The Price of Smiles

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Seto Kaiba
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The Price of Smiles

So... is anyone following this?

A new mecha anime by none other than Tatsunoko Productions for their 55th Anniversary?

http://egaonodaika.com/
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Ryujin
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Re: The Price of Smiles

I'm watching. A bit surprised that the incident with Joshua happened this early.
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Seto Kaiba
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Re: The Price of Smiles

Ryujin wrote: Mon Jan 14, 2019 10:30 pm I'm watching. A bit surprised that the incident with Joshua happened this early.
He was a pretty obvious decoy protagonist... he's barely in the OP at all.

Aesthetically, the theurgears from Soliel look like a weird mix of the seikijin from Isekai no Seikishi Monogatari and the Arm Slaves from Full Metal Panic! but maneuver like something out of Eureka Seven or Macross... the enemy ones look like a crappy Graze knockoff.
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Re: The Price of Smiles

at first i was meh. and then the Opening came. i'm sold. what can i sat? i like yuri subtext in moi mecha anime.
havent taken a good look at the mechs. but hey, Yuri. :D
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Ryujin
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Re: The Price of Smiles

Seto Kaiba wrote: Mon Jan 14, 2019 11:40 pm Aesthetically, the theurgears from Soliel look like a weird mix of the seikijin from Isekai no Seikishi Monogatari and the Arm Slaves from Full Metal Panic! but maneuver like something out of Eureka Seven or Macross... the enemy ones look like a crappy Graze knockoff.
I feel that Yanase was going for a design that reflected the Empire's style of government, which is also seen in their uniforms. You have Soleil's colorful, even gaudy, cut & color schemes reminiscent of 18th Century continental armies on one hand, and the Empire's same-y, utilitarian fashion style that's the hallmark of the 20th century's armies on the other.
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Re: The Price of Smiles

watched episode 2. i took a better look at the mechas. Joshua's has...Crotch Thruster/ Anti grav?
i think that's a first for me. and i am reminded of the units from Nobunaga the fool and Gargantia. the former for the general designs and height and the latter for the universal feature of hover/anti grav.

on a side note. any ideas on the origins of the squads/unit names? there are some nice/cools sounding names there.
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tHeWasTeDYouTh
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Re: The Price of Smiles

So is this show worth watching? Been checking what people are saying and it is pretty meh from what I hear.
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Seto Kaiba
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Re: The Price of Smiles

tHeWasTeDYouTh wrote: Sun Feb 10, 2019 1:57 am So is this show worth watching? Been checking what people are saying and it is pretty meh from what I hear.
My hopes were high at the outset, since Tatsunoko Production used to be one of the giants of mecha anime and this was supposed to be one of their anniversary projects... but this show's a trainwreck.

Six episodes in and the nicest word I can come up with to describe the show's situation is "struggling". The quality of the animation took a very visible dive starting in the fourth episode, and six episodes into a twelve episode series I'm honestly not sure if the writers even know what they want to do with the series. Many of the episodes don't seem to really be connected to each other or a larger plot, just lots of the random human awfulness of war. There was a bit of promising mecha action early on but it's mostly dissolved into static formations shooting at each other like this is the Napoleonic era all over again or something.

Good concept, bad execution would be my TL;DR summary.
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Re: The Price of Smiles

This probably explains the reason I haven't seen anyone talking about it...

The only mecha show I've seen this season is REVISIONS, the cel shaded anime on Netflix by Goro Taniguchi. The animation is pretty rough but the story isn't that bad. Although I'm only 4 eps in. The animation definitely takes away from it.
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Re: The Price of Smiles

Seto Kaiba wrote: Sun Feb 10, 2019 7:56 pm
tHeWasTeDYouTh wrote: Sun Feb 10, 2019 1:57 am So is this show worth watching? Been checking what people are saying and it is pretty meh from what I hear.
My hopes were high at the outset, since Tatsunoko Production used to be one of the giants of mecha anime and this was supposed to be one of their anniversary projects... but this show's a trainwreck.

