The Price of Smiles

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Jason-Jamey
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Re: The Price of Smiles

A question wonder regarding this series is, like all series, how it will be integrated into Super Robot Wars. Since it takes place in another galaxy and is Real Robot setting, the closest pairing would be with Armored Trooper VOTOMS. Someone else also recommended Gold Lighteon because even though that also hasn't debuted yet, it came from the same company and balance out Egao's gritty Real Robot theme with its light-hearted Super Robot theme.
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Seto Kaiba
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Re: The Price of Smiles

Jason-Jamey wrote: Wed May 29, 2019 12:54 am A question wonder regarding this series is, like all series, how it will be integrated into Super Robot Wars.
Would they even bother? The Price of Smiles was a flop.
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Henyo
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Re: The Price of Smiles

hmmm..was there ever a series that got into SRW that's considered a flop? i mean all around, critically and financially.

we've gotten weird series thanks to the Mobile X-Omega. so Price of Smile still has a chance to debut there...
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Seto Kaiba
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Re: The Price of Smiles

Henyo wrote: Thu May 30, 2019 6:06 am hmmm..was there ever a series that got into SRW that's considered a flop? i mean all around, critically and financially.
Have they done Southern Cross?
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yazi88
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Re: The Price of Smiles

Nope, Southern Cross has not been in any SRW game, and likely never will. If there was a time for it, it might've been the GBA/DS era where there wasn't any voice acting and would've been easier to put obscure shows in.

Mospeada might have a chance. It has decent popularity, even got a bluray release too in Japan.

SRW is weird in that they wait a long time to put older shows in. Dougram, Vifam have yet to be in any SRW, sometimes they wait for the right settings to put these shows in. VOTOMs took a very long time, and its only been in a few games too.
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Seto Kaiba
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Re: The Price of Smiles

yazi88 wrote: Thu May 30, 2019 5:24 pm Nope, Southern Cross has not been in any SRW game, and likely never will. If there was a time for it, it might've been the GBA/DS era where there wasn't any voice acting and would've been easier to put obscure shows in.
Well, thank goodness for small favors... that show was such a mess that, if it weren't so transparently obvious that the brain trust at Tatsunoko'd thought it would be a hit, I'd be inclined to suspect they were Springtimer for Hitler-ing.

My suspicion would be that The Price of Smiles will likely not be appearing in SRW at any point in the foreseeable future... the series was a train wreck, generated practically no merchandise, and wasn't even much of a mecha series. The Theurgears show up a fair bit but they and the war they're fighting seldom connect to the actual plot.


yazi88 wrote: Thu May 30, 2019 5:24 pm Mospeada might have a chance. It has decent popularity, even got a bluray release too in Japan.
Genesis Climber MOSPEADA was only a commercial flop, ratings-wise it actually did OK. Not great, but OK enough to get a wrapup OVA.
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yazi88
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Re: The Price of Smiles

Mospeada still has some figures and toys coming out every so often, so I guess there is still a bit of interest there. It might've generated more interest years later to get a bluray release.

But as for Price of Smiles... I have no interest in it at all... I didn't even knew if was airing when it did until I saw some screenshots on social media... but then again there really isn't much mecha shows coming out these days either... last actual new show I liked that was a original product and not based on a adaptation was Kuromukuro...

Mecha is becoming even more niche nowadays too. Super Robot shows are pretty much non-existent outside of studio trigger releasing something every so often. Maybe I've just grown old or bored of newer things as it seems bland...

Knights and Magic, Comet Lucifer, Darling Franxx... for the most part I've seem to lost interest in newer mecha IPs... The writing is so generic or just boring...
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Seto Kaiba
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Re: The Price of Smiles

yazi88 wrote: Thu May 30, 2019 8:05 pm Mospeada still has some figures and toys coming out every so often, so I guess there is still a bit of interest there. It might've generated more interest years later to get a bluray release.
It had a small but fervently faithful following when it first aired in Japan. It's also the only one of the three shows that Harmony Gold bastardized to make Robotech to really benefit from it in terms of exposure, as it has a similar tiny but loyal following in the west with deep pockets for top tier collectibles.


yazi88 wrote: Thu May 30, 2019 8:05 pm But as for Price of Smiles... I have no interest in it at all... I didn't even knew if was airing when it did until I saw some screenshots on social media...
It coasted for a while on the interest it generated with its status as an all-new, original mecha anime series made as a commemoration of Tatsunoko Production's anniversary. It was a calculated ploy to cash in on the fond memories the mecha fans have of the shows Tatsunoko did in the mecha genre's formative years, but it completely failed to pan out when the show turned out to be a Southern Cross-caliber bad idea.


yazi88 wrote: Thu May 30, 2019 8:05 pm Knights and Magic, Comet Lucifer, Darling Franxx... for the most part I've seem to lost interest in newer mecha IPs... The writing is so generic or just boring...
That's because anime in general is running on a razor-thin margin with studios looking for guaranteed successes that they can use to balance out the majority of shows that won't break even for years. Innovation and originality are risks that many creators can't get backing for unless they're well-established in their field. About the only creator left who's got both the passion to innovate in mecha and the influence to get the capital to make it happen is Shoji Kawamori... notoriously inconsistent as his non-Macross work can be.

