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Chris's criticism was certainly echoed a lot on MAHQ and other spaces back in the day, but that doesn't imply that there is not merit to his claims. From a sequel to Zeta standpoint we have a series that starts off with a completely different tone, and one that neuters some of it's most effective and interesting side characters in pursuit of comedy that is rarely funny. You'd be hard pressed to find someone who finds ZZ Yazan or ZZ Bright more interesting than their Zeta versions. From a standalone standpoint you have a series that's incredibly oddly paced; a series that actually earns the tone problems label that people give other series. One that has very disappointing and uninteresting designs and is highly lacking in impressive fights; setpiece or Ep to Ep. Character wise you see people coming in to reclaim characters like Roux and Elle, which is fine, I like them fine myself, but the hyperbole of modern internet discourse has inflated their actual importance and worth to the series; they aren't that important to the narrative. Who is, is Judeau and Haman. Tomino did something interesting with Haman, he ended her character arc in the previous series when she seemingly killed Quattaro. Having a character suffer the malaise of having won, and yet not being in any way fulfilled by it is an interesting arc to set her off into. But, taking your most dynamic villain of the previous show, and then having her feel little more than ennui with the briefest flashes of her previous scintillating sociopathy is not that interesting. "Going through the motions" is not usually the best description for your main villain in a show; putting it up against the ZZ federation which can also be accurately described with the same line is an absolute disaster. Now, you can say there are other shows that do have two sides fighting out a pointless war that neither side wants like VOTOMS, but that show despite having a larger physical universe, was much smaller in scope. It was a show about a handful of people rather than the galaxy; Gundam, as a whole, has always had it's setting as a character in the work, and how it develops or regresses because of the actions of the characters is just as important as the internal growth of the players. ZZ could or perhaps did try and have the message be that the existing power structures are utterly impotent and incompetent; tethered to pointless rage and jealousy. That the next generation needs to use their gumption and moxie to make a clean break and liberate itself from the past. Unfortunately said moxie and gumption makes the Shangri La kids incredibly loving annoying and unsympathetic, and starting off the series like it's a comedy undercuts the seriousness that you're supposed to be taking in regards to their characters. Then you get the Char problem, Haman being a mopey bore for most the series could be redeemed by having the planned reunion with Char, and the competing passions she'd feel between Judeau and him. Atonement and Revenge, or something like that. Instead CCA gets greenlit and instead of the back half taking off we get a dollar tree Char with zero interesting interplay with Haman. There's very little to actually recommend in ZZ. It's got all the excitement of a McDonald's meal at 3:15 on a Wednesday; it's existence isn't unneeded or unappreciated for what it is, but the most it can hope for is to both tide one over until the real meal and to remind one of what a truly great burger is by measuring the lackingness of this one.
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Apr 16, 2023 22:51
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https://twitter.com/zeonicscans/status/1647720461185449985?t=ElVCn_xdGNsnPtoyrioqVQ&s=19
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Apr 16, 2023 23:18
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Gaius Marius posted:From a sequel to Zeta standpoint we have a series that starts off with a completely different tone, and one that neuters some of it's most effective and interesting side characters in pursuit of comedy that is rarely funny. You'd be hard pressed to find someone who finds ZZ Yazan or ZZ Bright more interesting than their Zeta versions. I'll take that challenge, at least for Bright. I can't say Yazan is more interesting, or really much of anything at all, but I do think ZZ Bright is more interesting than Zeta Bright, for the primary reason that I think Zeta Bright is pretty dull himself, and doesn't really have much character beyond being the captain of the Argama and shouting at people. At least in ZZ he gets to pine for his family and be tempted by someone else, realize that maybe using violence isn't the way to inspire people (a thing the character defaulted to in 0079 and Zeta; often with negative results, but without any introspection of what that meant) and showed some actual faith in the people placed in his command. The depiction of those things is not the best, but I'll take it over him just kind of being there in Zeta. Unfortunately, he loses that growth in Char's Counterattack, since he treats Hathaway the way he treated Amuro and Kamille i.e. using violence or threats to try and control him. You could head-canon that the stress of the situation has gotten to him, and he's reverting to type in order to deal with the end of the world, but it's still undercutting of his character that he's almost the same person in Char's Counterattack as he was 14 years previously in Mobile Suit Gundam, and has shown little growth in that time, even losing what little growth he did have in Gundam ZZ, both not giving his family much attention and using threats to try and maintain discipline or command. Bright is kind of a poo poo, frankly. tsob fucked around with this message at 23:36 on Apr 16, 2023 |
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Apr 16, 2023 23:31
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ZZ Yazan is a complete swing and a miss. He was too competent, dangerous, and effective in Zeta to be believable as a buffoon getting beclowned by scrappy junkyard kids. It would have been a bit more believable if it was, say, a surviving Jerid in the same role, because Jerid actually has a history of failure and being kind of an idiot. ZZ Bright definitely has more going on than Zeta Bright does. Zeta Bright is just Being A Good Captain, whereas ZZ Bright is kind of a burnout wreck who is incredibly tired of being forced to do this poo poo anymore and really wants to either go home and see his family or possibly get laid or just something other than people putting the weight of the world on his shoulders and forcing him to send magical newtype children into battle to solve the world's woes.
