Today I received the Prima Collector's Edition Guide for Twilight Princess HD. I completely skipped the guide for Tri Force Heroes, because that one didn't follow the usual design. It didn't have the title of the game on the book's spine and it had some colorful artwork on the front, instead of a golden crest or symbol. And since I buy these guides for my collection and certainly not for the content, I didn't want to spend any money on it.
The Majora's Mask 3D guide also already gave concern about the quality with its messed up spine, but luckily the Twilight Princess HD guide doesn't have any of these issues and it does go along nicely with the other books. Here's how it looks right next to the original Twilight Princess guide:
The contents of these two books are pretty much identical as well. Just as Nintendo has remastered the game with minimal effort, you just get a "remastered" guide here. They swapped all the screenshots for newer ones, which look arguably a lot better, since the original had screenshots with a pretty bad quality. They rearranged some stuff and made very little tweaks to the design, but overall it's the same guide. So, if you open both books at the same page, you get the very same content with the same wordings!
They added seven pages for the Cave of Shadows with some useful strategies (nothing that I couldn't figure out on my own already, though) and an INCOMPLETE checklist for the Miiverse Stamps, but both guides have the exact same number of pages, 448 in total. Before this section they only changed the Palace of Twilight, which saved two pages for some reason. What they did then was minimizing their "Legendary Checklists" at the end to the smallest font ever to save a lot of space. Otherwise this would have become the largest guide in the collection so far.
The Legendary Checklists are still not legendary by the way - they tried to fix some of the oversights in the original, but they keyword is "tried". For example they added four of the missing Dig Caverns, but they are still missing one at Kakariko Gorge... The biggest joke is the new Miiverse Stamp list though. They arranged it in the order, how they found them, which is very inconvenient, because the alphabet doesn't go "ANHUO" and I'm pretty sure that this isn't even the optimal order, if you would go for "early as possible". And for some reason they don't even have all the stamps in the list, just little over half, even though they claim it's a complete list!
There are even some weirder examples, e.g. they have the Cucco Stamp in their checklist, but in the treasure chest lists, as well as in the actual guide the same chest supposedly still has 50 Rupees (thanks to @Leothyx for pointing this out). What's going on here? As someone, who has assembled a complete stamp list in less than a week, I'm not sure, what they are doing. It's not that hard. Maybe Prima should hire me...
What I'm also missing is any new artwork. They just reused the same artwork from the old guide with nothing new to be found. To be fair Nintendo also didn't update any of their character and item artwork, they just released some new illustrations. But if you're looking for those, you won't find any of it.
Anyway, at least the guide is now based on the Normal Mode, so this time all the maps are as they should be and not mirrored. I like that a lot, because I never really was fond of the mirrored Wii version. And this is why I still prefer this guide over the original Twilight Princess version, even though it's just a lazy remaster as much as the game.
They added a different cloth map as well, which is nice and visually my favorite of the cloth maps so far:
The original guide had a different one, where they tried to mark all Poe Souls, Treasure Chests, Pieces of Hearts and so on. That's useful for when you play the game and don't want to use a large book all the time. The new cloth map is nice for putting it in a frame and hanging it on a wall, which I plan to do.
The Majora's Mask 3D guide also already gave concern about the quality with its messed up spine, but luckily the Twilight Princess HD guide doesn't have any of these issues and it does go along nicely with the other books. Here's how it looks right next to the original Twilight Princess guide:
The contents of these two books are pretty much identical as well. Just as Nintendo has remastered the game with minimal effort, you just get a "remastered" guide here. They swapped all the screenshots for newer ones, which look arguably a lot better, since the original had screenshots with a pretty bad quality. They rearranged some stuff and made very little tweaks to the design, but overall it's the same guide. So, if you open both books at the same page, you get the very same content with the same wordings!
They added seven pages for the Cave of Shadows with some useful strategies (nothing that I couldn't figure out on my own already, though) and an INCOMPLETE checklist for the Miiverse Stamps, but both guides have the exact same number of pages, 448 in total. Before this section they only changed the Palace of Twilight, which saved two pages for some reason. What they did then was minimizing their "Legendary Checklists" at the end to the smallest font ever to save a lot of space. Otherwise this would have become the largest guide in the collection so far.
The Legendary Checklists are still not legendary by the way - they tried to fix some of the oversights in the original, but they keyword is "tried". For example they added four of the missing Dig Caverns, but they are still missing one at Kakariko Gorge... The biggest joke is the new Miiverse Stamp list though. They arranged it in the order, how they found them, which is very inconvenient, because the alphabet doesn't go "ANHUO" and I'm pretty sure that this isn't even the optimal order, if you would go for "early as possible". And for some reason they don't even have all the stamps in the list, just little over half, even though they claim it's a complete list!
There are even some weirder examples, e.g. they have the Cucco Stamp in their checklist, but in the treasure chest lists, as well as in the actual guide the same chest supposedly still has 50 Rupees (thanks to @Leothyx for pointing this out). What's going on here? As someone, who has assembled a complete stamp list in less than a week, I'm not sure, what they are doing. It's not that hard. Maybe Prima should hire me...
What I'm also missing is any new artwork. They just reused the same artwork from the old guide with nothing new to be found. To be fair Nintendo also didn't update any of their character and item artwork, they just released some new illustrations. But if you're looking for those, you won't find any of it.
Anyway, at least the guide is now based on the Normal Mode, so this time all the maps are as they should be and not mirrored. I like that a lot, because I never really was fond of the mirrored Wii version. And this is why I still prefer this guide over the original Twilight Princess version, even though it's just a lazy remaster as much as the game.
They added a different cloth map as well, which is nice and visually my favorite of the cloth maps so far:
The original guide had a different one, where they tried to mark all Poe Souls, Treasure Chests, Pieces of Hearts and so on. That's useful for when you play the game and don't want to use a large book all the time. The new cloth map is nice for putting it in a frame and hanging it on a wall, which I plan to do.
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