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https://twitter.com/Cross_Ultimate/status/1020382960929988608?s=19
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Apr 28, 2019 20:13
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It was such a bummer that the villains won that fight 
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Apr 28, 2019 21:16
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CaptainRat posted:It was such a bummer that the villains won that fight It's an even bigger bummer that we'll never get a Master Grade of Tryon 3.
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Apr 29, 2019 00:29
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So, continuing my pursuit of mech anime I've never seen, Metal Skin Panic MADOX-01 is now in the can. Historically, it's of some interest, I suppose. It's got Anno producing and animating before his directorial debut with Gunbuster, and it's the first anime directed by Shinji Aramaki, so if you want trivia, there's trivia. The combat animation has aged alright, in a very 90s OVA (not bad for something from the late 80s.) And... it's not very good. Not that it even rises to the level of bad, to be clear. Bad implies more failure and more success at once. Bad means something to talk about. And MADOX doesn't really have that. The characters are more thinly sketched than Inferno Cop, and the plot is really, absurdly basic. 1) Military makes a mech. 2) Average guy stumbles into mech after reading just half the manual, gets stuck. 3) Military sends psychotic obvious villain to recover mech. 4) Average guy tries to see his girlfriend off before she goes to England... still in the mech. There's some comedy in the mech being used for ordinary things, except that nobody reacts. I don't mean "nobody reacts on the level you'd expect". I mean nobody reacts. In a setting where this is the newest cutting edge military prototype, people just harass our hero on the road and sell him fried shrimp like nothing is happening. The apathetic "How about that" citizens on Rocky and Bullwinkle, whose whole comedic purpose is to not give a poo poo about things, still show more engaged reactions. Also, nobody except the villain gets hurt, despite millions in property damage. This is neither shown to be the result of dedicated effort nor used as a comedy beat a-la Destroy. It's just... there. Consequence-free violence without even the slightest nod to the fact that consequence-free violence is really weird. The action is... okay? I guess? There's nothing terribly interesting that I remember. Just basic 10 foot mech fights without any real standout gambits or reasons to get invested. Looking back into the OVA era... man. There were a lot of weird one offs, weren't there? Just brief little blips.
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Apr 29, 2019 23:17
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I just watched the first two episodes of Armor Hunter Mellowlink and I have to say they were good fun. Had I known the premise of this show was "Guy thinks he's Solid Snake and goes on a revenge tour where he fights Armored Troopers without a mech of his own and only using guns, explosives, and other knickknacks" beforehand I would have picked this up way sooner. Raxivace fucked around with this message at 13:56 on May 12, 2019 |
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May 11, 2019 22:50
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Mellowlink is real good, the vertical space ship episode is cool as hell.
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May 11, 2019 23:54
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EthanSteele posted:Mellowlink is real good, the vertical space ship episode is cool as hell. Yeah, and just as the formula gets old, they change things up enough to keep up the momentum. I finished it pretty recently. Fun times. Fun, vengeancy times.
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May 12, 2019 09:43
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Do you need to have watched Votoms before Mellowlink? I know I should regardless but ones short and ones, uh, not
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May 12, 2019 09:47
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Sakurazuka posted:Do you need to have watched Votoms before Mellowlink? Not really, no. It's pretty self contained.
