Seto Kaiba

Pretty sure Hayate's still the main character in the story. This ain't just a music video, y'know? A big part of the story is his romance plot with Freyja and him fighting in the war with Windermere.

Oh, it is. For a guy whose magnum opus franchise is best known for radically reinventing itself with each new installment, he's pretty damned consistent about not bringing the original cast back. Mari Iijima remarked at Super Dimension Con that she'd be open to reprising her role as Minmay but she knows Kawamori's against bringing the character back, and the idea that Lady M was someone who was affiliated with Megaroad-01 was torpedoed mere months after the series ended.1 Berger Stone was apparently just spinning a yarn. HG doesn't own the old anime, and it wouldn't get rid of the legal problems... Considering Macross the First uses the DYRL? Zentradi designs almost exclusively2, and the only TV series design that is consistently reused is the standard trooper body armor... most of them would likely be green or that chalk-white that many of the grunts were in DYRL?. There'd probably still be at least some signs of the rest of the Amazing Technicolor Population spectrum, like Quamzin being lavender. 1. In the Nov 2016 issue of Newtype. Macross Delta's creators apparently never bothered to come up with a real identity for Lady M, as she's just an Omniscient Council of Vagueness-type exposition device. 2. Quamzin was, IIRC, the only one in Macross the First to retain his TV series appearance, though he wore the movie body armor. Laplamiz got an all-new design reminiscent of Mikimoto's design for Jinna Fiaro from Macross: Eternal Love Song for the manga, and we've yet to see Milia.

What I've heard from friends who've had the chance to see it already is that it flows better than the TV series. It's still a compilation movie, with all that entails, so whether it's told "better" would be a subject contingent on whether you feel fewer digressions from the main story is a good thing. (IMO, it is...) ... protagonist focus is a bit off lately too. Some friends of mine who were in Japan on business over the last few weeks were kind enough to bring me back some souvenirs, including three copies of the movie's booklet/brochure. The interviews with voice actors were no surprise... but the fact that they didn't bother to interview the main frigging character's voice actor was. They just did the members of Walkure and Chisato Mita, the character designer.

If only... if you take the VF-1's cost and apply other remarks comparing its cost to that of the average Destroid, which is said to be approximately 1/20th the cost of a VF-1, your average Destroid has a price point of around $6.3 million. That's about what a M1 Abrams cost back in '99, and about $2.6 million less than one costs today. Clearly some serious advancements in manufacturing technology were made even before they got 'hold of that factory satellite. If a giant robot only costs six mil, one can only imagine how much the cost of a tank came down... (By 2059, destroids had achieved the level of glorified forklifts, so the price must REALLY have come down with automated factory tech.)

Alien cat-people are a pretty old trope and the inhabitants of Voldor are a pretty vanilla take on the idea... they're not fleshed out enough to say they're similar to cat-person aliens from any particular series. It's mostly just an excuse to get Walkure into nekomimi cosplay and tick another item off a list of standard fetishes. Still, since they've been established to be a thing, it's a safe bet the Voldorans, Ragnans, and even Windermereans will be showing up in other parts of the galaxy in the future, much like how Zolans have sort of stealthily spread out from their homeworld in the manga and light novels. (Of course, the Zentradi are as seemingly omnipresent as you'd expect for a species that outnumbered human survivors eight to one on postwar Earth.)

As an amusing side note to my previous post, the Sky Angels book gives the RDT&E cost of the VF-1 Valkyrie program as $50 billion... less than both the F-35 (@$55 billion) and F-22 (@$67 billion).

To date, the only time an actual number was put to it was in Masahiro Chiba's Sky Angels VF-1 tech manual in '84. The flyaway cost for an early block VF-1A was given as $126 million (c.2008). Bear in mind, this was written and published back in 1984 when the average cost of a modern (4th Gen) fighter was $28.9 million per unit. A VF-1A was 3.3 times as expensive as the priciest modern fighter jet in service at the time (the F-14A). Nobody foresaw that, by the time calendars caught up to Macross's events, $126 million would be a pretty reasonable price tag for a conventional fighter... with the F-35B and C sitting pretty at $122 mil, and the F-22 at $150 mil. All told, around 5,500 VF-1 Valkyries were built and delivered to the military during mass production. A lot of the civilian market stuff is units that were built under license from Shinsei Industry for non-military use, though some military spec models did fall into civilian hands via disposal sales. after its retirement.

