The 30the Anniversary Capcom Character Encyclopedia is an interesting book with a few content issues, but it ultimately worth picking up.
30th Anniversary Capcom Character Encyclopedia is an interesting book. Artistically, it’s what you expect from Capcom. There is a history of beautiful designs and pieces of art from the company on every page. You get roughly two illustrations of each character. Sometimes these illustrations are a mix of classic and modern art, sometimes just classic. The page quality is great. They used high quality stock to print this book out. The cover is nicely designed, and the binding feels solid. Again, this is a nice book artistically. It’s lacking a bit on content though.
Every character in the book gets a couple paragraphs explaining who they are and there is a data section on each page. These little data sections list things like first appearance, last appearance, height, weight, other names, occupation, arch enemy and a few other small things. It would have been great for them to go more in-depth on each character’s information. A list of games the character has been in, which consoles the games were on, who the characters creator is or even moves lists for the fighting game characters would have been interesting. It feels like what we were given was put together in a short amount of time.
The character choices that were made for this book are interesting as well. All in all there are 207 characters from Capcom’s history. The choices are interesting because there are characters you would think they would absolutely include at the very least because they’re in games that came out recently and there are characters that haven’t been in a game for a couple decades. Characters like Dudley, C.Viper, many Mega Man robots, and many others from Street Fighter, Rival Schools, Power Stone, etc. are left out. Then there are characters most people have never heard of included. There’s Agrippa from Shadow of Rome, Baby Head from Captain Commando, Lonely Astronaut from Section Z and a few others. There are also characters that are grouped instead of given their own page. The whole cast of Battle Circuit and King of Dragons each share a single page. I can appreciate the choice to include so much history, but the amount of characters they left out makes this feel like volume 1. The book isn’t called volume 1 though.
With that said, at $16.99 this book is a great value. It’s rare that you find a book like this and of this quality for less than $25. While I would have loved to have seen a book two or three times larger that costs $50, this makes for a great book to have sitting on a coffee table. It’s fun to flip through it and read about the characters I’ve spent so much of my life playing as.
Give it a buy. You can’t beat the value. If you a Capcom fan, you shouldn’t give it a second thought.
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