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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    As a casual Star Wars viewer, I definitely don't feel like the trailers for The Acolyte warned me to lower my expectations for the series. IMO, both the trailers and the extended preview for The Acolyte made the series look far more action-focused and exciting than what we actually got. They also made it look a LOT more professional-feeling and polished than the finished product by showcasing the action rather than the writing and omitting the truly cringeworthy aspects of the scenes they'd used for the promotional materials like Mae's unintentionally hilarious tendency to pose dramatically and challenge Jedi to "attack [her] with all [their] strength". I had the same thought. Specifically, the Jedi in The Acolyte remind me a lot of the Vulcans from Star Trek: Enterprise. They exhude that same arrogant belief in their own superiority, they show the same unwillingness to consider evidence that contradicts their own conclusions until hard evidence leaves their view in tatters, and they show similar cracks in their emotional reserve where irritation leaks out into snide and snippy responses when one of their perceived inferiors isn't toeing the line. Master Sol is no exception to most of this too. Look at how readily he dismisses Yord's views out of hand except when they align to his own desires. Lee Jung-jae's delivery as Master Sol reminds me a lot of Gary Graham's performance as Minister Soval later in Enterprise's run after his character's racist views toward Humans had softened.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    If you use the coupon codes previously mentioned, the price difference is only about $19, not $50. Way too many people here are blowing this out of proportion. Limited Edition releases are ALWAYS stupidly expensive, especially for anime, and most of the price difference people are seeing is because the US release is being sold at MSRP if you don't use the discount codes and because the UK price posted doesn't include VAT until you actually put it in your cart.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    You clearly did, considering you forgot to account for it in the final price you converted to US dollars. As for why it's so expensive, I think the obvious answer is this is a low volume product by dint of being limited edition. They have to amortize the costs for licensing all of that additional material in the purchase price If they want to make a profit.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... not s'much. You're forgetting that those European prices aren't all-inclusive either. You've forgotten the Value Added Tax. The base price might say 99.99 GBP, but that's 119.99 GBP with VAT factored in, or about $153.47 at the current exchange rate. The French are paying 139.99 euro for the same, which is $152.52. (VAT's 20% in the UK and France, if you were wondering... while US sales tax averages 5-7%.) And that's only considering the "early bird special" pricing with limited unit numbers in smaller markets... the suggested retail price that they list is actually almost exactly we'd be paying without discounts (~$190). Crunchyroll is basically charging non-subscribers a premium to order it through their store... but if you actually use the discount codes the price delta between what we're paying and what our friends in Europe are paying is only about $19 US. That's hardly extortionate. (Esp. when you consider how much more they likely had to pay for the legacy English audio tracks.) (For anyone wondering, I did go in and set up dummy orders to check the actual prices... I used 10 Downing Street and 57 Rue de Varenne as addresses to check if there'd be shipping costs, it seems we all get free shipping out of this extravagant price tag.)
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Considering how many folks here cheerfully plonk down comparable (and larger) sums for the latest DX Chogokin and Arcadia offerings, I'm not sure this could be called "$100 too expensive" for most. And there's going to be a regular edition coming out a bit after the "Ultimate" one at a far more reasonable price point anyway.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Even if she does, there's no payoff. Master Indara's less a character than she is a plot device, and it's pretty clear they only cast Carrie-Anne Moss to play her for the sake of the trailers to convince prospective xennial viewers this'd be a spectacular martial arts feature like The Matrix. (Which is a REALLY dated reference if you think about it. They were leaning on borrowed gloss from a TWENTY-FIVE YEAR OLD movie to sell this series to us.)
