Spock and C-3PO are a good call for Naaga and Balance. Toei is clearly riffling through major sci-fi series here for inspiration, which isn't a bad thing. That they made the human the emotionless one and the robot the overactive one is an interesting inversion of what you'd expect. At the same time I'm not sure if it's a smart thing to do in the long run; the show only has 5 face actors to begin with, and now they just "burnt" one by making him emotionless, wasting the full emoting range a proper face actor offers. At least they've lined up a good VA and suit actor for Balance, though it can't completely make up for the fact that he's a suit.
Right now most of the characters - and sadly, all of the humanoids - feel like caricatures. Lucky is dialed up to 11 constantly, Spada seems like he is always hosting a cooking show, Hame is laughing at everything inappropriately, and Naaga is an especially dry Vulcan (and Balance is C-3PO if he was even more excitable). I get the archetypes the writers are going for, but none of these characters are well grounded right now. They're not people with interesting personalities, they are the personalities.
Meanwhile we'll see if this holds up, but I like how the staff is embracing the foreign worlds concept, even if it is on a budget. They're running around an industrial plant as a stand-in for an industrial planet, and it feels right; it's not an obvious reuse of one of their standard filming locations. While urban Tokyo is nice, after Jyuohger it's a nice break to get away from it. Production is going to have to go back to the Toei lot sooner or later, but I hope they keep up this kind of variety.
Agreed. I can appreciate that they're not making him a functional clone of Spock, but a character that speaks in a broken manner disturbs that part of the unconscious mind that processes speech and is now trying to figure out what's wrong with the guy. There's no reason he needs to speak like that.takenoko wrote:I don't like the way Naaga speaks. Spock and Data didn't have emotions either, but at least they could speak fluently. Also they understood friendship on an intellectual level. The writing here makes Naaga seem like a dumb baby who's also slow on top of it. Some combination of the writing/acting is to blame for this, since I normally like characters without emotions. But this one wasn't doing it for me.
It was a couple of quick suit shots (on an admittedly nice industrial set), followed by CGI for the rest of it. I will fully admit that I'm not a fan of heavy CGI use for mech fights, but in my book this fight didn't have anything interesting going on.I wasn't as impressed with the mech fight this time, but it is interesting that gold and silver's mecha already have humanoid modes.
Naaga and Balances' mecha aren't standard robo size, and we didn't see suits or physical models. They were pure CGI. I wouldn't expect to see them operating solo too often. They're not meant as stand-alone robos.Draccy wrote:Naaga and Balance are going to be a fun duo, and it's nice to see their Voyagers are more defined and will likely operate solo a little more.
I guess that means Pink and Orange will have Voyagers in the same since, while the main five keep the robo.
