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Author Topic: I like anime, do you like anime?  (Read 3123164 times)

Neonivek

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Re: I like anime, do you like anime?
« Reply #29280 on: October 12, 2016, 06:41:32 am »

Reelya :P the hypothetical Battletech with Justin Beiber was Live Action :P

Oddly enough for one or two anime's in particular they got the original singers of the Japanese version of the song... to sing the English one (with the same hilarious pronunciation issues.)
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Max™

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Re: I like anime, do you like anime?
« Reply #29281 on: October 12, 2016, 06:48:02 am »

I am glad that I moved away from the Palladium mechanics to the Mutants and Masterminds system, but it is probably why I look at the whole Robotech series differently. It's been a while since I had the Southern Cross book, it was always harder to find anyways, but I recall that they initially used the giant clones for mining, then they encountered the Invid and protoculture, and this allows them the option of making mecha and such for said giant miners, they set them up as a military force, THEN since they needed to delegate out various responsbilities to captains and whatnot in the field they had to be smarter than the average drones (who are literally 30~ foot tall children trained to fight) and some of those wound up stealing the secrets of protoculture and escaping to set up their own little empire.

Feeding giants who you can shrink to human size at will is rather silly, and there are green and blue and whatnot hair people later on, humans took a race of giant cousins who had only known warfare and showed them how to live like little people who do things besides fight and die.

The Masters track down the rebels and their new family, who seem to have lived on this planet for a puzzlingly long time, they fight, we fight, drive them off, then the Invid go "HAI I HURD U GUIZ LIEK FLOWER OF LIFE" and start blowing shit up.


Also, I have no clue about "jingoistic WWII victory music" but the Macross one was pretty generic 80's anime music, I liked that Robotech had this big bombastic piece for no reason.
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Furtuka

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Re: I like anime, do you like anime?
« Reply #29282 on: October 12, 2016, 07:19:11 am »

I can respect Robotech as something that was necessary for its time, but Harmony Gold's bullshit has pretty much used up any and all of whatever good-will the show deserved. And that aside even back when I watched it as a little kid the damn frankenshow made no sense due to the canon welding and protoculture fuel nonsense until I looked up its origins online.

...also Robotech Minmay is a terrible singer.
« Last Edit: October 12, 2016, 07:29:46 am by Furtuka »
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Frumple

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Re: I like anime, do you like anime?
« Reply #29283 on: October 12, 2016, 07:48:55 am »

Deploy the wall!
Jack Kirby's books were retconned to not actually be very official I believe. He probably took a lot more from the wider Macross franchise than the TV guys ever did.

Well, sounds like they've retconned that the Zentraedi sort of faded away, but it really is just to justify how they magically vanish after episode 36. Even a warlike militaristic culture is plenty of "culture" even if they don't know about singing, swimsuit competitions and soda. So I find the idea that they just blended into nothingness because they "lacked culture" to be more of an apologist thing for the cracks in the series than anything else. After all, they did have huge fleets of very distinctive spacecraft, thousands of years worth of tradition and technology. Where did that all go? We're supposed to believe that tech that humans cobbled together in a decade from one single crashed alien ship out-competed every single alien-designed war machine from a 500,000 year old spacefaring race, basically overnight. After all, the series makes the point more than once that humans know literally jack shit about space warfare, yet our earth-based designs cobbled together overnight just happen to trump literally every device created by a race that had been fighting space wars for 500 millennia.
... the uh, thing you seem to be missing, is that the zentraedi knew roughly jack shit about the stuff they were using. Basically everything that wasn't combat was handled by the masters (with rare exception ala Exedore, and even his shtick was mostly that he was a once-in-a-generation genius), right up to and including basic ship maintenance (it's actually a plot point somewhere or another, with zentraedi ships having mechanical difficulties due to degradation because their crew had no sodding clue about what basically anything did or how to fix it when it broke). The zentraedi were not a race that stood on their own -- they were warlike and militaristic, but they were also a slave race, literally created to serve another one, and intentionally kept in technological ignorance and away from cultural influences to make control an easier thing.* That's why the culture thing happened like it did, with the humans managing to get communication going on with the zentraedi when they were far away from the Masters' influence and on a mission that wasn't explicit genocide (which was mostly how they avoided the problem before that point -- the masters just gave their soldiers orders to murder pretty much absolutely everything that tried to talk to them). It's also why there just wasn't much zentraedi culture to overwrite. Basically the closest thing they had to that was some engineered in aggression, with almost everything else being "Obey the Robot Masters". They had combat and some industrial (mostly focused around extraction) skills (and that wasn't the terribly impressive; most of it was just due to their size) and... pretty much nothing else.

