Ultimania

Ultimania

Square Enix is a Japanese video game development and publishing company formed from the merger on April 1, 2003 of video game developer Square and publisher Enix. The company is best known for its role-playing video game franchises, which include the Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and Kingdom Hearts series. Square, and later Square Enix, has produced a number of different strategy guide books for many of their games, similar to those produced by many other video game companies. Beginning in 1999, Square began to produce books that focused on artwork, developer interviews, and background information on the fictional worlds and characters in the games rather than on gameplay details.

The first series of these books were the Perfect Works series, written and published by the Square subsidiary DigiCube. They produced three books between 1998 and 1999 before the line was stopped in favor of the Ultimania (アルティマニア, Arutimania?) series, a portmanteau of ultimate and mania. This series of books is written by Studio BentStuff, who had previously written game guides for Square for Final Fantasy VII. They were published by DigiCube until the company was dissolved in 2003, and since then by Square Enix. Dozens of books in the series have been produced since 1999, sometimes with multiple books written per game or revised editions published years afterwards. One of the books, Final Fantasy IX Ultimania Online, was solely published online as part of an experiment by Square with online content delivery; another for Final Fantasy XI was planned, but the idea was abandoned as unsuccessful and all subsequent books have been published traditionally. The Ultimania series had sold over 10 million books by July 2007.