Last year I began importing a couple of Japanese artbooks to compliment my introducing a new “book” focus onto The Otaku’s Study. I tried to go for a variety of different types of books ranging from those based on anime and video games, to those based on visual novels. One of those books I picked up a couple of months back was the Yotsunoha Art Collection, based on adult visual novel “Yotsunoha” released in Japan back in 2006 by Haikuo Soft and later ported over to the PlayStation 2 as an all-ages edition. This was also adapted into a manga series and a two-part OVA series which I semi-reviewed back in the early days of The Otaku’s Study.
Similar to the White Fairy: Kudryavka Noumi Photo Album artbook that I reviewed back in June 2013, given its visual novel roots there are some images that do contain suggestive content including nipple shots and panty flashes. There are also a few other (mostly) manga scenes that contain riskier “eroge” content that you would more likely see in a visual novel release. In these couple of scenes, they are heavily censored (To A much higher degree of penis censorship than you would expect to see with an ordinary doujin or visual novel release).
Coming in at a mere 80-pages, you might not expect this book to have much content, and in terms of full-page and double-page spreads you might be right. However while it is not a complete compendium of Yotsunoha artwork, there is a tonne of visual content in this book including dakimakura designs, artwork for the different pieces of promotional material produced for the visual novels and a lot of other content that is all of reasonable quality. There is a lot more than I was expecting, even if some of the images can be quite small on the pages.
While there is a lot of content, do note that this book does not contain any CG artwork from any of the games or any artwork produced for the anime adaptation back in 2008.
Bonus Shout-Out
Just a quick shout out to the team at J-Subculture.com who allowed me to trial out their shopping / proxy bidding service last year. While I found their site bulky and rather challenging to navigate at first given the number of different online shopping services they cater to (Amazon, Rakuten, Yahoo! Japan Auctions etc.), their prices were reasonable and their service was also efficient in my experience.