And... yeah, you actually seem to have no idea what the SDF is. The humans didn't cobble together something that happened to trump every device created by a race that had been waging galactic wars of genocide for millennium, they took the mostly intact masterpiece culmination of technology that said race's more or less most brilliant scientist ever made, that had a working mcguffin device that could power literal galactic empires, and then got it moving again. That's the SDF 1; Zor made that thing, it was barely damaged by its crash (or at least the important parts were), and it took humans decades of freakish magic space plant/energy exposure on top of a few ridiculously capable experts (and Zor clones, don't forget the Zor clones) to even start to understand the thing, though they at least got it working (mostly) before that point. And all that on top of the zentraedi not really knowing how to use a lot of their material -- it's (or at least was) canon that the post-war human/zentraedi organization managed to get some of the remains of the initial fleet to work several times more effectively than the zentraedi alone did; the Factory Satellite being a primary example of that. The humans have a hell of a time when they run into the actual Robot Masters, and a large chunk of the reason they didn't get just straight up exterminated at that point was because the RMs were facing a seriously major energy crisis, on top of a fair glob of other stuff. They got their asses kicked to a fair extent even with a number of years of extended R&D supplemented by what the zentraedi was able to help with and what amounted to a protoculture rosetta stone (in the form the SDF); just about the only reason the first war didn't end with no more humans was because the RMs weren't there, and were stingy about their technology when it came to independent zentraedi forces (and even then, the zens actually did have mechs that strictly outperformed the veritech and battroid stuff, with the female elites being an example). Plus the zentraedi, like the RMs themselves, were fairly badly energy starved at that point.

I'd probably guess part of the problem you're having comparing the tech is that most of the screen-time stuff we have (even with the supplementary stuff) is focused on ace pilots, many of them basically inhumanly (sometimes literally, sometimes very literally once protoculture shenanigans really start kicking in) skilled. The veritech stuff helped a bit with unexpected movement and whatnot, but to a large extent even with that most of the time the RDF forces barely held on, if at all. It took a lot of things going the humans' way to make robotech happen, from a canon perspective (and do remember, they still lost >70% of the human population and the Earth ended up with ~95% of the surface hit with orbital bombardment). There wasn't actually many instances of technological parity except when the SDF got involved... and again, the humans didn't make that. Just incredibly skilled pilots that happened to have tech that let them leverage that abnormally well and said oversized mcguffin mcguffin carrier.

... though yeah, as per furt, the supplementary material outside the actual TV series really did a hell of a good job of making sense of the series itself. The books were the big one, but even other stuff (comics, games, etc.) helped a fair bit, too.

*And if you think that's stupid, you wouldn't entirely be wrong. Iirc there were protoculture exposure issues among other things that had been screwing with the RMs' minds for a long, long time. They were basically brilliant with incredibly bloody impressive technology, but also effectively brain damaged and acting fairly erratically because of it, on top of just kinda' being colossal jackasses to begin with.
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Reelya

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Re: I like anime, do you like anime?
« Reply #29284 on: October 12, 2016, 09:10:36 am »

I get what you're saying, but you're basically justifying the made-up cruft they added to Robotech by citing other made-up cruft they added to Robotech. It doesn't iron over the discrepancies at all, because it was literally just additional cruft they glued onto the series to try and justify how clunky everything is.

The whole thing about Zor's battleship was itself idiotic. Why did the most powerful race in the universe put the entire supply of Protoculture on one ship, and if it's so vital to every race building mecha, how is a 4-million strong fleet able to even operate without it? For several decades. And it doesn't gel as an explanation to say that they merely couldn't build more mecha without it, because in the final arc of Robotech/Macross the allies capture a space-station which is geared to churn out Zentraedi mecha.

And the leader of that fleet actually orders the SDF-1 blown up, which should logically fuck themselves completely over, since they'd be permanently out of Protoculture and no longer able to resupply said battle fleet. Then there are another two invasions of powerful races who are somehow able to invade Earth despite not having any protoculture at all for many decades (if not millennia in the Invid case), as we are repeatedly told that the only supply is on Earth, and the Mars Expedition is also able to invade Earth, even though they shouldn't logically have Protoculture on Mars either: since it's stated to all be on Earth. So for something so supposedly vital that everyone needs, lacking it is never actually shown to impede any race in the slightest.

Also, at the start of Robotech, Roy mentions that SDF-1 was "built for giants" - i.e. Zentraedi. But it's supposed to be Zor's battleship built and run by Robotech Masters, who aren't giants and don't have giant troops on their ships, and the giants (in Robotech) specifically mention that it's Zor's Robotech Master's battleship. Yet when the giants turn up, they're absolutely gobsmacked that human-sized people even exist. Didn't they know that their commanders the Robotech Masters and Zor weren't actually giants, and how does this gel with the flat-out statement that Zor's battleship was made for giants? I can't see any way to resolve that without retconning almost all the TV dialogue out.

And no, I don't think it counts if the Jack Kirby novels rewrite all the dialogue to avoid the issues. I'm talking about the issues with the original complete series adaptation. The novels are their own separate continuity.

I can respect Robotech as something that was necessary for its time, but Harmony Gold's bullshit has pretty much used up any and all of whatever good-will the show deserved. And that aside even back when I watched it as a little kid the damn frankenshow made no sense due to the canon welding and protoculture fuel nonsense until I looked up its origins online.

