[Review] Attack on Titan !

[Lunix I]

Attack on Titan was the project name for a cancelled Blizzard Entertainment massively multiplayer online game. With speculation regarding the game beginning in 2007, Blizzard revealed little information besides that it would be completely new and not be based on the company's then-current three main franchises.

The game was internally canceled by Blizzard in May 2013, though publicly they announced that the project would be delayed as they took the title in a different direction. Its official cancellation was made in September 2014. Internally, about forty members of the Titan project used the developed assets to craft a new game which became Overwatch.

Attack on Titan 2 is coming to Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Windows PC and Xbox One in North America and Europe, publisher Koei Tecmo confirmed this week. The sequel to Omega Force’s 2016 adaptation of Attack on Titan will focus on the anime’s second season, with a bit more story for hardcore fans.

The exact details of how Titan would have played are not known, but Blizzard's Jeff Kaplan, who served on the Titan development team and later became the director for Overwatch, identified that the game was a class-based shooter game. Players would have selected a character from several classes, which granted them initial abilities. As they progressed in the game, they would gain points to use to spend on a skill tree for that character. Kaplan said that, near the point of Titan's cancellation, the variety of skills they had in the game led to overpowered combinations, and described the result as "very cluttered and confused".

Shortly after the cancellation announcement, Kotaku ran an article in which they described the game as "a massive multiplayer PC game in which players could both maintain non-combat professions and shoot their way through death-matches on a sci-fi version of Earth." According to the article, which was sourced by anonymous employees who worked on the project, the game would take place on a near-future Earth where the player would take on a "mundane job" during the day while fighting enemies at night.

In 2007, users on a Blizzard Internet forum speculated that the game was in development after the company published job listings for character and environment artists to work on a "Next-Gen MMO" that was "Top Secret." A Blizzard community representative confirmed that the postings were for an unannounced game that was not an expansion for World of Warcraft. Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick, Blizzard COO Paul Sams, and Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime all verified that it was a new game in 2008. A confidential project schedule was released without the company's consent in November 2010. It showed a project titled "Titan" with a release date in the fourth quarter of 2013. Blizzard China's general manager either resigned or was terminated after the leak.

Eren Jaeger lives with his foster sister Mikasa Ackerman and best friend Armin Arlert in the town of Shiganshina adjacent to Wall Maria, outermost of three circular walls protecting humanity from man-eating Titans said to have killed all other humans one hundred years prior. When Shiganshina and Wall Maria are breached by the Colossal and Armored Titans, invading Titans force humanity to retreat behind Wall Rose. After a titan devours his mother and his father disappears, a vengeful Eren enlists in the military along with Mikasa and Armin.

At the 2010 Spike Video Game Awards, Blizzard co-founder Frank Pearce told gaming blog Destructoid that the studio had begun talking about the title as a recruitment tool. Morhaime spoke of the game in broad terms during a panel discussion at the 2011 D.I.C.E. Summit. He said that the company had its most experienced MMO developers working on the project. He explained that they were using lessons from the years of working on World of Warcraft, and he also emphasized the significance of players gaming with people they know as opposed to strangers. Morhaime believed that World of Warcraft and Titan, upon its release, would be able to co-exist on the market. He had made a similar statement in 2008 when he told Wired magazine that the game would be so different that it would not compete.

In an interview with Gamasutra in March 2011, Sams revealed that the game was playable and laid out a vision for the project to "still be growing strong" in ten, fifteen or twenty years, having "set a new mark in the industry." By September 2012, development had grown from small teams focusing on concepts to a team of over 100 people and Blizzard vice president of game design Rob Pardo said that the game was "in the middle of development", noting that it would be a "very big project that's got a long ways to go".