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Apr 17, 2023 00:09
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I never read the ZZ critiques before going into it. Couldn’t make it 5 eps. A year later went back after hearing it gets better after the first 18-20. Yeah no it got better but its still rear end. Doubly so because Judau is a good character and feels wasted. The end felt like a fizzle and the only really interesting parts to me were the whole Dublin drop and Kamille being more than a vegetable. Going from Zeta to ZZ made me think that the people who made Zeta died or something.
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Apr 17, 2023 00:13
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I tried to watch ZZ after I finished Zeta the first time, but I bounced off the first three episodes. Never went back to try it again, but I guess I should. It's wild to think that that is the exact same experience as people who were watching at the time. There was like one recap/preview episode after the finale of Zeta and then ZZ started the next week!
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Apr 17, 2023 00:16
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Begemot posted:I tried to watch ZZ after I finished Zeta the first time, but I bounced off the first three episodes. Never went back to try it again, but I guess I should. If you’re a gundam fan / like the UC its worth watching but oof the part where it gets “better” is like going from a 2 to a 4.
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Apr 17, 2023 00:19
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I think ZZ has some stuff that's stronger than anything in Zeta, though I just didn't like Zeta all that much
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Apr 17, 2023 00:30
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ZZ Bright is hilarious. Poor guy is just completely checked out.
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Apr 17, 2023 00:31
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I think the first half or so of ZZ is better than the back half and also a lot of Zeta.
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Apr 17, 2023 01:00
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Part of me wishes that Zeta had a proper compilation movie series to cut a lot of the fluff out of it. A New Translation isn't really the same thing.
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Apr 17, 2023 01:12
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WrightOfWay posted:I think the first half or so of ZZ is better than the back half and also a lot of Zeta. I'd buy this for two seconds if the problem was just a tonal shift, and not that most of those episodes are basically foiling the same 2-3 villains over and over again with very low stakes presented. Like it's not "omg this is slapstick now! I want drama!" it's just mostly really really boring. I'm wrapping up my third rewatch now, and for like the first two eps it was "ok I know what to expect, this isn't SO bad once I get past the absurdity" but then man it just gets so tedious. I will however defend that once they get to roughly earth, it gets much better than just a "2 to a 4". But that kind of relies on if you ended up liking the cast, and buying into the Neo-Zeon conflict as interesting. Which... like I said this is my third rewatch, the previous two I didn't enjoy it as much.
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Apr 17, 2023 01:16
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Counterpoint: I love how much of an idiot Mashymyre is https://twitter.com/splendidland/status/1273743573566005248
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Apr 17, 2023 01:17
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Waffleman_ posted:Counterpoint: I love how much of an idiot Mashymyre is He's a great example of what I'm talking about though, he is fun and goofy... but then they just keep reusing him over and over with the same plot beats for a poo poo ton of episodes on a row at the start.
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Apr 17, 2023 01:18
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I’m watching through ZZ for the first time, and I just finished the two Moon Moon episodes. ZZ Bright is maybe my favorite Bright so far, I love the bit where he just thinks “I’m a terrible father” to myself. The comedy isn’t ever gut-busting, but I get some chuckles out of it. The biggest issue so far is Mondo and Beecha and how they’re treated, it just seems cheap and the writers couldn’t come up with anything better than "but they’re our friends!" after trying to sell out the Argama multiple times to keep them in the story.
