Considering the fact that one can never have enough Kino no Tabi, I went out and bought Tokyopop’s release of “Book One of The Beautiful World.”
I find it interesting and I guess fitting that Amazon lists the book as:
Popular in this category: (What’s this?)
| #56 in | Books > Religion & Spirituality > Fiction > Visionary Fiction |
Interesting mainly because I’m surprised they don’t have a category for anime novels, especially considering there seem to be more of them released stateside these days. Not that I really know, as I don’t pay these trends much attention.
The book was worth its price, especially if you’re a huge fan of the series like I am. Each chapter tells one of the stories that we’ve seen already in the anime, and I mainly enjoy reading them because of the deeper look at Kino’s perspective on these people and their customs. While certain tales worked better in the visual form, namely the coliseum, which gave us a much closer look at each of the involved characters and the awful condition of the city, others worked better on paper. The story of the land of peace may have had a greater emotional impact in the series when we see the villagers massacred, but the novel spent more time describing the battle and Kino’s reaction to it, even showing her and Hermes stifle a cheer when one of the villagers manages to wound a soldier.
I think my main disappointment is that the whole book seemed rushed in comparison to the series, especially if there were 11 light novels released. A fourth of this 200 page book was spent on the Coliseum, but it’s hard to accomplish in 50 pages what the series accomplished with 2 episodes. And yes I realize the books came first, so I guess all I can hope is that there will be a lot more in future books that I haven’t seen animated.
On a final note, what I really want from the series right now are three things. 1: Another season, if there’s enough material for it (and there totally is). If not, I’ll just take more of the little OVA’s they’ve been putting out. 2: For the Good Smile Kino figure to be re-sold. I want that thing so fucking badly. 3: Gakuen Kino. Translate that and bring it over, like right now.
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Sigh…unfortunately, I think that’s the only Kino light novel we will be seeing from Tokyopop…I understand that they are dropping the series, in the sense that they have not released the second novel for 2 years now.
Don’t really know why they stopped – and they did quite a good job with the first book as well.
Just realised that baka-tsuki is having an on-going translation – http://www.baka-tsuki.net/project/index.php?title=Kino_no_Tabi
It’s a shame more of them haven’t been released. I bought that book early last year hoping for the remaining volumes to be released within a few months. It’s been over a year now. Almost two years since that book’s stateside release.
Such a bummer. The Kino series is really great.
It’s been two years since it was released??
;______________;
Yep, and volume two was originally slated to be out sometime last year, than sometime this year, but it doesn’t look like that’s the case. And a second on Gakuen Kino – alternate reality from the same creator for the win. :P