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Lemon-Lime posted:Because beams normally go so fast as to be nearly-undodgeable by anyone except newtypes or super prototypes, usually are one-hit-kill, and sometimes don't even need to do more than pass within 50m of something to blow it up, which leads to fights that are significantly less interesting to watch than having a bunch of 30-ton warmachines pounding the ever-loving poo poo out of each other at close range with ballistic weapons and missiles. Beam weapons are dodged pretty drat regularly by most units except grunt units which themselves die incredibly quickly to any unit with a name unless there's a point to it. (Which IBO also does.) Beam weapons are one-hit kills only if they score a direct reactor/cockpit shot which is true of ANY weapon in Gundam. Beam weapons were significant because they pierced armor easily while being high power which is not exclusive to beam weapons. (Railguns in IBO fill the same narrative niche basically!) and the "needs to pass within 50m of something to blow it up" is Unicorn's beam magnum which is shown to be an abnormally powerful shot.
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Oct 14, 2018 18:39
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ImpAtom posted:Beam weapons were significant because they pierced armor easily while being high power which is not exclusive to beam weapons. (Railguns in IBO fill the same narrative niche basically!) Dainsleifs are functionally beam weapons so the distinction is meaningless to make (they have the same combination of long-range accuracy, one shot kill, impossible to defend against except by not getting hit in the first place, and literally occupy the same narrative niche in IBO as beam weapons do in early UC), which is why I wrote Lemon-Lime posted:It works fine when the long-range undodgeable insta-kill weapons are rare and scary, as in 0079 or IBO. Not being able to show mechs get hit because if they do get hit it's instant death (or sufficiently crippling that it would be boring to have every fight end with the protagonists' MSes missing several limbs) limits what you can actually have happen in a fight. It's the same reason why IBO's ships shrugging off MS-calibre weapons and getting to actually be a threat and do things as a result, is a lot more interesting than UC ships which just explode if a beam rifle (or Char with a bazooka) so much as sneezes in their direction. I find long-range beam spam really tedious to watch because it diminishes the physicality of what are supposed to be these colossal metal machines. It's also why later UC stuff has I-fields and anti-beam coating, so they can partially get away from this, but they never manage to fully graduate to beam weapons working in a way that's interesting. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 19:11 on Oct 14, 2018 |
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Oct 14, 2018 18:59
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Droyer posted:They could have replaced every beam weapon in gundam with something that fires physical ammunition and they wouldn't have to change a single fight scene. Bad choreography is bad choreography, blaming it on a piece of in-universe technology is dumb. The video I posted shows that it’s a lot more than choreography. The pilot literally sits there, targets the entire battle field then ejaculates beam cannon fire on everything. The fights are better when they go hand to hand. Even in the notorious Mika/Carta fight, the only one hit kills were due to killing the pilot before he could get inside his Graze. The other guard took a few hits and Carta lasted a good bit before getting wasted.
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Oct 14, 2018 18:59
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Lemon-Lime posted:Dainsleifs are functionally beam weapons so the distinction is meaningless to make (they have the same combination of long-range accuracy, one shot kill, impossible to defend against except by not getting hit in the first place, and literally occupy the same narrative niche in IBO as beam weapons do in UC), which is why I wrote I mean that is true of *any* significantly powerful weapon. Railguns (not just the IBO style) and missiles fill a similar niche. (Railguns in fact are basically beam weapons in several Gundam shows.) Likewise you're discussing something that doesn't happen. Protagonist suits, *almost exclusively* are defined by having special armor that resists damage. The armor in IBO is just the latest version of this and like every Gundam series it gets bypassed pretty regularly. Likewise acting like every ship dies in a single hit in Gundam is *also* not actually something that happens. Most carriers survive a huge amount of damage. A lot of the time the focus is on destroying the bridge... which hey, IBO does by having Mika crush it with a giant hammer. You're discussing the difference between ranged and melee which has always been a Gundam thing and why you have tons of beam saber/melee fights even when they make no logical sense. It's why Minovsky Particles *exist* to force people close together in fights.
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Oct 14, 2018 19:11
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Solkanar512 posted:The video I posted shows that it’s a lot more than choreography. The pilot literally sits there, targets the entire battle field then ejaculates beam cannon fire on everything. How is this more than choreography when you've literally just described a piece of bad choreography?
