Strategy Guide Reviews

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Initial Impressions of White Knight Chronicles Strategy Guide

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Sorry Darksiders fans, but the guide got pushed aside for now due to the release of White Knight Chronicles, a JRPG I have been eagerly waiting for for well over a year.

The game itself has been…interesting to say the least. I’ve never played a combat system like it before, and I’m still trying to figure out why I created an avatar for it to have no real relevance to the story. Maybe it will come to me later. But for now, it’s just a created being that I have taught all magic to and kept it in the back for healing while I control the main protagonist and his—I can’t believe I’m going to say this—MECH.

But as for the guide, I’m not a huge fan of its design. It doesn’t flow very well and its blocks of text make it somewhat difficult to quickly find out 1) where you are and 2) what information you need. But considering that the guide’s design earned the Uncharted 2 strategy guide a 4/5, and this guide was written by the same group, I’m not surprised.

As for what advice it gives, I have to say that when I do use the guide, it has been most helpful. As I said earlier, the combat and skill system is quite strange, and the guide gave very sound tips for manipulating the system. It’s also a lifesaver when it comes to prep, from basic battle prep to boss prep. However, I do find one thing about the prep to be funny: it expects your levels to be quite low at certain points, and my party has had far higher levels than the guide predicts. On the one hand, it makes me wonder how hard the writers made things on themselves, but on the other, such low expectations are nice, because they tell you things like, “Yulie is probably around level 3, so don’t go too far north until she’s level 6.”

I haven’t used the guide at all for boss fights yet, because I’ve found the bosses to be somewhat easy and straightforward. But when I read the strategies after the fact, I laughed at how complex the strategies were. They would tell me to order this character to do magic or make sure I had this combo learned, and I was able to get the job done with little struggle. Maybe it’s because my levels were higher than suggested, or maybe the writers really did make things hard on themselves.

It’s going to be an interesting ride, for both the game and the guide, methinks.

The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks Strategy Guide review

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Strategy Guide Review Policy:

My goal for these strategy guide reviews is not to discuss whether one needs the guide to complete the game. Every gamer has different strengths and skills, and one may need every bit of a guide, another may need to look up information for quick assistance once, and another may laugh at the idea of ever using a guide, even the online freebies. My goal is to determine whether the guide is 1) helpful in the first place, 2) does it encompass gamers who need hand-holding as well as those who need a quick reference and 3) how much information does it really have.

Review:

Anyone who has played both Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks knows that the latter is basically the former with a train and more polished gameplay. The same goes for the strategy guide.

As Stephen Stratton wrote both guides, it’s obvious that he took the same formula from the first guide and applied it to the second, and it worked just as well. And why shouldn’t he have? The game had the same basic formula—even when it came down to the final boss fight, sadly enough—so the guides definitely should have followed suit.

Each chapter in the walkthrough starts with maps, a checklist of items players should have already obtained and items players should obtain while playing. The guide then holds the players’ hands through each task, offers tips, and then starts over with the same format for each dungeon in the chapter. The guide also tells players when they can play certain mini-games, such as finding specific rabbits, in between tasks or in between chapters. This is particularly useful in hunting down heart containers and force gems, since they are each hidden in screwy places or random mini-games.

The guide also shines when it comes to boss fights. The bosses are far tougher this time around over PH, and with a few, it isn’t particularly obvious how you fight them. Sure, you know that you use the weapon that you find in the dungeon, but it’s not always obvious exactly how you are supposed to use it. The boss in the Snow Realm that you defeat with the boomerang immediately comes to my mind.

And of course, in the back is the stellar list of every item Link can pick up in the game and where he can get it. Well, except for the rabbits. For these, the guide has included a map that marks every rabbit with a number and color (green for forest, blue for ocean). This way, when the guide says, “You can find rabbits 1-7 in the Forest Realm,” you know exactly which rabbits the book is talking about. The only real excuse you can have for not catching every rabbit is your poor rabbit catching skills (some of the buggers are hard to snag, I admit).

The only complaint I have about the guide is the same complaint I had about the PH guide, no big shock there. Every now and then, the guide would give the direction “west” or “east,” when the opposite direction is really what was meant. But this doesn’t happen often, nor does it make it impossible to understand what was meant. As much as the north, south, east, and west directions are given throughout, it’s understandable that one or two would get messed up. At least “west” was never written instead of “south,” or something similar. That might have been too confusing.

As you might have guessed from my comparison to the PH guide and from, well, the image at the top, I have given the Spirit Tracks strategy guide a 5 out of 5. Well done, once again, Mr. Stratton.

