YMMV / World of Warcraft: Chronicle

• Awesome Art: The books have dozens of full-color, high quality illustrations (by Peter Lee and other Blizzard artists) that never appeared in any other media, and provide visual references to the most significant events. Third volume's art is arguably slightly less awesome due to its cartoonish style, but is still very good.
• Broken Base: Volume 3 proved to be controversial compared to the acclaim of the first two volumes. It was this volume that (among other things) went over the events of World of Warcraft and its first three expansions. The writing of WoW is generally considered to be a disorganized mess at the best of times, and the attempts of Chronicle to make sense of it haven't really fixed that. Some specific changes to details and character motivations sparked debates, considering that players can literally go see most of the original versions in the game. Oh, and the accompanying artwork in the book is seen as a step down as well, with several pieces drawn in an overt 'cartoony' style that isn't well-liked.
• First Installment Wins: The Chronicle's books are seen as the best guidebook to warcraft lore with similar lore books that came out after like Grimoire of the Shadowlands, the Exploring Azeroth series, and The Dragonflight Codex filled with many inconsistencies (which to be fair Chronicles had as well, however was much less glaring), some unfortunate elements in some of the race descriptions, and overall seen as less interesting.
• One-Scene Wonder: To a non-player, a lot of events, especially in Volume 1, may seem out of place - such as War of the Satyr, the backstory of Suramar, Eldre'thalas and Crystalsong etc, as they have virtually no impact on the main story. However, they are obviously retroactive Chekhov's Gun foreshadowing stories that lead to actual in-game plots (some of which appear in Volume 3).
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • The canonization of the Stormwind nobles being Brainwashed into not paying the Defias has received this response for removing moral nuance from the Alliance.
  • The writers changing orc/draenei history so the orcs continually attacked, enslaved and raped Draenei 90 years before the Legion arrived has drawn heavy criticism for ruining the orcs depiction as as a fairly peaceful shamanistic race prior to the demonic pact.