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Oct 14, 2018 19:12
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Solkanar512 posted:The video I posted shows that it’s a lot more than choreography. The pilot literally sits there, targets the entire battle field then ejaculates beam cannon fire on everything. That is literally choreography. SEED is super bad about its fight choreography and it could have happened with bullets or missiles. It is not beam specific that SEED is really lazy about stock footage of a man doing a pose and then killing everything.
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Oct 14, 2018 19:15
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ImpAtom posted:which hey, IBO does by having Mika crush it with a giant hammer. This touches on something else I was gonna say: If you (the general you, not you ImpAtom) want to argue that beam spam is samey and uninteresting you're not wrong, but over the course of IBO Mika smashing something with a hammer also became very samey, at least to me. There were a couple standout fights with real impact but you could say that about pretty much every gundam show, beams or not.
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Oct 14, 2018 19:15
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Droyer posted:but over the course of IBO Mika smashing something with a hammer also became very samey, at least to me I mean, that's basically my point. Mika smashing something with a hammer or shooting big cannons at stuff over and over again gets significantly less samey for me than MSes firing beam weapons and either instakilling some grunts in a visually boring way, or being forced to miss anyone important because if they'd gotten hit, they would be out of the fight. This is because even when Mika is smashing something with a hammer over and over again, the act of him smashing something with a hammer is significantly more fun to look at and has more variations on how that happens, than the action of someone firing a giant beam cannon and killing 12 grunt suits in one shot, or firing a giant beam cannon and missing.
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Oct 14, 2018 19:19
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Lemon-Lime posted:IBO really highlights just how garbage a lot of fights are to watch in Gundam shows just because of beam weapons. Honestly I'd say it's just the opposite and highlights that bad choreography or lack of emotional investment can't make a fight exciting no matter what the characters use and that the opposite is true too.
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Oct 14, 2018 19:22
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I feel like someone needs to point out a well-choreographed beam shootout now. Reckon the Kampfer Amazing versus GM Sniper K9 fight counts?
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Oct 14, 2018 19:27
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A lot of 0079, Char's Counterattack, F91 and Victory Gundam for a start I suppose. I don't think the choreography is as strong in Turn A or G-Reco despite loving Turn A, but Tomino's UC shows tend to have strong choreography.
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Oct 14, 2018 19:32
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G-reco actually has some of my favorite fights in the franchise. Almost every fight has something unique and memorable about it (though that might admittedly that might be because I've seen it far more recently than a lot of other Gundam stuff). It's full of stuff like this https://www.sakugabooru.com/data/e21e6e46e782ea94225e551f3f05d5ea.webm https://www.sakugabooru.com/data/4c819dd329a47875735bd32d115edb2b.webm https://www.sakugabooru.com/data/211ddc4ca9c2820430d2057be69b8ecb.webm And it rules
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Oct 14, 2018 19:44
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Full Armor versus Psyco Zaku has beam weapons and rockets and everything else and it's one of the best duels in the whole franchise.
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Oct 14, 2018 20:13
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Yeah but in AGE they made the beams spin so they're even more powerful
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Oct 14, 2018 21:30
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Arcsquad12 posted:Full Armor versus Psyco Zaku has beam weapons and rockets and everything else and it's one of the best duels in the whole franchise. Yeah, it's really incredible
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Oct 15, 2018 02:06
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Fights need a good back-and-forth where the viewer can tell when one combatant gains a real advantage without instantly deciding the entire fight. That can be done even with beamspam, but it is considerably easier to organize when both mobile suits can get hit a few times without being effectively beaten. Full Armor versus Psyco Zaku has several areas where one side gets a positional advantage, but most Gundam fights barely use the terrain, when terrain even exists in the first place. You can totally have good fight scenes with one-hit kill beam spam. Most action movies treat guns as a one-hit kill, and they still manage to produce good fight scenes. But then the director needs to put all the tension into setting up a clear shot, which cannot be accomplished with stock footage. IBO's biggest advantage is having episodes without fight scenes. Because the studio does not need to pump out a fight scene every single week, they can put more effort into making the fights different, rather than relying on stock grunt kills.
golden bubble fucked around with this message at 03:05 on Oct 15, 2018 |
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Oct 15, 2018 02:46
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It's not an inherent rule of beams that they need to be able to one hit kill everything anymore than it's an inherent rule of ballistics that they don't. IBO could have been designed so that everyone could one shot everyone with cannon shells and SEED could have been designed where everyone could soak up tons of beam fire before death. The rules of the setting and how the weapons function are defined by the writers. It's 1000% choreography.