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Apr 17, 2023 01:20
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My ZZ is out of date, but in the middle of a Zeta rewatch and it doesn't sound like there's that much space between Mashymere and someone like Jerid, who similarly recurs while being ineffectual. The other rotating antagonists don't have much charm or substance for me (Jamaican, Kacricon, Buran Blutarch) so having these larger-than-life guys around is one of the highlights when the show is stuck in weekly battles.
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Apr 17, 2023 01:27
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There's a lot of difference between Jerid comically failing as other things are going on, and Mashymere being basically the main antagonist representation in early ZZ. Jerid was rarely ever the front and center of the plot momentum in Z. Also Jamaican is a great character, he's a super unlikeable middle manager that everyone around (even on his own team) clearly visibly hates, and then he gets semi-fragged by a subordinate. It's a satisfying character arc. He feels like he popped out of a military themed version of Office Space. EDIT: lol I completely forgot Roux straight up shooting Glemmy with a beam, not Glemmy in a mecha, but just him standing out in the clear. If they hadn't made her sad and tearful about it, or given him a slow motion "SO THIS IS HOW IT ENDS" thing, it would be top five Gundam kills ever. Just her aiming, him going "wait AH FUC-" and boom would have been goddamned hilarious. Grape fucked around with this message at 01:41 on Apr 17, 2023 |
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Apr 17, 2023 01:38
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Zeta is a better gundam uc story to me but I gotta say I really enjoyed watching zz more (not until moon moon tho. I loved moon moon unlike most)
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Apr 17, 2023 02:33
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DamnGlitch posted:Zeta is a better gundam uc story to me but I gotta say I really enjoyed watching zz more (not until moon moon tho. I loved moon moon unlike most) This is where I'm at.
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Apr 17, 2023 02:35
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X-Ray Pecs posted:The biggest issue so far is Mondo and Beecha and how they’re treated, it just seems cheap and the writers couldn’t come up with anything better than "but they’re our friends!" after trying to sell out the Argama multiple times to keep them in the story. Mondo and Beecha should have been spaced about halfway through the show and it would have been a better story for it.
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Apr 17, 2023 02:40
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haypliss posted:My ZZ is out of date, but in the middle of a Zeta rewatch and it doesn't sound like there's that much space between Mashymere and someone like Jerid, who similarly recurs while being ineffectual. The other rotating antagonists don't have much charm or substance for me (Jamaican, Kacricon, Buran Blutarch) so having these larger-than-life guys around is one of the highlights when the show is stuck in weekly battles. The thing in Zeta was that the emphasis was on the reason for the fight, and the random blonde Titan or Feddie of the week was flavor. Meanwhile, ZZ doesn't really have a war outside of whatever the Gundam team is doing, so the focus had to be on the main antagonist, and thus repeated gimmicks stand out even more.
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Apr 17, 2023 02:48
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I mean it still is kind of a war, just one on a slightly smaller scale. Can't have the Second Neo Zeon War in CCA without a First. Though it doesn't help that ZZ has the least supplementary material of the UC trilogy so the war feels even smaller.
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Apr 17, 2023 03:59
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I think people might be underestimating Brights development in Zeta because it's not spotlighted very much. His first scene is him getting his rear end beat by the Titans then by the end he's pulling the trigger on Gryps. Dude becomes both more radical and willing to win at any cost and more exhausted at having to do so over the course of Zeta. ZZ leaning into the comedic tiredness of him rather than desperation and moral quagmire he should be in as a result of killing thousands and probably dragging another young kid into certain death/debilitation was also a mistake. For ZZ the war feels smaller because the lense of the camera is so focused toward the Argama crew. Zeta has constant hints of other poo poo going down. Karaba, Kais bullshit, the Radish being built off donations, anti titans demonstrations in colonies, Axis, the splitting of the Titans into sub factions, federation politics. There's just a lot more moving parts and a sense that things are happening without Kamille and Quattro being there for it. Hell, they never explain where the Dijeh came from, it's just there because Amuro did some poo poo off screen.
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Apr 17, 2023 04:13
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I mean they literally wrote it out of the compilation movies. It wasn't until Unicorn ZZ started getting some love in universe.