Six episodes in and the nicest word I can come up with to describe the show's situation is "struggling". The quality of the animation took a very visible dive starting in the fourth episode, and six episodes into a twelve episode series I'm honestly not sure if the writers even know what they want to do with the series. Many of the episodes don't seem to really be connected to each other or a larger plot, just lots of the random human awfulness of war. There was a bit of promising mecha action early on but it's mostly dissolved into static formations shooting at each other like this is the Napoleonic era all over again or something.

Good concept, bad execution would be my TL;DR summary.
yeah once I went to the website and saw the character designs I kind of knew it was going to be bad. Mecha anime is pretty bad nowadays. All we really get that is solid is Gundam
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Seto Kaiba
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Re: The Price of Smiles

tHeWasTeDYouTh wrote: Mon Feb 11, 2019 2:34 am yeah once I went to the website and saw the character designs I kind of knew it was going to be bad. Mecha anime is pretty bad nowadays. All we really get that is solid is Gundam
Looking at a bunch of the character designs, especially those from Soliel, it feels like Tatsunoko still hasn't grown beyond "let's just copy Macross" as a school of thought for developing a mecha series that worked so poorly for them in the 80's with Genesis Climber MOSPEADA and Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross.

Harold, Izana, and Break all look suspiciously like Macross Frontier characters... Ozma, Alto, and Bobby to be precise.
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Re: The Price of Smiles

Seto Kaiba wrote: Mon Feb 11, 2019 2:15 pm
tHeWasTeDYouTh wrote: Mon Feb 11, 2019 2:34 am yeah once I went to the website and saw the character designs I kind of knew it was going to be bad. Mecha anime is pretty bad nowadays. All we really get that is solid is Gundam
Looking at a bunch of the character designs, especially those from Soliel, it feels like Tatsunoko still hasn't grown beyond "let's just copy Macross" as a school of thought for developing a mecha series that worked so poorly for them in the 80's with Genesis Climber MOSPEADA and Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross.

Harold, Izana, and Break all look suspiciously like Macross Frontier characters... Ozma, Alto, and Bobby to be precise.
you can add the bald dude. he looks a lot like the bald dude from Coffin Princess Chaika. only thing missing is a Gundr. the Alto lookalike looks closer to OO's Billy Katagiri for me.

at episode 6 right now. at the pace it's going i can safely say this is the new Argevollen.fortunately(or is it?) it doesn't have an Aldnoah Zero counterpert this season.
but really, it's not terribly bad nor amazingly good. it also shares Argevollen's QUALITY. episode 6's faces. :lol:
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Re: The Price of Smiles

Seto Kaiba wrote: Sun Feb 10, 2019 7:56 pm
tHeWasTeDYouTh wrote: Sun Feb 10, 2019 1:57 am So is this show worth watching? Been checking what people are saying and it is pretty meh from what I hear.
My hopes were high at the outset, since Tatsunoko Production used to be one of the giants of mecha anime and this was supposed to be one of their anniversary projects... but this show's a trainwreck.

Six episodes in and the nicest word I can come up with to describe the show's situation is "struggling". The quality of the animation took a very visible dive starting in the fourth episode, and six episodes into a twelve episode series I'm honestly not sure if the writers even know what they want to do with the series. Many of the episodes don't seem to really be connected to each other or a larger plot, just lots of the random human awfulness of war. There was a bit of promising mecha action early on but it's mostly dissolved into static formations shooting at each other like this is the Napoleonic era all over again or something.

Good concept, bad execution would be my TL;DR summary.
Not to mention that Yuki has near-Kira "Jesus" Yamato style ideals ("I don't want anyone to die!") and stubbornly sticks to them (literally runs the military idealistically rather than realistically) regardless of how it might help OR hurt either side, even while admitting that she can see where the more experienced people are coming from. I really wish Harold got more angry at her for her idiocy before when she refused to allow them to capture/kill that female Empire commander...
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Seto Kaiba
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Re: The Price of Smiles

Well, we're now one episode away from the end of The Price of Smiles and it still feels like this f*cking series hasn't got a clue what it wants to be or where it wants to go.

The ongoing war between the Kingdom of Soleil and the Empire of Grandiga doesn't seem to have any relevance to any of the character drama 99% of the time. It's just this thing that's going on in the background that doesn't seem like it really affects the lives of the main characters. There's some half-assed political subplot going on but that is every bit as incomprehensible and meandering as the war story. The closest we've gotten to actual progress in the plot is...