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Oct 15, 2018 03:07
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One of my favorite parts of G-Reco is when Bellri gets his final upgrade, and he tries out Photon Torpedoes. It fires out these little motes of light that apparently erase matter from existence when they hit something, leaving these big perfectly spherical gaps in opponent MS. Bellri sees how destructive they are and is just like, "welp, never using that again". And he never does.
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Oct 15, 2018 03:49
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Droyer posted:G-reco actually has some of my favorite fights in the franchise. Almost every fight has something unique and memorable about it (though that might admittedly that might be because I've seen it far more recently than a lot of other Gundam stuff). Sya what you will about Tomino, but him and his crew know how to make interesting mech battles. Victory and G-Reco are top-tier.
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Oct 15, 2018 03:58
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Everyone forgetting the true terrain battle of ball vs zaku in 08th ms team
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Oct 15, 2018 04:07
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Kanos posted:It's not an inherent rule of beams that they need to be able to one hit kill everything anymore than it's an inherent rule of ballistics that they don't. IBO could have been designed so that everyone could one shot everyone with cannon shells and SEED could have been designed where everyone could soak up tons of beam fire before death. The rules of the setting and how the weapons function are defined by the writers. If you're defining choreography that broadly, yes. But that's the same as saying that everything about a show is determined by its writing, before revealing that your definition of writing includes animation and directing. A lot about a show's fights can be determined before the actual stabbing and shooting starts from more baseline aesthetic and narrative decisions. If you write a setting so that mooks can take fifty rounds before slowing down, that leads to different fights than one where a glancing shot will kill you, even if you hand both of them to the best fight choreographers alive. (A bad enough one will, of course, give you the same fight for both, but we're assuming at least a little effort here.) Iron Blooded Orphans setting things up so that even the most basic mobile suit was going to take a lot of killing and that gunpowder and huge chunks of metal were the order of the day meant it had a different feel than fights from other shows. Beams can come off as terrifying wonder weapons or as GI Joe style nerf equivalents, but they tend to evoke different emotions in an audience than "real" guns. Similar deal with a giant mace versus a laser sword. Yes, yes, it's all aesthetics, but aesthetics matter. I noticed that in a bunch of the (very good, I agree) shots from G-Reco that Droyer posted, there's a focus on suits just going in for punches and kicks instead of just beams and blasts. You can never completely divorce style from substance. In conclusion, although I agree that you can have exciting, diverse fights with beams everywhere and IBO style weapons don't guarantee anything good, the baseline decisions matter, and that includes abandoning beams. Just because both results can be good doesn't mean they're the same kind of good.
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Oct 15, 2018 04:13
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chiasaur11 posted:If you're defining choreography that broadly, yes. But that's the same as saying that everything about a show is determined by its writing, before revealing that your definition of writing includes animation and directing. My counterpoint is that CCA has some of the best fight choreography in the entire franchise, and the fights in CCA are insanely lethal and people die or lose on almost the drop of a hat. IBO itself went back on "mobile suits are durable and hard to kill" numerous times, usually with Mika basically murdering entire squads of dudes. It's just that they bothered to animate it well and spent work on the sound and feel of the scenes. You could have him do what he did with a beam sword or beam axe pretty similarly, if you did it right. Beam melee weapons feel really good when they're given a sense of weight and resistance on contact instead of just being instant super slicers. Take this scene:  It's a beam weapon, but it's got very noticeable weight to it and there's resistance when it makes contact since it has to heat the metal before it can win through.
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Oct 15, 2018 05:13
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It really is all in the choreography, the in-text technology involved (which is essentially arbitrary) literally does not matter so long as the action and direction are solid. Blaming beam weapons for bad fights is just mistaking a symptom of a problem for the entire problem itself.