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Apr 17, 2023 04:16
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Wrote it out of.....what? What compilation movies? E: Do you mean A New Translation? That's less writing ZZ out and more giving Zeta more of a conclusive/what if he was happy ending for the one-time project. Waffleman_ fucked around with this message at 04:22 on Apr 17, 2023 |
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Apr 17, 2023 04:19
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Waffleman_ posted:Wrote it out of.....what? What compilation movies? The Zeta compilation movies end in a way that means ZZ Gundam wouldn't happen at all, unlike the 0079 movies which end setting up Zeta just as well as the show. (In fact, some manga that try to act as prequels for Zeta can only exist in the movie continuity)
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Apr 17, 2023 04:22
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You shouldn't take ANT as anything other than Tomino playing around with his own work after decades away. Arguing which is more or less Canon by virtue of its existence is as pointless as debates if TV or DYRL macross is the "true" version of events.
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Apr 17, 2023 04:23
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You can't really compare the 0079 compilation movies to A New Translation because they have different purposes. The 0079 movies were intended to spread the series to a wider audience in an age where you couldn't just catch a rerun or get a DVD, and A New Translation is a slight reimagining of Zeta intended for the 20th anniversary. ANT isn't meant for a new audience, it's meant for people who have already seen Zeta.
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Apr 17, 2023 04:24
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Gaius Marius posted:You shouldn't take ANT as anything other than Tomino playing around with his own work after decades away. Like the Gundam Evolution episode where Amuro prevents anyone from dying when Hathaway and Quess fight, yeah. I was just explaining what was meant when people talked about the movies "invalidating" ZZ.
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Apr 17, 2023 04:25
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I was intending that post for the lummnite
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Apr 17, 2023 04:28
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Anyway, they should give ZZ a new dub.
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Apr 17, 2023 04:28
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I enjoyed the first episodes of ZZ more, when the show gave zero fucks and owned it, than the last batch which is baffling in how it sabotages itself both intentionally and due to incompetence to the point that it's hard to tell which is which at points. Spoilering out of courtesy for people thinking of putting themselves through this thing. The moment that made me give up on this show was in the early 40s. So like, Rasara dies from having debris fall next to her, while she is on top of Mondo shielding him from nothing falling on either of them. The next second, Judau throws a rock at the guy in a mobile suit and it makes a cartoon bouncy noise as it rebounds off his head, and the mobile suit walks away. Rasara has no actual visible wounds when people gather around her for her dramatic death scene. Not only that, but if she'd actually gotten crushed by the weight of anything falling on her, Mondo would've gotten hurt too and he's clearly unharmed, making the scene confusing more than anything else. The choice to sabotage the drama by doing a bit of looney tunes comedy via the rock throw only makes the whole thing more strange. The deaths of Ple and Mashimyre are not as bad, but they're still completely ineffectual at producing any kind of reaction other than "Wait, that's it?" There's also a whole bunch about the plot that makes zero sense and indicates production was probably super rushed and scenes were being improvised on the spot, like when Elle apparently holds off an entire army at bay entirely offscreen, and no one even acknowledges it is a thing that happened. At the last possible second we learn that Leina survived because Sayla saved her from a burning house that was under attack by mobile suits in a scene she wasn't present for in a show that she wasn't in until this second. The show feels like it is written by rolling for events in a table of random story developments. There are things about ZZ that work, sure, I personally hold Crybaby Cecilia as one of the best one-off tragic arcs in UC as a whole, for one. I can understand people choosing to focus on other aspects of the show, like the characters, but you have to acknowledge the way ZZ handles its big moments and reveals makes Gundam Narrative look like a masterpiece of storytelling. I mean it. NT being stupid and badly paced is an infinite number of times better crafting of, well, a narrative than whatever ZZ does. X was also brought up and I think it makes an interesting comparison on the characters angle, because characters are probably the only thing people who like X will consistently say is good about the show. X is a slow and uneventful series for the most part, so I can understand why people find it boring. What it does manage is to stay consistent to itself and that means it makes character development stick, the plot beats that do happen landing solid. In ZZ I wanted to like the Shangri-la kids not named Beecha and Mondo, but the show did absolutely everything in its power to not care about them, so why should I?
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Apr 17, 2023 04:48
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Gaius Marius posted:Go look up Operation Troy and be mad goddammit
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Apr 17, 2023 10:22
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GBO2 feeling so clumsy is part of its appeal and as long as it hits that niche, it basically has a captive audience. The joy of the controls is that you're wrangling your MS and when everything lines up, you kick rear end. The downside is, well, everything else.
