The Art of Flynn: Son of Crimson - Review (Book Flip Through)

Welcome back to another book review and today I'm going to take a look at a fantastic art book. It is Flynn, Son of Crimson, the official art book. Always love a good pixel art game and this book shows off the art in a fantastic way. It's a pretty hefty book, you can see this here. That's how thick it is, you got the spine, front and back. Let's check it out right away. Why waste time? There you go, you got the contents here from concept art all the way down to credits. 306 pages as it says. Let's start off with concept art. Already with strong Zelda link vibes and this goes between pixel art or actually showing line art. It's really great. Big fan of this. Dare I say, I have not finished the game. When it comes to finishing things for games and books, it takes me quite some time. I am definitely more invested in movies and TV shows as that is my bread and butter but I do love a good game. I'm still playing Spider-Man on the PS4 with my little one as he swings through the city and I do the battles. It takes us forever. But anyway, you got here all the characters, cool designs, love the different variations. I love just these pages with art and cool character designs. That's just the thing that I like about this game. There are many things that I like but character art, the pixel art, the animation is great. Music is super cool too. Look at that. Love seeing all of this. Cool characters. And as always, for me, stuff like that, cool poses, I love how those arms go down with the dragging fingers. It's just always great for inspiration, like oh what could you do with the pose when you do a new animation piece anywhere. So cool. But I do love how it really looks at all the characters. Different poses, different colors, different variations. Super cool. You got your friends, as it says here, I'm just reading what you have here. So cool though. Look at that. Love it. So cool. And they announced that they're going to do an art of books thing. Ooh! I like it. I'm frequently looking at little pixel art tweets that they have showing off the work. It's great. You got your environment here, the holo. Of course, this goes into spoiler territory with anything. But dare I say, since I am less invested in games in terms of time, I don't spend as much time playing games as I watch movies. My spoiler meter isn't as sensitive, I would say. That's cool. Love seeing this, of course. Cool scenes from the early beginnings. Stuff like that. Anybody who watches my art of book page throughs knows that I love stuff like this. Anything that's kind of a rough sketch, an early exploration, anything that is not just a finished work of art. So cool. Stuff like this, I love as well. Kind of design elements, side views. You got your title treatments here. Posters. So great. But yeah, just anything where you can see the progress and the progression of a piece of art. And that could be just for a single piece of art, for a poster, for a game design, for anything. An animatic, storyboards, all that stuff, of course. As you can imagine, this is my favorite. And if you look at this here, come on. Checks all the boxes. Super cute. Great colors. As you can see, there's a motion button. You have this. Gives you an idea of the motion and the complexity of it. So yeah. So the moment I saw that, I was like, okay, I need to have that. And also, again, it's going back here, the use of color in the game is great. And just if you go through these pages and you switch to this, you might argue, well, these are just basic colors. I know. I know they're basic colors, but come on. To me, beyond basic. I love it. This is a cool marriage of color and design, proportions, everything. So cool. Come on. Look at these. It's cool seeing from the artwork from before and now seeing that in pixelated version. So great. Maybe because I'm old, I just love pixels. So cool. Come on. How is this not super cool? I mean, given my age, pixels that, you know, my first game was Pong, that's how old I am. So for me, it was always cool seeing, like super early on, I played Atari, Intellivision, stuff like that. Philips. You have the cartridge putting in with the keyboard on the main console. It's great. Love Intellivision as well. So cute. I love these. And then getting into 8-bit, 16-bit, all that stuff, it's just always great to kind of interpret what you see in those pixels. And back in the day, super nicely detailed, it was more through a CRT TV, so it wasn't as clean in terms of the pixel art. It was almost kind of, you know, with that filter over it. Anybody who's young has no idea what I'm talking about, but it just kind of smoothed it all out. It was still just not as pixel clean as it is now, but as I have continued to play games on and off, my fascination with pixel art has never stopped. Maybe it's because my prime time was the LucasArts point-and-click, that type of animation, the backgrounds, come on, Conker, that type of stuff, Commandos, come on, it's so great. These are awesome, I love it. So cool. Come on. It's not like that. I see this and I want to play this. It just makes me happy. I don't know. For some people, it's the nostalgic factor of PS1 blurry textures and low-poly stuff, which I can see the appeal. And for others, it is photoreal, high-fidelity, HD remasters, everything, you know, 4K, 8K, 60 frames a second, all that stuff. And to me, it's just this. I mean, come on. So cool. I love that we have full two-page spreads. So neat. I mean, even if you don't play the game, it's a great art book. All that. Hopefully, it's not too dark for the recording. Yeah, yeah. A bit of a Super Ghost and Goblins, depending on the title. Vibes there. Of course, some Castlevania vibes every now and then. You can't shake off the origins of some of these Metroidvania games. Metroid itself is great. Come on. So cool. I love seeing this. So cool. I love it. Of course, you would think that by now, I would have attempted to at least do some pixel art animation or something, or at least my own game. I don't know. That's a lot more involved than just pixel art animation. And maybe one day, one day, when I have time, I definitely want to do something not as complex as this. Definitely more low-poly pixel art and kind of try something out. I do love it so much. I need to animate at one point something. Now, I did have an idea, two ideas for a game, actually. And who does not have ideas for a game? Never got to it. And actually, I really wanted to make a game. I collected a bunch of reference and wrote, you know, design, doc, and a bunch of stuff. And that was 10 years ago, when my little one was born. And I was holding as a baby, get some downtime, thinking about certain things, and never got to it. Actually, one idea was extremely close to the Untitled Goose game. Kind of a mischief thing where you move your character around, grabbing items to get somewhere, but the act of grabbing that would be to annoy or, in one effect, would annoy someone around them. Something like that. I still like the idea, though. I don't think it's different enough that I could start, but I do like my other idea. And one day, I will go through another art book and tell you that idea that someone else did. And that someone else should. Because I never get to it. All right. Look at that. Almost there. Cute. Love this. Credits. To the artists. And Flynn's story will continue. I hope so. That is the end. There you go. Awesome book for an awesome game. If you have played the game and you finished it, let me know in the comments. If you know of the game, let me know in the comments. I'm very curious. Maybe I'm alone in my pixel art love here. Maybe animation circles. Maybe pixel art is too old. I don't know. I'm very curious. Anybody who watches my channel, who plays games maybe, and also knows that game, I'm very curious what your thoughts are. But that is that for the flip through. As I always say, many more books to come. I was kind of busy with the job search just a couple weeks ago. Got a new job settling in, so I got more time to dedicate to the channel again. And that's that. As always, thank you for watching. Thank you for watching to the very end. I appreciate your time. If you like this, maybe you want to subscribe so you don't miss any of those uploads. You got reviews. You got a bunch of stuff. Go through the channel. This is my pitch at the end, which I should do at the beginning, but why not? Check it out. If you like it, subscribe. Maybe not. Maybe dial in a couple weeks later. Maybe there's something else that you would like. And hopefully I'll see you later. And that's it from me. Thank you for watching.