As of noon tomorrow (JST), the mobile RPG game SINoALICE will no longer be in service anywhere in the world, on any platform. “The Worst of All Stories” chronicling the unfortunate and maddening efforts of fairy tale characters to resurrect their creators has been woven since early 2017 by creative director Yoko Taro. However, that journey has now come to an end. Aware since late last year that the game was reaching its end of service, and the availability of this book likely to become more and more challenging in months to come, my cruise deviation into Sydney allowed me to nab this book on the shelf of Kinokuniya Sydney. With less than 24 hours to go until the end of service, I would like to ask the question… is SINoALICE Illustration & Story Works 2017-2021 worth tracking down? Read on to find out.
Coming in at 320 pages from cover to cover, SINoALICE Illustration & Story Works 2017-2021 is packed full of artwork, character designs, and text, split across five chapters: Artwork, Characters, Collaboration, Event / Story and Interviews. Surprisingly minimal attention is placed on promotional material artwork, with only a few full-page pieces at the beginning of the book. Instead, the artbook favours individual character concept artwork, the final character designs for each of their job forms, and the character stories associated with each of them. With a limiting factor being that this only covers content released in SINoALICE’s first four years of service, the strong balance of text and illustration makes this not only a solid design compendium but also a solid archive of the creative writing processes that went into the game.
Even without the characters being the Disney-fied portrayals popularised in Western media, the original character designs by Jino are exceptional, really reflecting the personas of each of the characters, and those pages in the Artwork section dedicated to showcasing the conceptual design of each are easily my favourite. These include not only the initial character designs but arc-specific designs where their appearance can substantially change. For example, in Act of Reality, Pinocchio adopts longer hair and a more feminine appearance.
Easily the second most substantial highlight is the majority of the book, which is a compilation of every character job design released for SINoALICE between launch and when the book was created, accompanied by the character story for each. Of course, this is also where the major limitation of this being a Japan-exclusive book comes to prominence and doesn’t get any easier. With SINoALICE Illustration & Story Works 2017-2021 never being released overseas, it is only available written in Japanese, therefore much of the content you may not understand if you don’t read the language. Furthermore, it could be argued there is too much to practically use an OCR translation app like Google Lens on. If you do understand Japanese however, having each character’s story alongside the adequately sized character artwork and sprite is a nice touch.
The same also carries across to the Collaboration section, highlighting some of the unique characters accessible only through these events (with full story event text script to boot), including those around NieR: Automata, NieR Replicant ver.1.22474487139, Drakengard 3, Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, Rozen Maiden, Re:Zero and more – although not a complete coverage of the events featured in SINoALICE. As someone who didn’t get to play many of these events, it was a nice inclusion one doesn’t always expect to see in a mobile game’s artbook – with the scripts (while requiring translation) a nice touch.
The remainder of the book covers text-heavy story scripts from the first few arcs, and an extensive 4-page interview with Jino, the game’s designer, focusing on elements including the character designs, user interface and design language, and proved to be a good insight into how they sought to separate SINoALICE from other social mobile games on the market. Even if you are not necessarily up for translating the last two chapters, the pages often feature visual goodies that make them nice to look at still.
In terms of the artbook’s build quality, I am torn on its exterior design. For a book of this size and weight, I would have felt a little more comfortable with a hardcover or at least thicker cover paper – but at least they included a dust jacket. The paper quality itself throughout the book is solid and the cover artwork is nice, featuring gold embossed elements framing the cover art and the words SINoALICE. However, the rear cover is completely lacking detail – or anything at all, a stark white page which feels like they just forgot to add it. Instead, information about the book, its barcode etc is all contained on an obi, which I unfortunately ripped during transit, meaning that it does look a wee bit odd when looking it over. Of course, that is ultimately my fault.
The interior design of the A4 book on the other hand is really well laid out, with striking design language that draws from the design language used in SINoALICE and shows that a lot of effort was put into the layout of the book. While the layouts are consistent to a degree, it is clear they didn’t confine themselves to a few basic templates, and were very dynamic with how they presented the information and artwork to readers.
It is regretable that, with less than 24 hours until the game reaches the end of service, we are unlikely to see a second book release featuring the character designs, collaborations and story events that were released in the latter parts of 2021 to 2024. But hey, maybe Square Enix and Pokelabo will surprise us, perhaps in collaboration with the team behind the six-volume SINoALICE manga.
But ultimately, while SINoALICE in Japan is offering players who complete the game by end of service an “archive” app to view at least the characters they unlocked through the in-game gacha system – シノアリスだったナニカ | The Story That Was Once SINoALICE – SINoALICE Illustration & Story Works 2017-2021 is an impressive archival collection of the game’s first few years, and if you were a fan of the game, may be worth tracking down a copy of while you still can at a somewhat reasonable price.
Sinoalice Illustration And Story Works 2017-2021 is also known as シノアリス 絵物語全集 SINoALICE Illustration & Story Works 2017-2021.
The book also includes a redemption code for an exclusive job (Snow White / Book of Library), but unfortunately is no longer redeemable.