Isn't one of those where that drop-down antipersonnel gun thing is in the original trilogy? Maybe Han removed one or both of the surplus landing gear to make room for more dakka?

Macross already tried going the Gundam route once before with Super Dimension Fortress Macross II: Lovers Again. As much as I personally love it, it was not particularly well-received in Japan. Its mechanical and character designs are the only parts of it that get consistent praise, while it usually gets sharply criticized for not doing enough differently from its predecessors in terms of story. Considering the Macross fandom's well-entrenched expectation that each new series will "mix it up" substantially, going the Gundam route is almost certainly ill-advised. Amusingly enough, given you cited Gundam 00 as an example, one of Gundam's biggest faults is a lack of innovation. It can get INCREDIBLY samey, especially in the Universal Century timeline. Improvements in animation tech have let them do more, and more impressive, fight scenes that still get old fast thanks to a lack of variety and the fact that the plots are getting progressively weaker and less interesting, with some having crossed the line all the way into Excuse Plot territory (e.g. Thunderbolt, Build Fighters). A Zentradi-centric story in the Gundam style wouldn't be able to exploit the trick Gundam uses to prevent its fight scenes from becoming bland and samey... a Monster of the Week-style constant influx of new models. The Zentradi and Supervision Army have been using the same designs for over half a million years now, with no means to develop new weapons. The one time a Zentradi fleet has been depicted as actually having developed a new mobile weapon was Macross: Eternal Love Song, where Quamzin and his cohorts used skills learned on Earth to build an original battle suit for Quamzin to use in the final offensive against the Leplendis fleet (which is totally not the colossal lavender lovechild of the Sazabi and a Nousjadeul-Ger, honest!). For a variable definition of "eye candy", that's what they've been doing starting from Macross Zero. Delta's definition of "eye candy" is the other one... As much as I love Macross, if we end up with a Macross version of Nekopara I am officially out. Like the song goes: I would do anything for love, but I won't do that.

My understanding is that that's the number of days on which you were the member who received the greatest number of reputation points (upvotes).

Who knows what she's supposed to be in this comic. Everything's traced from somewhere, which has led to some interesting cases of characters with seemingly fluctuating ethnicity as their facial structure changes from panel to panel. This comic's an anatomical nightmare. Eh... it's easy to forget all the blatantly disingenuous, outright fraudulent, and borderline racist stuff he said over the years now that he's no longer around to shoot his mouth off with more of same at conventions and in interviews. When he wasn't outright claiming that he created the stories in their "Americanized" form and then paid the Japanese to animate 'em, he was rhapsodizing about how he flawed and inferior he felt the original Japanese shows were and claiming the Japanese creators felt his bowdlerized versions were superior to their own work. He was still making those claims into the early 2000s. Whether the bowdlerization was his idea, corporate's, or the industry's was a story that changed with the regularity of the tides. It'd be one thing if he'd stopped at "that's just how we did it back then"... it's something else entirely to argue that whitewashing the shows made them superior to their original Japanese versions and made him a superior creator to the Japanese artists who created the shows.

Maybe it's autocorrect, and they meant "cenobites"? I mean, I can't imagine how anyone who wasn't a pain-worshipping masochist or the kind of fanatical Robotech fan who'd take out a second mortgage to buy Carl Macek's kidney stones would find this comic even slightly readable. By its very nature, Robotech was an attempt to whitewash Macross. Carl Macek was pretty darn vocal in his belief that general audiences wouldn't be able to handle the idea of characters who were foreign even in an explicitly-Japanese art form, and aggressively pursued the removal of what he called "ethnic gestures", by which he meant references to Japanese culture. Roy Focker, Max Jenius, and Bruno Global were all white, though the only Americans on the cast were Roy Focker and Claudia La Salle. You might be thinking of Amuro Ray from Gundam instead... he was a Japanese-Canadian half. Hikaru was full-blood Japanese, Misa was full-blood Japanese but spent part of her childhood in Australia. Minmay was the only half in the main trio, being half-Chinese.

