Strategy Guide Reviews

A Strategy Guide for your Strategy Guides

No more Sands of Destruction

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As much as I really wanted to finish it, especially since I was near the end, I had to quit Sands of Destruction. The game is unbelievably boring and I’m not a huge fan of its format: dungeon mazes with weird puzzles and back-to-back boss fights. Literal back-to-back boss fights. Most of the bosses were not that difficult, but what they lacked in difficulty they made up for in annoyance. Annoying as in, oh I’ll just keep healing myself, ha ha! This way, the fight will last up to thirty minutes to an hour! Ha ha! Playing on a Nintendo DS for hours at a time when you don’t use the stylus is really painful for my hands. Hence why I could only play Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days for about an hour to an hour and a half at a time.

Wish I could say that the story was engrossing enough for me to continue, but it wasn’t. There will be no world destroying. Only world changing. Bleh.

So what’s next for me on the handheld agenda? Well I have Final Fantasy III that has been staring at me for nearly a year. Now that I have a review copy of the guide, I need to get cracking on that.

So far I’m still enjoying WKC for the most part. I hate how much prep the game requires for every little thing. I thought that the sphere grid in FFX was a beating as well as the skill system for Lost Odyssey, but this one really takes the cake. I have spent 30 minutes in just prep and Georama time alone! When you only have an hour to 90 minutes to play at a time, that really bites. It doesn’t help that I wonder how useful the Georama really is…

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.

What? I’m playing a videogame without a strategy guide??

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Sands of DestructionYes it is true that I can and do actually play games without a strategy guide. Right now I’m playing Sands of Destruction on the DS, a game I’ve been looking forward to since LAST January, and I’m also reviewing it for Kombo. It’s nice to be able to review a game you actually wanted to play.

I have to say that I’m not entirely pleased with the game so far. I was really interested in it because I liked the idea of the story being about destroying the world instead of saving it. However, while one partymember is rather hell bent in destroying the world, the protagonist with the power to do so is all about changing it and making it better. Somehow I think that’s what “destroying the world” really means. Lame. I could pick up any other JRPG and save the world.

On top of that, the graphics are a huge disappointment. The occasional cut scene when you enter a new area is really nice, but these are short and few. The rest of the time, you are presented with graphics that look like they are from a GBA game, Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories in particular. Couple this with the fact that you don’t use the touchpad at all, you have to wonder why it is on the DS in the first place, other than the fact that Nintendo no longer supports the GBA.

To quote another review of the same game from a friend of mine, the game is okay, but I don’t think I’d recommend it to a friend, especially if the friend likes challenging RPGs. Last night I died for the first time, and I’m halfway through the game. For that fact alone, I can see why a guide was never deemed necessary for production. But I still like it so far, despite how easy it is, but I also like odd games. I’m also still hoping that I get to destroy the world.

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.

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