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Previous Winners
Wonderful Life with the Elements – The Periodic Table Personified (2012)
Persona 4 Arena: Official Design Works (2013)
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As they have done for a number of years now, Udon Entertainment have provided video game and anime fans with a solid compilation of artbook releases across 2014. From major franchises such as Street Fighter and Resident Evil to more niche series including Hyperdimension Neptunia and Fate/Stay Night, I genuinely enjoyed making my way through their monthly works. Often it is not just the artwork that is the highlight, but the localized comments which often provide insight into the development process and how a character or locale goes from conceptualization to a finished product.
This year I have opted to give my English Localized Artbook of the Year 2014 award to Substrata: Open World Dark Fantasy, an artbook which goes against quite a lot of what I said in the previous paragraph. Rather than delivering 240-pages of content from a pre-existing game, this book asks the ambitious question: “Is there any value in an artbook / design compendium based on a title that doesn’t exist?”. Fortunately my answer to that was… Yes!
Substrata is the brainchild of illustrator Paul Richards, who as some of you may know worked with Vigil Games on Darksiders I / II among other titles. When THQ closed their doors last year, Vigil Games was one of the studios that ceased work alongside their parent company. Mr. Richards initially conceived the book as a way to reunite fellow artists from the company to work on at least one last project together, and ultimately managed to assemble a team of over 80 creative minds from various studios to develop visual concepts for the Dark Fantasy setting. While it lacks refinement to tie all the concepts together into one coherent world, every page delivers a distinct idea that could work in a game of the genre..
While it is more like an artbook than a design compendium, Substrata: Open World Dark Fantasy is nevertheless an interesting read with some fantastic artwork. Its uniqueness and quality both see this book worthy of 
The Otaku’s Study English Localized Artbook of the Year 2014.
