Shingeki no Kyojin: Before the Fall
Attack on Titan: Before the Fall

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AoT Before the Fall tells a story that happens about 70 years before Eren, Mikasa, Armin and everyone else you know from the main manga or anime.

The main character here is Kuklo, "The titan's soon", a baby somehow born from a titan, and during his journey, we will learn more about stuff like how people lived 30 years after humanity started living inside the walls; how the military dealt with the expeditions outside the walls without their ODM Gear, and even how the same was invented.

This manga has a bunch of new and amazing characters, which in my opinion, is the highest point of the ... manga. Kuklo, Charle, Kardina and all the other characters you'll find here are amazing, unique and really enjoyable.
The story itself is great; not amazing like the main one, but still great. Besides some inconsistencies, such as titans active at night, it fits really well in the AoT world.

Overall, it's a really good spin-off story, and people really should read it, since it's very unknown between the fandom.

Having recently blitzed through AOT, I decided to give this a go too.

For someone that was grabbed by the initial impact that AOT had, this was… lacking in it. A lot of it felt like some high school SoL.

What did I like about the series? The origin of the ODM gear and its inventors. The Survey Corps of early era that struggle to justify its existence and the politics of the capital city. All of those were cool but not enough to cover for the characters the character development and the plot that really goes nowhere.

The ending arc is unsatisfying. They did their best to ... hype up the final part and in the end, gave me very little to enjoy both in terms of quality and length.

The art is fine, in my opinion. I noticed that the scale of the titans compared to the original series seemed off, though. 10-15 m class titans looked a lot bigger in this series, perhaps alluding to mankind’s unfamiliarity with something so alien as titans.

Some spin-offs can stand on their own but this is at best a supplementary material. A rating of 6 is on the generous side in my opinion.

this does not need to exist. it is a long, exhausting, dreadful read full of the most useless and unnecessary series of events known to man. and slapping an AoT logo on it doesn't really help it out.

halfway into the first chapter, it's kinda evident that things are just going to take a turn for the worse. not that it's completely abhorrent but that it tries a lot of things and does not really succeed at any of them.

the art is ok. it tries to mimic the original AoT art but i did feel like the background art was lacking for the most part ... and it did come off as a bit awkward and stiff a good chunk of the time.

Before the fall features some of the most forgettable characters i've known. the story just gives you little reason to be invested in any of them and it doesn't help that they're basically walking cliches/tropes.

a lot of my frustration stems from two things. firstly, it's just too long and the contents of the story do not justify that length. secondly, the story is set in the same world as AoT but it doesn't really use that in any meaningful way.

Before the fall isn't all terrible but it does itself no favours by telling a predictable, mediocre story and tying that to AoT.