Courtesy of our good friends at HobbyLink Japan we’ve been sent the book Valkyries Second Sortie to review, featuring the work of the very talented Hidetaka Tenjin. Unsurprisingly, this new book is very much focused on the more recent work Tenjni has undertaken for Macross Frontier. We’ve naturally taken a few select snapshots to show off the truly stunning content within it.

Following on from Hidetaka Tenjin’s previous Valkyrie themed book, it seems that we will be graced with yet another wonderful entry called Valkyries Second Sortie. As the cover suggests, it seems that this edition will also be more focused towards the recent Macross Frontier. As with all of Tenjin’s work, this will be a must buy on its release later this month. Make sure to pre-order it now!

Super Robot Wars L was released today in Japan (you can buy it here). This is the latest game in the series to be hosted on the mighty DS and despite the extensive asset re-use, we’re still moderately pumped to play it.

Separately, the next Composite Ver. Ka toy will be that of the PTX-EX Exbein from the recent OG anime The Inspector. As with all Ver. Ka treatments it’s definitely been given the patented Katoki flair, but that’s not surprising from a mecha with shades.

Finally, there have been rumours floating around about a new PS3 2D SRW game. Entitled Super Robot Wars U, it would apparently feature mecha from Armored Core Nexus and Front Mission amongst a slew of others (even including Tetsujin 28-go). The only thing is that the article in Famitsu that “announced” it was actually meant as a hypothetical piece. So it’s not really a fake game per se, as Famitsu never intended the exercise as such, but it won’t be getting made any time soon. Whilst an obvious pity, as the line-up was several orders of epic, here’s hoping Banpresto follow it up with a real PS3 SRW announcement.

For those that read this site much, you’ll know that from the site’s logo above to this interview; we’re fans of Junji Okubo’s work. Despite being a fiendishly talented mecha designer, he’s also a proper old school shmup fan. Years ago he used to have an Eightbit Fighters site, where he showed renders of classic shmup ships from the 8bit era of gaming. What was and still is remarkable about that was how he forced himself to focus on the original 8bit pixel art as his sole reference – extrapolating the remainder himself. There’s hardcore and then’s there’s just plain awesome, Junji falls squarely into the latter category. Well, it seems that Attract Mode have his first Eightbit Fighters Chronicles volume in stock (for only $20 too!), collating all his wonderful renders from his website into a very shiny book. So pick it up now whilst you still can.

It turns out that the fantastically talented Hidetaka Tenjin is having a second book published, with the first being his brilliant Macross specific Valkyries. Simply titled as Hidetaka Tenjin Works the book contains a total of 84 illustrations; 34 from Gundam, 10 from Macross, 6 from Votoms, Aquarion, Eureka Seven, Patlabor as well as other fighter jets.

The PSP games Macross Ace Frontier and Ultimate Frontier also had box covers by Tenjin as well, so they are notable from a gaming standpoint. He’s no stranger to other games too, as he penned the amazing cover for Gradius V.

It’s also worth pointing out that much of the amazing CG work seen in Macross Zero was assisted by Tenjin, so he’s not just your average model kit box art illustrator. The book is released later this month and you can pre-order it here.