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Oct 15, 2018 05:27
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IBO's tech base doesn't really change much. Yeah, it waves its hand at doing so and sometimes it is relevant when cool choreography calls for it, but in the same breath there are multiple occasions where we see single pilots effortlessly cut thier way through units. Like is there really any meaningful difference between a beam saber and Bael Gundam's weird swords considering they ALSO are shown to effortlessly cut units in half? Like to move away from Mika, McGillis in Bael tearing his loving way through the fleet singlehandedly is not distinguishable from Char doing the same. He cuts units in half effortlessly, kills carriers singlehandedly... honestly there's literally nothing different about that fight from a traditional Gundam fight. Honestly a *lot* of Season 2 stuff tends towards that direction.It's really about choreography. What IBO's tech base days doesn't necessarily match how it is portrayed and while it does some cool things when it focuses, when it needs to show units getting murked or carriers getting taken out effortlessly then it does. ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 05:38 on Oct 15, 2018 |
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Oct 15, 2018 05:35
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Kanos posted:My counterpoint is that CCA has some of the best fight choreography in the entire franchise, and the fights in CCA are insanely lethal and people die or lose on almost the drop of a hat. That's a fair point, but it's not much of a counterpoint when I just admitted insanely lethal fights could be just as good or better. I just said they were, you know, different. (The back half, however, is a counterpoint, and similarly fair.) chiasaur11 fucked around with this message at 08:37 on Oct 15, 2018 |
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Oct 15, 2018 07:52
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Kanos posted:Take this scene: You know I had forgotten how much I love the Sinanju.  Tae posted:Everyone forgetting the true terrain battle of ball vs zaku in 08th ms team The problem with 08th MS Team and Unicorn in this argument though, is they're both OVAs. It doesn't feel quite fair to compare them to TV series, which get a lot less time and budget per episode. RillAkBea fucked around with this message at 09:58 on Oct 15, 2018 |
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Oct 15, 2018 09:52
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I liked the IBO fights because they a) didn't constantly re-use stock footage the way that Wing did, and b) the melee beatdown focus made everything feel way more brutal, which fits with what the show was trying to say about how horrible being a child slave is. It was kind of neat to see a Gundam where beam weapons were the old and busted poo poo, and the modern stuff just shot you with huge bullets and then hit you with a hammer.
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Oct 15, 2018 14:33
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At least in Wing, the stock footage was the same suit each time, instead of Seed inexplicably having different machines follow the exact same movements. Look at this dumb poo poo.
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Oct 15, 2018 15:11
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jackhunter64 posted:At least in Wing, the stock footage was the same suit each time, instead of Seed inexplicably having different machines follow the exact same movements. Look at this dumb poo poo. Fukuda was a big fan of the possibilities offered by early-00s tech, including swapping out animation models and digipaint colouring. It made his shows look like rear end, but at least it might have made working conditions for his animation department slightly less murderous.
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Oct 15, 2018 15:17
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RillAkBea posted:The problem with 08th MS Team and Unicorn in this argument though, is they're both OVAs. It doesn't feel quite fair to compare them to TV series, which get a lot less time and budget per episode. I think it's entirely fair, considering this argument started as "beams make fights less interesting". In fact they basically prove the point I was trying to make: With well-done choreography a fight can look good regardless of whatever technology exists in the fiction. The thing that makes beam spam bad is the spam bit, so I don't get why people blame the beams.
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Oct 15, 2018 15:41
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Droyer posted:I think it's entirely fair, considering this argument started as "beams make fights less interesting". In fact they basically prove the point I was trying to make: With well-done choreography a fight can look good regardless of whatever technology exists in the fiction. The thing that makes beam spam bad is the spam bit, so I don't get why people blame the beams. I probably should have explained that better. I meant more that TV shows have a lot of episodes to fill and when you don't have the luxuries of OVA production and the sponsors are breathing down your neck, beam spam and cheap fights are an easy crutch to fall back onto, especially when you can jam stock footage back to back and make an infinite number of fights with some crafty editing.
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Oct 15, 2018 17:27
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RillAkBea posted:The problem with 08th MS Team and Unicorn in this argument though, is they're both OVAs. It doesn't feel quite fair to compare them to TV series, which get a lot less time and budget per episode. This is a fair cop, but I think the earlier mentioned G-Reco and Build Fighters both stand as pretty solid proof that beam weapons can be part of your choreography in a TV show and still be amazing. You can also look to older TV shows, like Victory - it might be bugfuck insane and not to everyone's tastes, but it's gorgeous to watch in motion. RillAkBea posted:I probably should have explained that better. I meant more that TV shows have a lot of episodes to fill and when you don't have the luxuries of OVA production and the sponsors are breathing down your neck, beam spam and cheap fights are an easy crutch to fall back onto, especially when you can jam stock footage back to back and make an infinite number of fights with some crafty editing. Yeah, this is basically the crux. Beam weapons have a bad wrap because it's super easy for a time-strapped animation studio to animate a big flashy scene of [PROTAGONIST] blowing away his enemies with unstoppable giant neon beams, like the prototypical SEED stock footage.
