u/Solid_Station4330

What is it with victorian era inspired gacha games and their female white hair protagonists who seem to keep falling into deadly romances with flirty dark hair criminal women. I mean yeah it only happened twice but still. Two nickles

It has been the next upcoming patch instead of the last one.

Like, some of the things that make it feel like Filler is that you just go away and do something unrelated and then come back to pick off where you left off without consequences or real changes even though you just like fought two gods and became the savior of a whole country. Too many things of high importance happen but at the same time it feels like nothing happened. An top of that the escalation of threats is way too huge and weird, even though you had the assistance the system that was built, it still feels kind of silly given last week you just barely fought off what was bassically a serial killer werewolf.

But like the order of events makes way more sense the other way around, with some minor changes.

So, trying anything post Charon Hunter crisis is too dangerous, you caught too much attention and the prisoner is too well guarded, you come to that conclusion easily enough. You can just kind of lead into the Flora arc right after, with a time skip buffer. Events play out the same way they do in the last patch.

The Foresaken burn Icelake's Heaven Tree, killing a lot of people in the process and making it harder for the Empire to respond to their activities there. Flora and Vita soul bond, Vita sacrifices herself separating her from all her allies. A path is set with Flora in the Misty Sea as Flora brings back Vita the exact same way it does in the patch: meetup with Hilda, and later potentially with Outsider and Snow, have Hilda help you find and rescue Berry, and then meet up with Flora in the south Free State where she went to gather power to challenge her uncle for the throne. All the while things get dire with the Forsaken causing chaos and the war with the Church.

Except now, instead you go over to Huaxu, Vita having been washed away somewhere else and maybe getting picked up by Zhiliu or something on her way back from the empire. A meeting of chance after Zhiliu was disappointed from those guys trying to scam her, not being able to get a hold of the material she needed to complete her plans. Things large play out the same, but the escalation makes more sense since we just went from a fucking Heaven Tree burning and enveloping the land in smog and leaking Phoxene.

By the end of the Huaxu arc Vita has some idea of how her powers work and get's a proper power up. She did touch divinity but only through using the huge system set before her, not something she can replicate on her own yet, but she has at least started to get the hang off her powers and come to understand what they mean abd guessed at what the empire wants to with her as well as gotten an idea of what could happen if they succeed. So both Flora and Vita are progressing in their own way on their own path towards gaining the power to take on the empire.

Huaxu is devastated after what Zhiliu did, the gods have their hands full revisiting and making right on their mistakes. Zhiliu is still responsible for killing a shit ton of people with her stunt, so she is forced to step down and maybe has her assets frozen or something or placed under house arrest of some kind while Huaxu figueres it's shit out. Vita at least get's the location of where Berry and Hilda and her allies are and a way to get there. So then you can go into whatever comes next.

Like it feels like a more natural progression and put's the Huaxu arc in a situation where it's not just that crazy weekend we went to vegas or whatever.

Like it seems crazy that they didn't do this way when it would've only meant putting off Huaxu for one more patch, just a few more months. And it would've made the entire experience so much better.

So for context, my introduction to Macross was actually through used Robetch dvds from a garage sale my mom got me when I was a kid. Watched them with my best friend at the time and we both loved it.

Didn't realize the whole localization thing until way way way way later. Since I was really young I liked watching telenovelas with my mom and grandma, and I also like romantasy (I don't enjoy all them but when they hit they hit) and other types of romantic melodramas.

So, that being said. I've been catching up with the series, not in order but, but I have been doing it for years now, like around covid. I finally finished all the shows and movies outside of the Zero one. . . Because for some reason I can't push myself to finishing that one.

And like. . . I don't think I like most of the main romance relationships. The Minmay/Hikaru/Misa triangle is still my favorite either as Macross or Robotech, so glad Misa ended up with Hikaru in both too. Pretty much everything in Plus is messy as fuck and I love it.

I liked Basara as a character but wasn't really into any of the romantic parings in 7.

The main from Frontier was kind of boring and I actually don't understand why they didn't go back to the 7 situation or pulled a Symphogear. Sheryl and Ranka's dynamic as established idol and up&commer in a rivals situation feels like it would've been much more interesting to watch by itself. Like rival idols who are also rival mecha pilots Top Gun style would've been amazing.

Delta was a weird one. Because I don't understand why Freyja and Hayate didn't get together sooner. Like it's not like the plot was pushing their relationship back or anything. Mirage was never a series contender and it never felt like Hayate was being pulled between the two the way Hikaru was in SDF. Neither of them have character reasons to not just get together like unresolved trauma or emotional hangups the way Isamu and Myung have at first. It just feels so sterile. So eh.

Also as an aside, I liked that as a whole the Macross series feels so varied and unique. Each entry feels like it's something different than anything else in the series. Like for the most part it feels like the writers aren't afraid to deviate from what is familiar when they need to. . . However the jump between Frontier and Delta felt like the most sterile.

It's a different location and setting. And they focus on a different type of danger and antagonists. . . But the dialogue and writing and characters feel too close to Frontier. It's a little disappointing, because like the jump from SDJ to Plus and then 7 is so massive it leaves an impression. And then Delta just feels like DLC for Frontier.

I hope that whatever the next Macross series is they take more risks and try to do something different, that it feels like a fresh entry rather than just "whelp the fans sure did like Frontier, huh."

It's like if in the middle of the first act of FF7, Cloud went to fantasy China and fist fought gods and found out he had Jenova cells and what that meant before they yeeted him back to Midgard before half an entire city block falls from the sky.

Like, you go from sluming it in the mud, having pretty personal and smaller stories while uncovering the secrets of the empire and all that. . . then you just go to fantasy China to do some random shit, only to come back to the actual main plot just in time for a major turning point to happen lol. Like my god, the last patch's final boss was twin god dragons, and now we are fighting terrorists on a train. We went from more the grounded start arc to final boss JRPG nonesense only to go back to pick up right where we left off. Like if this was an anime the Huaxu arc would be the one every skips when they are binge watching the show for the first time.

Can't wait until we go back to Huaxu every single anniversary to do some random shit for the yearly filler event.

You can't power scale characters in this series for the same reason that you can't power scale artists in real life or doctors. Like it's why in real life there is no such thing as "the world's best heart surgeon," but also if you tried to compare heart surgeons to dentists or veterinarians.

There is no mana or power levels or special bloodlines or six eyes the like. Technically any witch could make Qilfrey's dragon if they really wanted to the same way that technically anyone can learn to replicate any drawing style (if you work in animation your job is mostly going to be trying to replicate other people's art style to stay on model.)

Also, the magic system in WHA is so tight that you could make a spell to replicate Infinity from JJK, any witch in the series could with enough time. Some might just take longer or go about it differently.