  7. Seto Kaiba
    ... so it is. $179.66 at the current rate of 1:155.85, so if you get all the discounts the US release is slightly cheaper than the Japanese one... and you won't have to pay another $40 or so on top in shipping.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    It's 15 off the discounted price if you stack it with the Crunchyroll member discount, as far as I can tell. Crunchyroll's member discount shaves $19 off the top, bringing it to $170.99 plus tax and with free shipping.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Well, I placed my order... the Crunchyroll member discount and coupon code took a neat little chunk off the top and the shipping's free. The asking price didn't seem that outrageous to me. Then again, my standards have probably been skewed pretty badly by years and years of paying the already hefty prices fans in Japan are shelling out for "limited edition" media PLUS international shipping. 😅
  10. Seto Kaiba
    By sheer coincidence, I noticed a minor call forward in The Acolyte's first episode. The planet that... ... first appeared in Star Wars: the Clone Wars as the setting for a brief story arc where the son of an assassinated Separatist senator derailed peace talks on Mandalore and tried to hire the Death Watch to assassinate Count Dooku as revenge. That episode just happened to be next on my watch-through of Clone Wars after watching The Acolyte.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Goin' in for number two... For all Disney+'s usual polish, I really cannot get past how there's this weird imbalance of production values where set design, wardrobe design, and the writing make this feel a lot lower budget than it is. Even though I didn't care for Obi-Wan Kenobi or The Book of Boba Fett, both were still very polished-looking, professional-feeling undertakings that felt like their main flaw was just an unnecessary or underdeveloped premise. The Acolyte weirdly feels like it lacks that polish and professional tone... like it's a high-budget fan film. Believing whatever you're told without evidence seems to be a bit of a theme with this series. OK, I'll admit it... I asked for non-heroic Jedi and the The Acolyte delivered exactly what I literally asked for. I was just expecting something more... fun? Personable? Capable of displaying more emotions than "deadpan" and "dull surprise"? These Jedi are non-heroic, but it's mostly just because they're awful judges of character and kind of sh*tty people. Which is realistic, I guess, it's just not very fun or interesting. This really is just a full-on f***ing idiot plot. This story can ONLY occur because everyone in it is behaving like the biggest idiot possible at all times. Seriously. What the hell. If this is how the Jedi protected the peace in the Republic for thousands of years, it's amazing it took another 113 years for them to get Order 66'd. There it is... the obligatory "I have a bad feeling about this". On the whole, The Acolyte's second episode was definitely better than the first. It has all the same problems, but the plot feels at least a little more together and flows better from set piece to set piece. It's still an idiot plot, but it's no longer an incoherent one. If it were handled differently - like having civilian law enforcement trying to solve these murders instead of the Jedi - The Acolyte could be an interesting story about hunting a killer out for revenge across the stars. Its main narrative flaw is that most of its cast are Jedi. They've got some good actors here but their performances come across as wooden and boring because they're playing characters for whom displays of emotion are fundamentally out of character. By the same token, the antagonist's performance comes across just as bland and insipid despite a capable actress the character is limited to the extremes of just a few emotions like anger and sorrow. So it leaves just two people in the story thus far who actually behave like relatable people, so the performances don't really shine because they're sharing every scene with flat characters. The Jedi just aren't relatable as characters. Audiences can relate to Din Djarin's desire to protect the Child, to Boba Fett's desire for a better life, to Obi-Wan's lingering guilt over Anakin, or to Cassian Andor's smoldering discontent with the injustices he suffers. There's nothing to relate to in Sol, Indara, Yord, etc. thus far. Even Osha's participation in the story seems little more than incidental.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    All right... wading into this one while the fine folks from animal control de-bat my attic. (No, that isn't a euphemism for anything.)🤣 Well, the first casualty of this roaring rampage of revenge is my immersion. RIP, you were with us for only two minutes and just three lines of (intelligible) spoken dialog, but forever in our hearts.💀 Who wrote this crap? Oh... Leslye Headland, the executive producer, wrote this. Delightful. That bodes SO WELL for this show. After all that fuss and being so prominent in the advertising, Carrie-Anne Moss... Can we briefly stop to appreciate that we have a character who is a repair technician on a ship whose owners don't care about workplace safety who is named Osha? As in, Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Naming wise, this is up there with the likes of Cad Bane, Moralo Eval, or Darth Sideous. This seems to be an authentic idiot plot so far. The story is only able to proceed because everyone involved (most of them Jedi) behaves in the stupidest manner possible. It really is remarkable how remarkably unlikeable all of these characters are. All in all... ugh. One episode down and I am already ready to call this one the worst of the Disney Star Wars shows so far. It's not a slow start. There's a LOT going on here and a lot to unpack. It's just that all of it is nonsensical and it's packaged with some of the worst acting and writing I've seen since the prequel trilogy.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Well, I'm game. This looks like it'll be a good set.👍
  14. Seto Kaiba
