/m/ — The thing I never got about the SEED remaster changing Nicol

>>23784895 (OP)
Han shot first.

>>23784898
An interesting comparison since Lucas actually did straight up add entirely new scenes with his Star Wars remasters. I want to ram my head through a wall when I'm watching ROTJ on TV and the fat alien singer woman with the long mouth shows up in Jabba's palace.

>>23784895 (OP)
They didn't change any of the dialogue for any of the characters for anything. Not even for the Perfect Strike, which was a bigger addition to the Remaster than anything else. So likely it's equal parts a technical limitation, and a conscious decision to keep everything the same.

My personal opinion here, the driving decision was fixing a storyboard issue. The main change you see here is that the Strike is facing a different direction in the two shots as it starts its swing, which is why the sword comes in from the opposite direction (in the original it swings the sword starting from its left, but in the Remaster it's holding the sword to its right, so the hilt is sticking out in different directions after embedding itself in the cockpit). The Remaster version makes a bit better sense because it implies that the Blitz is attacking from its right, from the Strike's blind spot in a surprise attack, whereas in the original it looks like the Blitz is coming straight-on towards the Strike's front, which is fucking stupid if you're trying to do a surprise attack. And also, if it's attacking from the same direction that the Strike is already facing, why isn't Aegis on the ground behind it?

Like, yeah, you could argue that they could have also made it so that the Strike is swinging its sword forward as it pivots to its right in order to face the new oncoming threat. But given the positioning of the sword beforehand and the fact that they still have to try to keep the camera angles the same as before, that's probably a bit hard to pull off since from the viewer's perspective the sword is now being obscured by the Strike. And this feels like the kind of thing that they would only realize after the fact, moreso since Kira still acts as if he deliberately attacked Nicol afterward. So I'm willing to chalk this up to it being an innocent mistake on the animators' part, than a deliberately malicious attempt by Fukuda in making Kira more innocent.

File: 1616067247700.jpg (192 KB, 680x680)

>Kira swinging his sword into the cockpit as a reflex
turned into
>Kira tries to disarm but Nicol's dumbass runs into the beam part of the swerd

>>23786579
Honestly if that was the intention then it didn't work because I assumed Nicol missed and Kira swung at the cockpit on battle instinct even when I only had the remaster to go off of

>>23786797
Whatever's they were going for in the remaster is really not well animated at all which just makes the change all the more pointless, it ends up being one of those things where you can't actually tell what's going on and have to figure it out from how everyone reacted.

File: IMG_6938.jpg (374 KB, 1080x1080)

>>23784906
The singer is in every cut of ROTJ. You just don’t remember it in the original because it’s a puppet in a much shorter scene.

>>23786817
I actually do remember it because I used to watch it on VHS all the time, it was so much better in the original because it wasn't godawful CGI that looked completely out of place next to the original practical effects, and the song was better.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2w25pcTIFlQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiDRgDmXGi4
I'll always be a ROTJ defender even though it's a lot of people's least favorite, but even I have nothing good to say about CGI Sy Snootles.

Humiliation ritual for Nicol

The remaster one makes them both looks so much worse... Kira looks like he's flinching and recoiling like a kid too afraid to swing a baseball bat, and Nicol looks like he's slipping on a banana peel.

>>23789332
He does look like that, but what bothers me more is the way he positions his sword makes it look like the point is going to pierce the cockpit and yet the next frame is still a slash from the side.

>>23789332
Yeah I was always confused in the remaster why he didn't follow through and fully bisect the Blitz. It's a physical sword and it was shown other times the Strike can't stop it on a dime.

>>23784895 (OP)
Hold the fuck up. They remastered SEED?

>>23794767
Yes, back in 2011 or so. It's a really shitty remaster though, there's a huge chunk of scenes where it looks like they just outright copied over and blurrified the original 2002 footage. The nice thing though is that they also cut out most of the review episode stuff, and some of the re-animated stuff really does look a lot better.

File: 20 year old wrinkles.webm (2.78 MB, 1280x720)

>>23794785
>>23794767
The original footage both film and CGI effects were produced in 480p at best so it'll naturally look like shit when upscale and run through a filter

File: remaster good animation.webm (2.88 MB, 1920x1080)

>>23794790
>>23794785
>>23794767
But yes, some scenes are fine. IIRC this part is not new footage, it was just done well to begin with.

>>23794785
>>23794790
>>23794793
Director Fukuda said he wanted to do more to improve the old Seed animation, but he was given a very limited budget by Bandai. So he did the best he could with limited resources available. A lot of budget was saved for things like Perfect Strike animation.

