Coldbird posted:He seems young enough to maybe have been born after the gate exploded. Maybe the nobles consider kids born in orbit of Earth to be effectively Terran...? I don't remember him being called that, not sure why he was wearing a uniform if he wasn't one of the bad guys. I thought it was pretty clear that the noble dude took pity on the kid and his dad and took them as prisoners of war and after that probably made them servants. It's also possible he kept him around because he knew the princess had an interest in earth or she asked the noble dude to allow the kid to become a servant to spare his life.
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Jul 11, 2014 16:54
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Coldbird posted:He seems young enough to maybe have been born after the gate exploded. Maybe the nobles consider kids born in orbit of Earth to be effectively Terran...? I don't remember him being called that, not sure why he was wearing a uniform if he wasn't one of the bad guys. Maybe it's not pure black white morality just a thought
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Jul 11, 2014 18:41
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Coldbird posted:He seems young enough to maybe have been born after the gate exploded. Maybe the nobles consider kids born in orbit of Earth to be effectively Terran...? I don't remember him being called that, not sure why he was wearing a uniform if he wasn't one of the bad guys.
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Jul 11, 2014 19:34
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Daler Mehndi posted:"There's a missile coming." Best part by far. I ended up watching this twice with two groups of friends and the  scene was amazing both times.
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Jul 12, 2014 00:53
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quote:And so, the discovery of an artifact belonging to an ancient Martian civilization, the Hyper Gate on the Moon by Apollo 17, paced the way for the human colonization and development of Mars. However, this resulted in the appearance of the Vers Empire, which claimed ownership of the martian relics and Aldnoah, their ancient technology, and proved to be the source of a long-standing conflict. So it is sounding like the Vers are an interplanetary empire with with their capital at Planet Vers. Bah, I was hoping this conflict would be a tad more fair, Earth is totally outmatched. Their giant robots are worthless. Though you'd expect a super advanced empire would have a better system of government than loving feudalism. Also the princess is totally alive. The Chekov's necklace remains unfired.
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Jul 12, 2014 12:54
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Lord Koth posted:Realistically, all life on the planet should be dead, given the force needed to do all that. Even discounting that, New Orleans shouldn't even have still been around to get landed on. Given how close it is to those impact craters, and the fact that it's BELOW SEA LEVEL, it should have simply been drowned under a huge amount of water 15 years previous. Wouldn't all the massive craters around the world lower the sea level, though?
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Jul 12, 2014 15:39
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XboxPants posted:Wouldn't all the massive craters around the world lower the sea level, though? Unless the material cleared was vaporized and removed, it had to go somewhere. Combined with the energy imparted in collisions, the sea level should be up if anything.
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Jul 12, 2014 15:56
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PerrineClostermann posted:Unless the material cleared was vaporized and removed, it had to go somewhere. Combined with the energy imparted in collisions, the sea level should be up if anything. The material would have been blasted onto the surrounding land, so it's still out of the water. That said, one crater of that size probably wouldn't do much globally but a couple dozen probably would.
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Jul 12, 2014 16:08
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ViggyNash posted:The material would have been blasted onto the surrounding land, so it's still out of the water. That said, one crater of that size probably wouldn't do much globally but a couple dozen probably would. And surrounding water. And the atmosphere, where it would either be blown with the winds for a short period of time or carried for years, blocking out sunlight.
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Jul 12, 2014 16:44
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A whole crapton of Shimura's drawings for the character designs.               I'm not thinking too hard about where the Vers empire is from, or what the timeline exactly is or anything yet, there's only been 22 minutes of show so far.
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Jul 12, 2014 18:01
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What a loving episode
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Jul 12, 2014 19:00
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Eeeeugh, this show is brutal.
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Jul 12, 2014 20:00
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I love the vaporizing mechs. What a cool technology, visually. It's great how the things can walk through buildings, and it somehow makes the student's death more horrific when there's no gore splatter. MC-kun's works great there, too.
