So I've been watching IBO recently, powered through the awesome first season and I'm just kind of not feeling the second season as much at all; mostly because the antagonists just feel kind of shallow? Iok is the worst and Julieta just kind of comes out of nowhere for someone so hypercompetent. I kind of wish she'd been introduced, even if just fleetingly, in the first season to give some manner of build up to her presence.
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# ? May 4, 2021 04:59 |
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# ? Apr 20, 2024 02:13 |
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Nuebot posted:So I've been watching IBO recently, powered through the awesome first season and I'm just kind of not feeling the second season as much at all; mostly because the antagonists just feel kind of shallow? Iok is the worst and Julieta just kind of comes out of nowhere for someone so hypercompetent. I kind of wish she'd been introduced, even if just fleetingly, in the first season to give some manner of build up to her presence. IIRC they had no idea if there would be a second season until very late in s1, so there was zero chance of setting up stuff for that.
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# ? May 4, 2021 05:12 |
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wdarkk posted:IIRC they had no idea if there would be a second season until very late in s1, so there was zero chance of setting up stuff for that. There was a rough idea what to do with a second season, but it was only in the last five episodes that a second season was locked in, which meant that Mari Okada had to adjust the trajectory of the final episodes pretty late in the game. If you wondered why there were so many fakeout deaths at the end of season 1... there you go. Iok is, indeed, the worst. That's his narrative purpose. He's supposed to be a dude who sucks and who, due to immense privilege, has never had to deal with the fact he sucks.
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# ? May 4, 2021 05:26 |
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Tae posted:Wasn't Zeta's design a response to Macross's popularity and why suddenly everyone transforms for no reason That's what I've heard, and the timeline does roughly line up to support it. Whether it's 100% true is another story.
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# ? May 4, 2021 05:28 |
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It's true. They might never admit it but we all know
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# ? May 4, 2021 05:34 |
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Zeta has great looking stills but really, really cheap animation. Like it doesn't use inbetweens or something half the time. The result is generally nicer looking than 0079 but it's not what I'd really call good, though there is enough to appreciate
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# ? May 4, 2021 05:41 |
chiasaur11 posted:Iok is, indeed, the worst. That's his narrative purpose. He's supposed to be a dude who sucks and who, due to immense privilege, has never had to deal with the fact he sucks. It works because I hate every scene with him, he just snowballs every fuckup into a bigger fuckup.
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# ? May 4, 2021 05:43 |
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chiasaur11 posted:Iok is, indeed, the worst. That's his narrative purpose. He's supposed to be a dude who sucks and who, due to immense privilege, has never had to deal with the fact he sucks. This is all true but it doesn't really change the fact that he's frustrating and annoying every time he's on screen and not in a way that's particularly interesting or unique. They needed someone to fill a role and well, he passes that absurdly low bar without adding anything past that.
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# ? May 4, 2021 05:45 |
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Stairmaster posted:It's true. They might never admit it but we all know I mean, Zeta was started as a Bandai project, not a Tomino and Sunrise one. Fun fact? Bandai actually wanted to do a project before Zeta with a different studio. The future Studio Gainax was in talks to make a MSV anime. Of course, it didn't work out that way. ninjewtsu posted:This is all true but it doesn't really change the fact that he's frustrating and annoying every time he's on screen and not in a way that's particularly interesting or unique. They needed someone to fill a role and well, he passes that absurdly low bar without adding anything past that. Counter: He's a perfect illustration of what's wrong with the system Gjallarhorn operates under, in a way people like Izanio aren't, a logical endproduct of Gjallarhorn's culture.
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# ? May 4, 2021 06:03 |
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I hate the design of the Zeta itself. What's wrong with your faceeeeee
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# ? May 4, 2021 06:08 |
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The Re-GZ is better than the Zeta itself. Straps away a lot of the busy work while keeping the general theme. The one and done backpack is silly though.