Fortunately, Seed Remaster sold really well. So Bandai increased the remaster budget by a modest amount for Seed Destiny. Not enough to remaster everything but Fukuda had a little more wiggle room.

>>23794818
Will they ever get a full-scale remaster at some point?

>>23794818
And then he said f this imma make Cross Ange :)

>>23795226
thank god, Cross Ange is the last great /m/ show

>>23795175
>Will they ever get a full-scale remaster at some point?
What you have....is what you are going to get. Bandai is a notoriously stingy company. Tomino himself wanted to reanimated all of Zeta Gundam, but Bandai refused and gave him a tiny budget and only a small team. So we got the Zeta Gundam movies which used a mix of old and new animation.

The only way we would ever get Seed or other Gundams fully reanimated...is if someone else paid for it. Like if Netflix or some other American company was willing to pay for it. Because Japan isn't going to do it themselves. They hold onto money with a death grip. It's really funny.

>>23795504
I wonder why they're so stingy about it, it's not even like remakes are uncommon in anime. Magic Knight Rayearth of all things is getting one this year. I would think something like Gundam would be far more popular and would easily be able to justify a remake.

>>23784895 (OP)
they just made Nicol look like a little bitch who killed himself by being BAD at piloting his gundam

>>23798537
>I wonder why they're so stingy about it,
It's a Japanese business and Asian culture thing. Japanese businesses are extremely inflexible, slow moving, and don't like employees innovating. They pay their employees bare minimum and expect absolute loyalty.

Japan is hyper focused and prefers slow improvements to existing ideas. This means Japanese businesses are great are making 1 thing well (like cars such as Toyota and Honda). But ask them to come up with brand new ideas? They falter very badly. It's why Japan never came up with software like Google, Google Docs, Google maps, etc. Start up companies are frowned upon in Japan. If you have a start-up company on your Jap resume it's considered low-tier. The Japanese public worship "big name" brand Japanese companies like how peasants worship large clans and dynasties in ancient times.

It's also why that, despite being the center of anime, Japan never came up with the idea of anime streaming and didn't invent anime streaming sites like Crunchyroll. It was a western idea. Japan actually fought against the idea for many years and considered it illegal. They wanted customers to buy expensive DVDs, and Blurays. Often with a disc only having 1 or 2 episodes (max) and costing around $100 dollars. The Japanese anime companies turned "milking their customers" into an art form. Then streaming destroyed their plans. Even today, Japan only reluctantly accepts anime streaming because the rest of the world does it. But Japan had to be dragged kicking and screaming during the 2010s to accept it.

Asian businesses also have a "death grip" on their money and profits. Way more than the Western Countries. Asians don't seek wealth, but rather they worship it. I mean literally. Many Asians have a literal god of money that they pray to and worship.

>it's not even like remakes are uncommon in anime.
"Remaking" is a relatively modern thing. Anime companies hate spending money to redo things unless they earn a ton of profit.

>>23798746
>"Remaking" is a relatively modern thing.

It's really not though. The first Kitaro remake that readapted some stories from the manga was from 1985 (original anime series from 68). Then it got another reboot in the 90s, and another in the 00s and another in 2018. Jungle Emperor Leo got a 89 reboot after the original anime in 65. Astro Boy had a series in 63 and a reboot in 1980 and another in the 00s. Dr.Slump got a reboot in the 90s. It's really just that Western fans don't care about most old shows that got reboots/remakes in the 80s and 90s.


>>23798537
I think it's Sunrise itself that doesn't like full remakes of their original series for some reason. Just look at how they adapted The Origin flashbacks, but not actually the part that would overlap with the original series.

They've never done remakes for any of their non-Gundam robot shows either.

They're doing a Keroro remake later this year, but that's not an original Sunrise series, and it's now handled by the BNP side of the company that split from Sunrise proper for more than a decade now.

>>23798808
>It's really not though.
Those are the exceptions. Not the rule. And Japan views those anime as cultural icons to pass down to new generations. So remaking them periodically every few decades is fine. Sort of like how Super Sentai and Kamen Rider continuous reuse the same idea.

Generally, anime is not directly remade. Not unless Japan believes there's profit to be made. Particularly from Western fans.

One thing I don't get about SEED is the autistic fucking rage over it. I was watching a review on the Gundam TCG and for no fucking reason at all the retard fuck starts having a tangent on how much he hates SEED and for really dumbshit reasons too.

>>23798857
I think it's caused by western fans seething that Japan doesn't hate SEED like they do.
Also people that don't understand that SEED has a popular style for Gunpla. But unlike the first it's a purely matter of taste.