Nope, just that Reon was tasked with delivering said YF-25 to the head of the Uroboros branch. I'd assume that the Sephira NUNS had decided to either buy VF-25s from the Macross Frontier fleet or obtained a license from the fleet to build their own VF-25s locally. Though not strictly canon, both the Variable Fighter Master File and Variable Fighter Episode Archive both indicate the Frontier government made a mint on the VF-25 Messiah selling them as export models or selling licenses to their allies to build them under license. The VF-25 is probably the single most numerous 5th Generation VF besides the federal VF-24 and monkey models of same. There's no official spec corresponding to the "Thunder Hammer" I'm familiar with. As far as I'm aware, that was a customized model kit based on the Hasegawa 1/72 scale VF-1S and Armored Valkyrie kits done for the October 2002 issue of Model Graphix magazine (as part of a run of articles titled "Advanced Valkyrie in Action"). It was built by Kouichi Hatakeyama and painted by Shigeki Ninomiya. "Thunder Hammer" is not the name of the unit in the article, but rather the name of the squadron that it belongs to... a moon-based unit, the 5th Space Operations Group 1920th Squadron "Thunder Hammers". You might get a juvenile chuckle or two out of it being misspelled "Thunder Hummers" on the article's title page. It looks like the custom kit recycles some parts from another design the same issue featured, the VE-1AEW Alvitr. Namely, a large, distressingly phallic looking radar. The only real functional difference is that it appears to have the NP-BP-01 booster packs from the Super Pack instead of the built-in boosters of the regular Armored Pack. Some versions of it are shown with the Strike Pack's beam cannon.

Checked Crunchyroll, Hulu, and Netflix, and none of the three appear to have it. I don't think that Amazon Video does either. This may be one of those titles that slipped through the cracks.

... y'know, I could totally see him shouting down "God" from Star Trek V. All things considered, that's not exactly going to make for riveting television. The Zentradi Army has been on the same Search and Destroy mission for the last half-million years, hunting what remnants of the Supervision Army remain after the Protodeviln were sealed. That's an awful lot sitting around punctuated by the occasional brief-but-violent skirmish that ends with most of one side retreating to regroup. There's no real opportunity for a story to develop and progress, and as the Zentradi Army was forbidden culture by the ancient Protoculture you're stuck with a cast of flat characters with no possibility for development. It'd be like watching one episode of the Clone Wars cartoon, with everyone who isn't a battle droid or a clone trooper edited out, on repeat. The Zentradi are consummate professional soldiers, but one of the main reasons they were so eager to adopt Earth's culture is that the life of a clone soldier is monotonous as hell. Which would be equally boring, but with slightly more opportunity for character development as the Zentradi would be cultured Zentradi. Basically, an entire series of below-decks Star Trek episodes re-set in the Macross universe... or, if you're feeling sassy, Red Dwarf: Zentradi Edition. EDIT: Actually, I'd be down for a Red Dwarf-style below decks comedy about the Zentradi marines. That actually sounds pretty fun. ... I'm not sure how to take a declaration that it's easier to like a person with no personality. That pretty demonstrably doesn't work when it comes to characters in fiction, audiences tend to loathe characters who don't have any personality. (e.g. Twilight) Plus there's the fact that Zentradi in Macross are probably the ones with the MOST social baggage within the New UN Government's sphere of influence. Rogue Zentradi fleets are an ongoing, very urgent threat to inhabited worlds. Zentradi are also disproportionately overrepresented within the ranks of anti-government terrorist groups, and malcontent Zentradi within the military are seen as significant threats to the peace as well. There's evident discrimination against Zentradi, as seen in the Macross Plus OVA from General Gomez (and a little from Guld himself) and in Macross 7 Trash, as well as an entire Macross story (Macross the Musiculture) focused on Zentradi political activism. Only recently has a rival shown up to challenge the Zentradi for dominance on the social problems front, and that's the Windermereans from Macross Delta. Got pretty bloody tedious to me, to the point that the battle droids tended to have more evident personality than most of the actual characters. (To the extent that a few of them showed some awareness of the Jedi's godmode sue status.) Star Wars's expanded universe got broomed for a good reason... a lot of which had to do with the writers endlessly abusing the same goddamn characters over and over again until there wasn't any part of them left that was likeable or relateable. When the Imperials had only two kinds of actual characters - monomaniacal tyrants and incompetent buffoons - and the Rebels had only one (the selfless hero) it got old REALLY BLOODY QUICK.