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# ? May 4, 2021 06:34 |
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chiasaur11 posted:Counter: He's a perfect illustration of what's wrong with the system Gjallarhorn operates under, in a way people like Izanio aren't, a logical endproduct of Gjallarhorn's culture. This is still just him fitting into a slot rather than being at all interesting in his own right. He's just a collection of all the stuff the writers needed to demonstrate but didn't have any actually good ideas for how to accomplish
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# ? May 4, 2021 06:46 |
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I thought Iok would be pretty lame by himself but was amusing in the context of Julietta visibly dying a little more on the inside every time he did some dumb poo poo.
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# ? May 4, 2021 09:27 |
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A lot of the Zeta and ZZ designs overall look much better in contexts outside of the original shows, even back in the 80's stuff like the three Gundam Wars books and various other art and modeling books/magazines were able to make them look so much better by tweaking them in both minor and major ways
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# ? May 4, 2021 09:42 |
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It’s always irritated me that the name was “A Laws” instead of Arrows.
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# ? May 4, 2021 12:14 |
So I'm on the final episode now and I've really enjoyed IBO over all. But I dunno, it feels like every time season 2 gets good it trips over its self with characters like Iok, Juliete and the introduction of the Dainsleifs which just kind of make the entire plot feel weaker over all because now the villains just seem to have infinite silver bullets to kill everyone with I guess. Like as rad as that entire last battle was: it was just a matter of waiting until the inevitable Dainsleif waves to end the series with a bunch of people dead again.
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# ? May 4, 2021 14:24 |
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Nuebot posted:So I'm on the final episode now and I've really enjoyed IBO over all. But I dunno, it feels like every time season 2 gets good it trips over its self with characters like Iok, Juliete and the introduction of the Dainsleifs which just kind of make the entire plot feel weaker over all because now the villains just seem to have infinite silver bullets to kill everyone with I guess. Like as rad as that entire last battle was: it was just a matter of waiting until the inevitable Dainsleif waves to end the series with a bunch of people dead again. "The villains"?
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# ? May 4, 2021 14:27 |
sassassin posted:"The villains"? They gleefully do warcrimes with illegal weapons, so yeah.
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# ? May 4, 2021 14:28 |
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Rustal ended slavery and freed Mars from its economic stranglehold. Tekkadan were a paramilitary company using legal weapons to try to become dictators of Mars.
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# ? May 4, 2021 15:01 |
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Tekkadan made a bunch of insanely bad decisions and hitched their horse to McGillis who is a raging lunatic trying to live out his power fantasy. It's heavily suggested a few times if McGillis just approached Rustal and was willing to work together with him to reform Gjallerhorn Rustal would've been 100% on board.
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# ? May 4, 2021 18:50 |
Shinjobi posted:I hate the design of the Zeta itself. What's wrong with your faceeeeee Its my least favorite feature of the design, but it isn't as ugly as the F91 french nut cracker face.
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# ? May 4, 2021 19:14 |
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Nuebot posted:So I'm on the final episode now and I've really enjoyed IBO over all. But I dunno, it feels like every time season 2 gets good it trips over its self with characters like Iok, Juliete and the introduction of the Dainsleifs which just kind of make the entire plot feel weaker over all because now the villains just seem to have infinite silver bullets to kill everyone with I guess. Like as rad as that entire last battle was: it was just a matter of waiting until the inevitable Dainsleif waves to end the series with a bunch of people dead again. IBO S2 is structured as a tragedy. 'The heroes keep getting into stupid, unwinnable fights against people severely out of their league through their own hubris' is the whole point.
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# ? May 4, 2021 19:20 |
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Darth Walrus posted:One AMV concept I'd love to see done well would be footage from the Gundam franchise as a whole set to the Star Wars main theme. Seems like it would be a perfect way to summarise the whole gigantic, decades-long saga. I mean it worked with F91
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# ? May 4, 2021 19:26 |
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Since it's May 4th, I figured I'd ask. Did Gundam steal the beam saber aesthetic from Star Wars, or is there something prior to that?
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# ? May 4, 2021 19:33 |
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Looks pretty stolen to me. Sure, the lightsaber borrowed it from katanas but I feel that's a much larger gap between katana and lightsabers vs lightsabers and beam sabers. It's funny how beam sabers are just pretty normal while there's always excessive amounts of fan worship for the lightsaber though.