>>23798857
Back in the day, Seed was incredibly popular with women due to its focus on character development, drama, and characrers discussing their feelings. Some people hated this. Particularly UC fans who wanted more UC, and AU fans who wanted a more action focused series.

Also many people in the hyper obsessive part of the Gundam fanbase that focused on mecha specs hated Seed. Director Fukuda said that his focus was character development and making cool looking action scenes. That's his number 1 priority and everything else must serve that.

When asked about Seed databooks, Director Fukuda said not to take them too seriously. They are written for fun. And the information written inside them can easily be wrong or be changed depending on the needs of the story. If the he and the writers want to make a change to the story, then they do not care what the databooks say. Director Fukuda said they will just do it anyway and release a new databook with new information. This pissed off the autists who love reading databooks and want Gundam to have specific rules. It's why you have crazy people like Wackymodder84 who made videos tons of videos complaining about Seed.

Lastly, Director Fukuda regularly gives interviews and uses social media to answer fan questions share his thoughts. The answers he gives are often not written down in databooks.

For example Director Fukuda said in interviews that Proud Defender has its own nuclear reactor, and that Mighty Strike Freedom needs 2 nuclear reactors to power the disruptor. This is not written down in databooks anywhere. So this infuriates people who maintain the Gundam Wiki. They say thar social media posts don't count as evidence and refuse to update the pages with new information.

Laslty Director Fukuda says that he regularly withholds information from being released in databooks because he wants the audience to pay attention to the details of the story. He wants to see if fans will notice Easter eggs without him saying

>>23798935
>Seed was incredibly popular with women due to
Kira x Athrun

>>23794790
I'm sure that going widescreen was a condition of the project, but having to punch in and crop any assets that only existed at 480i and couldn't be reworked is horrific in what's supposed to be a definitive option.
Reminds me of the Babylon 5 DVD release. There's a reason the HD version for streaming just kept it 4:3.

>>23799063
>Reminds me of the Babylon 5 DVD release. There's a reason the HD version for streaming just kept it 4:3.

Not exactly. The HD release on streaming used video that was scanned from high quality broadcast tapes. These tapes already had finished 4:3 episodes on them. The quality was better than DVD quality, but worse than HD quality. The resolution of the tapes was around 600p. Which is slightly under 720p. So the studio just upscaled the 600p video to 1080p for streaming.

Basically the studio skimped out and used the cheapest method possible to BARELY qualify for an HD release. The most barest minimum possible.

>>23799173
Anon if you mean the B5 release, you're wrong unless my memory is failing me. The most recent release had rescanned film assets, but anything involving CG was already mastered to 480i 4:3 for broadcast, and that's what was upscaled since there was no way in hell they were redoing effects for the entire show.
The DVD release is infamous because in an effort to take advantage of the 16:9 safe zoned shooting it also either stretching or cropping in the aforementioned effects shots to 'fit' and looked terrible.

>>23799178
>The most recent release had rescanned film assets
They never rescanned the true original film assets. That was a lie, or the social media person they hired didn't know what "film assets" means. J Michael Straczynski (B5 creator) said the video quality for the HD release wasn't high enough to be the original film. That they used high quality broadcast tapes for the HD release. Better than DVD but worse than true HD.

>>23799208
Yeah looking back at it now you're right. It's still easily the best release of the show but it's not optimal. Either high quality tapes or a film positive intermediary depending on what their workflow was like, though now that I think about it I doubt they had an optical printer for the effects shots. So probably tape.

File: Nicol Edit.jpg (291 KB, 1943x1080)

Shigeta himself commented about the change in the HD Remastered extras
https://twitter.com/ultimate_lewman/status/1789448774202343857

>>23801189
I don't understand. Why did Nicole de-cloak? He could have grabbed Kira from behind while staying invisible.

>>23801201
if unintentional, it's because it ran out of cloak time

if intention, then it was to grab kira's attention and force him to stop attacking athrun and deal with nicol instead

>>23801201
Because he was about to ram one of his exploding darts into Kira's face and had to turn off the cloak to get his Phase Shift back up so he didn't blow himself up.

I'd honestly say Nicol's death being a tragic accident on the part of Kira probably fits his later development of turning into Mr. Jesus "I don't want anyone else to die" Yamato than Kira just killing him. I remember people back in the day raging about how getting Freedom and turning Jesus "Ruined" Kira after he'd finally gained a killer instinct with Nicol and "Was ready to understand that to end the war he had to kill the enemy feelings and friendship be damned and was ready to buckle down and get shit done like Amuro until Lacus ruined him" but if it was always intended to be an accident then that was just Murrican fans projection in the first place

>>23801219
>>23801235
Except we see Blitz Gundam attack and blow up many things while in cloaked mode.

