Elden Ring Official Art Books: which to buy
There are three Elden Ring official art books, not one, and the difference between them decides which you should buy. Volumes I and II cover the base game and are out of print at the publisher. Volume III covers Shadow of the Erdtree, is the only one UDON still sells directly, and is the one to start with if you are buying a single book.
Who actually makes these
The English editions are published by UDON Entertainment, the same house behind the Dark Souls Design Works books and Bloodborne: Official Artworks. They are translations of Japanese editions produced by KADOKAWA Game Linkage, with the artwork credited to FromSoftware and the rights held by Bandai Namco.
That matters more than it sounds. UDON’s own listing for Volume III says the English book “contains the same content found in the Japanese edition” - the publisher committing, in writing, that nothing was cut for the translated release. Art book buyers ask that question constantly, because plenty of licensed art books arrive in English shorter than the original. Here you are paying for a translation, not an abridgement.
It also tells you what these books are. UDON’s line in this space is developer-side material: concept art, design sheets, the versions of a creature that did not ship. It is not a screenshot collection.
The three volumes
Volume I - 432 pages, ISBN 9781772942699, English edition 2023.
Volume II - 384 pages, ISBN 9781772942705, English edition 2023.
Volume III - 320 pages, 8.25 x 11.75 inches, hardcover, full colour, ISBN 9781772944051, November 2025, $59.99.
The first two are the base game across 816 pages between them. The third is the expansion, and UDON describes its contents specifically: concept art, illustrations and material designs for the new environments, enemies and bosses of Shadow of the Erdtree, plus the weapons and armour it introduced.
One thing worth being blunt about, because it changes the purchase: UDON’s own store no longer lists Volumes I and II. Search their shop for Elden Ring and you get Volume III, and then the Dark Souls and Bloodborne books filling out the collection page. The first two volumes exist, they have ISBNs, and they are findable - but not from the publisher, which means the price is whatever a reseller is asking rather than a cover price.
Why Volume III is the one to buy first
It is the volume that still has a supply. Everything else follows from that.
The $59.99 cover price is a real number you can pay today, where Volumes I and II carry secondary-market prices that move. It arrived in November 2025, roughly a year and a half after Shadow of the Erdtree launched on 20 June 2024, which is late enough that the book covers a finished, patched, fully understood expansion rather than a launch snapshot.
And it stands alone. UDON says it “continues the tradition of the first two volumes”, but Shadow of the Erdtree’s art is its own body of work - the Realm of Shadow does not reuse the Lands Between’s palette or its creature design language. You are not reading part three of a story. You can buy it without the other two and lose nothing.
The case against is equally simple: it is the smallest of the three at 320 pages, and it covers the smaller half of the game. If what you want is Malenia, Radahn, Leyndell and the horseback silhouette from the marketing, that material is in Volumes I and II and not here.
What these books are not
They are not strategy guides. There are no maps, no build advice and no boss tactics. If you want to know where to go next, that is a different purchase entirely.
They are also not a way to experience the game cheaply. An art book of a FromSoftware title is a spoiler machine by construction: bosses appear in it, late-game regions appear in it, and a design sheet says more about a creature than the game ever states out loud. Elden Ring’s storytelling depends on encountering things without warning, so buying the art book before finishing the game trades away the thing you paid for the game to get. Finish it first - see the Elden Ring review for what that involves - and buy the book after.
What a $59.99 art book buys
Full colour hardcover, 320 pages at 8.25 x 11.75 inches. That is the standard large-format art book shape, and it works out at roughly 19 cents a page, which is normal for the category and cheaper per page than most single-volume game art books.
The comparison worth making is against UDON’s own back catalogue, since it is the same publisher at a comparable trim: Dark Souls: Design Works is $39.99, Dark Souls II and III are $49.99 each, and Bloodborne: Official Artworks was $44.99 before it sold out. Volume III is the most expensive of the set, and it is also the newest and the only one covering a game still in active print. If you have bought a Design Works book before, you know roughly what arrives.
Bloodborne being sold out is the more useful data point. UDON’s FromSoftware art books go out of print and do not obviously come back, and Elden Ring Volumes I and II have already left the store. Treat availability as the constraint rather than the price.
English edition or Japanese import
Because UDON says Volume III carries the same content as the Japanese edition, the import question comes down to one thing: do you want the captions in a language you read.
The artwork, the layout and the page count are the same either way. What the English edition gives you is the material design notes, the labels on the sheets and whatever commentary sits alongside the images, in English. On a book of concept art that is a smaller share of the object than it would be on a novel, but it is not nothing - a design sheet’s value is partly in what the note beside it says about why a shape changed.
The practical argument runs the other way. The English edition is the one with a US cover price and a distributor behind it; the Japanese edition means an import, a proxy or a specialist seller, and shipping a 320-page hardcover of that size internationally is not cheap. Unless you specifically want the Japanese edition as an object, the translated one is the easier purchase.
What none of them cover
Three volumes, two games’ worth of content: the base game and Shadow of the Erdtree. Elden Ring Nightreign, the standalone spin-off, is not in any of them, and neither is the Tarnished Edition released for Switch 2. If you came here after Nightreign, none of these three books is about the game you played.
That is worth saying plainly because the listings do not make it obvious. A reseller writing “Elden Ring art book” is describing one of three books, none of which is the one a Nightreign player might assume they are getting.
Who should buy which
Buy Volume III if you want one book, if Shadow of the Erdtree is the part of Elden Ring you cared most about, or if you have bought a UDON Design Works book before and want the newest one. It is in print and it is self-contained. The Shadow of the Erdtree review covers whether the expansion itself is worth the time first.
Buy Volumes I and II if you want the base game’s art specifically - the Lands Between, its bosses, its armour sets - and accept that you are buying from resellers. Check the ISBNs against the listing, 9781772942699 for Volume I and 9781772942705 for Volume II, because “Elden Ring art book” as a listing title tells you nothing about which of three books is in the box.
Buy none of them if you have not finished the game, or if what you actually want is a guide. Both are common reasons people buy an art book and then regret it.
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