I have been pretty critical of art books and guidebooks recently published by Kadokawa / KGL on Insert Credit – notably for their ill-thought ELDEN RING OFFICIAL ART BOOK Volume I, its way too shiny print process and absurd layout decisions.
Well ! I am happy to say the new Ars Minaba -皆葉英夫の「原点」たち- art book (288 pages / ¥4950), compiling over 30 years of Minaba Hideo’s contributions to video games, is one of the best game-related art books I have seen in the past few years, in spite of its publisher.
Now, you may look at the Amazon.jp page I just linked and be confused by the seven tepid reviews. Fret not! Those critics are Granblue Fantasy-loving morons who feel misled to believe the main focus of the book would be about big color illustrations of Granblue Fantasy, and are complaining that there wouldn’t be more pages dedicated to their money-grabbing SSR waifus, and are not understanding the merits of printing a few kilograms of in-development roughs and drafts. Forget about these losers!
This is a TREASURE TROVE of game development resource, covering his entire career from obscure PC-88 role playing game Barbatus no Majo til Granblue, with tons of never seen before contents from Squaresoft, Square Enix and more. It’s also printed and laid out with upmost care.
What surprised me the most is how comprehensive the book managed to become: they got Cygames, their arch-nemesis Square Enix, Mistwalker (= probably Marvelous?), Shueisha, Level 5, Bird Studio, Microsoft Games and even Nintendo (!) for a Super Mario game (!!!) to greenlight the appearance of their copyrighted works in the same book.
So what you get inside is stuff like rough research drafts for Mallo and Geno which he created, the famous roughs for FF9 that leaked on The GIA before FF8 came out, his support work for Toriyama and Inoue on Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey, all his characters and background work for FF12 and Blood of Bahamut, forgotten stuff like Archaic Sealed Heat and Sakuranote, and even a bunch of pages dedicated to an unannounced and cancelled Simulation RPG for 3DS with post-apocalyptic Puerto-Rican pirates as its protagonists (!) that looks heavily inspired by Hugo Pratt’s Corto Maltese and rad as hell.
The FF6 section is also filled with early research on the game’s eventual art direction, with early ideas for a ¾ isometric view façon Landstalker which he explains directly inspired Super Mario RPG later on.
The most revealing part of the book for me, on a first read through, has been to discover how well Minaba adapts his style to the peers and masters he works with. I thought this guy was basically a friend and copycat of Yoshida that had managed to find his own way eventually. No! He was copying Yoshida when and because the job at hand was to support Yoshida’s characters. In Blue Dragon, his Toriyama-like stuff looks just like the Toriyama of that era, down to new Toriyama-like Monsters and vehicles. Same for Inoue on Lost Odyssey. Etc. This is just a really, really talented artist doing what feels right for each project.
From my perspective, it’s pretty much an essential book if you ① are interested in character design for video games and ② have the means to buy and shelve such a big fat baby.
ISBN-13 978-4041127704