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Jul 12, 2014 20:14
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I thought it was pretty weak, to be honest. The Vers' military advantage is so extreme it robs the fight scenes of all tension. There's not even any horror here- the show's characters aren't realised enough for that. It doesn't help that their emotional responses are all so muted- they don't react to the invasion as if- well, as if they're engaged in a total war against an enemy that levelled every major city on Earth only hours ago and are now scrambling to evacuate. They act like it's some minor brush war out of sight and mind and like having to flee their hometown is some minor inconvenience. It reduces the episode to warporn. (Alright, it got better when the Cataphract started chasing them down, but by that point the damage was done.) Weirdly, despite the fact that he's -central, I'm still liking the MC quite a lot. I think the fact that he's so obviously, deliberately reserved makes him easier to swallow, while everyone else just seems... unreal.I realise Urobutcher is reaching for his usual "the universe is a cold and empty place and terrible things happen for no reason" thing here, but all I'm getting from it is "things happen"- thirty minutes of billiard balls bouncing around a snooker table would have said as much. Yes_Cantaloupe posted:I love the vaporizing mechs. What a cool technology, visually. It's great how the things can walk through buildings, and it somehow makes the student's death more horrific when there's no gore splatter. I found it interesting that he stopped at the bridge. A limit to how much material can be annihilated at once?
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Jul 12, 2014 20:38
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Autonomous Monster posted:I found it interesting that he stopped at the bridge. A limit to how much material can be annihilated at once? I think that it can't see where the tunnel is going, even trying to following them. The head of the mech is too high.
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Jul 12, 2014 20:58
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Well that was a hell of a thing, the show is definitely looking promising so far. I think it's cool how the Vers mecha's ability to make stuff Go Away is used as both an effective weapon and as protection. Part of me wonders if there's a giant pile of stuff back on Mars/Vers.
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Jul 12, 2014 21:50
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If they refer to it as the "power of god", I'm guessing the Vers folks are just using something they found and barely understand. Though, it doesn't hurt that they seem to have actually planned their invasion instead of relying on wishful thinking while discounting all first-hand experience from the previous war. I mean goddamn, the earth military is incompetent. They presumably developed mechs because Vers had them, but neglected to arm them with anything but upscaled assault rifles. All of that would be fine if this was the first time Vers attacked, but it most certainly is not. No one in the entire military chain of command aside from one guy no one believes had the slightest inkling about Vers' capabilities. I can't say it is entirely unrealistic, though. They spent 15 years in a circle-jerk about how next time would be different without ever trying to figure out how to make it true. That sounds like modern military thinking to me.
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Jul 12, 2014 22:13
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Really, if the enemy has orbital control and space travel and you don't you're screwed regardless of their super robot fighting power. Even if you beat them on the ground they can just sit back and throw rocks at you. The governments and militaries of the world are seriously delusional, but I guess that's believable. Anyway, I think the trick to beating this guy is going to be setting a trap under it. Obviously the disintegration field can't cover the soles of its feet. Might even be enough to just tip him over and watch him fall into the Earth's crust.
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Jul 12, 2014 22:18
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It seemed like they don't really have a good idea of the enemies capabilities. The military guy from the first episode had a flashback to an enemy mech and said that no one believed him about how powerful they are.
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Jul 12, 2014 22:21
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Ethiser posted:It seemed like they don't really have a good idea of the enemies capabilities. The military guy from the first episode had a flashback to an enemy mech and said that no one believed him about how powerful they are. I think part of it was to do with the previous war being fought on the Moon, rather than on Earth. Since it ended with a giant explosion (that presumably killed off anyone with first-hand experience of fighting the Martians, as well as a bunch of Martians themselves), it would presumably be easy to write it off as a draw. Martians attacking Earth itself seems to have been confined to one skirmish on Tanegashima, which was hushed up. Something I noticed when watching the first episode again. The orange trainee mechs are described as KG-6s, while the front-line grunt mechs being pasted in episode 2 are KG-7s.
