Friday, February 24, 2012

Skyward Sword Collector's Guide

I just received the Prima Collector's Edition Strategy Guide of Skyward Sword joining my collection of guide books. I didn't even know there was one for Skyward Sword until two weeks ago. It came out on the same day as Skyward Sword, but with the game in my hands and all the news around the 25th Anniversary I totally missed it. Well, now I got it anyway from a seller in the UK.

Here are some pictures, first how the guide looks wrapped in plastic:


The content description on the back side is just a sheet. Unwrapped the back side is completely light blue.


Overall the guide has the same look as always, just a light blue color this time and a different golden framing on the front cover, like always. But with its 272 pages this is the shortest of the four Collector's Guides. The 320 page Spirit Tracks guide already looked quite thin in comparison to the previous two guides, but this one is even slimmer.


The cloth map has the same quality as the one from the Twilight Princess guide. However, of all the maps this has to be the most useless one. It only shows the ingame map with the names of the individual areas. The maps for Twilight Princess, Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks at least showed you important information like locations of Heart Pieces and other collectible items. That's completely missing from this cloth map, it's really just a gimmick and not a help.

Visually this guide is probably the best looking one of the four. It's full of nice artwork and pleasent to the eyes. The other guides usually had the problem of bad quality screenshots, but not this one. However, while the guide looks nice, content-wise it's the most lacking one. I just roughly skipped over the guide, but there are already many things I've noticed. First of all... there are no seperate lists for Pieces of Hearts and Goddess Cubes! I'm not joking, they don't have lists for these. If you want the location of all Heart Pieces and Goddess Cubes, you have to search through the whole walkthrough. This is quite unpractical. What if I miss one single Piece of Heart? If I can't find it, I want a list, where I can check, what pieces I've got. It's no wonder that this guide is so much slimmer than the others, the other three got at least their "legendary checklists".

Another bad example is the Imprisoned. There they didn't feature the tactic, where you jump on its head, they always just tell you to go for the toes, which can be very dangerous. Jumping on the head is the easiest and safest way to beat the Imprisoned in all three fights. If he grows a pair of arms, just use the Groosenator to stun him first. This is especially helpful in the Lightning Round. But it's these kinds of things that show you that the guide was written in haste. I will probably update the post with some other flaws later on.

Well, I'm happy that I've written my own guides, because I wouldn't want to rely on this one. The guide is simply just a collectible item for fans.

1 comment:

K2L said...

I once saw a guide for TP, but I didn't buy it because I already had beaten the game, and the only thing I needed (up until very recently, in fact) for 100% completion was finding all of the fish out there (fishing in TP is quite boring, IMO). The game was quite lacking in sidequests anyway.

Nowadays, I don't want guides at all because I want to find all stuff on my own, unless I'm REALLY stuck on something. Besides, in the case of SS; I was already fairly spoiled, so a guide would worse that.