Construction & Content
I know it's been forever with my last review and I wasn't feeling up to a full art book, so instead I chose to do a mini review on a book that isn't exactly an art book.
While I'm sitting here twiddling my thumbs and wondering when exactly Square-Enix will release a very overdue art book for Final Fantasy XIII, this mini book will have to do for now.
It's completely written in Japanese, which is unfortunate for me, since the meat of this book is the actual writing and not the pictures.
The first 20 pages of content in this book is what it's titled after. - Episode i - is the epilogue novella of Final Fantasy XIII written by Eishima Jun. I wouldn't really have thought much of it if it was standalone, but given the fact that we now have a confirmed sequel, I suppose this short story on what happened AFTER Final Fantasy XIII holds some weight as canon. I skimmed through the English translation, but you won't be missing much if you miss this little bit that bridges FFXIII and FFXIII-2 .
The middle 36 pages are devoted to a section called Reminiscence. It looks to be a collection of the extra scenes in the game that never made the final cut. The writing is obviously not doing much for me but the small screen caps along the edge I found to be the neatest things in the entire book. They're the corresponding scenes, but only preliminary CG renders since they never made it to the final cut. Very cool even if they're tiny and hard to make out.
The final 20 pages are the "fanciest" pages since they include double page spreads of the promotional CG renders/artwork for the game. You know... these are the images that are made into posters, plastered on to every bit of related merchandise, made into wallpapers by fans.... the images created to impress. Not that I'm complaining though. These eye candy artworks are the best renders made for the game, and damn it shows.
Final Rating
- Strongest Point: Loved the behind the scenes/deleted material
- Weakest Point: Size is far too tiny to do the content justice. Especially the full CG renders. Would have been nice to have been available in English.
Numerical Rating: N/A