Artist: Joe Tringali
Artist: Edison Yan
Publisher: Udon Entertainment
Rating: WORTHY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often reward aplenty!
In my sweet innocence, I was totally unaware of what this actually was when I requested to read what I thought was a graphic novel - maybe about graffiti artists(!). I didn't know that it was merely artwork from a video game developer named 5th Cell! Oops! My kids, of course, immediately related to it and enjoyed the sample images I showed them (which appear in my blog). At least one of them would probably be happy as a lark were he to end up in a career like the one which Joe Tringal or Edison Yan made for themselves!
5th cell is a decade-old company which has developed games like Mini Poccha, SEAL Team 6 (which actually doesn't exist in real life!) and Siege, working under license, but which then moved on to developing their own games, including the innovative Drawn to Life which is a game where the player can draw their own hero and world on the Nintendo DS touch-pad.
This book is a sampler of the artwork which 5th Cell created for their games - from characters to environments to weapons, to animals, and so on, and while I can appreciate the artwork, for me it wasn't enough. Whether you like it, hate it or adore it, the artwork is static and flat. What I would have liked to have seen, and what I had hoped for (once I realized what this was!), was some text to go along with the art: maybe some details - even brief ones - about how this art was translated into a dynamic video game. How they created their games, how they got the ideas, There is none of that. All we get is page after page after page of these characters in rank and file, and scenes, and oodles of weapons, which really isn't that interesting after the first few pages! Not to me anyway.
If you're a die-hard fan of 5th Cell's art and/or their video games, then this might well be your dream graphic book, but I see no enduring value to it otherwise, not as it is, and I can't recommend this as a worthy read since there's really nothing to read, and honestly not all that much to look at.