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May 12, 2019 09:53
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Same spoiler warning as usual. Brave Command Dagwon - The Pretty Boy One Dagwon is the story of En, Kai, Shin, Yoku and Ryu; five highschoolers (later seven with the additions of Geki and Rai) who are chosen by the alien Brave-Seijin to become Braves in order to fight against the alien criminals who escaped from the space prison Sargasso. If that last sentence reminded you of Power Rangers you're right on the money, Dagwon feels very much like a combination between Brave, Power Rangers/Super Sentai and Gundam Wing (I doubt Wing is the first anime to do the "5 pretty boys as the protagonists" thing but it's the earliest one I'm aware of). The show breaks franchise convention in a major way by having very few robot characters, instead having the human protagonists become the robots. In terms of structure Dagwon is very similar to J-Decker, wherein each episode a new alien, shows up that the heroes have to defeat, with no central villain until the very end. There are a couple of recurring villains though and obviously the show builds up towards a climax towards the end. I have a couple of problems with how the villains are treated in this show: Firstly, and I realize this is a somewhat odd complaint in this kind of show, but there's no reason for why only one alien shows up per episode. In all the previous Brave shows, and I imagine most MOTW fiction, there's always some kind of justification even if it's often pretty weak, but in Dagwon they're all just hanging out in Sargasso since the start so there's no reason ever given why they don't just all attack at once. Secondly, while the villains are supposedly intelligent, albeit evil, beings most of them don't have any clear motive for why they attack. There are a few exceptions to this, some of them are just animals and a few actually have more concrete plans and motivations but most of them just start destroying things for no reason whatsoever. In fairness there is a reveal at the very end of the show that makes sense of this, and it's actually a very neat and borderline Lovecraftian twist, but I'm honestly not sure if nearly 50 episodes of weakly written villains was worth it. The protagonists' writing is better, but very uneven. The main character En gets the most development, as you might expect, but some of the secondary Braves get far more than others. Most of them only get one or two focus episodes, and while some of them have personalities that show through during the fights e.g. the nerd always being the one to notice something about the aliens' biology or the ninja being the one who sees through deception, others are not so lucky. Shin gets the shortest straw by far. He's a very stereotypical skirt-chaser character, which doesn't really come through in battle, and his focus ep is a pretty standard "the skirt-chaser falls in love for real" deal which doesn't really show a different side to him like most of the other characters' focus episodes do. Somewhat ironically considering the franchises track record, the most well-realized character is one of the two actual robots, Lian. He has an arc when he's first introduced, his personality shines through consistently and he's the only character with an arch-nemesis and towards the end of the show he even gets to have a proper duel. I was surprised by the lack of shipping bait in Dagwon. Going back to the Gundam Wing comparison all the Gundam boys are imminently shippable with at least one other Gundam boy. Dagwon is very clearly angling for the same audience, but there are so few character moments between the Braves that there's basically no material to work with. Dagwon does something I've never seen another Brave show do. It only happens a few times but occasionally it had an episode about a real societal problem, and at the end of the episode it wasn't resolved since it isn't resolved in reality. As an example, about midway through there's an episode about a mouse alien that eats everyone's food so everyone gets cats to chase them away. From that description you might expect, as I did, that it's a comedy episode, but it actually ends up being about how humans use animals and then discard them without considering the animal's feelings. At the end of the episode that's not magically done away with and it ends on a sad note because it's something that happens for real and there's no real solution. Much like Goldran, Dagwon has a very good upgrade curve, but the show accomplishes it in a different way. Where Goldran kept introducing new robots and combinations after the main character's final form Dagwon instead intoduces the final form itself very late, in the early 40s. Something I found quite neat is how when they do it the first time they mention how the combination itself is very dangerous and they actually stick to that. It's only used 3 times in the show total and En is completely exhausted afterwards. The side team combines the same way it always does, but I find the idea more difficult to wrap my head around when it's 3 or 4 humans combining into one individual rather than 3 or 4 robots doing it. There's also a new kind of combination, where Dagshadow combines with three drone animal robots to become Shadow Dagwon. Action-wise the show is pretty standard Brave fair, though I think the show does a better job than most of the earlier ones so far at having the side characters actually feel useful. Whereas the main character still almost always gets to land the final blow, the side characters all have unique abilities that help make the villains vulnerable, so it feels more like En is the one that lands the final blow than the one who does everything. Unfortunately, the gap in quality between stock-footage animation and regular animation that was lessened during J-Decker and Goldran is back in full force, though the last ten or so episodes are animated way better than the rest of the show. It's nice, but I think I would have preferred more consistent animation throughout. In conclusion, I don't really know how I feel about Dagwon. It has some nice ideas but it doesn't capitalize on the character writing a smaller central cast would allow, and doesn't really do anything particularly special to make up for it. I had heard it referred to as the black sheep of the franchise, and at the time I assumed it was just because of the lack of robot characters, but now I think it's pretty deserved. That said though at worst I'd call it mediocre so if you're really jonesing for some robots and you have no other ideas you might as well give it a shot. Traditions: The main character combination harkens all the way back to Exkaiser, where only the upgrade parts get replaced and not the central robot (or human in this particular case). There are two weapon robots this time: Lian who turns into a sword, and Gunkid who turns into, you guessed it, a gun. There's also a secondary character, Thunder Dagwon, that combines with a big non-sentient machine just like the main character, but he doesn't get any further upgrades. Lion chest returns for Lian and both the original main robot, Fire Dagwon and its intermediary upgrade Power Dagwon have animal head chests as well (a bird and a dragon respectively). Standard 3+1 combination team. Ninja robot returning for the third time in a row in the form of Dagshadow and its combination Shadow Dagwon. Shockingly there's no drill tank! Even Might Gaine, the show where all the robots turned into trains, managed two drill tanks. For shame Dagwon. There is a drill train though, dagdrill. Finally, much like Might Gaine I feel like I have to say something about the translation. You can watch the whole show on the youtube channel Subdivers, but they translated it based on a korean translation and don't seem to be native English speakers. The translation is rarely straight-up wrong as far as I could tell, but it's rife with bad grammar and bizarre word choices. Still far better than Might Gaine's bootleg subs, but that is very much damning by faint praise.