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, you're not wrong... at this stage of the game, the audience score is all but completely meaningless. It'll only start to become a viable metric once RT clears out the pre-release review bombing by toxic Star Wars fans, the season has aired in full, and a few months have passed for them to accumulate a decent body of reviews by people who've actually watched it.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Critic scores are almost completely meaningless these days. Too many of the critical reviews are bought-and-paid-for by the major studios and the networks. If you look at RT's new releases on streaming, 80% is practically the floor for critical review scores on anything new. For proof, just look at Paramount+'s recently concluded flagship series Star Trek: Discovery. Its critical score average across five seasons was 84%, on a series that did so poorly worldwide that its sponsor tried to cancel it three separate times before selling the rights back to Paramount at a loss to be rid of it. The audience score average? 34%. The delta between the critic score and audience score got as wide as 67% during the show's run. The only way that happens is if the critics are either completely out of touch or the studio's putting its finger on the scale... and I don't doubt for a second that's already happening with The Acolyte too, regardless of where its audience score eventually stabilizes because that's marketing.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Me too. IMO, that we're seeing plenty of the xenos in the trailers isn't a great sign... that's a pretty good indicator we're headed more into the slasher flick territory of Alien 3, Resurrection, and Covenant than the horror of the original and Isolation game.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Hrm... I wonder why Rolling Stone and a few others withdrew their reviews then? Disney's Ministry of Truth (marketing dept) got 'em, maybe? 🤣 Ah well, I'm headed into this one with my expectations kept pretty low. Three seasons of The Clone Wars and counting has, if anything, reinforced my opinion that Force users are the least interesting characters in any Star Wars story. A story that's positively infested by them doesn't appeal much. I'm open to having my mind changed, though. After all, I do love Andor and that started out feeling like an advertisement for Dramatic Walking as a cinematic device the same way Battlefield Earth is an advertisement for Dutch Angles. 🤣 I was going to make a joke about how I'm keeping my expectations low enough that only Master Sol spending the entire first episode in the john coping with the aftermath of a questionable food truck taco could truly make it unwatchable... but then I realized that would actually just make him the single most relatable Jedi in the franchise.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    We've seen multiple approaches, if we consider Master File as well. Macross the Ride's VF-0改 "Zeak" [sic]* was only superficially a VF-0. It faithfully recreated the appearance and transformation of the VF-0, but "under the hood" the VF-0改 was for all practical intents and purposes a VF-25A-0. Macross 30's VF-0 Replica is a less extreme example that follows the same basic approach as the VF-0改. It was a reproduction VF-0 made with more modern materials and using systems from Shinsei Industry's VF-5000 and VF-1C** including thermonuclear reaction turbine engines. (That makes it something akin to an upgraded version of Master File's VF-0+ Phoenix Plus, which was a VF-0 upgraded with the VF-1's engines and some other improvements that was supposedly used in the closing days of the Unification Wars, which may have been used in Macross the First as well based on creator commentary.) Variable Fighter Master File: VF-0 Phoenix's VF-0 "The Nostalgia" was a true reproduction of the VF-0 in as close to the state it was actually flown in as possible. It was built as a private project by Shinsei Industry staff based on the analysis of wreckage of two VF-0A's that were recovered from the ruins of Edwards Air Force Base after the First Space War.*** * Should be "Zeke" not "Zeak", it's one of several Macross R references to World War II-era aircraft... in this case, the Allied nickname for the Mitsubishi A6M Zero. ** A civilian-use VF-1 variant that appeared in the Macross Frontier short story Actor's Sky and the Macross Frontier novelization. It's used as a flight training aircraft at Mihoshi Academy, and was used by the actor who played Shin Kudo in the Bird Human movie filmed in Macross Frontier's TV series as part of research to play the character. *** Said by Master File to have been No.07 and No.13 from the CVN-99 Asuka II's carrier air wing, which were damaged beyond repair during the Mayan Island incident and transferred to Edwards AFB for storage before the First Space War ruined everything.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    It seems that a couple of entertainment news outlets like Rolling Stone either weren't aware of, or forgot, that The Acolyte doesn't drop until 9pm today and briefly published their reviews from the screening events early. The articles have since been taken down, but they made no secret of their dislike for the series. Rolling Stone's article was titled "The Acolyte Review: This Star Wars prequel series isn't a Force to be reckoned with - Even a veteran Jedi master would lose their patience with this latest Disney+ addition to the canon, which focuses on a pair of twins and revenge, and... zzzzz." (It still shows up as the top search on Google, though the article itself now returns a 404 error.) That said, the same reviewer (Alan Sepinwall) absolutely loathed Andor season one... the best-written, best-acted, most profound piece of media Star Wars has produced since the franchise was sold to Disney by a comically gargantuan margin and IMO a supremely strong contender for the single best-written Star Wars story ever made. So it's worth taking that opinion with a piece of salt big enough to build another Starkiller Base on..