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# ? May 4, 2021 19:35 |
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Laser and particle beam swords are cool. Gundam definitely raided the Skywalker Sound SFX department for their late 80s early 90s projects.
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# ? May 4, 2021 19:39 |
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Laser Swords have been a thing in Sci-fi since at least the 50's, just like space psychics. That said, calling them beam sabers in particular definitely makes it seem like the lightsaber was the primary influence.
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# ? May 4, 2021 19:41 |
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Argas posted:It's funny how beam sabers are just pretty normal while there's always excessive amounts of fan worship for the lightsaber though. That part is pretty easy to explain I think. The main part is that, because this is the real robot genre and anything that works well repeatedly is a technology, beam sabers proliferated wildly. The second part is that heat hawks/swords/etc can block them; lightsabers would not be nearly as cool if you could block them with anything that is not a lightsaber or a dumb EU thing.
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# ? May 4, 2021 19:42 |
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wdarkk posted:That part is pretty easy to explain I think. The main part is that, because this is the real robot genre and anything that works well repeatedly is a technology, beam sabers proliferated wildly. The second part is that heat hawks/swords/etc can block them; lightsabers would not be nearly as cool if you could block them with anything that is not a lightsaber or a dumb EU thing. Yeah. It's just funny to me because I find stuff like Amuro vs Char in CCA with beam sabers far better than every single lightsaber fight in Star Wars.
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# ? May 4, 2021 19:48 |
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Darth Walrus posted:IBO S2 is structured as a tragedy. 'The heroes keep getting into stupid, unwinnable fights against people severely out of their league through their own hubris' is the whole point. Yep. You also get Shino's gambit in the final battle, which is important since It's exactly Tekkadan's usual play, this crazy gamble that no-one else sees coming, betting everything on pulling an ace one last time... And then they don't. And Shino dies. Tekkadan got so far by getting lucky on the gambles they had to take, and then they don't leave the table when they had the chance. The odds caught up.
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# ? May 4, 2021 19:50 |
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Dunno if I agree with that but I'm not about to say you're wrong. Certainly better than the prequel fights. Sword duels in fiction to me are always more about the emotional state of the characters than about the flash or style. If you can balance both you have an absolute banger of a fight scene, but I don't get much of that from the CCA duel. It's a lot of chasing and debating with occasional explosions. Even though it's older and looks cheap as hell I enjoy their literal sword fight at A Baoa Qu better.
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# ? May 4, 2021 19:52 |
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Emotional stakes and flash+style fulfill different areas of enjoyment Personally I really enjoy the visual elements of fights and don't mind if emotional stakes are low. Interesting choreography is usually more important than how many cool effects you can layer over an image though imo, animation is about movement so if your visual spectacle is happening in an animation they better have put a lot of thought into how these characters move!
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# ? May 4, 2021 20:13 |
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ninjewtsu posted:Emotional stakes and flash+style fulfill different areas of enjoyment It does help to have good enough animation to convey the choreography/make more advanced choreography possible, though. They're not entirely separate concepts.
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# ? May 4, 2021 20:17 |
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ninjewtsu posted:Emotional stakes and flash+style fulfill different areas of enjoyment True, which is why I said I won't tell anyone they're wrong for liking what they like. For me, that's what can sell a good fight scene. Then again I'm also the guy who thinks the Full Armor versus Psyco Zaku is one of the best duels in the whole franchise. Also this literally just popped into my recommendations and it's neat. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1efdvbKJsw Is École du Ciel any good outside of the novelty of a Manga set in Quebec? Arc Hammer fucked around with this message at 20:25 on May 4, 2021 |
# ? May 4, 2021 20:21 |
Arcsquad12 posted:Then again I'm also the guy who thinks the Full Armor versus Psyco Zaku is one of the best duels in the whole franchise. Thats a debate? It is. It has this amazing frentic pace that Gundam rarely manages to hit or sustain. It felt like some of the best Macross sequences but with MS which was awesome.