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Jul 12, 2014 22:49
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Sindai posted:Really, if the enemy has orbital control and space travel and you don't you're screwed regardless of their super robot fighting power. Even if you beat them on the ground they can just sit back and throw rocks at you. The governments and militaries of the world are seriously delusional, but I guess that's believable. The protagonist may use mines to make this rear end in a top hat fall into the earth; I thought it was also pretty neat how he used the enemy's ability to dissolve most of his sister's mech as to decrease mass
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Jul 12, 2014 23:21
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Weird how even though the martians have seeming in-fighting between the landing ships and go to battle by getting some high-ranked goon who wants a name for himself, they actually act in a more logical manner than "any alien" in any sci-fi I remember. (Disrupting enemy infrastructure, etc.) I like that.
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Jul 13, 2014 00:24
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Well, I guess I'm not the only super-genius who saw through the obvious weakness in that design. You wouldn't even necessarily need a land mine to beat it, a regular old pit trap would work. Anything to get it off-balance and the thing will burrow itself straight down into the Earth's mantle, unless it turns off the field - and then you just toss some grenades down the hole. I was also thinking it might be vulnerable to energy weapons, since you can still physically see the mecha through the field so clearly it doesn't stop light, maybe a laser could damage it - but that's probably too technical for an anime audience so they'll likely just go for the trap. That disintegration-field thing is still a really bad rear end idea though, particularly with how they animated him just completely ignoring all terrain and walking right through it. Given that poo poo isn't appearing behind or around him in a pile of undifferentiated matter, I'm guessing it teleports stuff away rather than outright disintegrating it, but yeah, more techy than the audience is probably willing to bother with so it's just going to be a magic Go-Away field. I hope there's more of an explanation as to why the Vers wouldn't just mass-produce the living poo poo out of those and the laser-head models (or combine them?) though. Here's hoping the main character just steals the loving thing.
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Jul 13, 2014 00:34
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Autonomous Monster posted:I thought it was pretty weak, to be honest. The tension is not in whether or not the earth military can stand up to the Vers, but how long we can hold up and get away without getting mangled. The long rambling drunken speech in episode 1 was basically telling us that we're completely and utterly outmatched. The lack of emotional response was just in the boys, who thought it was one big camping trip and the fact that they were in danger hadn't quite gotten through into their thick loving skulls. That was the point of the "are we going to get drafted?" speech, which dripped with dramatic irony. Boy, you're not going to graduate. You're getting put on the front lines immediately. Meanwhile, everyone else was terrified. On a tactical level, the Vers are invulnerable. Their one downside is that they are hideously undermanned. Their castles are almost empty, don't use semi-autonomous drones, and they send out high ranking officers into combat without a retinue of peasants. So on a strategic level, they can be quite vulnerable. If you can suicide bomb enough castles, or saturation nuke them, you can delay their attack. Or even make an alliance with some of the Vers knights, then you can play divide on conquer on them. This could happen with Cruhteo: they have the princess, and they have the daughter of one of the ringleaders of the assassination attempt. This is, of course, assuming that the princess even survives. Urobuchi killing her off is not out of the question. Sealing off any plans of a pre-emptive peace deal is necessary to keep the drama going. So either bowlcut kills the princess and Slaine turns on the Vers, or the princess survives and Cruhteo turns on the Vers, or the princess survives and the other knights don't give a drat even when they've lost their casus belli: the social structure of Vers seems barely controllable. This kind of internecine warfare is what happens when you pick a Feudal government. On that note, they barely seem to understand their own technology. Somehow I think they salvaged or stole it from civilizations that actually knew their hands from their asses. If they picked a Dictatorship for another 4 points, they might be twice as advanced.
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Jul 13, 2014 00:51
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Phobophilia posted:On that note, they barely seem to understand their own technology. Somehow I think they salvaged or stole it from civilizations that actually knew their hands from their asses. If they picked a Dictatorship for another 4 points, they might be twice as advanced. Their technology is a bit of a hodgepodge. On the one hand, they've got interstellar travel, and those miraculous disintegration/displacement fields, but on the other most of their offensive weaponry has been missile or ballistic and their mechs' movement seems almost as clunky as earth's.
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Jul 13, 2014 01:01
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Coldbird posted:I hope there's more of an explanation as to why the Vers wouldn't just mass-produce the living poo poo out of those and the laser-head models (or combine them?) though.