On May 28, 2013, it was reported that development on the project had been rebooted, with seventy percent of the team moving to other Blizzard projects and the release date delayed. Blizzard spokesperson Shon Damron confirmed the development status, stating that the remaining core developers would be working to accommodate new technology into the game. Blizzard president Mike Morhaime stated that the company was in the process of selecting a new direction for the project and re-envisioning what they want the game to be. He said that the game was "unlikely to be a subscription-based MMORPG", and that there were no official announced or projected release dates. Morhaime noted that Blizzard has gone through this sort of iterative development process with previous games.

On September 23, 2014, Morhaime revealed in an interview with Polygon that production of Titan had been cancelled. The cancellation of Titan was estimated by external industry analysts to have cost Blizzard at least US$50 million, though this amount of money for Blizzard was not overly burdensome, given that the company at the time was valued over US$15 billion. These analysts believed that Blizzard recognized that unless Titan offered something significantly compelling over currently-active competing MMOs, it would not have succeeded in the market, and the decision to cancel the project, despite the cost, was a benefit to the company in the long run.

Transition to Overwatch

While Blizzard publicly stated that Titan had been delayed in May 2013 as they refocused its development, the game had already been canceled internally. Of the 140 members on the Titan team, only 40 were kept in a group to develop a new intellectual property, while the others were transitioned into other departments within Blizzard.

Attack on Titan has become a critical and commercial success. As of December 2018, the manga has 88 million tankōbon copies in print worldwide (78 million in Japan and 10 million outside of Japan), making it one of the best-selling manga series.[6][7] The anime adaptation has been well received by critics with the first two seasons being met with universal critical acclaim with praise for its story, animation, music, voice acting and characters, although reception for its third season has been more mixed.

However, the anime has proved to be extremely successful in both the U.S. and Japan, thus boosting the series' po[CENSORED]rity. Although it also gained fame in neighboring Asian countries, political interpretations of the series caused controversies in China and South Korea.

The remaining Titan group of 40, which included Kaplan and Chris Metzen, were told they needed to come up with a new idea in about six weeks, or otherwise they too would be transferred to other departments. Taking inspiration from team-based shooters like Team Fortress 2 and the po[CENSORED]rity of multiplayer online battle arenas (MOBAs), the team used some of the existing Titan assets to develop a prototype game, where players would select pre-defined hero characters with different types of abilities and skills, and face off in team-based matches. Metzen also said that due to the recent failure of Titan, the group suffered from poor morale, but the idea of a team-based shooter invigorated them, and helped to establish an optimistic narrative taking place in the near-future of Earth, encompassing a range of diverse heroes and characters.

 The prototype game proved successful, and the team set off to develop what would become Blizzard's fourth major IP, Overwatch. Some Overwatch assets can be traced to their Titan roots, such as the character Tracer, who originally was one of the skins available for the Jumper class in Titan, and the map "Temple of Anubis" that had been developed for Titan. Overwatch was formally announced on November 7, 2014, and released May 24, 2016.

Anime fans who are already intimately familiar with the characters and story of the show’s second season will have some extra narrative to look forward to in Attack on Titan 2, Koinuma and Suzuki said.

“The game story will follow season 2 but it’s more like we did with the first game,” Suzuki said. “We had a bit of original story after the anime season ended. Characters will have side stories. We’ve [worked with] the original manga creator and publishing company Kodansha; they’ve been supervising the content. We’re not diverging too far from the original character settings.”

“We have the camp where you can have conversations with the characters and learn more about the story,” Koinuma added. “Conversations that don’t appear in the anime or the comic [will be included], so fans familiar with the anime and manga will see something new they haven’t seen before.”

Koei Tecmo and Omega Force have been pretty quiet on gameplay details for Attack on Titan 2, but promise new information on the game’s release date, narrative and new mechanics in the coming weeks.

