Book Review - The Art of FOC

[Paulbot]

I've only quickly flicked through it but so far I really like it. It's unlike any other TF book in my library. I've seen many books of this style showing scifi worlds from fiction or from movies, but Transformers has never had something that shows off Cybertron. Many of the painted pictures of Cybertron are just wonderful. The chapter "covers" in particular are gorgeous.

The character art is good too, but much of it we've seen before. The stuff we haven't though is a treat. There's a certain triple changer that looks awesome. The art work is better also than just using the game models IMO (better than the somewhat boring CGI renders in all the Bay Movie guide books).

For the G1 book nostalgics like me, some pictures do bring to mind Earl Norem's art in story book "Battle for Cybertron" (which of course also had the Autobots leaving a war-torn Cybertron).

It's bigger height/width wise than I expected. I also had the impression it would cover both games, not sure where I picked that up. But it's definitely purely FOC focused.

[Tetsuwan Convoy]

Went through it last night after work as a bit of before bed reading. While I like it a lot and it has lots of cool pictures, I will say that I am disappointed it hasn't gone into much detail on the design influences of the characters.

Teig briefly talks about Blast-off and how they adapted him to pre-earth mode, but that is in an intro to the book. When you get to the picture of Blast off, they spend more time reciting parts of his G1 bio and personality than anything else. this is the same for the others as well. I would like to have seen why they decided to settle on a certain design for each character. Why isn't Onslaught a flat bed truck? etc.

Another odd one is Grimlock. All that pre-release talking up of him and his page only has 2 pictures, both of which were used in promotional artwork.. Very few characters actually have concept sketches in the book. Bumblebee has quite a few. I think he is the only one. Surely they would have had a couple for the dinobots, Grimlock would have for sure.

Oh and no mention of the awesome map room either as far as I could see. Probably the most impressive empty room in the whole game and not a thing...

Nice to see some unused concepts as well. Springer as a triple changer, Broadside and Ravage too. All looking very nice. Now I want a FOC2/WFC3 even worse than before!. Heck I'd even settle for a Chronicles of Cybertron. That way they can even go back to before WFC.

[BigTransformerTrev]

Teig briefly talks about Blast-off and how they adapted him to pre-earth mode, but that is in an intro to the book. When you get to the picture of Blast off, they spend more time reciting parts of his G1 bio and personality than anything else. this is the same for the others as well. I would like to have seen why they decided to settle on a certain design for each character. Why isn't Onslaught a flat bed truck? etc.

Another odd one is Grimlock. All that pre-release talking up of him and his page only has 2 pictures, both of which were used in promotional artwork.. Very few characters actually have concept sketches in the book. Bumblebee has quite a few. I think he is the only one. Surely they would have had a couple for the dinobots, Grimlock would have for sure.

I agree I would have liked to have seen more concept sketches. But I suppose the title of the book is 'The Art of Transformers Fall of Cybertron' where subconsciously we may all have been thinking it might have been more of 'The Making of Transformers Fall of Cybertron'. So I suppose we are meant to look at the pretty pictures, rather than get the answers of the 'why' and the 'how'. Still a cool book though