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May 13, 2019 21:26
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The first shonen to have a sentai-like cast of pretty boys that pretended they were all of equal importance and pretty much defined the genre was Saint Seiya. edit: Like even to the point of deliberately making yaoi bait. There's one scene in the manga where a character is frozen and another uses their power to unfreeze them but in the anime they turn that to "i will take off my armor to hug his lying frozen figure so i can warm him with my body for an hour". GimmickMan fucked around with this message at 16:05 on May 19, 2019 |
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May 19, 2019 16:00
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Seiya was first and also is an unstoppable media juggernaut but Dagwon is probably closest related to Ronin Warriors, also by Sunrise. The real winner of the pretty boy mecha wars is Armored Police Metal Jack, though.
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May 19, 2019 16:24
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GimmickMan posted:The first shonen to have a sentai-like cast of pretty boys that pretended they were all of equal importance and pretty much defined the genre was Saint Seiya. That scene will never stop being a meme, will it? At least amongst us Latin Americans. Then again the whole series is this weird combination of absolute misogyny and an extreme attempt to get fangirls through sexy topless men fighting while having an extremely strong bond.
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May 19, 2019 16:51
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Blaze Dragon posted:That scene will never stop being a meme, will it? At least amongst us Latin Americans. One reason why I liked the first season of Saint Seiya Omega (the only one that matters) is that it walked some of that back. Yuna got to stay cool and relevant all the way through. Incidentally, anyone got any thoughts on Yamato 2202 now it's over?
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May 19, 2019 17:26
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Not as good as 2199 but the Andromeda owns so seeing the different iterations of it and also hundreds of them in one space battle doing stupid poo poo was pretty great by itself.
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May 21, 2019 03:16
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2202 was a 7.5 or 8 to 2199's 9. I think they went a little too far in needing exponential notation to track orders of battle onscreen at any given moment, but gently caress it it was cool anyway. They lost track of the heart of the series a little, the crew is what's important. Adding Gamilon and Gatlantis characters doing their own thing spread the focus away from the developed cast from 2199. Both were good and interesting and advanced the plot, but they should have been doing it in relation to characters we already knew more than they did. Bring on the next series and make lots of cool models ! e. I just watched about 24 minutes of the Macross Delta movie, and I can say without hesitation or qualification that they should have done just this. If you've been put off the series by underwhelming reviews, this may be just the thing. I'll check in again when I've got through the whole thing. mllaneza fucked around with this message at 05:54 on May 21, 2019 |
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May 21, 2019 03:30
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2202 just mostly feels like it lacks 2199's focus since the big quest to get to go save Teresa ends 40% of the way through and Teresa herself does nothing except spout platitudes about fate and then disappear forever. Gatlantis are also really boring villains until the last quarter of the series when Zorder's motivations get infodumped onto the viewer, and the space battles that consist 95% of huge rows of ships firing their guns over and over are plain bad compared to 2199's small scale engagements. The first quarter of the show with the mutiny is really strong, then it's just kind of whatever until the end stretch. The whole thing could have been much better if they'd rearranged the plot a bit to make Teresa actually matter. Also, Keyman's "oh no! I might betray everything I stand for to be pals with my uncle, the space Hitler who caused my mother's death and committed untold space crimes including against my people!" arc felt incredibly forced.
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May 21, 2019 06:33
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Lemon-Lime posted:and the space battles that consist 95% of huge rows of ships firing their guns over and over are plain bad compared to 2199's small scale engagements. I kinda forgot to mention this but it's worth reinforcing now that it's been pointed out, holy poo poo the battles in 2202 were lame compared to the awesome 2199 ones. There's a bunch of really cool ship designs and several shots that look cool as stills but god everything looked bad in motion up until the last couple episodes (and even then, there was still some really boring spacefights in between the okay ones) Also Gatlantis just seeming to use nothing but hordes of the same big giant battleship at all times was lovely because the cool triangular missile ships are a much better design and weren't represented enough.
