Have to post one last picture of this happy nuclear Martian family.

Really glad I finally got my hands on a Barzam II rendition I can own. I remember when I first got into Advance of Zeta back in 2016 the designs that really got my attention were the Woundwort Ex and the Barzam II. I spent, and still spend, hours just looking at the designs imagining how they would behave if they were machines that were actually made. If you had put a gun to my head and told me to name my favorite AoZ back then I would have said one of those two, then after a while it would've been the base Woundwort and, after even more of a while, it would've been the Hazel Rah. These days I honestly would tell you to blow my head off over picking a single favorite.

The more time passes, and the more designs keep churning down that pipeline, the more I think Fujioka is the best designer that still gets regular work within the franchise. Others like Katoki, Ebikawa and Gyoubu are more misses than hits for me. It's easy to forget that Advance of Zeta: The Flag of Titans was originally tied to the A New Translation movies that were coming out in the early 2000's. And, while everything else that was coming out at the time to tie-in with the movies (up to and including the movies themselves) has been largely forgotten by time while Flag of Titans, now rebranded ReBoot still under the Advance of Zeta moniker, is still going strong. And it does so on the sheer strength of it's designs.

I read the FoT novels that were translated by Zeonic and it's really nothing special, I think. It has no real stand out action scenes for the designs to shine. It had no equivalent of Brave Cod going to town on the FAZZ team with the Mk-V. And as for the manga, they really should've hired a better artist. Those machines warrant linework on the level of Ark Performance. The designs were kept in fan's memories by looks alone in the interim between FoT and ReBoot.