Really, any story arc in which Mirage is actually allowed to grow and develop as a character would be an improvement on what the Macross Delta series did with her... she's Hayate's instructor for a while and then she's just sort of hanging around out of focus. I'd have liked to see her come into her own as a pilot and become a worthy successor to the Jenius family tradition and the franchise's latest lady ace... a criminally underappreciated segment of the franchise's casting. The series kind of built it up like the Immelmann Dance was going to be how Mirage finally broke through into greatness, but it never paid off. I could kind of see singing as a alternate route for that tho...

"What does God need with a Super Dimension Fortress?" Depends how similar they actually are. The various Macross series have been pretty good about mixing it up over the years, so even while the characters follow broadly similar paths of development they're all quite distinct. They changed with the times, and their characterization tended to reflect social issues in Japan. Arguably, it'd be Hayate who's most similar to another Macross protagonist (Alto), and he's still so different in terms of his motivations and temperament that there's no confusing the two. Franchises that DO have essentially (or literally) the same protagonist over and over again do have problems as a result of it getting samey or wearing out their welcome. Gundam has this issue with the Universal Century timeline, in that a lot of its protagonists outside of the OVAs are basically the same exact character as Amuro... the bored, angsty kid from a wealthy background whose family'd been involved in the creation of the Gundam. Judau's the only one who really breaks the mold. It also became a problem for Star Wars, which (pre-Disney) reused the SAME characters so often the stories became quite absurd and ultimately had to be thrown out. The "other" series, The-Show-That-Must-Not-Be-Named, caught a LOT of flak for its new generations of "original" characters all being blatant expies of the most popular (Macross) characters and progressively less likeable with each new iteration as a result of it all getting stale.