  21. Seto Kaiba
    The whole situation is made worse by the fact there are at least two VF-0 models that are built by post 2012 Shinsei Industry between the official setting and Master File. In Master File, Shinsei Industry was responsible for a reproduction VF-0 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the first space war armistice. In Macross 30, they're presumably the ones behind the reproduction VF-0 models that are used all over Uroboros.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah... Stonewell AND Bellcom vs. Stonewell Bellcom is one of those long-running inconsistencies in how the company names are presented in Macross publications. I mentioned it a while ago while I was going over the VF-0 book, but Master File took a whack at explaining away the inconsistency as "Stonewell Bellcom" being a joint venture by the separate companies Stonewell and Bellcom dedicated to variable fighter development. That's the thing... the founded-in-2012 Shinsei Industry was the ONLY company named Shinsei in the setting until Macross Zero. The Macross Plus and Macross 7-era materials all list only three companies involved in the creation of Shinsei in 2012: Stonewell, Bellcom, and Shinnakasu. The creative team working on Macross Zero seems to have forgotten that Shinsei Industry was founded after the First Space War and erroneously credited them as codevelopers on the VF-0... four years before the company was founded in-universe. The "second Shinsei" mentioned in Macross the Ride and Macross Chronicle appears to be an attempt by the creators to explain this continuity problem away by breaking the One Steve Limit and retroactively adding this second Shinsei company to the aforementioned merger which previously did not mention or include any such company. Master File, as noted, attempts to explain this in more detail by claiming the pre-war Shinsei Industry (written 新星工業 as opposed to 新星インダストリー) was a developer of land warfare weapons systems and subsidiary of shipbuilding firm Yashu Heavy Industries. (And yes, the fact that they're both named Shinsei Industry really takes the cake...)
  23. Seto Kaiba
    The reason for this confusion just hit me. Macross Plus and Macross 7-era materials describe Shinsei as a new company that emerged out of the merger of Stonewell, Bellcom, and Shinnakasu Heavy Industries. Macross Zero-era materials inexplicably mention Shinsei as an involved party in the development of the VF-0 despite that being set four years before Shinsei was previously said to have been founded. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-0 Phoenix offers some mild clarification/explanation in its development history of the VF-0. It asserts that the original Shinsei Corporation was a land warfare weapons company and subsidiary of Yashu Heavy Industries, the shipbuilding firm that would go on to design the Macross Quarter-class.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    I don't think so, no... If you go back to the materials for Macross Plus and Macross 7 - e.g. This is Animation Special: Macross Plus - there is no mention of a fourth company named Shinsei going into the merger. "Development began as a joint project between Shinnakasu Heavy Industries and Stonewell Bellcom in 2011. However, in 2012, just one year after development began, the aircraft development divisions of Shinnakasu Heavy Industries and Stonewell Bellcom merged to form the new Shinsei Industry, making this [the VF-5000] the first aircraft developed by Shinsei Industry." - This is Animation Special: Macross Plus pg68 3rd sentence. I'll check more extensively later today, but I'm reasonably sure that most other works that discuss the merger don't mention a fourth company already named Shinsei in the merger that produced Shinsei Industry. EDIT: Macross Chronicle's Worldguide Sheet 06A "Military Manufacturers" describes Shinsei industry in the same terms as above.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    ... having zero familiarity with the content creator in question, I question the necessity of the jab at their content. Yes... but not to the extent shown in that YouTube video. I'm guessing whatever models they're using - physical or CG - are not built to the same scale. It's like they used a 1/60 scale Valkyrie next to a 1/72 scale Legioss. Macross's VF-1 Valkyrie is 12.68m tall in Battroid mode. MOSPEADA's AFC-01 Legioss is 8.75m tall in Armo-Soldier mode. As such, the Legioss should be approximately 2/3 as tall as the Valkyrie if both are in their respective humanoid robot forms.
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