Uncharted 2 Strategy Guide Review

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Strategy Guide Review Policy:

My goal for these strategy guide reviews is not to discuss whether one needs the guide to complete the game. Every gamer has different strengths and skills, and one may need every bit of a guide, another may need to look up information for quick assistance once, and another may laugh at the idea of ever using a guide, even the online freebies. My goal is to determine whether the guide is 1) helpful in the first place, 2) does it encompass gamers who need hand-holding as well as those who need a quick reference and 3) how much information does it really have.

Review:

Upon first glance of this guide, it looks massive and a bit overwhelming. It’s over 300 pages long, and if you knew nothing about the game Uncharted 2, you would think that just by looking at the book that the game will take one 30-40 hours to complete. I finished the game in thirteen hours, and if I had taken more time to actually look for all one hundred treasures, I bet it would have taken me fifteen or sixteen hours.

From that information alone, you can guess how much fluff is packed into the guide, and I’m not talking about the appendices. The guide goes out of its way to include several pieces of historical and factual information about the objects Nathan Drake encounters in his adventure, including the Cintamani Stone, the prayer wheels in the ice temple, and Shambhala itself. Every time Drake finds a new weapon, it is detailed a bit as well in its own decorative box and if it has any historical significance, it’s also listed. It’s almost like the guide was designed to look like Marco Polo’s diary, cluttered with images and notes.

While this is fantastic from an educational point of view, and it makes the guide look very nice in the inside, this design takes away from how easy it is to find information in the walkthroughs, because the walkthroughs are broken up all over the pages to make room for the artwork and informational boxes. As a result, you could easily cover ten pages in fifteen minutes of gameplay, but you could add another five minutes of searching time to figure out where you are in the game.

That said, the walkthroughs themselves, when you find your spot in the game, are nearly flawless. They provide well written descriptions and well devised strategies to keep Drake alive and/or find his way through a crazy platforming puzzle. In fact, the platforming puzzles are where the guide really shines. In addition to a written walkthrough detailing where Drake should go and what he should look for, the guide also has a screenshot with a directional map plotted out to show players where Drake needs to jump and climb. These were lifesavers in the ice temple section, where to me, it was NEVER obvious where to go.

I do wish that the walkthroughs that were not about the platforming though had as many telling screenshots. It provided stellar screenshots showing where each treasure was, along with a written walkthrough for each, but it didn’t provide this same service with the shooting walkthroughs. For example, in the tank chase scenes, a few screenshots depicting where Drake should try to take cover or run to would have been most helpful, as the writing for those sections was a little vague. But then again, if these sections had all these desired screenshots, the pages would be even more cluttered than they already are.

The appendices have everything a user could possibly want, from charts of medals to treasure locations to the game’s store inventory. It also has quite a unique appendix that details all the possible types of cover Drake can use. I’ve never seen anything quite like it in a guide before. I’m not sure how useful it really is, but it’s interesting to see all the various objects Drake can use to hide behind.

All things considered, the guide is extremely well done. It really helped this newbie to the shooter genre survive her first attempt, not to mention potential hours of frustration in trying to figure out all of the platforming puzzles in those temples. Writing-wise, BradyGames created another masterpiece. However, due to the cluttered journal design, I have to give it a 4/5.

Initial Impressions of Spirit Tracks Guide

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I will get into what I think of the game later, but as for the guide, I am quite happy with it so far. It has the same design and set-up as the guide for Phantom Hourglass so everything is very easy to find and the walkthroughs are incredibly easy to follow along. I’m also pleased to find that the author’s humor has once again found its way back into the words.

My only complaint is that I bought the Collector’s Edition guide like I did with Phantom Hourglass but no fancy leather bookmark came with it like the last book. I supposed I could use the PH bookmark, but it’s already in use for the Uncharted 2 book, since that guide came with nothing for me to tear out and use as a bookmark. Fortunately, ST has a nice separate fold-out map, so that is sufficing for now, but I was really looking forward to collecting another leather bookmark. But I suppose I’ll survive and make do with what I have. Grumble grumble…

Bookmark aside, unless I find something completely flawed or useless, I expect that this guide will also be a perfect 5/5 like its predecessor.

Assassin’s Creed 2 Strategy Guide review

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Strategy Guide Review Policy:

My goal for these strategy guide reviews is not to discuss whether one needs the guide to complete the game. Every gamer has different strengths and skills, and one may need every bit of a guide, another may need to look up information for quick assistance once, and another may laugh at the idea of ever using a guide, even the online freebies. My goal is to determine whether the guide is 1) helpful in the first place, 2) does it encompass gamers who need hand-holding as well as those who need a quick reference and 3) how much information does it really have.