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Oct 15, 2018 18:31
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Lemon-Lime posted:Dainsleifs are functionally beam weapons so the distinction is meaningless to make (they have the same combination of long-range accuracy, one shot kill, impossible to defend against except by not getting hit in the first place, and literally occupy the same narrative niche in IBO as beam weapons do in early UC), which is why I wrote: Let's not be hasty with slobbering all over IBO for this - even within the course of a single battle, the power of a Dainslef varies wildly. In other words, they writers didn't let the fictional properties of the weapon limit what they could do. So in the grand Arianrhod vs. Revolutionary Fleet battle, the Dainslef is shown completely overpenetrating Gjallarhorn ships and taking them out in short order. In that same battle, Isaribi and Hotarubi (not even mentioning the Hammerhead from episodes past) are shown no-selling Dainslef rounds. Yes, Hotarubi 'goes down', but they're able to use it as a shield later that battle and it completely absorbs a ridiculous number of Dainslef rounds, none of which overpenetrate (like they did against Gjallarhorn ships). Flauros takes one shot from one that same battle, and it's nearly bisected and practically disabled - all it can do is use Hotarubi as a shield and hope to retaliate with a Dainslef of its own (a Dainslef shot which would've ended the conflict in a single shot, despite even greater volumes of Dainslef fire apparently lacking the same levels of power coming from Arianrhod). During Tekkadan's final stand, Barbatos and Gusion take more than one Dainslef round (which, by the way, should have had their deadliness amplified by gravity and atmospheric re-entry given how intact the round was after hitting Tekkadan's Gundams) and remain operational enough to kill hordes of mooks. Essentially, yes - Dainslef is powerful - but functionally, it operates like a beam weapon and beam weapons are also inconsistently powerful throughout Gundam for narrative purposes. Ultimately, it devolves down to an issue with choreography - which as I've illustrated with the Dainslef's varying power levels, is an issue that afflicts IBO as well as just about every other Gundam series out there. LuiCypher fucked around with this message at 18:47 on Oct 15, 2018 |
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Oct 15, 2018 18:44
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Droyer posted:I think it's entirely fair, considering this argument started as "beams make fights less interesting". In fact they basically prove the point I was trying to make: With well-done choreography a fight can look good regardless of whatever technology exists in the fiction. The thing that makes beam spam bad is the spam bit, so I don't get why people blame the beams. even the spam part can work, like at the end of 0079 when everyone was one-shotting each-other because they all had laser guns but nobody could actually defend against beams
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Oct 15, 2018 19:43
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New trailer dropped for Narrative. The art style looks like a cross between Unicorn's crisp linework and Thunderbolt's heavy shading.
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Oct 16, 2018 16:46
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Arcsquad12 posted:New trailer dropped for Narrative. The art style looks like a cross between Unicorn's crisp linework and Thunderbolt's heavy shading. I just watched that trailer and it looks good. It's definitely more inspiring than the previous trailers. We've got some hints at story now too. Speculation spoilers: So it looks like Protag's childhood friend got cut up for cyber newtype experiments and she was the one that ran away with Phenix? And the crazy Narrative equipment is all for a containment field because they want to capture her alive/the Phenix undamaged? Blink and you'll miss it stuff/list of new HGUC kits coming soon, buy them all kids! -New Dijeh recolor beating up purple flying donut. -White Neo Zeong -Snipa Jesta (Though he's already on PB)
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Oct 16, 2018 17:32
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Hoping for more Gustav Karl.
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Oct 16, 2018 17:48
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RillAkBea posted:I just watched that trailer and it looks good. It's definitely more inspiring than the previous trailers. We've got some hints at story now too. The Phenex is supposed to pop up out of nowhere to help with fights and then leaves according to some of the fluff in the kit manuals, so this lines up with that.
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Oct 16, 2018 18:04
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Arcsquad12 posted:New trailer dropped for Narrative. The art style looks like a cross between Unicorn's crisp linework and Thunderbolt's heavy shading. Yeah if nothing else, this movie is gonna be really pretty. I'd love a limited theater run to happen in NA.
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Oct 16, 2018 18:21
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Azubah posted:The Phenex is supposed to pop up out of nowhere to help with fights and then leaves according to some of the fluff in the kit manuals, so this lines up with that. Legion of the Damned, only it's a Gundam
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Oct 16, 2018 19:10
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