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May 21, 2019 07:04
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Yeah, most of it's hundreds of copypasta space ships. There are a few with a hero ship that adds some dynamism to lackluster scene, like Kodai's destroyer breaking formation and going wild on the Gatlantis fleet.Too many shots of copypasta Andromedas dragged the series down. That shot in the credits with the Yamato maneuvering in front of a planet and zooming off is an amazing piece of animation. It's a pity we weren't getting something of that quality every time we see a ship in danger.
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May 21, 2019 07:14
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FWIW I feel like the whole thing would have held together much better if they'd:
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May 21, 2019 07:38
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100% agree with the first two points, just excise Keyman entirely, and sorta kinda on the fourth. I get what they were going for - the original Yamato II had the big climactic battle of Saturn sequence which was like two episodes long and was pretty universally regarded as an awesome bit as I recall. Thing is, the original battle of Saturn also had a bunch of cool looks at the strategic side of things and was portrayed more as a series of skirmishes involving different elements of larger forces. Instead of that, we got like six episodes of somebody reaaaaallly wanting to turn Yamato into LoGH and failing miserably at making it look anywhere near as good. But at least the whole thing with the time fault and multiple design iterations of the same ship being in the same battle as a result was kind of inspired 
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May 21, 2019 07:51
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The ending of Yamato 2202 was a case of "let's do the movie ending...but also no, not really" so you could say they had their cake and ate it.
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May 21, 2019 17:50
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I got the impression that Keyman sympathised with Dessler because he knew he was trying to make the most of governing an unfixably awful species with an unfixably awful government who'd already blown most of their better chances for getting themselves out of their predicament (like, say, allowing a bit of interracial dating to save their inbred, racist asses). The flashbacks did give me the impression that most of the heinous poo poo he pulled was pretty standard for the position, with the only unusual element being his competence. Which does all sit kind of uncomfortably with all the Hitler parallels in the first season, mind you.
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May 21, 2019 18:25
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wielder posted:The ending of Yamato 2202 was a case of "let's do the movie ending...but also no, not really" so you could say they had their cake and ate it. Lol I thought they were actually going to go for it, too. Then 26 removed all consequence. While we're at it, get rid of the Yuki amnesia bits too, because the hell brought that on?
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May 21, 2019 19:17
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I've been watching Gasaraki (3 episodes so far) after catching it as a secondary recommendation for someone in the recommendation thread. I actually like the "world building" with newscasts and focus on (albeit babby's version of) political scheming. My biggest problem is, having read how lovely mecha would be in real life. The show does a commendable job with trying to reason mecha would work because whatever AI weight balancing and maneuverability, but the scene of a tank battalion getting absolutely destroyed in a desert with what originally seemed to be a high ground advantage and clear visibility stretches my sense of disbelief, especially when the animation doesn't exactly sell me on the maneuverability of these mechs in mid-to-fairly-close range to be maneuverable enough to dodge literal tank shells. Or the fact there's no combined arms presence whatsoever. Just. Tanks. edit: Or newscasts of assault helis flying in literal rows like the tanks did in the previous episode  You don't need to be a military fanatic to spot the ridiculous stuff. I need to hold my sense of disbelief but sometimes I wish some military nerd made a mecha show that wouldn't be ridiculous from tactical povYeah I've watch 8th MS Team which does the whole realistic mecha concept better. Dessel fucked around with this message at 00:19 on May 22, 2019 |
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May 22, 2019 00:10
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Dessel posted:I've been watching Gasaraki (3 episodes so far) after catching it as a secondary recommendation for someone in the recommendation thread. Ouch. For my recommendations, I'd suggest you might want to try out VOTOMS or FLAG. FLAG isn't exactly what I would call "good", but it's much more grounded than most mech anime when it comes to how the tech works. And the tin cans in VOTOMs are, well, tin cans. They can lose to infantry if the infantry is badass and they screw up. They're just part of a war machine, not the whole. As for Gundam, I know I've recommended IBO on these grounds before, but IBO goes the extra mile surprisingly often. Mechs need repairs and refueling, and they've got weaknesses that mean they're not the be-all end-all of combat, even if they can kick the poo poo out of anything else on a planet. They also have strengths that explain why they were the pick for most uses. It's a pretty good show in a lot of ways.
