Book Review: The art of Final Fantasy IX

[Black_Alchemist]

The art of
FINAL FANTASY IX

Paperback: 160 pages
Publisher: Brady Games; 1 edition (8 Dec 2000)
Language English
ISBN-10: 0744000505
ISBN-13: 978-0744000504
Product Dimensions: 30 x 23.6 x 1 cm
Availability: Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | JP)

‘The Art of Final Fantasy IX’ gives a fascinating insight into the world of Gaia and it’s in habitants. Whilst the book comes in at 160 pages it does only contain a small portion of the artwork created, whilst this is disappointing the pieces chosen are some of the best pieces to showcase the artist/s passion in the project. The book itself is well put together and the pages are printed on a weighty semi-gloss paper so whilst you are flicking through the book you don’t feel like you are going to rip the pages as you browse through the book. Within the book we are given several areas which range from the main characters, to locations and the creatures and items encountered in the journey.

One of the things that I like about this book is the inclusions of the original designs by Yoshitaka Amano, who has worked on the ‘Final Fantasy’ franchise for a very long time, opposite the final design iteration of the characters, however I would have preferred to have more sketches of the character’s evolution from the Amano concept to the final version we received in the game, to see how they came about the design decision for specific characters. After the main characters section is over we are greeted with a section solely populated with various character designs you’ll meet on the game and on some of the designs they have used a visual representation of the protagonist to show the height of some of the non-playable characters. The next section is probably my favourite section of the book: the world concepts for the game. Whilst there are some coloured concepts what I like about this section is all the penned visual for the environments before any colour has been added to them to fully bring them to life. However like I have said previously there are only a small portion of environmental concepts which I was hoping the book would contain more of the different places you visit rather than just the main places you visit however the pieces they have chosen to incorporate into the environments section are some of the nicest pieces in the whole book.

The next section is all about the various airships in the game so has the final render of the airship, but what good about it is that it has some of the preliminary sketches of the chosen design behind the finished render, however I would have liked more vehicle concepts and designs they came up with during the pre-visualisation stage that could have been used in the dungeon and dragon style world they chose to see how they would have incorporate different designs into the setting. With that in mind they seemed to have missed out on of the more important ships that is seen frequently throughout the story the ‘Invincible’ which i would have liked to have had a closer look at some of the more unusual design for that airship as it doesn’t follow the same theme as the other airships so would have been interesting to see how they came to the final design conclusion for the ‘invincible’.

Now onto one of the weaker sections even though there are plenty of final designs for the creatures in the world unfortunately again there aren’t any rough sketches of monsters that didn’t make it into the game so was a little bit disappointed not to see any creature development from the rough doodle to final design. The one major disappointment in this section is the lack of designs or even final images of the summons in the game which I was hoping to have a good look at and see how they came up with the designs for the creatures compared to their previous incarnations in the games before ‘Final Fantasy IX’.

The next sections of the art book come in the form of weapons and items, whilst these chapters are a fundamental part of the ‘Final Fantasy’ experience I feel they don’t really add any depth to the concept part of the book, however I am ok with them being included because some of the weapons do have some quite unique designs and patterns on them that your can’t see in the game due to graphical limitations at the time so at a mere 20 something pages I feel this is more than enough design work to give you a small insight into the sort of designs the artists were going for in the end product. The final chapter is called cinema, which is basically a section of stills blown up and are spread over the last pages, to me it seems like they were trying to fill up the remaining pages as they hadn’t got enough to fill the desired quantity of pages, so to save face rather than delay the book they used the stills and described what was going on in them, whilst this is all well and good I personally would have preferred more art work in the book more so then the added stills. What could have been nice in that section was some of the story boards used for the cinematography so I could have seen what they had planned out for the sequence.

Overall I would give this art book a 6.5/7 out of ten for the sheer amount of finished designs it is defiantly one for the more avid collector of ‘Final Fantasy’ memorabilia, but unfortunately due to the lack in pre-visual designs it wasn’t quite what I was expecting so it lost a couple of points there and the final cinema chapter also lost a point because with it being the ‘Art of Final Fantasy IX’ I was expecting more artwork and not stills from the cut-scenes in the game. So all in all I would recommend this book to anyone who is a fan of ‘Final Fantasy Ix’ or ‘Final Fantasy’ in general, or anyone who has an interest in seeing some of the hard work that goes into visualising a videogame.

Hope as with any review, I have given you some insight in to the ‘Art of Final Fantasy IX’

[parka]

Thanks for sharing.

Final Fantasy art books are incredibly hard to find. I've seen a variation of another art book also for IX and it's also not up to standard. I don't know what Square don't want to create a book for each of their series since they are so popular.

[en_b]

This is a great book for the aspiring or working game concept artist. Great character and prop designs, as well as some amazing hand drawn level design work. Its an old book but if you can find it its a great one to have.
Nice choice Black_Alchemist

[Black_Alchemist]

Cheers guys for the comments tried to be as honest as I could with the review as I to felt it was lacking in some areas but it definitely is still a good book to try and get hold of if you can, and I personally haven't been able to find any other books pertaining to specific titles in the Final Fantasy franchise, so I'm not sure why Square doesn't pick up on this like many other companies have.

PS. Cheers Parka for putting the links in for people to try and buy this artbook