Spoiler
... the revelation that using chrarslapis as an energy source is what's behind the slow deterioration in the planet's agricultural viability, which was what motivated Grandiga to declare war on Soleil.

As plot twists go, this is so deep in hack writer territory it's genuinely embarrassing to watch the characters try to take it seriously. It came into the story far too late for its associated plot thread to be resolved at a natural pace in the series, almost everyone outside of the main cast seems to have already known, and nobody seems to really care. In my estimation it wanders even farther into the most cretinous kind of writing (the Hideo Kojima school) with the further revelation that chrarslapis is tapping energy from the nanomachines which the original colonists used to terraform the planet (because nanomachines are f*cking magic, right?), and that all of humanity on that desolate rock are 100% dependent on chrarslapis for energy. NO alternate energy technology exists, apparently.

The sheer number of bad decisions and failed spot checks that had to occur for the human settlers on this remote world to get where they are is astronomical, and firmly puts them in "too dumb to live" territory. These people's ancestors came to the planet in an interstellar spacecraft. They have giant robots, hard light holograms, and an array of other highly sophisticated technology. How is it that NOBODY in this scientifically-advanced civilization noticed that what chrarslapis allegedly did was flatly impossible right off the bat? Every scientist just conceded that the First Law of Thermodynamics was out to lunch and that was it? So the various nations on the planet all decide to just adopt this new technology as their one and only source of energy despite having zero clue how it actually functioned. After all that hemming and hawing about how hard life was for the settlers, what kind of complete idiot would make an unexplained phenomena their civilization's one and only source of energy for all technology? Nobody bothered to preserve the technology for wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, or nuclear power, even as a backup for chrars? Most of that isn't exactly complicated. Add to that that nobody bothered to even properly preserve records of how to work the nanomachines that were the only thing keeping the planet suitable for human life.

Moreover, where the hell are these nanomachines getting such seemingly inexhaustible supplies of power? They're microscopic, and overunity is a fairy tale. That energy has to be coming from SOMEWHERE.
To put the cherry on that sundae of awfulness, every character who seemed to realize what useless pillocks the two main characters are seems to have up and died... and the show keeps trying to make the Grandigans a little sympathetic despite having spent so much time previously establishing that they're kind of complete arseholes who'd murder and abuse children.
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Henyo
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Re: The Price of Smiles

Okay..that was something...something..i don't have much words for how this one ended. actually i think bittersweet fits. on one hand, No more wars using mechs powered by Ma..i mean SUPER ADVANCED TECH DISCOVERED BY MAN.

on the other hand..this could have been something good if handled with better care. also, That damn opening was a bunch of lies!!! to be fair to the show, i had my Yuri goggles set to high that time.

side note: Seto Kaiba what is this "cretinous kind of writing (the Hideo Kojima school) you speak of? i have never been into the Metal gear series or much of Kojima's other works. can ya enlighten this humbe(NOT) one.
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Seto Kaiba
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Re: The Price of Smiles

Henyo wrote: Fri Apr 05, 2019 10:12 am Okay..that was something...something..i don't have much words for how this one ended. actually i think bittersweet fits. on one hand, No more wars using mechs powered by Ma..i mean SUPER ADVANCED TECH DISCOVERED BY MAN. [...]
All future wars to be fought by twatting each other with sticks and sharp bits of metal like it's the goddamn middle ages.


Henyo wrote: Fri Apr 05, 2019 10:12 am side note: Seto Kaiba what is this "cretinous kind of writing (the Hideo Kojima school) you speak of? i have never been into the Metal gear series or much of Kojima's other works. can ya enlighten this humbe(NOT) one.
Hideo Kojima is easily one of the worst writers I've ever seen.

He seems to be incapable of telling the difference between complexity and depth, so every story he writes is a twisted and impenetrable mess of disjointed action sequences, dialog that sounds like everyone is coming down off of dental anesthetic (to the point of frequently being memetically awful), and emptying dustbins of exposition into the horrified faces of his audience. New World Order conspiracy theories feature prominently in his work, and nanomachines were essentially his equivalent of "a wizard did it" for the entire Metal Gear Solid series and frequently border on being swiss army molecules or actual goddamn magic. They could do anything from monitoring someone's vital signs and administering medication to rapidly healing wounds, purifying water after you drink it, acting as a cybernetic two-way radio, remotely hacking computer systems, hijacking someone's body, mind control, and at one point turning a United States senator into something resembling the Incredible Hulk.