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May 22, 2019 10:34
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Patlabor 2 is the best for this. It opens with a military academy dipshit taking an elite experimental mechanized combat unit into the Cambodian jungle and getting owned by Cold War anti-armor crap The franchise as a whole is about how the primary use for bipedal mechs is construction and follows the police unit charged with stopping the Marvin Heemeyers of Japan
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May 23, 2019 21:43
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KILLMECHA
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May 24, 2019 21:23
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Yea I *think* I have watched all there is to watch of Patlabor and yeah they occasionally really manage to make the mecha a believable military force and a believable part of the universe with warts and all. and I've watched VOTOMs from beginning to end which sure was a journey. FLAG has managed to pass me completely, I'll have to watch that.
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May 26, 2019 02:58
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there's always Dai-guard, the super robot that loses it's finishing move because they forgot to copyright it and it got stolen also it has a drill arm that sucks and just makes the robot's arm fly around everywhere
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May 26, 2019 07:09
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Xabungle is the best practical robot show. They siphon gas from all the defeated robots after every fight.
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May 26, 2019 13:17
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Xabungle totally works on saturday morning cartoon physics though a dude gets hit with a loving nuclear bomb and walks away charred black like daffy duck hit with a blunderbuss
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May 26, 2019 21:49
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Saw this on Twitter, thought it was neat: https://twitter.com/qomechang/status/1135189839211405318?s=21
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Jun 3, 2019 19:59
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Looks vaguely like a Darling in the Franxx design.
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Jun 3, 2019 20:43
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Kanos posted:Looks vaguely like a Darling in the Franxx design. It does, but the design that immediately came to mind was the Mack Knife from G-Reco.
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Jun 3, 2019 20:47
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Same spoiler warning as usual. Brave Command Dagwon OVA - The Boy With Crystal Eyes Released about 9 months after the original series "The Boy With Crystal Eyes" is a 2-part OVA sequel to Dagwon, and the first OVA in the Brave franchise. Taking place about a year after the show, it tells the story of En finding a young boy who's being chased by a mysterious organization, and deciding to help him. As one might expect from an OVA the whole thing looks beautiful, with excellent animation and well-choreographed fight scenes, though there is the occasional bit of primitive 3d-cg which has not aged well and looks incredibly jarring. I really enjoyed the very start where we got see all the Dagwon boys’ daily lives. I always enjoy when sequels return to old characters to show how they’ve grown and what their lives are like after whatever conflict they were involved with, and I make no exception here. Unfortunately, I quickly lost interest once the plot started in earnest. My main problem with it is that it hinges entirely on one of the Dagwons having information he doesn’t share with the rest for no apparent reason which leads to a misunderstanding that isn’t cleared up until the end and ultimately leads to tragedy. Reiterating my spoiler warning because I’m gonna be talking about the ending of the OVA here. So it turns out that the boy is actually a larval state of a space monster that would suck all life out of the planet if it reached adulthood, and the mysterious organization is actually a division of the space police headed by one of the Dagwon boys. Literally all of the fights are the Dagwons fighting against people who would have been their allies if they had only communicated so the main conflict for most of the OVA feels pointless, not to mention that it’s very out of character for the Dagwon who knew to take such extreme measures. In the end the boy allows the heroes to kill him rather than dooming the entire planet, and they all feel sad for a bit before walking away. If this had been a 2-parter in the middle of the original Dagwon TV show I think I would have quite liked it, but as a final farewell to these characters it feels underwhelming.
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Jun 3, 2019 22:59
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Is Escaflowne any good to watch in 2019? I noticed the Blu-ray set is pretty cheap and I haven't seen it since watching bits and pieces as a kid when the local rental place had the VHS volumes. I liked it then but wasn't sure how much was rose-tinted glasses.
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Jun 5, 2019 19:42
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there's a good story there, but it's a very slow burn and kind of falls apart at the end thanks to isaac newton.
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Jun 5, 2019 19:45
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Escaflowne is excellent.
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Jun 5, 2019 19:53
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RichterIX posted:Is Escaflowne any good to watch in 2019? I noticed the Blu-ray set is pretty cheap and I haven't seen it since watching bits and pieces as a kid when the local rental place had the VHS volumes. I liked it then but wasn't sure how much was rose-tinted glasses. It's very very good, but the final arc has been trimmed to the bone and you can tell - I believe they wrote the story assuming they'd get like 50~ eps and instead got 26~ and they scrambled hard. Still, the ending lands and I still love it. Also the music is BALLER
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Jun 5, 2019 19:54
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