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Apr 17, 2023 11:05
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Waffleman_ posted:You can't really compare the 0079 compilation movies to A New Translation because they have different purposes. The 0079 movies were intended to spread the series to a wider audience in an age where you couldn't just catch a rerun or get a DVD, and A New Translation is a slight reimagining of Zeta intended for the 20th anniversary. ANT isn't meant for a new audience, it's meant for people who have already seen Zeta. I'd argue that ANT is a bit more of a "slight" reimagining of Zeta, even completely setting aside the "But ZZ can't happen!" thing. The entire back half of the show is wildly altered, almost completely for the worse. Cutting out Char's speech at Dakar and the entire Kilimanjaro sequence is cutting two of the emotional high points of the entire production and replacing them with nothing. It's an extremely wild decision for them to devote an entire movie to Four/Kamille and then have that arc end by Four getting domed and Kamille never finding out or caring. You're completely right in that it's pretty much aimed at people who are already familiar with the material, though. Kanos fucked around with this message at 11:37 on Apr 17, 2023 |
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Apr 17, 2023 11:31
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to think that any version of Zeta that doesn't include Jerid, on crutches, getting judo thrown down a mountain could ever be canon is pure folly
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Apr 17, 2023 11:33
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Hopefully when they get around to doing a third game it'll be made from the ground up with the assumption that it'll be getting released outside of Japan rather than how GBO2 was built for an exclusively Japanese audience and they just gradually expanded it to an international audience because a surprisingly large amount of people in the West were playing the game and even spending money on it thanks to the PS4 being region free, because a lot of the game's biggest flaws come from how it was crafted exclusively with the Japanese market in mind(the overusage of stun mechanics, the awkward aiming mechanics, the ability to do any in game communication being near nonexistent* and indeed the game will outright punish you for using what is there) *not just the lack of VOIP but also when the game launched you could freely text chat in public lobbies, but within about 5-6 months after the game launched they changed it so you could only use canned pre made messages in them, and this happened specifically because of xenophobia on the Japanese player base end of things, like apparently Japanese message board threads for the game are constantly full of comments of Japanese players getting really mad that anyone outside of Japan plays the game and they bombarded the developers with complaints about foreigners using the text chat to the point where the developers just decided to lock out text chat entirely
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Apr 17, 2023 11:41
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Grape posted:There's a lot of difference between Jerid comically failing as other things are going on, and Mashymere being basically the main antagonist representation in early ZZ. Jerid was rarely ever the front and center of the plot momentum in Z. Jerid’s kinda goofy and incompetent, but he’s nowhere nearly outlandish and broad as Mashymere. And Mashymere isn’t even the most ridiculous villain in ZZ so far, that honor goes to the lady
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Apr 17, 2023 14:40
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ZZ and X have similar issues which to me center on two main topics: weak villains and poor tone/pacing. Neither show "gets to the goods" until way too late in their run spending way too much time trying to get us to care about relatively flat characters and the good characters you want to care about don't get much to do really until the show decides to accelerate the plot to get to big developments that come in rapid order and it all feels too little too late. The last 1/3 of the run time of both shows is much more engaging than the prior pieces, but then its all compressed and it just hurts the whole thing. ZZ isn't awful, X is probably worse, and X is honestly at worst bland for Gundam. The franchise has considerable lows lower than either of those shows, but both of them feature a lot of wasted run time and empty "filler" for lack of a better word. Zeta get such high praise imo for presenting character we give a drat about and never letting them get bogged down in chasing psychic dolphins or world building that never is relevant later. In a vaccum these things aren't bad, but in the context of wasting our time during the show? They stand out more to me when I think of them. Most of what I remember about those 2 is how they aren't awful, but they sure aren't good and what a waste. since we got Wing and not X, so much of X just feels like reused cheaper worse Wing design by time I got to watch it. That might be unfair to it, but its true none the less for me.
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Apr 17, 2023 15:45
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Waffleman_ posted:You can't really compare the 0079 compilation movies to A New Translation because they have different purposes. The 0079 movies were intended to spread the series to a wider audience in an age where you couldn't just catch a rerun or get a DVD, and A New Translation is a slight reimagining of Zeta intended for the 20th anniversary. ANT isn't meant for a new audience, it's meant for people who have already seen Zeta. This tracks. The only highlights of ZZ to me are Judau beating Wongs rear end and Dublin eating a colony.
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Apr 17, 2023 16:51
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