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# ? May 4, 2021 22:14 |
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wdarkk posted:Since it's May 4th, I figured I'd ask. I can't find it offhand, but I've seen an interview with Tomino that's probably a few decades old at this point where he noted that he saw Star Wars during the early production of Gundam, and that it influenced him. I think Star Wars released in 1978 in Japan, which would put it about a year before Mobile Suit Gundam aired. I vaguely recall Tomino mentioning that he was frustrated that the film had done a lot of the kind of drama that he had been thinking about, but it was only a few lines before the interview moved on to other topics, so it it didn't get in depth about the comparison or anything. I don't know that it had a huge influence on Gundam in specific areas, since Star Wars goes for more stark morality and melodrama, while Tomino generally goes more for moral ambiguity but I would think that the use of beam sabers was influenced by it at the very least. Argas posted:Looks pretty stolen to me. Sure, the lightsaber borrowed it from katanas but I feel that's a much larger gap between katana and lightsabers vs lightsabers and beam sabers. It's funny how beam sabers are just pretty normal while there's always excessive amounts of fan worship for the lightsaber though. Lots of mobile suits have beam melee weapons, but it's almost always protagonists who actually use them. You do still get the occasional grunt using them, but it's pretty rare really. When it does happen it's probably going to be a good fight too, like the Stark Jegan or Byarlant Custom in Unicorn. Interestingly enough, Lucas' original vision for Star Wars was that laser swords would be a mundane weapon and there's even some Ralph MacQuarrie art of a stormtrooper with one, but that changed at some point in production to be a rare weapon that's basically exclusive to main characters.
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# ? May 4, 2021 22:20 |
RevolverDivider posted:Tekkadan made a bunch of insanely bad decisions and hitched their horse to McGillis who is a raging lunatic trying to live out his power fantasy. It's heavily suggested a few times if McGillis just approached Rustal and was willing to work together with him to reform Gjallerhorn Rustal would've been 100% on board. This is the part I actually do like. It's specifically the things I listed that I'm not a big fan of, and Having the tekkadan lose, ultimately, was a pretty ballsy decision that I loved. I just really don't like a handful of specific narrative choices used to bring about what are otherwise really awesome moments and plot beats.
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# ? May 5, 2021 00:32 |
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ninjewtsu posted:Emotional stakes and flash+style fulfill different areas of enjoyment Star Wars has quite a few good fights with emotional stakes. But in terms of just flash/style, most of Star Wars are fairly nothing to me. Episode 1 has some moments but Star Wars is so obsessed with the lightsaber that the space wizards don't live up to the name because they're just swinging swords around almost all the time instead of trying to win the fight. Kylo with his hilt blades and Rey with her thrust attacks are at least kind of interesting as small bits but it's still doing the thing Star Wars does where it's worshipping the lightsaber too much. I'm not asking for force aneurysm (which is dumb imo) but it's probably at least partly the issue of having actors who aren't necessarily martial arts stars. I think you're right in that animation vs live action is a big part of it. Stuff like Char throwing his beam tomahawk to take out Amuro's rifle happen so quickly that it's easy to miss? That's the poo poo I love. Star Wars fighting tends to be pure lightsaber swinging. Swing swing parry parry. Throw in some acrobatics too. Darth Maul is probably one of my favorite fights in terms of pure flash/style. There's a lot going on compared to fights where nobody is winning until the invisible timer is up and they're just swinging at each other. The whole fight he's getting pushed back, never having enough of an advantage to finish off one of the Jedi because he's too busy trying to keep them at bay. He's not losing, yet, but he is being pushed back but then you realize that was always the plan. He was luring them somewhere. The action manages to tell a story despite me trying to exclude everything but the action. Mechs do show damage better than humans do unless you're willing to get super gory. But lightsaber users just going down to the slightest tap is frustrating when force users are also supposed to be masters of willpower.
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# ? May 5, 2021 00:51 |
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I think the clean one hit kills comes from samurai movies, but if you wanna see a samurai movie with the reverse. Twilight Samurai has a final scene with an aging bureaucrat, and a drunk fighting a horrible messy fight where they smash up the entire set desperately trying to survive
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# ? May 5, 2021 02:16 |
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# ? Apr 20, 2024 02:13 |
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In that Gundam podcast mobile suit breakdown they found some interview where he said star wars did influence him and he thought the lightsabers looked cool as hell so he put them in
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# ? May 5, 2021 02:21 |