Review : Warcraft: The Sunwell Trilogy.

Set in the world of the popular computer game series, Warcraft: The Sunwell Trilogy is a high fantasy story of fire breathing dragons, rotting undead and one mysterious young woman at the center of it all. Written by well known fantasy novelist Richard Knaak, who also helped with the english adaption of the Ragnarok manga series. The Sunwell Trilogy actually contains the three seperate graphic novels; Dragon Hunt, Shadows Of Ice and Ghostlands, is unscaled to a larger page size and given a well designed hard cover.

The story revolves around Anveena, a young seemingly innocent country girl and Kalec, a blue dragon who has taken human form and cannot leave it due to unforeseen circumstances. Kalec is searching for the sunwell, a lake of potent magic that has seemingly disappeared. After Aveena's home is attacked, she gets caught up in Kalecs search for the sunwell as well. Unfortunately, the undead scourge are also looking for it and hamper the pair at every turn.

For those familiar with the franchise, the story takes place after the events of Warcraft III and leads up to the final events of World Of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade. For those unfamiliar with Warcraft or just wanting to brush up on their lore, The Sunwell Trilogy contains a very dense explanation of Warcraft history at the start. If you've never played any of Warcrafts incarnations I would not suggest this manga, it seems to have primarily been made for Warcraft fans, a lot of events and character appearances will have a lot less impact to those unfamiliar with the franchise.

The art is more reminiscent of older manga titles, but is still very much in the anime style, the female blood elf Tyri is inarguable proof of it, especially when she gets attacked by tenticles at one part in the book. Despite being called 'War'craft there isn't actually a lot of overly violent scenes within the book, or adult/sexual themes for that matter, making the novel accessible for all age groups.

The Sunwell Trilogy has a fine narrative, which is easy to follow for anyone but will appeal more to Warcraft fans. The conclusive plot twist is pretty shallow and obvious, but besides that it remains overall a strong graphic novel that will entice all high fantasy story lovers.