'Tales of' is a popular franchise JRPG series developed by Namco Tales Studio and Bandai Namco Studios. The franchise began in 1995 with its first release of Tales of Phantasia, and grew even more. As a result the Tales of franchise contains 16 main games, multiple spin-off games and even anime/manga adaptations.
Tales of has a couple of art books (with most of them focusing on 1 main game), one of the art books is Mutsumi Inomata Art Works: Tales of 2004-2015 which focuses on the character designs of the artist Mutsumi Inomata from the following Tales of games; Destiny, Destiny 2, Graces, Hearts (R), Innocence (R), Rebirth, Tempest, Xillia, Xillia 2 and Zestiria.
It's great to see Mutsumi Inomata's artworks in a span of 11 years, you can see the evolution in his character designs. The art book contains lots of high quality artworks which is really great, Also the coloring of his older artworks is awesome, it feels really old school and done in a rough way because it seems like colored in with a pencil compared with his newer artworks where everything is digital. At the end of the art book there's a couple of pages with small noncolored artworks and sketches.
A really great must-buy art book for the Tales of fans. It contains lots of artworks of every franchise, except Tales of Zestiria has only 3 pages. The quality feels great and the coloring is superb. You can't go wrong with a retail price of 3700 yen (~33 dollars, ~30 euros).
