Any good books on JRPGs (or Final Fantasy specifically)?

[Philosoraptor]

Aside from strategy guides and such - and the mediocre Final Fantasy and Philosophy, which I already have - are there any good books out there on JRPGs? I'm interested in things like their history and influences, and maybe in-depth information on the worlds of some specific games.

Mostly I'm interested in titles available in English, as that's the only language I can read. However, I'm mildly curious about titles in other languages as well.

(I'm aware of the existence of the Ultimania series, and some of them do sound like something I'd be interested in. But to the best of my knowledge they're only available in Japanese, some fan translation projects that never went much of anywhere notwithstanding.)

[The Man]

TheLifestream.net has fairly extensive translations of a lot of FFVII's supplemental material including parts of the Ultimania. If you want the other games' Ultimanias you're probably out of luck though.

edit: I lied. They have at least parts of some of the other Ultimanias as well, including FFVIII's and FFIX's.

[Philosoraptor]

Okay, I partially take back the "that never went much of anywhere" part. That's good to know.

Any answers to the main question, though?

[Wolf Kanno]

Not really, you're best bet is to use Google to find Development interviews of various titles to get the info but no one has actually made a book on the genre itself. I would recommend going on YouTube and seeing if you can find some of the old TechTV content like Icon (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_r2dpOtFvM).