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Live! From Japan! It's... FFXI books!
May. 31st, 2005 08:09 pmYay! My package got here before I go out of contact! I placed an order with nippon-export.com, and while the shipping took much longer than the site implied, the books are great!
The books, in no special order:
The three of the six books are manga. One is highly cute and the other two are okay. Door of Dreams 1 is the cute one (the art style looks just the same as in that "Taru as every job in the game" picture). The other two (Land's End, and the other has either no name or it's in Japanese) are okay at best. I have scans from the cute one.
The next book is Life in Vana'diel. It has a few cute maps, but in general the book looks like very basic info. What little original art in it comes from other books. Totally not worth buying, I'd suspect not even if you could read Japanese.
The Vana'diel World Report is everything Life isn't. It's the shape of a brick, but much thicker. Not a bit of space on the 700+ pages is wasted. It's also everything the FFXI book they finally released in the US was not: It's full of detailed maps -- coffer/chest locations, NMs, anything you could want on a map. The book seems to have not just info on every NPC in the game, but pictures of each one! There are listings for the mobs in every zone, what aggros/links, what it's weak/strong to, etc. Even the newest areas are covered! It's a useful resource even if you can't read Japanese. It must be fall-down amazing if you could read the language. (Seriously, I can't even imagine having this much info available at your fingertips!)
The last book is (in my opinion) the coolest one: Final Fantasy XI: World Concepts. I love seeing how ideas evolve, and the "what if"s and "what could have been"s. This book is full of all that.
To reduce spam, I'll put the links and descriptions behind a cut:
( Links to and descriptions of 17 scans from the books. Concept art, manga pages, etc. No images, just links and text. )
The books, in no special order:
The three of the six books are manga. One is highly cute and the other two are okay. Door of Dreams 1 is the cute one (the art style looks just the same as in that "Taru as every job in the game" picture). The other two (Land's End, and the other has either no name or it's in Japanese) are okay at best. I have scans from the cute one.
The next book is Life in Vana'diel. It has a few cute maps, but in general the book looks like very basic info. What little original art in it comes from other books. Totally not worth buying, I'd suspect not even if you could read Japanese.
The Vana'diel World Report is everything Life isn't. It's the shape of a brick, but much thicker. Not a bit of space on the 700+ pages is wasted. It's also everything the FFXI book they finally released in the US was not: It's full of detailed maps -- coffer/chest locations, NMs, anything you could want on a map. The book seems to have not just info on every NPC in the game, but pictures of each one! There are listings for the mobs in every zone, what aggros/links, what it's weak/strong to, etc. Even the newest areas are covered! It's a useful resource even if you can't read Japanese. It must be fall-down amazing if you could read the language. (Seriously, I can't even imagine having this much info available at your fingertips!)
The last book is (in my opinion) the coolest one: Final Fantasy XI: World Concepts. I love seeing how ideas evolve, and the "what if"s and "what could have been"s. This book is full of all that.
To reduce spam, I'll put the links and descriptions behind a cut:
( Links to and descriptions of 17 scans from the books. Concept art, manga pages, etc. No images, just links and text. )
