All of the players assemble at the Capital, and it’s looking unlikely that any will catch the train out of town.
Creative Staff
Story: Yukako Kabei
Illustration: Shunsuke Taue
Translation/Adaptation: Sarah Alys Lindholm
What They Say
Kieli, Harvey, and the Corporal are on their way to the capital with Joachim in tow…though nobody seems too happy about it. But when undead monsters attack their train, the group is separated, leaving Kieli on her own — that is, until she meets her father! Now that she’s reunited with her relative and her old friend Julius to boot, does this mean the end of Kieli’s adventures with Harvey and the Corporal?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Here we are at the beginning of the end of the KIELI series. With the long meandering road trip coming to a close it finally feels like the story has tightened up. With a razor like focus the author gets to work resolving motives and plunging headfirst into unexpected strife.
Many of the past conflicts are revisited for this grand finale. All of the bits and pieces we’ve learned about the strange power source which fuels the undying, and the poorly made replicas, become a driving point for survival. All of the characters we’ve met along the way are put to use in one way or another in this volume.
Kieli finally has her reunion with her estranged father. The meeting goes against cliché and feels amazingly genuine. Emotions and actions are slow to change in this story, and past mistakes are not easily forgiven or forgotten. I love Kieli’s dogged annoyance at the church and the officials, but I could see where some more religious readers would be rubbed the wrong way. Although, I doubt many of those readers made it this far in the series if they felt strongly enough about it. The characters in Kieli aren’t so much atheists as they are agnostic pessimists.
Joachim has haunted Kieli and Harvey from the very first volume. He should have died then, and stayed dead, but instead he kept coming back like a bad penny. The reason for this is inelegantly pointed out in the final pages of this volume for those that couldn’t figure it out. Is he more than a plot device and a foil for the heroes? Yes, but barely. His growing insanity as his body breaks down is fascinating to watch, and that alone makes up for his shortcomings.
All of the undying soldiers we’ve met seem to be facing the same set of identity issues. Joachim and Harvey’s we’ve seen play out in previous volumes, and when we rejoin Beatrice we see that she to is on the brink of loosing her mind. Like the other undying, she had a mortal past she can only remember in dreams. All the booze and fancy clothes in the world can only temporarily distract from her emptiness. She’s been demonized for so long that she doesn’t know how to deal with being a friend and a good person. Just like the others, she may not get a chance to make good on her past mistakes if she can’t survive the ongoing crisis.
That’s the big lingering if for everyone involved, survival and a chance at a normal life. Harvey had a daunting task returning to the capital to attempt to set things right about his mentor, Jude, and the rest of the experiments. Then when the church soldiers arrived and forced Kieli to confront her family’s past, things became even more complicated. However, their actual arrival in the capital comes at the worst possible time. I won’t spoil the surprise that awaits them, and it’s not just the zombie like monsters but something far stranger which has huge implications for their world and lives. A happy ending looks impossible, and the chapter listings on the table of contents for the final volume read as ominously as possible. I can still hope that somehow, Kieli and Harvey will find a way out of this and keep their promise to return together to a life more ordinary.
The insert art still feels not up to snuff, and it’s not just because it consists almost entirely of static close ups. It simply isn’t gory enough. The text description are far more visceral and violent than the clean, barely blood flecked artwork is depicting. This is painfully obvious in the final illustration. If the artist didn’t want to depict the worst of it, they could have chose different scenes. Instead the illustrations fall flat and are often factually inaccurate.
To Yen’s credit they’ve continued to print the frontispiece artwork in color, and in this volume that art is a fold out featuring all the players in the story in their own frame.
In Summary
Kieli’s story is coming to a close, and her arrival in the Capital couldn’t have been at a more inopportune moment. While it’s contrived to bring everyone together in one place for this grand finale, it’s not unexpected. The various characters all have their reasons for being in the Capital, and they all have demons to be confronted, some emotional and some physical. The final volume is going to have more than a few mysteries to explain, and I hope we get a few answers as to what the Church was up to with all these poorly executed experiments. More importantly, I hope that Kieli and Harvey get their wish, even if it appears that fate is working against them.
Content Grade: B +
Art Grade: C
Packaging Grade: B +
Text/Translation Grade: A –
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Yen Press
Release Date: April 23rd, 2013
MSRP: $11.99
