Chronocidal
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Given some of the changes they made, I don't think they gave a flying crap about any line art from anything. My brain is waffling back and forth over what fraction of ass this effort can be considered. Kinda feels like the "contractual obligation album" of Macross DX releases. On the plus side.. maybe the prices will tank like the Sv-262, and I'll be able to pick up a spare for my brother on the cheap.
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Yeah, I'm genuinely baffled by the change, and actually caved to curiosity and ordered one at BBTS just to experiment with it. I really just wonder if the joint is just tight enough that most people don't realize it can move, or if they actually disabled it.
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What I'm saying is that the green colored area and red colored area should be different, because they're designed that way on purpose on actual aircraft. What they did was duplicate control surface panel lines from the top of the wing that should not exist on the underside of the wing. If this was a car, the equivalent would be if they drew the outlines of a sun roof on the underside of the car. It has no reason to be there. All it really amounts to is laziness on the part of the CAD artists responsible for designing the molds, since they just copy-pasted the panel details to both sides of the wings. Anyhow, not sure if I can justify picking up any of these. Looks like the baby of a Yamato and a Bandai DX. Not really bad at all, but I don't need more VF-1s in that same scale that don't really offer anything new that I like better than what already exists. Can't deny the battroid is more imposing, but I'm not a huge fan of panel lining and black landing gear. The nosecone joint seems to always be off-center too, and those elbows hurt to look at. Also.. speaking of the elbows, just browsing back, I see this.. Seriously, what is even happening with these elbows? Did they accidentally glue the first joint in place, and no one can move it? Edit: Actually, one fun question, do the wings on this one ratchet? Not that I'm going to pick one up just because of that, but it is definitely something I'd like to see.
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Wait, the VF-19 Advance tails are pinned? I thought they were just a much better snap than the YF-19 got? Looking at mine, I don't see any way to get a pin in there, the tails are solid plastic.. They don't want to pop off though, so I'm not going to force them to check.
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To be entirely fair, they did make the nozzles a bit more tapered than you usually see. It's not really hard to think of them as nosecones, especially if they aren't hollow.
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You're thinking of the trailing edge flaps, which are primarily things that only fold down, not up, unlike the toys with moving surfaces that just use simple one-piece flaps that go up and down, and aren't really accurate to anything. A lot of the details on the VF-1 were based off of the F-14's wing design, which uses spoilers on the upper surface to control roll at low speeds. I think a fair number of airliners use them as well. They're just pop-up panels on the upper surface of the wing used for control and air-braking on the ground. Those panels shouldn't exist on the underside of the wing, and the proportions on both top and bottom are all out of whack anyhow. They're pretty much just a minimum effort attempt at panel lines, which is sadly all you can really expect from any manufacturer that doesn't specifically focus on detailed aircraft replicas. If you want a good example of how they should look, check out these posts. detailing the process of customizing an old Jetfire to have all of the proper control surfaces.
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Obvious visually, but it's still confusing. I just wondered if they over-engineered the entire thing, and gave it a triple joint, and people are just not moving the part that would look better instead.
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Maybe I'm missing something here, but do the elbows just not rotate at the forearm joint at all? All the pictures seem to show them stationary, with all of the motion happening with the skinny extension piece. That video seems like it confirms it.. the entire lowest segment of the arm looks stuck permanently in the forearm armor, despite being curved as if it's supposed to rotate.
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I hate that the parts that rankle me the most are the stupid changes Bandai made for absolutely no other reason than "We like this better than the official line art." It's stuff that's completely and utterly inconsequential to the design, and how it functions.. but they decided they wanted to change it anyway. (Yes, I'm still salty about the misshapen canopy and tails, among other things. The tails especially bother me, because an early prototype had them correct, and they changed them to be wrong. )
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Not when the upper surface of the wings have spoilers that only exist on the top side by design. Hasegawa went ham and just copy-pasted most of the panel lines of an F-14's wing, but Yamato/Arcadia and Bandai both changed the spoilers into a blank panel on the underside of the wings. Unfortunately, the panel lining just makes it stick out more than it would otherwise.
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Two things sticking out to me in particular: - Those are some pretty gnarly looking elbow joints, flexibility aside. - I can't un-see the upper wing panel lines duplicated on the underside. At least they didn't double up the NO STEP Markings.
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Very likely several months later, judging by how much later their release dates tend to be than Japanese sites. Boy do I ever wish Bandai would just abandon its obsession with those stupid spring pins though.. looking at those elbow joints hurts my soul.
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And... forgot to fold back down the lights on the wings. I'm still trying to figure out if the arms are actually as tiny as they look, or the view and angle are fooling me.
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Not sure you can compare this one to the re-release of the YF-19 though. The demand for the original with all of the accessories remains much higher that I've seen, and while it's nice to have a budget version available, it's more like a consolation prize for the people who missed out on the better one.
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Hah, bravo! I was already blown away with the flaps, but you keep adding more levels to this.
