Before anything vaguely interesting.
Creative Staff
Story: Ryo Suzukaze
Art: Thores Shibamoto
Translation: Ko Ransom
What They Say
Humanity has been devastated by the bizarre, giant humanoids known as the Titans. Little is known about where they came from or why they are bent on consuming mankind. To combat these monsters, mankind has developed a new set of tools to grant them the skills of flight, speed, and agility. Before the Fall details the development of those tools. Before the fall, and before the trials of “the Titan’s son” Kyklo, a young smith by the name of Angel Aaltonen grappled with the giants as only a craftsman could…
Technical:
The cover here is a decent enough action shot of Angel zipping away from a Titan. It’s not exceptional but it has some nice dynamic motion to it and does its job well enough. The back cover is just plain red with a synopsis and an emblem, which is a bit bland. There is a rather nice color image included as an extra at the start, which is by far the nicest picture in the book. The text doesn’t read distractingly poorly, but there is something that feels unfortunately a tad stiff about it. If I were to try to pinpoint it, I’d say that the issue is that the translation probably stuck a little too closely to the original and ended up with some stilted sentences as a result. Paper quality feels solid and honorifics are not used.
The images interspersed throughout the book are unfortunately pretty dire. Technically, the style of the characters is perfectly fine, if a little stiff. However, it’s the compositions and the choice of what was drawn that’s downright poor. They’re almost all just close up looks at faces, or at best a full character shot, occasionally poorly cropped, with virtually no context of what they’re even showing. In the most painful example, at the key first appearance of a Titan and the ensuing panic we get… a back shot of Angel, where we can just barely kind of see part of the Titan, tiny and shoved in the corner. It’s a shame because the artist definitely could’ve added some solid images to give context to the world and add a little flavor, but instead we get some rather useless fluff.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Angel Aaltonen is a craftsman working in Shiganshina District, alongside his friends Maria (who confusingly works in the Garrison to defend Wall Maria), and Solm, a member of the Survey Corps. As this is a time before the events of the main series, though, Angel has never even seen a Titan. This is frustrating to him as it limits his ability to devise efficient weapons, especially as the government seems uninterested in creative work. Even so, Angel gives his all and is considered the ace of his workshop, where he is assisted by a girl named Corina Ilmari. One day, though, while he’s pondering a new material called Iron Bamboo (that’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like), he’s called into his boss Caspar’s office along with an explosives expert named Xenophon. The boss tells them of a new “factory city” that the government has been building in secret, and they end up getting to go visit, with Corina tagging along. To keep things from getting too dull, they get attacked on the way by terrorists, but ultimately all arrive safely.
While there they marvel at the facilities and learn of a new material called Iceburst Stone, which ends up being pretty much just compressed gas. Oddly, despite their stated specialties, Xenophon ends up making a sword from the Iron Bamboo, while Angel comes up with a prototype of the Equipment from the main series somehow without any iteration and off of only a vague comment from his assistant. When they arrive back in town, though, Titan lovers cause a riot that ultimately ends in the first ever Titan getting into Shiganshina District. After it kills Corina, Angel kind of snaps and ends up singlehandedly luring the Titan out of town using the prototypes.
From there, the rest of the book is spent with Angel going on a personal vendetta to manage to prove that Titans can actually be killed, getting swept up in plenty of politics along the way. Will he be the one to finally take down the first Titan?
In Summary
Unfortunately, this book was kind of doomed from the start based on its premise. The whole idea is to lead up to the invention of the equipment used to kill Titans, as well as the methods to do so. Obviously, this leaves the book in a situation where the characters are constantly searching for an answer that the reader almost certainly already knows, unless this is their introduction to the franchise. This could still be salvaged by making the journey an interesting one, but sadly the book completely fails to understand the idea of inventing or how to make it interesting. What we get instead are miraculous materials and solutions that pop up fully formed out of nowhere, rather than iteration or some sort of interesting methods. It’s certainly telling that the book needs to end the first chapter with an abrupt and random action scene out of nowhere just to keep the reader from drifting off. It’s only the book completely abandoning the invention theme and going for heavy action in the back half that saves it from being an absolutely bland mess, but even then there’s still plenty of shallow politics clogging things up. Big fans of the series may still be able to get a bit of enjoyment from the better scenes in the book, but even so it’s hard to recommend this absolute drag of a book.
Content Grade: C+
Art Grade: N/A
Packaging Grade: B+
Text/Translation Grade: B-
Released By: Vertical
Release Date: September 16th, 2014
MSRP: $10.95