Review:

This is my first time to deal with a guide from Piggyback Interactive, and I really was not that impressed. While I am willing to admit that this game would definitely not be the easiest to write a guide for, it still doesn’t change the fact that I found most of the guide’s walkthroughs to be unusable.

The guide’s biggest flaw is its design. It’s very artistic and very appealing to the eyes, but while this is very conducive for an artbook, it most definitely is not for a strategy guide. For example, the guide only offers maps of the cities Ezio visited, but provides no maps for any of the walkthroughs, which in many instances, would have been more than helpful and/or welcome. Instead, the guide heavily relies on screenshots to show the player where they should be heading or what they should be looking for. These are occasionally helpful, like in the Assassin’s Tombs, but during missions, they are mostly extremely frustrating and oftentimes provide no assistance.

To make matters worse, the screenshots provided are extremely small, which do not help in deciphering the locations the writers refer to. The screenshots are so small in order to accommodate the other artwork on the pages that had nothing to do with offering a strategy. The artwork should have been replaced with the screenshots themselves, and then the tiny screenshots could have been replaced with maps that detail at least a red path of where Ezio travels in this particular memory. Some of the artwork could still have been used to keep the pages esthetically pleasing, but most of it should have gone in the back as a bonus artbook section.

The guide’s final problem in design lies in its table of contents. The table of contents in the front lists only five sections, and none of these sections are detailed as to what they contain. If you want to find out, you have to flip through the book and use the vertical “tabs” on the outside edge of the pages to find what you are looking for. Again, while this is artistic, it does not help players quickly find what they are looking for. If they want to look up the Achievements or Trophies they can obtain, users will first have to guess if these are listed in the Secrets section or in the Reference section, and then when they get to either section, they will still have to flip through it to find where the Achievements are. As a result, no quick look-up is as quick as it should be.

Fortunately, the writing in the walkthroughs for the most part is simple enough to understand and follow (it was only in a few spots that I had no idea–and still don’t know–what they were talking about), so I could piece together what they recommended Ezio do. Note the words, piece together. While I could usually understand what the writers were trying to convey, the words and directions were often quite vague, even in the sections where the writers provide additional and a deeper strategy, forcing me to rely on myself and what I could see anyway. That’s kind of not the point of a guide. Once again, maps for these missions would have cleared this up.

Now where the guide excels is in the Bonus material. It provides additional maps of each city that detail all the feathers and glyphs and a tear-out giant map that has all the cities with their feathers, glyphs, codex pages, and viewpoints clearly labeled. When I went glyph hunting at one point in the game, I heavily relied on these maps, and they were wonderful. Not only do they label where each feather and glyph were, but they provide screenshots of their locations. As anyone who has hunted feathers and glyphs knows, these are in some funky spots.

The guide also (fortunately for me) has in-depth solutions for each TRUTH puzzle that accompanies the glyphs. I only have one complaint about these solutions, and I fully admit that I’m being nit-picky with it. I really wish that the solutions included explanations for the passcode puzzles. I was able to understand the first couple of these, but after a certain point, I had no idea how to solve them or how these solutions made sense. Just a little nudge in why the passcode is what it is would have been nice for my inquisitive mind.

The biggest bonus that the guide offers (aside from all the pretty, pretty artwork and character designs) is the summary and analysis of the first game as well as the second. It summarizes the plot points of both games, explains each glyph left behind by Subject 16 in the first game, summarizes the second game, explains the cut scenes (such as the big cut scene with Altair and Maria in the middle of AC2), explains the TRUTH, and contains a FAQ session regarding the rather unusual and puzzling ending. While I admit that these are the writers’ own personal thoughts, most likely fueled by hints from Ubisoft, it still helped me wrap my mind around the ending sequences and what is in store for the future of the series.

The secrets that the guide unveils definitely saves it from being completely useless. It’s actually quite unfortunate that the design of the guide detracts from its usefulness so completely. The writing, while rather vague, is mostly fine, but if it only had clearer and larger screenshots as well as individual maps for the walkthroughs, it would not have been nearly as confusing. Due to this weak combination, I ended up not really using the walkthrough sections at all unless I really got lost and mostly used the guide for finding and deciphering glyphs.

Thus, Assassin’s Creed 2: The Complete Official Guide receives a 3/5.

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