Ar Tonelico Visual Book Souten Rakudo

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Ar Tonelico Visual Book Souten Rakudo focuses on the game characters and promotional art works from the first three games. If you’ve purchased any of the previous Ar Tonelico guides, then you’re in for a lot of repetition.

Ar Tonelico Visual Book Souten Rakudo is an A4-sized art book and 192 pages. It’s relatively thin due to the paper quality. I would describe the paper as slightly better than a magazine, as the pages don’t feel sturdy. On the bright side, it doesn’t take away from the print quality, which is still high with barely visible dots. The cover art and the art work below the slip cover are both new and repeated inside the art book.

The thumbnail index at the front of the art book reminds me of Tony’s Art Works from Shining World. That was also a book where you’d be happier if you hadn’t already bought the other materials collections.

The art book goes through the games in order, starting with Ar Tonelico: Melody of Elemia. The promotional art work for the game, which includes CD covers, goes from pages 8 to 23. Most of the works receive a full page.

Ar Tonelico II: Melody of Metafalica is next, and covers pages 24 to 41. Lots of nice illustrations, although nearly all of them were in the Ar Tonelico II Materials Book.

The materials book for Ar Tonelico III came out at the end of April. If you have that one, all the illustrations in that section of Souten Rakudo will look very familiar. Ar Tonelico III features from pages 42 to 55.

That’s pretty much it for the promotional art work side. From this point on, it’s all character profile illustrations. Each section finishes with a few pages of “Event Scene Galleries” for each game. The illustration organization is by game. This includes previously published illustrations from other Ar Tonelico materials books.

I don’t buy a lot of video games books, but I do it when I like the character designs. I think the Ar Tonelico games are the reason I first became a fan of Nagi Ryou. He has a very unique style in character illustration. His flare in game design definitely carries over to his original works and fan arts.

Ar Tonelico Visual Book Souten Rakudo finishes up with a 10 page interview with Atsunori Kawachi and Akira Tsuchiya. It’s followed by 24 pages of random and rare costumes worn through the games. There are even a couple of pages of wedding dresses. It’s a great visual book, focusing entirely on the illustrations on the games. If you’ve never purchased another Ar Tonelico visual book, this is definitely the one to get.