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Jul 13, 2014 01:05
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Mordja posted:Their technology is a bit of a hodgepodge. On the one hand, they've got interstellar travel, and those miraculous disintegration/displacement fields, but on the other most of their offensive weaponry has been missile or ballistic and their mechs' movement seems almost as clunky as earth's. And then that one mech had laser guns on its head. Clearly theres something not right about their technology, theres no consistency. Its definitely got something to do with the moon. The Earth claims that the relic exploded/was blown up, but theres the hints (or maybe it was outright stated) that they found something there that went haywire. They didnt sit around for 15 years for nothing.
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Jul 13, 2014 01:08
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Yikes. gently caress the Martians indeed.
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Jul 13, 2014 02:33
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This show is reminding me more and more of Ace Combat 5 (with a dash of Halo). I'm really glad that they got the whole Princess isn't dead, Assassins were paid of by Martians plot twist out of the way early. It would have been very stupid for it to come later, given how easy it was to guess.
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Jul 13, 2014 04:02
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I'm thinking mc's entire thought process is just the best way to get back home and cook eggs without interruption.
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Jul 13, 2014 04:56
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Triggerhappypilot posted:This show is reminding me more and more of Ace Combat 5 (with a dash of Halo). I'm really glad that they got the whole Princess isn't dead, Assassins were paid of by Martians plot twist out of the way early. It would have been very stupid for it to come later, given how easy it was to guess. Yeah, I'm glad they pushed ahead with that plotline early. Now, though, I'm just curious how the hell these kids are going to handle Smugnose McWarcrimes over here.
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Jul 13, 2014 06:12
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T.G. Xarbala posted:Yeah, I'm glad they pushed ahead with that plotline early. Read the earlier posts on this page.
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Jul 13, 2014 06:14
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Furious Lobster posted:Read the earlier posts on this page. Sorry, force of habit. When you avoid looking at spoiler tags, it's easy to forget to mouse over them after you're not really spoiled anymore.
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Jul 13, 2014 06:17
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Triggerhappypilot posted:This show is reminding me more and more of Ace Combat 5 (with a dash of Halo). I'm really glad that they got the whole Princess isn't dead, Assassins were paid of by Martians plot twist out of the way early. It would have been very stupid for it to come later, given how easy it was to guess. That briefing from episode one really felt like ace combat. I wonder if these nuggets will live up to Razgriz.
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Jul 13, 2014 07:23
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I'm getting shades of Evangelion with the whole "bad guys are so powerful there's not really any point to fighting them without special plot weapons." thing.
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Jul 13, 2014 10:26
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Dr_Amazing posted:I'm getting shades of Evangelion with the whole "bad guys are so powerful there's not really any point to fighting them without special plot weapons." thing. I really hope they DON'T go this route, and instead let the protagonist use clever yet primitive means to beat the hyper-tech martian mans. People have already pointed out that a simple land mine should work on the disinto-field mech, I don't think anyone managed to shoot at the laser mech so hes probably relatively weak defensively, and the sword mech....something will come up for that guy, I'm sure...
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Jul 13, 2014 11:27
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If nothing else, the 'poo poo is happening!' music in this series gets me pretty pumped.
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Jul 13, 2014 12:23
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Harettazetta posted:If nothing else, the 'poo poo is happening!' music in this series gets me pretty pumped. It's a Hiroyuki Sawano OST. That's kind of what he does.
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Jul 13, 2014 23:25
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Dr_Amazing posted:I'm getting shades of Evangelion with the whole "bad guys are so powerful there's not really any point to fighting them without special plot weapons." thing. That's a broad enough premise that there are a ton of shows in that vein!
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Jul 13, 2014 23:31
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Harettazetta posted:If nothing else, the 'poo poo is happening!' music in this series gets me pretty pumped. I liked the musical sting that played when they showed off the Martian fortress at the beginning of this episode. The whole scene gave me a "Half-Life 2" vibe. As far as the fight choreography goes, I wish they'd taken a leaf out of Evangelion's book and had a brief montage of Earth's militaries really unloading on the Martians, to no effect. The actual resistance we saw was pretty anaemic.
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Jul 13, 2014 23:58
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