- Is this glass half full...or half empty?When you buy this strategy guide by Nintendo Power your going to ask your self the above question repeatedly. This mag is like a hit or miss sort of affair... only when it misses, it misses by a long shot!
Nintendo Power scales things down in terms of walk throughs. Your not going to see the lengthy, long winded, (and sometimes completely unnecessary) approach that Prima guides sometimes likes to take. The maps are plentiful and make up the better parts of the guide itself. You can see pretty much right off that they prefer to let the maps do most of the talking for you. The relatively meager walk through segments tend to give you simple "suggestions" or "call outs" that cross reference the maps, which are then labeled with numbers and letters. Nintendo Power tries to simplify it's walk through structure in this way to convenience you. However, after a little while this becomes a tedious task because then your scouring the maps trying to find all the hidden chests or items, or to even simply locate where YOU are compared to the map. Since random battles occur so quickly and in great quantities, your bound to lose track of your position because the battles will have taken your attention away from the maps you've been scanning long enough to confuse you. This is very true especially in the later areas where the maps get larger, the battles harder, and the mazes more twisting and confusing (if your trying to pop EVERY chest). Nintendo Power's lack of details in crucial areas and dependency on it's maps, is exactly one of the hit or misses I'm talking about. You'll either appreciate the wink and shove approach they give you, or you'll loathe it like me.
Other issues concerning this guide is the bestiary sections. First and foremost, the game itself provides a bestiary present in the main menu. Each time you defeat new enemies, sections of your bestiary will fill in. The enemies you encounter have an ID number which usually is related to the point in the game that your meant to encounter them. Nintendo Power went out of it's way to be different and catalog the enemies into alphabetical order rather than their in game ID number! If your really trying to perfect your game and wish to encounter all the enemies there is to see (thus completing the entire in game bestiary) your going to need to spend copious amounts of time cross referencing enemies. Going on line to Gamefaqs is actually much easier to do for this task, which is a shame because those guides are for free. Perhaps what's more disturbing however, is the lack finer details to the bestiary offered in this guide in general. They pretty much give you what the game will have told you in it's bestiary anyways...it's like they simply right clicked, copied, then pasted into fine print on their own pages.
In regards to getting from Baron castle in the beginning to the Lunar paths in the end of the game, the guide has you covered...so long as your willing to repeatedly glance back and forth between game screen and guide maps consistently. Since this game is fairly linear however with few alternate paths, I don't see how you really could need this book to simply BEAT this game. The ideal for me at least was to use it to MASTER the game. That's where this guide takes it's biggest hit. Your given 1 page that briefs you on some of the extras to be explored after defeating the final boss. Most of these "extra" side quests involve some of the best equipment in the game, and opens up additional storyline content and newer areas as well. While the extra dungeons generate random floors each time they are visited, there are scripted events which never change...yet the guide fails to include ANY of that crucial information.
So basically it's all hit and miss, though it misses harder than it hits. For a bare bones point A to point B guide, it works but isn't perfect... and that's where it hits well enough. This game isn't that confusing to warrant a literal walk through (just that the battles make it hard for some people to play is all). What many players including myself were hoping for instead, was the extra content being covered here so that we could truly master the game. To that end, this guide misses the point entirely.
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