This lovely artbook collection arrived at my door a few days ago. Aoi Nishimata is a very popular artist and while she has some very nice art, I don’t follow her works very closely. However, based on how nice this book turned out to be, I may be looking for more of her works in the future.

This particular artbook is a doujin artbook that was released at Comiket72 in 2007. While it is not an officially published artbook, the packaging of this artbook is more impressive than most ISBN artbooks I’ve seen. The artbook and the extras came in a high quality clear case with a buttoned cover. As for the extras, there’s a pencil board with a different illustration on each side, telephone card (yeah, I’m going to use that XD), and a full size poster. All of the extras have the Nocturne cover image on them.

The artbook itself has a few sections in it. It starts out with some original illustrations which takes up a good portion of the book and then moves onto characters from Navel series. I haven’t personally played any of the Navel games or watched any of the resulting series, but I do recognize many of the characters ^^. Then there’s the interesting fanwork from other series such as Haruhi, Touhou, Clannad, Kanon, and To Heart. I like the Haruhi images in particular (you can see a scan of one below).

While the book, extras, and case are nice, this book was not cheap. It is the most expensive artbook I’ve purchased and was somewhat of an experiment to see the quality. Expect to pay over 10,000￥ for it (if you can find it in stock anywhere). If you can and are willing to pay the price, I do recommend this book especially if you are fan of Shuffle or the other Navel works.