None thus far. If the pattern holds from Frontier and Delta, we can expect them to officially confirm that a new series is in the works sometime next month. I'll admit, even as someone who thinks the Brisingr globular cluster offers a unique and fascinating setting for future Macross storytelling... I'd have a much easier time with the Voldorans if they had done more to make them look alien like they did with the Ragnans. The Voldorans should've been more given designs that were more obviously evocative of their evolutionary origins as a species of forest-dwelling predatory feline. What we got was more like The Planet of Nekomimi Cosplay, and that's almost as terrible as the number of cat puns that came with it. (Somehow, I imagine after decades of dealing with Humans and Zentradi who were raised in Earth culture, the Voldorans have long since grown tired of cat puns.) Then again, decades of Star Trek fandom have long since conditioned me to accept the humanlike rubber forehead aliens. There's a very obvious problem with that idea. Namely, that if you keep bringing back the same antagonist or type of antagonist over and over it very quickly gets old and loses all of its punch. Gundam's Universal Century is a great example of this. The idea of a resurgent Principality of Zeon was an "oh crap!" moment when it was first used in Zeta Gundam, but after the third or fourth time that a Neo-Zeon group came crawling out of the woodwork to threaten a colony drop, it had lost its punch and devolved into "So what are the leftover Zeeks calling themselves this year?". Star Trek's writers had a similar problem with the Borg. When the Borg were first introduced, they were a disturbingly alien threat that was beyond anything the Federation had ever encountered. A few really good stories were done that maximized the alien-ness of them, but then overuse started to cause consequences that ate into their ability to intimidate like "Descent" where the Borg ended up being manipulated by Data's evil twin brother. They lost the other-ness that made them such a thoroughly unsettling antagonist, and became just another race of rubber forehead aliens, trying to recapture some of that scariness via First Contact reinventing them as cyborg space zombies. The minimal gains from that were undercut by once again putting a face and a name to them with the invention of the Borg Queen, and then making them a recurring antagonist on Star Trek: Voyager, where any remaining ability to intimidate was lost forever when the kind of ships that were known for being able to hold off whole fleets singlehandedly were being repeatedly outmaneuvered and defeated by a single lightly-armed Starfleet science ship. They could also never be used in large numbers because they were previously established to be so powerful that sending more than one cube to attack Earth would result in a no-win scenario for the heroes. The Zentradi Army suffers from similar drawbacks in Macross. Not only has the other-ness of the Zentradi been significantly diminished by the way they're genetically basically identical to humans and easily blend into human society, with many characters being part-Zentradi; they've also got a scale problem similar to the Borg that impedes using them. A Zentradi Army main fleet is such a huge, overwhelmingly powerful force that there's no beating one. The best anyone can really do when confronted with one is run the hell away. Beating one in 2010 was a fluke, and even then more than half of the fleet survived. If that fluke repeats itself over and over again, the Zentradi Army's ability to intimidate goes down the tubes. So, to preserve the Zentradi as an actual threat they have to be avoided, and used sparingly and only in small numbers as hostiles. Creating new antagonists on the same scale runs into all the same problems, plus the "and why haven't we heard of THESE guys if they're also everywhere?" issue too. Significant name... if you were following the theme they've been building on since Macross 30. Harsh! (Though, to be fair, the NUNS did actually make the attempt in-series.)

Yeah, it's a bit of a pain... especially since Macross Delta conditioned us all to expect news of new developments every time there's any kind of Walkure live event. Macross Frontier, IIRC, had the preview version of its first episode a day or two before Christmas, then it ran from April to September of the following year. Delta, I know, was first announced in September and the teaser screened in Akihabara right before Halloween. They did their preview edition of the first episode as part of like a five hour special program on the last day of the year before running it April to September. If they follow the pattern, we'll get our first public confirmation that they're actually working on something in mid-March and the first actual information in September. This is coming a lot closer on the heels of the previous series though, so they might buck the trend. Does that include the animators? Cuz I kinda like the Satelight team's style.

Nobody's used Zero to excuse Delta. It's been cited as an example of another Macross show with similar writing problems to Delta's... how the writing suffers when one part of the Macross equation becomes the sole focus. We all still love it for its gorgeous dogfight scenes, even if we admit that the writing was a bit dodgy. That could get pretty dark... I mean, trapped in a MMO? Macross Galaxy's civilian population is canonically kind of already there. They're all cyborgs, and even before the Galaxy Executives started mind-controlling them all they were living most of their lives in cyberspace to avoid confronting the utilitarian cyberpunk dystopia the fleet had become after its corporate government legalized implants. Like if the hallucination in the despair squid episode of Red Dwarf were reality... Isn't Macross Dandy basically just a lazy Isamu? (Heck, Sharon's a big hologram like Admiral Perry, and one of her staffers looks a bit like Dr. Gel.) So here's a question. I don't think anyone here would disagree if I said that Macross Delta didn't really get a lot of use out of its setting, the huge Brisingr Globular Cluster with its twenty-something new colonized planets. Would you guys be down for another series set in the same locale, but featuring an all-new cast unrelated to the previous one? Like what Macross the Ride did with being set in the Macross Frontier fleet but having the cast of the series appear only as background characters?

