Oooh that’s cool! I have the Versusbook guide of that guide. The book flips over for the other game’s guide. The ages side is written by Casey Loe, author of the Majora’s Mask guide I won’t shut up about. It’s a good guide for Ages.
The Seasons guide is by Craig Keller and it has to be one of the worst guides I’ve ever used. One neat thing about the Oracle games is the overworld changes depending on which animal you get. Neither guide mentions this but the Seasons guide is just SO confusing in the assumptions it has for the player navigating a shifting map.
This is why I’m basically dedicating my current content I make on YouTube and Twitch to strategy guides. Someone got paid to help people beat a game. It’s incredible how long these books existed and how they continue to exist. When a guide is great, it enhances the entire experience.
Those last bosses for the Oracle games are p dang nasty I’m ngl. Glad the book left an impact
Oooh I bet that shreds. When I was in Japan this year I picked up the Super Famicom FF V guide and it has the BEST art for the characters and classes. They’re all chibi and oh so expressive. It kind of informs how Square would land on the 3D chibi style of FF III and IV for the DS tbh.
Really cute art in it. Generally speaking, Japanese guides have really cute/cool art.
I absolutely adored the Pokemon R/B/Y and G/S strategy guides I had as a kid and used them endlessly well into my teen years by which point they had started to fall apart but I still owned them into my 20s when they got destroyed in a housefire. I still have large chunks of information from them memorized to this day to use those memories as my guide when playing the games today.
I have a first edition print of their Mother 3 guide. I was an early adopter who imported Mother 3 before there was an English fan translation. /brag
The guide is incredible. It’s lovingly made by the biggest Mother fans in the world.
They also have an Earthbound/Mother 2 guide that they put on Kickstarter. I got a copy of that one as well, but I haven’t spent nearly as much time flipping through it since I already mostly knew my way around Earthbound before the book was printed.
On an unrelated note. I went to a local retro game store a couple days ago. I’ve visited several times this year (when I first discovered it), but this week was the first time I realized that they have an entire separate closet-sized room dedicated to strategy guides and retro gaming magazines. I was stunned; they had a lot of books I had as a kid and have never seen since.
They keep the really good stuff in the cabinet up front, of course, but they keep the price list for the books in the back. I discovered it hunting for the price of a strategy guide for Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen. Unfortunately, it was $90 and I left empty handed.
I have some time capsule guides like that for ESO, WoW, and Guild Wars 2. The information they provide on classes and skills can often be hopelessly outdated now, but the majority of the stuff is cool fluff, lore, and quests that are still relevant.
Going back to the era of cluebooks with this one for a fave, the Eye of the Beholder cluebook. The walkthrough part of it is written first-person in the style of the journal of a sourpuss of an adventurer and their hapless minion and guide, Bennet, and it’s such an entertaining read. When my partner and I played through it together for the first time a few years ago, we had it to hand and would stop every so often to read what they’d done and usually have a good chuckle at the antics.
I dont really use any now but growing up, my sister and I would use the Dark Cloud 2 strategy guide. i dont remember it too well but i recall it was really helpful for finding out all the weapon fusions and maybe some help with building the villages and fishing
we also owned the FF9 strategy guide but i remember being really confused by its formatting as a kid. We lost all of them during a move unfortunately but they were neat
I miss how old game manuals used to have guides in them. I fondly remember the one from Final fantasy legend. (some of you might know it as SaGa) which can be read here. The whole section after page 47 (Adventurer’s log) felt like the records of an expedition which was in the tower before me, and left crucial hints as to how to progress.
I love this. I plan to grab a CIB Mother 3 next time I’m in Japan. Respect
Hey dog, unironic I wanna chat in DMs or over discord about this. I would go and be a little guide sicko, bet. Do you know if they have an eBay presence?
This is so real. I know that feeling lol. I walked away from a very mint Dragon Warriors 2 original English guide at a similar price and I still think about it
(I"m a World of Warcraft lore freak.) I have a bunch of old guides for World of Warcraft. I definitely have the Vanilla guide and maybe The Burning Crusade also, and I have some hardcover atlases filled with really cool maps for areas that didn’t have in-game maps (like a lot of small villages and dungeons). Some of those areas have maps in-game nowadays, but I bet there are a still a few that are exclusive to the book (or that were destroyed in-game at some point and never got a map before being exploded).
The Instruction Manual for Illusion of Gaia has a guide like this. It’s an entire game walkthrough and includes the locations of all the hidden collectibles. It has a cute warning at the front of it telling you not to proceed if you don’t want spoilers.
I don’t know Final Fantasy Legend very well, but I love Final Fantasy Legend II. I have the manual and the extra map insert for that one. I don’t remember if the manual has a guide in it, but the extra insert basically fills that role. It has maps for the first few dungeons and a whole chart of items. Really awesome stuff.
Nice! That sounds like a great time. Dark cloud is a gap in my game knowledge. Is it a recommend and does the guide enhance the vibes?
Hehehe, it is an odd one. I made a video essay on that one and honestly the guide has some good ideas. It came too early and at the cost of a fully functioning book. But Square was almost right!
I feel similarly about this with the Destiny 2 guide albeit the quests in the Destiny one are literally useless. It’s cool to see the lore and changes the game went through. I made a video essay on this but it’s, uh, more of me driving the nail into the 2000 hour coffin of my Destiny 2 experience
Yeah dog, same. The Legend of Zelda on the NES’ instruction manual allowed the player to fill in both the overworld map and the dungeons. It wanted the player to interact with the space.
This shreds! I have to deep dive this soon. I tried to play Final Fantasy Legend by myself without a guide bc I’m such a FF II [Famicom] sicko but I couldn’t get the vibe. Big keen
Yo have you played Tunic? It might resonate with you if you haven’t