The series has gained a strong po[CENSORED]rity in not only Japan but also throughout the world. For instance, coverage of the anime appeared on the front page of the Hong Kong free newspaper am730 on May 27, 2013, concerning its po[CENSORED]rity within Hong Kong as well as in Mainland China and Taiwan. The series also attracted criticism: the South Korean Electronic Times magazine accused Attack on Titan of having a militaristic message that serves Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe's political leanings; while the series also resonated with Hong Kong youths who saw the invading Titans as a metaphor for mainland China. Hong Kong media commentator Wong Yeung-tat praised Isayama's style and the versatility of Attack on Titan's setting, which opens itself to readers' various interpretations.

also In 2013, after media linked to a 2010 blog post by Isayama indicating that the design of the character Dot Pixis was based on the Imperial Japanese General Akiyama Yoshifuru, an Internet flame war about the general's war record (e.g. allowing the Port Arthur massacre to occur) ensued on his blog and included death threats to the author. Because many of the threats written in Japanese had grammatical errors, it is believed that they were written by people outside of Japan.

Eren Jaeger lives with his foster sister Mikasa Ackerman and best friend Armin Arlert in the town of Shiganshina adjacent to Wall Maria, outermost of three circular walls protecting humanity from man-eating Titans said to have killed all other humans one hundred years prior. When Shiganshina and Wall Maria are breached by the Colossal and Armored Titans, invading Titans force humanity to retreat behind Wall Rose. After a titan devours his mother and his father disappears, a vengeful Eren enlists in the military along with Mikasa and Armin.

Five years later, the three cadet graduates are positioned in Trost district adjacent to Wall Rose when the Colossal Titan breaches the city gate. During the subsequent Titan invasion, Eren is eaten but survives after creating and controlling a Titan's body. Previously unaware of his abilities, Eren suspects his father's basement holds answers. Although Eren seals Trost's breach using his Titan power, many consider him a potential threat and a military tribunal assigns him to the Survey Corps under Captain Levi's watch, with many of Eren's friends following suit.

Attack on Titan won the Kodansha Manga Award in the shōnen category in 2011, was nominated for the 4th Manga Taishō Award and both the 16th and 18th annual Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize. The 2012 edition of Kono Manga ga Sugoi!, which surveys people in the manga and publishing industry, named Attack on Titan the eighth best manga series for male readers, while the 2014 edition named it the sixth best. Attack on Titan was the top favorite manga for Yomiuri Shimbun's Sugoi Japan Awards in 2015.

 Attack on Titan was the second highest selling manga series of 2013, with 15,933,801 copies sold in a single year. In April 2014, Oricon reported that 30 million volumes of the series have been sold. In the first half of 2014 it topped the chart, ending One Piece's five-year reign as the highest selling series in that period, with Isayama surprised about it and thanking the readers. By the end of the year, it was the second best selling manga with11,728,368 copies sold. In 2015, the series sold 8,778,048 copies ranking third for the year, and 6,544,081 in 2016 for the fourth rank. Attack on Titan was the second best-selling manga of 2017 with sales of 6,622,781 copies, behind only One Piece. The manga's publisher, Kodansha, credits Attack on Titan for the company's first revenue increase in eighteen years. The anime is noted to have helped in boosting the series' sales while Mainichi Shimbun called it a "once-in-a-decade hit."

Six of the seven English volumes published in North America at the time charted on The New York Times Manga Best Seller list for the week of October 13, 2013, and volume one was on the list for 81 weeks straight. In June 2015, the first volume clocked in at its 100th week on the top 10 chart, having sold 2.5 million copies. It also currently holds the title of appearing on the list for a volume with 121 weeks. Volume one was also number one on Nielsen BookScan's list of top 20 graphic novels in American bookstores for October 2013, and for the month of September, the series had more volumes on the list than any other series. The Young Adult Library Services Association in the United States named the series one of its "Great Graphic Novels for Teens" in 2013. Kodansha USA's English release won the 2014 Harvey Award for Best American Edition of Foreign Material. Attack on Titan was the only manga to be nominated for the 2015 Goodreads Choice Award for Best Graphic Novel/Comic.