Everyone else is just sort of following the Gundam model and endlessly rehashing the plots of previous shows... Gundam's a money spinner but it's stagnant as f*ck with the only question in a new series usually being what we have to call the space nazis this year.
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TezukaSensei
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Re: The Price of Smiles

Seto Kaiba wrote: Mon Apr 08, 2019 10:33 pm 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.
You missed some critical details here.
Spoiler
It was established that the chrars, (the mystery energy source thing), was in fact killing the planet slowly but surely. They realized after uncovering the research that some were trying to keep buried, that the chrars had to be neutralized to save the planet, not just to end the war. Also not everything ran on the chrars, they were almost exclusively for the arms race. The thing they did at the end was specificly to neutralize all chrars. Nothing more, nothing less. It was not an EMP.
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Seto Kaiba
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Re: The Price of Smiles

TezukaSensei wrote: Sat Jun 01, 2019 4:40 pm You missed some critical details here.
No I didn't, you just missed the other posts talking about it.

In fact, a good chunk of your "correction" is wrong.

TezukaSensei wrote: Sat Jun 01, 2019 4:40 pm
Spoiler
It was established that the chrars, (the mystery energy source thing), was in fact killing the planet slowly but surely. They realized after uncovering the research that some were trying to keep buried, that the chrars had to be neutralized to save the planet, not just to end the war.
Spoiler
Not quite. The actual (even stupider) reveal was that chrarslapis's supposedly infinite wellspring of clean and free energy was actually being siphoned from the ancient nanomachines that the original generation of colonists had used to reengineer the planet's environment into a habitable one for lifeforms transplanted from Earth. That planet is inhospitable to humans in its natural state, and draining increasing amounts of power from the nanomachines that're maintaining the human-suitable environment was causing the artificial environment to slowly break down.

TezukaSensei wrote: Sat Jun 01, 2019 4:40 pm
Spoiler
Also not everything ran on the chrars, they were almost exclusively for the arms race. The thing they did at the end was specificly to neutralize all chrars. Nothing more, nothing less. It was not an EMP.
Spoiler
Over its short run, The Price of Smiles was pretty clear on the subject of chrarslapis having been adopted as the main energy source for human civilization generations ago because - as far as these idiots knew - it was a miracle in crystal form that produced limitless clean energy and could be found all over the planet. Apparently the knowledge that was lost over generations included basic thermodynamics, since a middle school science class would easily be able to spot the obvious hole in the idea of infinite energy from an inert rock.

They make no bones about showing that chrars are used for most any situation where large amounts of energy have to be generated. The military is the largest consumer of chrars but it is far from the only user. The new chrars that much of the show's early plot revolve around were explicitly developed to power farms and factories to compensate for then-unexplained deterioration of viable farmland. They were only sidelined for military use after the war with Grandiga put the Kingdom of Soliel in such a bind that they had no other option. The new chrars captured by Stella's platoon early in the series is captured at the large-scale vertical farm complex it was powering. Likewise, when they demonstrate that overloading chrarslapis can depower all chrars in a wide area, the demonstration kills all power in the factory that they were occuying AND depowers all vehicles and equipment present.

So after going to such lengths to show that they'd literally DESTROYED A KINGDOM to keep the fact that chrarslapis is dangerous a secret because mankind was totally dependent on it, it's really weird that the show's ending glosses over the fact that Yuki and Stella essentially destroyed the energy infrastructure of an entire planet and nobody minds.
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Henyo
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Re: The Price of Smiles

whelp, seto replied just as i hit the submit button. XD

gonna change my post in light of this. :D

it will still be considered an EMP by those not in the know..which is basically everyone else outside of the Princess' Team. i thought about this end game and came to think that i really could have been executed better if they were given 2 or 3 more episodes. like they could have informed everyone in the world about the truth. and the evidence they've found could give the other side to think things over. small character developments if possible.

then the final battle would've more stakes for those who want to keep the tech(to keep the mechs of course and those who don't want loss the current levels of technology. just my 2 cents I've pondered over the months.
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Gruvvy
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Re: The Price of Smiles

I am watching it, so far looks interesting
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Seto Kaiba
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Re: The Price of Smiles

Gruvvy wrote: Thu Jun 13, 2019 5:22 am I am watching it, so far looks interesting
... yeah, that doesn't last. :|
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Henyo
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Re: The Price of Smiles

let's hope the the original mecha anime Granbelm can do the mecha anime with girls better.
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Seto Kaiba
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Re: The Price of Smiles

Henyo wrote: Thu Jun 27, 2019 12:09 pm let's hope the the original mecha anime Granbelm can do the mecha anime with girls better.
As difficult as it would be to make a mecha anime worse than The Price of Smiles, Granbelm looks like it's about to give it the good ol' college try.

From the two trailers I was able to find, Granbelm looks to be hardcore cutesy waifu bullsh*t. The mecha are even chibi-style and it looks to have magical girl costume changes.
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