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 ^^;