Type-Moon fandom always feels like the fandom for a popular band in a niche musical genre. If you meet someone who is into the genre you would be surprised if they did not know the band. But anyone outside of fans of the genre is more likely not to know them then to recognize them. If anime and manga fandom is rock, and visual novels are progressive rock, than Type-Moon is Pink Floyd. With that analogy it says a lot about the release of Type-Moon merchandise in English. At first if you wanted anything Type-Moon it was all through word of mouth and bootleg trading. They were a popular enough company in Japan that the hardcore English fandom was aware of them but it was really the Tsukihime anime, and more importantly the Fate/Stay Night anime, that made them more of a well-known name. (I will admit it was mainly Ayako Kawasumi being in the Fate/Stay Night anime as Saber that interested me in the series.) Over the years as the fandom has grown the amount of legitimate material available in English has increased. Type-Moon anime mostly gets licensed outside of Carnival Phantasm which is even too niche for anyone outside of Japan. The main manga series seem to get licensed but the more esoteric manga falls into Carnival Phantasm territory. With Fate/kaleid liner Prisma ☆ Illya Drei 3!! even being simulpubed on Comic Walker and Fate/Zero streaming it seems like while you can’t assume you will get everything from Type-Moon legitimately it does seem like there is little that is off the table.
But two of the crown jewels have always seemed completely out of reach. The visual novels that spawned everything are the grand prize but any conversation with companies that license games makes it clear that they are far to expensive and risky to license. So unless there is a major shift your just going to have to learn Japanese if you want to buy a copy of Fate/Stay Night. But the much more reasonable dream was getting the Type-Moon art books. They are loaded with original information and are not outside of the realm of profitable licensing. Thankfully UDON Entertainment recently released the first Fate/Stay Night art book. Fate/Complete Material Artbook 1: Art Material is not their first foray into video game art books. If anything they seem to be picking up quite a few titles lately. But Udon is wisely just dipping their toe in the water with this book and letting sales determine if they pick up more Type-Moon art books.
This post is mainly going to look on if UDON Entertainment is a good fit for the license. Should we be secretly hoping that this is the last Type-Moon artbook they do or are they going to deliver what we have always wanted?
Reverse Thieves 