OK, if you haven't kept up with Stalking the Retro, RetroGaming Round up and my Twitter, you wouldn't have known that I was a little excited about a certain Nintendo Art book...
Oh yeah! I was a very lucky boy today and received my copy of Hyrule Historia almost a week before I was expecting to receive it! Not only that, but I didn't even pay for Amazon's overnight shipping, I went with their free five day delivery, yet I still receive the book a day before actual retail release!
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| A book for the fans. OK OK it's not the £40 leather bound version, but it will still be a piece of history! |
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| Open the book and you see the ancient mural seen in Skyward Sword. |
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| There are plenty of pictures and artwork from the Skyward Sword game. This itself almost takes up a third of the book! |
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| The many faces of Link. Remember kiddies, there are more than one Link. |
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| The famous "Official Zelda Time Line" Page on the right. |
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| Shigeru's Early art for the NES/Famicom Legend of Zelda. |
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| Amazing colour sketches of the NES game's concept art. I've never seen these before! |
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| The art for Zelda in "Link to the Past" that shows the unused Futuristic Zelda. |
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| The Story behind Ocarina of Time. |
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| The Story behind Link to the past. |
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| Details about the DS games and "New Hyrule". I never got the beat Phatom Hourglass, and I didn't get myself a copy of Spirit Tracks; maybe I should get myself a copy to learn more about "New Hyrule". |
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| The many-many different versions of Midna seen in Twilight Princess. |
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| An article about Eiji Aonuma (The game's producer) near the end of the book. |
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| The Zelda Manga at the back of the book, remember kids, to read Manga, you read right to left! |
The impression I got from the book is simply this, "This is the Zelda Fan's book!". It's comprehensive, (despite most of the book is based on the latest game, Skyward Sword.), BIG! It has more than 270 pages with each page a little bigger than an A4 sheet of paper, and each sheet is glossy and thick, the quality of the book itself is very high and the hard cover itself feels like it can take a beating. Not only does this book show art work, it's a descent history book that explains it's confusing continuity very well, not only with it's explained time line chart, but in the written articles for each game too. It's nice to see artwork from characters scenes, and levels that were not used in the games. The unused "Future Zelda" from Link to the Past was very interesting, the many faces of Midna from Twilight Princess, and all the characters seen from the DS games that I have yet to play stir my curiosity for the franchise even more than before. Even if maybe you're not a Zelda fan, or maybe you haven't played a Zelda game before, this book is still worth getting just to see the artwork and the amount of work that went into the Zelda franchise. It's a definite purchase and read for any gamer!
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