I was remembering one day when my old friend who got a strategy guide for ever Square game he got (back in the day of FF8 and Parasite Eve). Then I was reading an article the other day about strategy guides, that these days, games are so complicated, detailed, and large that you need a strategy guide these days if you want to get anything special. I think this is pretty true. Think about FF10’s celestial weapons. There are no clues that these things exist, no way to know how they work (removing bad abilities, adding good ones), and no clues on how to get each one (all vastly different and different difficulty levels). If you didn’t have a strategy guide or Internet, you’d have no chance of getting these, lost in a game that you yourself bought, and its locked in there. So, in today’s day and age, what’s your opinion on strategy guides?
They’re not required to get through the game, but they damn well are necessary to get absolutely everything in it. The problem isn’t that the games are complicated, it’s that the things in them are there with no hint of how to get to them. Seriously, who could know that beating the Chocobo race at 0 seconds would get you Tidus’s ultimate weapon? There’s been at least a few of those sorts of things in every game since FF8 (remember beating 20 Tonberries? Yeah, I’d never have figured that out either).
I always try to buy the guide for every game I play before I buy the game itself. The reasons:
-
I want to know if the game will be to my liking;
-
I want to find everything in the game the first time I play it; and,
-
I like collecting the guides themselves. They often have cool art, and sometimes are fun to read all by themselves (anyone remember the LUNAR guides? Those were full of puns and jokes that cracked me up.)
These days you can find walkthroughs for nearly every game online, but it’s more comfortable to have a book in your lap while you play than having to check the PC screen every few minutes, in my opinion. 
One problem with guides is that they spoil at least some of the surprises for the player, but that’s the risk you take with them. (Fortunately, I’m immune to spoilers- as long as a game, movie, etc. is good, I’ll enjoy it even if I know all the details ahead!)
Yeah, that’s the exact opposite of me. 8p I specifically avoid FAQs my first time round since I don’t want to know anything about the game. And strategy guides are easily a third the price of the actual game, so there’s no way I’d actually buy a physical one when there’s all those online guides. 8p
I’m with Cid to an extent on the no-guide the first time around, although I make exceptions in cases where the gameplay makes it vital to know more than the tutorials tell you (Vagrant “Sim Blacksmith” Story) or when there are very high odds of missing very important one-time-only stuff (Suikoden series). Once I’m near endgame though, I jump on the net to see what stuff the designers where far too retarded to make somewhat guessable (FFX’s ultimate weapons).
And of course I resort to GameFAQs and asking around instead of the official guides. I mean, I would not pay for the info when I’m barely paying for the games themselves << >>
I generally buy guides for the same reasons as Wil. That and my perfectionist persona has to get everything possible in a game. As mentioned before, some things are easily missed without one.
I usually dive headlong into the game and sometime at the 2/3 mark I hit the net to see if there’s something major I’ve been missing or is in the offing.
Example: I could have never used Bum Rush in the emulator version (no Joypad). The easier to execute version off the net was pretty useful.
Stragety guides are nessary, because I would of not been able to figure out the numbers for the secret areas on the airship for FFX. Even though they do contain spoilers, I occasionly play the game through once then go and get the stragety guide then get the good stuff.
I agree with Cid that there are some things in games that seem completely random and that you couldn’t get without knowing about in advance, or being ridiculously obsessive-compulsive. For instance, to get Aeris’ limit break(which is very useful and you’d want), you need to talk to the guy who tells you the number of battles you’ve fought when the number of battles you’ve fought ends in an odd number or something mind-boggling like that. How would you ever think to talk to him when its time for you to have Aeris’ limit break, let alone figure out the number of battles needs to be odd?
Another example is that in the Japanese version of FF4, in the first town you visit there’s an extremely rare randomly encountered monster in a little garden in the corner of the town that drops the most powerful equipment in the game.
What’s this? Tell me.
After checking various FAQs, I may be thinking of another game, or I made it up somehow o_O
All RPGs play exactly the same nowadays. If you’ve played FFVII, you can play through any RPG before or since without a guide. Guides are necessary for the finer points like sidequests and certain stat info and stuff. But with gamefaqs you dont even need to buy one.
Here’s the thing about GameFAQ’s though. It’s awesome, don’t get me wrong. I’ve found a lot in its guides that aren’t in official strategy guides, but I get bored of reading a plain .txt file. I’d much rather look at a detailed, nicely illustrated book than that. Plus, making maps in Wordpad just doesn’t cut it for me. Their one big plus is that the authors put in their own game experiences into their writing so GameFAQ’s guide my have more funny ancedotes or looser language than a traditional guide.
No, maps in gamefaqs are useless at best. But I tend not to pay attention to maps in the first place, unless I get really inexplicably lost. Which again, in post- FFVII RPGs doesnt happen often.
I too tend to like the quips and comments in a gamefaqs guide. Except when they try to hard to be funny. More than anything, I just print up the sidequests guides anyway, or if I need so much of something, the guide that tells the location of all thos somethings, and so on.
I never buy the strategy guides. Although I should, because they’re a fine investment.
As far as faqs go, I won’t use walkthroughs. Sometimes I will “cheat” and look up something up online, for example, I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss any jobs on FFX-2 or certain characters in Suikoden.
If you replay to get everything, might as well use a faq unless you have a lot of time on your hands. It’s more rewarding doing it yourself (i.e. finding the Airship cutscene in VI with Cid and Setzer), but you really need an obscene amount of time nowadays.
I think some people out there are making a site to compete with GameFaqs, this one with pictures so you can have maps and things. I usually print out a faq (at work, not my paper) if I have a game I want to 100% complete and then follow it the second time around. I’m like Cid, and you have no idea how hard it is to avoid spoilers for Dirge of Cerberus while working on a site like this
Do you think game manufacturers are doing this consciously so you have to buy the strategy guide, thus pumping additional cost to the game. I mean, you bought the game, so you should have access to all the content into it. You wouldn’t like it if a DVD held extra outtakes and the only way to access them was to press “left” 200 times in two minutes, and there’s no way you’d know it unless you went on the Internet.
They’re absolutely doing it consciously.
And get bloody DoC already, for sheesh sake! You can probably already grab it used, and you can finish it within about 12 hours easy. 
You can even rent it for a couple days and finish it within one rental.
If I made a game, I’d go one step further, and the ingame hints for the sected-bits would be on the order of, say, Castlevania 2.
… nah, I’m not that sadistic.
Ever seen a book with hidden content?
(pretentiousness edit)
FF IX’s