Book Review: Final Fantasy VII Remake: Material Ultimania (Japanese edition)

This is the original Japanese edition artbook for Final Fantasy VII: Remake, and the original Japanese name is ファイナルファンタジーVII リメイク マテリアル アルティマニア.

First thing to know is there's going to be an English edition coming in December 2021. I definitely recommend getting the English edition even if you have to wait for months because there is a lot of text which I'm sure fans of the FFVII series and Remake will enjoy. The Japanese edition is really for people who know Japanese (obviously?). The English edition will be published by Square Enix as well.

If I remember correctly, there wasn't any official artbook for the original FFVII which was released in 1997, at least no English edition artbook that I can find. It was such a missed opportunity back then because the FFVII game was so popular and such a huge fanbase. I'm really glad this time Square Enix has an official artbook for this game. They only started putting out official Final Fantasy artbooks for newer games.

This is a 336-page hardcover with a dust jacket. Binding is excellent and paper is the low-gloss type.

This book collects the concept art for the game. You'll see designs (or re-designs in this case) for the characters, enemies, environments and props. There's a good amount of high resolution game stills included for the characters and environment, but substantially more hand drawn art, sketches and illustrations. The book actually includes a lot, such as costume designs for lady Cloud (lol), various non-standard costumes, graphic designs shown throughout the FFVII world, jukeboxes, vehicles and many miscellaneous designs. I thought they could have devoted more pages to the designs for enemies and bosses – there are just 28 pages included the summons Ifrit, Shiva, fat Chocobo, Bahamut, and small drawings for Mog and Cactus.

There are many pages of text written for the planning of the remake, storyboards, music, interviews with the staff and voice actors. There is a lot to read.

This is an excellent video game artbook companion for FFVII: Remake. If you don't know Japanese, it's definitely worth waiting for the English edition.

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This book was borrowed from Basheer Graphic Books for review purposes. You can order the book from them. Check with Basheer on Facebook.

Final Fantasy VII Remake: Material Ultimania is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | AU | JP | CN)

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This book was borrowed from Basheer Graphic Books for review purposes. You can order the book from them. Check with Basheer on Facebook.