I’m sure you are as much of a fan of SNK Heroines as i am and i am also sure you have realized that there are 3 art books and you are wondering which are the differences between them!. No fear, I’m here to help you. First, let’s check the 3 books…

1. The first one is the art book released with the Diamond Dream edition of the game. It’s only available in that edition and has a hard cover.
2. The “Official Art Book”, released by SNK first in their own online shop and a bit later in Japanese retail stores and other online shops. It’s the latest released so it’s the more complete one. It has soft covers.
3. The digital version of the “Official Art Book”, it’s included with the STEAM version of the game. It’s 90% identical to the retail release, but it’s missing some pages. We will talk about that a bit later.

The most important point to make is that the 3 editions have mostly the same content but arranged differently, the biggest difference is that the “Official Art Book” includes some of the DLC characters and i say some because, yes, it’s missing 2 characters. In a game called “SNK Heroines”, SNK decided that alongside the SNK characters MissX (Gals Fighters) and Jeanne (World Heroes) it was a good idea to add Thief Arthur (Square Enix, Million Arthur) and a female version of Skullomania (Arika, Fighting X Layers), these 2 last characters are not included in any of the books.

 

The art books are fairly short, but oddly enough, the Diamond Dream edition, the one that doesn’t include any of the DLC characters has quite a few more pages…

… but it’s easy to understand the reason, once we check the inside. Let first take a look to the art book included in the Diamond Dream edition of the game…

… now, let’s check equivalent pages of the Official Art Book…

 

As you can see, at the end of the day they show the same content, but the pages are way more populated in the Official Art Book, they try to fit as much as possible in each page… and taking in consideration that the whole point of these books is to appreciate the designs and illustrations i can’t say it’s a wise decision. Clearly the Diamond Dream edition is more pleasant to look at, with everything a bit (or much) bigger. Now, this situation changes dramatically if we check the digital edition, here you can zoom up each page as much as you want to check any little detail and it takes a lot of zooming before it starts to pixelate (at least in my 1080p screen!).

Aside of missing the characters MissX and Jeanne (among other things later mentioned), the main difference of the Diamond Dream edition is that it includes the manga panels that were published in internet…

The Official Art Book doesn’t have the manga panels, but it comes with some predesign of the characters, stickers (probably used in Line), information about the arcade game, merchandising, the special illustrations that show up when you complete the game with certain combination of characters…

Sadly, there isn’t a definitive Art Book, they all have their pros and cons. If you are not too interested in the manga, the Official Art Book certainly has more content related to the game, personally i find more interesting having MissX, Jeanne and the predesigns than the manga, but sadly some illustrations are a bit too small… which takes us to the digital edition included with the STEAM game, which remove the limitations of the paper book, the catch (which is not too important) is that it lacks some pages, these are related to the merchandising, the arcade and… the cover and back cover ^_^uuu, all this comes down to no more than 5 or 6 pages.

Personally i would rather have a book, but right now the digital release is hands down the easier to get, probably cheaper (just wait for a game sale if the price is a bit high) and it also comes with the soundtrack!.