Many have analyzed Attack on Titan as representing "the hopelessness felt by young people in today's society." while writer Mao Yamawaki called it a "coming-of-age story of the boys and girls at its core," with a new mystery every episode. It is these mysteries that critic Tomofusa Kure says amplifies readers' expectations. The artwork of the manga has been criticized as crude by some reviewers, with Isayama himself admitting his drawings are "amateurish." However, those same critics stated that after years of serialization, the art has been improving, and Kure believes that had the illustrations been "refined", it would not have conveyed the "eeriness" that is a key characteristic of the work. In a short review, Jason Thompson noted how the characters conveniently receive "power-ups" to create plot twists, but concluded that these said plot twists and the manga's post-apocalyptic world are "too good to miss."

The anime was compiled into two animated theatrical films with new voice acting from the same cast. The first film Attack on Titan – Part 1: Crimson Bow and Arrow  covers the first 13 episodes and was released on November 22, 2014, while the second film Attack on Titan – Part 2: Wings of Freedom (「進撃の巨人」後編～自由の翼～ Shingeki no Kyojin Kōhen ~Jiyū no Tsubasa~) adapts the remaining episodes and adds new opening and ending footage. It was released on June 27, 2015.[65][66] A rebroadcast of the first season was aired from January 9, 2016 on NHK's BS Premium channel. The compilation films were also broadcast in January 2017 on MBS.

A second season of the anime series was announced on the opening day of the first theatrical film, which was originally set to be released in 2016. It was then confirmed in the January 2017 issue of the Bessatsu Shōnen Magazine that the second season would premiere in April 2017. Masashi Koizuka directed the second season, with Araki acting as chief director. It has also been licensed by Funimation. It ran for 12 episodes.

An anime television adaptation of the Attack on Titan: Junior High manga spin-off began airing in October 2015. The series was directed by Yoshihide Ibata at Production I.G, with series composition by Midori Gotou, character design by Yuuko Yahiro, and music by Asami Tachibana Linked Horizon performed the opening theme "Youth Like Fireworks". The ending theme, "Ground's Counterattack" ("Hangeki no Daichi"), is performed by the voice actors for Eren, Mikasa, and Jean. A rebroadcast of the series was aired during January 2016.

It is later revealed that the Titans were created when Ymir Fritz found the "source of all organic life", and thus became the Founding Titan, which gave her the ability to become a Titan and to create and control the other Titans. When Ymir died as a side effect of having the Titan ability for 13 years, her power was divided among nine who received this same fate, and as such have their abilities passed upon death to other Subjects of Ymir, also known the Eldian people, their home country known as Eldia. These Titans consist of the Founding Titan, the Attack Titan, the Colossal Titan, the Armored Titan, the Female Titan, the Beast Titan, the Jaw Titan, the Cart Titan, and the War Hammer Titan. The Founding Titan remained with the Fritz family as Eldia's 145th King Karl Fritz, corrupted and power-hungry, arranged for his country's fall by the country of Marley and took a handful of his people to the island of Paradis.

 There, he used countless Colossus Titan bodies to make the walls and erased the memories of most of the people he brought with him with his Titan power, so they did not know anything about the outside world. As the memories of those with Titan powers are passed with them when they are passed to another, his descendants were influenced into continuing his work of ruling the Eldians in the walls through fear from the shadows, while the Eldians in Marley suffer as second-class citizens with some being exiled to Paradis as the Titans that terrorize the island's residents.

There have been four video game adaptations of Attack on Titan developed by Nitroplus staffers in collaboration with Production I.G. Nitroplus clarified that the studio as a company is not involved in the Attack on Titan Blu-ray Disc games, while individual staffers are. The games are visual novels and were included in the first copies of the third and sixth Blu-ray Disc volumes of the anime. The games cover spin-off stories about the characters of Attack on Titan. Isayama supervised the development of the games.

 

Edited April 20, 2019 by Lunix I
Update !