REVIEW: Game Art: Art from 40 Video Games and Interviews with Their Creators (nonfiction book) by Matt Sainsbury

Game Art: Art from 40 Video Games and Interviews with Their Creators is nonfiction. I bought my copy used.

Review:

This was published back in 2015, so it's a bit old in game years. Of the 40 games featured, I've played or had some familiarity with only 10 or so, tops. A few of the ones I recognized: Dragon Age: Inquisition, American McGee's Alice, several of the Atelier games, Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, Contrast, and Never Alone.

This was 261 pages, which doesn't provide a lot of room to cover 40 games and interviews with 26 or so creators. Some games featured a better selection of artwork than others - both in-game and promotional art. Others had a more meager selection, focused more on promotional stuff than in-game artwork.

I had thought that the interviews might focus on the artwork as well, but that wasn't always the case. For example, Alex Norton's interview about Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox focused almost entirely on the game's origins and how its players/fanbase enhanced it. There were a few really good interviews that touched on game art in significant ways, though - I particularly liked the interviews with Jennifer Schneidereit (Tengami), Guillaume Provost (Contrast), Yoshita Okamura (Arland and Dusk trilogies from the Atelier series), Amy Fredeen and Alan Gershenfeld (Never Alone), and Akihiro Suzuki and Hisashi Koinuma (Bladestorm:Nightmare, Dynasty Warriors, and Samurai Warriors).

It wasn't exactly what I expected it to be, but it wasn't bad.