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I had to think about that one a moment, that first image was definitely not the new set you were talking about.
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Hah, fair enough! I can't imagine they'd be "easy" to implement either, since the wings aren't nearly as thick as an F-14's.
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Doing the spoilers next?
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Macross Plus Ultimate Edition Blu-ray Release Thread
Chronocidal replied to sh9000's topic in Movies and TV Series
I'm not going to claim to be any sort of expert on animation production requirements in Japan, but I could see it potentially being some annoying limitation of the contracts involved in the transfer of the footage of both versions into an HD format. The other thing that occurs to me is that maybe the rights to the dub are somehow tied to the combination release, and they don't have permission to release them separately, or that it doesn't make financial sense to try selling them individually. It would be silly, but I could imagine the voice rights being so prohibitively costly that the OVA on its own would already cost nearly as much as the combination pack. -
Apologies for the zombie resurrection, but just received an interesting email from Master Replicas. They are running out the remaining stock of their Trek ships, but it looks like they are planning to continue some of the other franchises they've picked up, and look to be expanding in the future. Happy to see they are continuing the BSG line, and expanding more on the Stargate products, but the last section has me intrigued. "Ships from one of the greatest games ever made" has me incredibly curious, because it's such a broad subject to cover, and I have no idea what genre they might even be talking about. Given the recent sequel, I could easily see them making some Homeworld ships, but I would be absolutely over the moon to see anything from something like the Wing Commander or Freespace franchises. There are probably a lot of other options in arcade shooters as well, but I can't say those sorts of franchises would fit the sort of "collection" format they tend to focus on. The "classic sci-fi TV series" could also be any number of things, but I'm crossing my fingers for Babylon 5. The wild variety of designs from that show would make it easy to build a collection from. I'm kind of struggling to come up with more candidates than that though, outside of maybe a ship or two from Buck Rogers. I know there are a lot more series they could pull from (Space Above and Beyond, maybe?), but I don't know of a lot of really popular ones with more than one or two ship designs they could market. I'll need to expand my display space if they start making too many more classics though.
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That might be where some of the price discrepancy comes from then. I was just looking at the 40k yen as the normal retail price, but it looks like every retailer selling it is just adding a typical proxy fee on top of the MSRP for ordering directly from Bandai.
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I never tried any of the PSP ones, but based on what I read of the controls, Macross 30 was a huge leap in functionality. I did try the DYRL game included in the Blu-Ray release, and that felt very frustrating to play in comparison, but the combat for 30 was much better. I think the only "bad" part was that the battroid sections never felt as natural as any of the fighter or gerwalk sections, and it never felt like you had a reason to use battroid, unless it was a specifically contrived requirement that forced you to use it.
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There might be an inverted percentage involved in that 66%, since I think it should be 33%. But no, it's not accounting for shipping, tax, or whatever other international blood sacrifice we're paying to Bandai to get them to ship things here. Raw shelf price of about 40,000 yen comes to about $255 right now. BBTS is adding $95 on top of that, plus $4 shipping. Coupled with a local tax rate of about 10% (calling California the worst case scenario, because let's face it, it is), that's about another $35 on top, which while I've never used it personally, I'm betting would probably cover slow boat shipping. Ends up being roughly $290 vs $390. Definitely not a 66% difference, but depending on tax and shipping, you're still looking at a difference of up to $100. You might be able to work that down to closer to $50 depending on circumstances, but however you look at it, they're really not making the import options attractive. It almost feels like a tolerance test to gauge just how desperate international customers are to actually get any of these products imported.
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Yeah, the local markup makes this way more expensive. That's about a $100 markup over my copy from Japan, and that's not even taking sales tax into account. The free shipping at BBTS does help a little, but even then you're still saving over $50 importing it. To be sort of fair though, I think the original cost at release for the combined VF-25S and proxy-bought armor set was about that much when all was said and done.
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I really think the VF-1, and maybe Macross releases as a whole, threw an orbital strike-sized wrench into Bandai's typical mentality and approach to exclusive items. When all of your exclusives are one-off custom upgrades to individual mechs that you don't plan on re-releasing, yeah, single-issue exclusives make more sense. Once you cross that bridge into releasing vehicles that all use the same standard set of equipment, you've introduced a huge problem to that way of thinking. You've now made an item that every release in the franchise can use. If you intend to keep releasing more things that can use those add-ons, you'd best revisit the idea of making more. At this point, I think they're finally at least slightly waking up to the ridiculous market situation their practices have produced. As insanely overdue as it is, if we're finally getting a reissue of Ozma's armor pack in any form, I think pretty much anything is possible. I think what prompted them to release as many runs of the missiles as they did though is a byproduct of their past history. Collectors know how Bandai behaves, and so they may have attempted to stockpile all the missiles for all of the VF-1s they ever planned to buy in the future. Bandai was probably not prepared for that level of demand, because the orders they received could very well have exceeded the number of DX VF-1s they had even produced by that point.