>>23801189
This is funny because even the Japanese fans are like
>wtf Nicole just stabbed himself on Kira's sword! This makes no sense.
And the seed staff doesn't have an explanation.

>>23801262
Attacking isn't the problem, the problem is Phase Shift can't run with the cloak on as shown in the fight with AA where he had to keep shutting it off and turning armor back on to avoid the missiles and vulcan shots

>>23801274
So why not just stab Strike Gundam while cloaked and then retreat?

>>23801276
Because those darts explode on contact, so if Blitz doesn't have it's own armor up it's gonna get blown up as collateral, especially with Strike's own PS up which would mean it would destroy Blitz while Strike would just get knocked around

>>23801279
>especially with Strike's own PS up which would mean it would destroy Blitz while Strike would just get knocked around
Nonsense. Those darts rip through ultra thick and dense battleship grade armor. I don't care if Strike has Phase Shift or not. Those darts are going to hurt and rip through.

>>23801293
They barely penetrate, the point of the darts is to stick in and explode. They barely stuck into one of the AA's railguns. The only thing they punched through where regular Mobius's and those things are the weakest thing in CE. It's not gonna penetrate the Strike's PS.

>>23801293
More likely is that that shit is plot-powered. If Fukuda wants a dramatic scene, then the PS armor isn't going to matter worth a damn, and if he wants to portray how awesome the Gundam is the armor is going to stop literally everything thrown at it.

>>23798935
>When asked about Seed databooks, Director Fukuda said not to take them too seriously. They are written for fun. And the information written inside them can easily be wrong or be changed depending on the needs of the story. If the he and the writers want to make a change to the story, then they do not care what the databooks say. Director Fukuda said they will just do it anyway and release a new databook with new information. This pissed off the autists who love reading databooks and want Gundam to have specific rules.
specsfags ruin everything

>>23802979
>wanting consistency so that the show withstands the test of repeated viewings is a bad thing

>>23803014
The changes that are made are minor. Mostly stuff like "phase shift stops all physical attacks" to 'phase shift is resistant to most physical attacks'.

Hardcore fans are hyper obsessed with hard categories and can't deal with grey area. When Seed Freedom came out, they freaked out that nuclear powered Gundams could still shut down and not be able to fight forever. Or that beam shields could be broken. Or that phase shift could be pierced by physical attacks.

They kept demanding that databooks be updated. Fukuda literally responded on social media and said not to take databooks too seriously. That he purposely tells databook writers what they are and aren't allowed to write about.

>>23803477
Is that right? Interesting

>>23803477
>When Sneed Freedom came out, they freaked out that nuclear powered Gundams could still shut down and not be able to fight forever. Or that beam shields could be broken

These two things already happened in Sneed Destiny; have they been freaking out since 2005? Destiny nuke reactor runs can't keep up with the power draw of wings of light; and I am pretty sure high powered beam weapons break through a beam shields a few times and the defending suit had to get out of the way

>>23805151
>Destiny nuke reactor runs can't keep up with the power draw of wings of light
The databook explanation was that Strike Freedom's point blank railgun attack (when Kira caught the AS sword) had damaged Destiny Gundam's reactor. Destiny's phase shift armor stopped major damage, but there was internal damage. Things got knocked out of alignment internally, and needed to be repaired at the Minerva.


>and I am pretty sure high powered beam weapons break through a beam shields a few times and the defending suit had to get out of the way
I don't recall this happening.

>>23784895 (OP)
The thing you need to understand about kings is

>>23784895 (OP)
He liked to play the piano, but he wasn't very good at it.

>>23805151
Running out of power was said to be a mistake at the time and removed in the Special Editions and HD remaster.

Later versions just have Shinn being called back for some reason, with the written explanation mentioned above about needing to do maintenance.

>>23805151
>>23805232
They didn't pierce right through, but they push back, sending the unit that blocked spinning once.

>>23784895 (OP)
You know back when I first played Katawa Shoujo I knew nothing about SEED at the time so when I saw the composer of some of the tracks was named "NicolArmarfi" I just assumed it was some Italian guy using his real name. Wasn't until much later I found out he named himself after a character that loved to play the piano. Considering the tracks by that guy tended to be banger piano music, easily some of the best songs on the soundtrack, makes sense that he went with that name.

>>23807634
IIRC, The Strike Freedom model kits say the railgun performance was improved, and can cause internal damage even through phase shift armor (similar to Raider Gundam's mace damaging phase shift armor and/or causing internal damage from impacts). One of the kits mentions damaging Destiny Gundam's reactor.