Alliance's member governments being corrupt in the Macross Delta series or movies. We're told they have economic issues because of the cluster's isolation and are trying to boost their economy with military exports, but we never really see any sign that they're not on the up-and-up aside from their willingness to listen to, and excuse the behavior of, Lady M and the protagonists. I've got a copy of the novels on order, so I'll have to look into that when they arrive. I'd assume that the New UN Gov't considers them to have already learned their lesson, since the entire colony was subsequently overrun and enslaved by the Protodeviln and the inhabitants spiritia-drained and brainwashed in a fairly traumatic ordeal. Not to mention the fact that the party responsible for the whole mess, the rogue advsior Ivano Gunther, isn't around to take the heat (having fused with Gepernich) and most of his supporters died. It kind of depends which version of the Frontier story any subsequent work is treating as true at any given time... but Galaxy may also be off the hook on account of having f'ed around and found out with fatal results when it came to the Vajra. The fleet of millions was reduced to a handful of refugees as of Frontier's second movie and many of those got wiped out because they were actually undercover agents. No kidding. It's enough to make one assume the AIF-9B is similarly downgraded vs. the Ghost X-9. Well, yeah... he'd have to find a new bassist at that point. He only got upset because it affected their meal ticket.
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