...also Robotech Minmay is a terrible singer.
100% this. With added addition that the Mospeada singing is also crud compared to the Mospeada soundtrack.
« Last Edit: October 12, 2016, 12:19:38 pm by Reelya »
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Neonivek

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Re: I like anime, do you like anime?
« Reply #29285 on: October 12, 2016, 09:16:53 am »

Voodoo Sharks! Where the explanation creates more questions then it patches up.
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ToonyMan

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Re: I like anime, do you like anime?
« Reply #29286 on: October 12, 2016, 11:19:45 am »

mwah, hxh has an arc that is genuinely very good somewhere around episode 40(?) or so.
But after that awesome arc there is an extremely meh arc and after that meh arc is an arc that is just plain silly.
But after that awesome arc there is an extremely meh arc and after that meh arc is an arc that is just plain silly.
an arc that is just plain silly.
plain silly.
plain silly
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
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Max™

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Re: I like anime, do you like anime?
« Reply #29287 on: October 12, 2016, 01:05:38 pm »

You know, I don't think I ever finished the Southern Cross part, I watched most of the Mospeada bit since it was on one of the satellite channels that played anime in the mornings for a while. Keep in mind also that over here in the states Robotech was contemporary with Transformers, which runs on nostalgia, and the difference in scale and such between "uh oh, the decepticons are doing something absurd that involves stacking energon bricks against a dam and threatening to blow it up for some reason, again!" and "oh god, I don't even know if there is going to be a home left when we get back from the outer solar system, if we make it back" was awesome as a little kid.

Mostly though I'm just partial because it was one of my favorite settings to tool around in when I was trying to get new players used to the ridiculous Siembieda ruleset (and seriously, how is "owns more than 10 Palladium books and actually understands the rules" not an obvious sign of asperger's, didn't get diagnosed until pretty late, but I feel like it would have been easier to just start explaining the ruleset for resolving a round of combat to the docs than talking about how I came to enjoy the strange rush of anxiety I got when looking people in the eye and ended up with my weirdly focused stare out of habit) and helped paint over or eliminate a lot of the plot holes from smashing the three shows together.

Though I did have to go back and pull apart the stuff we did in our campaign world from the stuff written in the books, like I know a supervillain never opened a rift to pit the Invid against the Xiticix, but I can't remember if the grand cannon was reworked to allow a wider angle of fire or not?
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Reelya

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Re: I like anime, do you like anime?
« Reply #29288 on: October 12, 2016, 01:14:25 pm »

Though I love that the actual Transformers toys were created by the lead mecha designer (and later director) of Macross. Optimus Prime was originally called Battle Convoy, and the transforming flagships in Macross 7 and onwards are always Battle-<something>. So there's technically a nod to Transformers in Macross continuity.
« Last Edit: October 12, 2016, 01:20:40 pm by Reelya »
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Max™

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Re: I like anime, do you like anime?
« Reply #29289 on: October 12, 2016, 01:16:50 pm »

Yeah, the toys were great, and I've got fuzzy memories of the movie... yes, even that fucking song.

...you've got the touch.

...you've got the power!
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Reelya

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Re: I like anime, do you like anime?
« Reply #29290 on: October 12, 2016, 01:20:27 pm »

You know, I don't think I ever finished the Southern Cross part

Technically, nobody did. Southern Cross was actually an unfinished show that was canned for low ratings. So you're not missing much except a lot of dangling plot threads.
« Last Edit: October 12, 2016, 01:31:04 pm by Reelya »
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Max™

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Re: I like anime, do you like anime?
« Reply #29291 on: October 12, 2016, 01:24:10 pm »

(Talking to yourself in my voice, we should both be afraid)

That does sound right though, I can only recall seeing like two or three episodes even? Most of the Masters stuff I know was from the Return of the Masters sourcebook and the Sentinels one.
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Reelya

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Re: I like anime, do you like anime?
« Reply #29292 on: October 12, 2016, 01:33:23 pm »

Macross II is probably a good fit for Robotech fans to go see as well, it's even dubbed in English, and the overall plotline actually gels better with Robotech than Macross in my opinion. It was made entirely by Tatsunoko (who are the Japanese publisher responsible for the Robotech deal), and is hated / retconned out of existence by the original Macross creators.

Furtuka

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Re: I like anime, do you like anime?
« Reply #29293 on: October 12, 2016, 01:33:58 pm »

Yeah, it's actually one of Robotech's few remaining merits that it made Southern Cross watchable. At least from what I've heard surprise about that bit tends to be the reaction when nerds in Japan learn about it.
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Frumple

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Re: I like anime, do you like anime?
« Reply #29294 on: October 12, 2016, 01:36:14 pm »

Can't recall how much of the animated southern cross stuff I saw, tbh. Most of my memory of that line of the series comes from the novels, heh.
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