Super simple explanation: By in large, what most of us hope for in a new Macross series is a good balance between all of the key components of the Macross experience... the character drama in and around the love story, the space warfare that frames that character drama, and the music that ties the two together. It's the Macross triangle, if you will. When fans find a show unsatisfying, it's usually become one or more legs of the triangle are being neglected in the story. Macross II: Lovers Again and Macross 7 both tend to get criticized for their character drama, Macross Delta for neglecting all but the music, there was excellent balance in the Macross Frontier series, etc. Zero's problem was that it kept the character drama and the action in separate rooms and never let them mesh properly. So, while you had a plot about an ancient alien intervention that created humanity and left a secret history and a mission to a small tribe living out on a remote island and a there's a major conflict on their remote island over an ancient alien macguffin that'll help the victors do... something, nobody ever really says what they'll actually DO with the Birdhuman... the plot is just left feeling vague and unfocused, with half of it strained through Mayan's tribal mysticism and the other half muttered at the audience by a handful of unreliable or halfhearted narrators. It all falls by the wayside and is quickly forgotten in the face of the expansive all-CG VF dogfights that have no real connection to it until the very end and are, frankly, a LOT more entertaining.

It's definitely easier to plan, being given the date this far in advance.

My understanding was that the story was basically Escaflowne's... just with a modern world rather than a fantasy one. The designs sure were neat though. (I think, to a certain extent, we've seen a bit of the Air Cavalry Chronicles via Delta... after all, the words "Aerial Cavalry" and "Aerial Knights" are only like one kanji apart.) My conclusion, back when the Macross Delta Blu-rays were still coming out, was that the VF-1EX fell victim to copy-pasting of a template for VF specs when the liner notes were being written and that it was supposed to be a fairly standard VF-1 with a 14,700kgf engine output. The points I feel argue in favor of that conclusion are: The VF-1EX's engine model is given as FF-2001 and their maximum thrust is expressed not in kilonewtons but in kilograms-force. Macross has been using kilonewtons exclusively for thrust figures since Macross Zero, which suggests they're copying from an older book. The engines are described as Stage II, but with no letter... the engines in Macross Delta's new VFs were all described as "Stage IIC" or "Stage IIG". The FF-2001 was not a Stage II engine. Its top speed is given as Mach 2.89 @ 10km, slightly faster than the VF-1A/D/J/S Valkyrie but slightly slower than the VF-1X+ Valkyrie Plus the Special Forces were using in VF-X2. The thrust figure given, 147,000kgf, has precisely one zero too many to neatly slot it into the power band that'd produce performance slightly higher than the VF-1 and slightly lower than the VF-1X+. The description provided identifies it as a VF-1 that's been retrofitted with cockpit hardware from a current-gen VF. Nothing is said about retrofitting it to accept engines from a current gen VF, or the inertia store converter that'd be necessary to survive going balls-out in a VF with Stage II engines. Less than half that engine power was enough to create g-forces that turned Guld into a flight suit full of chunky salsa. The last time some nutter tried, in-universe, to retrofit a VF-1 to accept engines which were several times more powerful than what it was designed to accept (but still less than half the output of the VF-1EX liner notes) the result described as "unreasonable modification" and is noted to have been extremely difficult to control even for an experienced special forces ace, liable to turn into a fireball as a result of even a slight output control error, and so unstable that it broke down all the time. All told, my suspicion is that the VF-1EX is actually equipped with a pair of FF-2001 thermonuclear reaction turbine engines just like on the original VF-1 and consumer market models, and that that engine is rated for 14,700kgf (144.16kN) at 100% power. (Since this is a late-block model, I'd be inclined to suspect its overboost maximum is 240% power, as shown on the Block 6+ controls.)

That dead horse has a beating coming, never apologize for wanting the best girl to get her due! (Yes, I'm am unapologetic Mirage fanboy.)

If it were one or two things, eh... but Delta did an indecent, almost UC Gundam-esque amount of borrowing from its predecessor. (Perhaps the most blatant instance being that Delta straight up copied the entire ending of Frontier, Grace and Roid literally have the exact same endgame accomplished AND foiled the same way. Honorable mention to the VF-31's tech specs, which showed the VF-31 to be made mostly of off-the-shelf VF-25 parts.) I'd have liked to see Delta come up with its own highly memorable moments of awesome. With aces practically coming out of the woodwork, it's not like they didn't have incentive. (I mean, hey... Keith managed one.)