(It's rather telling that, when Kojima stepped back and let his assistants run the shop, the nanomachines thing swiftly ended up being relentlessly mocked by having a villain - the aforementioned senator - who hung a lampshade on the whole nanomachines thing being bullshit before turning into the Incredible Hulk and shooting ki blasts at the player character like something out of Dragon Ball.)
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Re: The Price of Smiles

ya know, i usually forget that just because someone is held in high regards by a large fandom doesn't mean others won't find his stuff MEH. i was under the impression that Kojima's stuff is more or less good. everyone and their dog seems to be into Metal Gear Series. just look at the hype surrounding his upcoming new game.

for the record, i avoid it whenever possible.

on the subject of writers who wrote POS?(<can certainly use the other Acronymn for POS for this anime huh?) this is kinda like Hugtto. great start, MEH Middle AND SUPER WTF End Game development(Looking at you WAKAMIYA!!!)
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Seto Kaiba
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Re: The Price of Smiles

Henyo wrote: Sat Apr 06, 2019 5:42 am on the subject of writers who wrote POS?(<can certainly use the other Acronymn for POS for this anime huh?) this is kinda like Hugtto. great start, MEH Middle AND SUPER WTF End Game development(Looking at you WAKAMIYA!!!)
As late and seemingly out of nowhere as the all-important revelation that chrarslapis was what was responsible for the slow deterioration of the planet's environment, calling it a "super WTF" end game development feels like we're not doing it justice. It's so completely random that it feels like the creators gave up trying to figure out what that series ought to be about and decided to troll anyone who was still watching.

As derivative and full of bullshit plot twists as it was, it reminds me of nothing so much as the cancelled Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross series from '84. Like The Price of Smiles, Southern Cross had an unimaginative but mildly interesting start followed by a train wreck of derivative bullshit and ending in an out-of-nowhere headscratcher that makes no sense no matter how many times you watch it. Unlike Southern Cross, The Price of Smiles can't use being cancelled barely halfway in as an excuse for its crappy writing.

The only way they could've made it worse would've been to make John Travolta the executive producer and give him a role in it.

I don't think I've ever seen a mecha show that caused such a spectacular failure to care. I've seen shows I loved, shows I liked, and shows I loathed, but The Price of Smiles fails so utterly at making an impression that I'm left unable to really articulate any feeling towards it other than a noncommittal "ehhh" sound. If Tatsunoko just wasn't going to try, why should I?


Henyo wrote: Sat Apr 06, 2019 5:42 am ya know, i usually forget that just because someone is held in high regards by a large fandom doesn't mean others won't find his stuff MEH. i was under the impression that Kojima's stuff is more or less good. everyone and their dog seems to be into Metal Gear Series. just look at the hype surrounding his upcoming new game.
Kojima's games are sound and enjoyable in terms of actual gameplay... it's just their stories tend to be conspiracy theory dumpster fires somewhere between Giorgio Tsoukalos and Alex Jones on the sliding scale of total bullshit.

It became completely impossible to take Kojima's writing seriously the minute he started seriously using the word "memes" in a serious, dramatic context.
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Re: The Price of Smiles

Probably not since Comet Lucifer have I felt so...empty watching a(n original) supposed mecha anime.
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Seto Kaiba
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Re: The Price of Smiles

Looking back at the series finale of The Price of Smiles, it's kind of shocking how utterly cavalier Yuki Soleil and her retainers are about the idea of setting off what amounts to a planet-wide permanent EMP. It's mentioned, but at no point does anyone seem to think about the actual consequences in terms of the cost in lives.

Yuki and Stella didn't just permanently kill power to every theurgear, artillery piece, and warship on the planet, they permanently cut the power to every municipal power grid, independent building, and vehicle. They probably hurt or killed a LOT of people that day. Every hospital lost power. Vehicles being driven became uncontrollable missiles in motion. People in buildings with powered sliding doors (like 90% of the buildings seen in the series) would be stuck in their own homes or businesses.
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