November 24th, 2009, 7:28PM by nat | 11 comments
I think Ranka should have gone for a more embarrassed look on her cover, as fair warning that the RANKA Macross Frontier Official Book would be nothing like the Sheryl Nome Visual Collection published earlier by Kadokawa. Suffice to say, Ranka's book did not meet expectations.
The RANKA book, which came out November 19, is B5 in size, and it comes with a fold-out poster with a new illustration. While it's a good start, this book doesn't put much emphasis on pictures, which was what I was hoping for after seeing the Sheryl Nome Collection. There are a few new pictures though, but at the same time those new pictures are also some of the only illustrations in the book.The new art work, on the inside is drawn by Ha-Ru (like the image above) and the poster and cover were drawn by Takashi Mamezuka. I was expecting some work from Risa Ebata, the character designer who contributed to the new illustrations for the Sheryl Nome book, but that didn't happen either.
The other three pictures above are the rest of the new art work in the front of the book. Sadly, the last one was actually enlarged to print in the book, so it's really pixelated. And that's pretty much the first 13 pages of the book.
At this point, the pictures pretty much stop and the Ranka "In My Life" section starts. The first chapter is made up of a life timeline for Ranka, then a Q&A answer session with her. Then it briefly covers Ranka's first love, Alto, and somehow the editors managed to misspell Sheryl's last name as "Norm" instead of "Nome" on page 26.
If you buy this book, you can learn Ranka's dance in just 17 moves! :D It's one of the cuter things in the book, and takes up two pages. After than it's back to screen shots articles and different fashions Ranka wore, using the character profile images that you would have seen in magazines like Newtype and on the website.
Although the book is 144 pages, most of it is miscellaneous trivia and info about Ranka. For instance, there's a 55 page "blog" that Ranka kept. Basically, it's just the episodes in summary from Ranka's point of view and how she remembered it. Great for those really, really hardcore fans. There's also a 5-page Ranka dictionary.
The book ends with interviews about Ranka and other things. One is with the director Shoji Kawamori who I would guess has more to say about robots than Ranka. And the other interview is with Ranka's voice actress Megumi Nakajima. They then manage to find another way to summarize episodes by having Megumi give her reviews of each of the episodes over 7 pages of the book.
The Ranka illustrations from magazines and promotional items aside from a couple of images, are mostly absent. I can only hope that Kadokawa would still take a stab at publishing a Ranka book after this one. I think if these two books had come out in reverse order, I would have definitely passed on buying the Sheryl one out of fear it would be this bad ^^;
14 years, 11 months ago
OMG I was just gonna grab this, thanks for the honest review...
14 years, 11 months ago
You're welcome, that's what I hope to do when books are bad---just show what's actually there ^^;
14 years, 11 months ago
It might the difference between an "official book" and "visual collection". And that's also a reason why I don't get too many artbooks from anime.
14 years, 11 months ago
Yeah, anime and game books tend to be a mixed bag no matter what the title, especially since they're not consistent in the ways they use "material collection", "visual collection", "visual book" etc. Sometimes you get a lot of bang for your buck, other times you end up with this :3 I have one titled Ozawa Akifumi Art Works which isn't much more than printed game CGs.
14 years, 11 months ago
We saw your blog today. It's nice! would love to exchange banner with your site. Our site is www.e2046.com, an anime figure site. Our traffic is good.
email exchangebanner@e2046.com
14 years, 11 months ago
Thanks for the warning, very appreciated!
14 years, 11 months ago
I hate Sheryl (is only a btch), and hate shoji (sht) kawamori humiliates much to Ranka
14 years, 11 months ago
What? Are you only buying them for the ero pictures?? This is way better than the Sheryl Nome collection. It's allll about Ranka, it's awesome and has more meat!! I'm so buying this.
14 years, 11 months ago
Neither of these books had anything you could remotely describe as "ero pictures." Most of the time, my sole purpose in buying art books is the illustrations. I'm not at all concerned about a fictional characters' opinion of the episodes she starred it, so the "meat" of this book is really meant for die-hard fans ;3
14 years, 11 months ago
Is this a poison? :P It's sad to see this book didn't live up to the hype compared to Sheryl Nome Visual Collection. They seem to have thrown in a lot more content other than artworks and it's just a shame this overweight the artworks material.
Overall, I doubt I will be flicking through this book a 2nd time so I'm happy to give it a miss.
14 years, 9 months ago
I just got mine in the mail today hoping it would be like the Sheryl Nome visual fan book. I am thoroughly disappointed as well :c Shoulda seen this first before I got it...