Feb 01 2009
Strategy Guides Often Crack Me Up
I’ve been a fan of strategy guides for a long time. I used to need them to just walk down a corridor, but now they’re more of collector’s items for me. I use them more for artbooks than anything. I look at them now for two reasons: 1) I now get paid to review them and 2) sometimes I get stuck. One thing I have noticed about strategy guides since I started to get better at games is that I rarely use the attacks or spells they suggest using. It’s not that I purposefully set out to go against their wishes. I just play the game, and sometimes I’ll look back at what they suggest.
I often end up laughing, because more often than not, the guides will say that I HAVE TO HAVE this one thing to beat the boss, but I NEVER seem to have it. The first time I noticed this was while playing Crisis Core. The first time I had to fight Genesis, it was hard and I didn’t have a ton of spell materia in my queue, but I still beat him the first try. I looked at the guide about a couple of days later, and it said that I had to cast Graviga to get Genesis’ HP down to a manageable size. I hadn’t even obtained that materia yet, because I sloughed off my missions for the story. The guide made that one materia sound so important to defeating him, but it’s obviously possible to defeat him without it. This guide was notoriously bad for that kind of advice. If you read through the strategies set for the missions, they make it sound like you can’t do anything without the Costly Punch materia. I never got that one either, and I completed 60% of the missions, including plenty that said I had to have it.
I look down at the guide for Lost Odyssey every now and then while I’m playing so that I can take notes for the review I will write for it. When I got to the first boss, the guide said I had to have a couple of accessories. Well, I never bought them. I didn’t have enough money because I bought more healing items than anything else, so I couldn’t afford these nice accessories. The strategy the guide offered centered around these items. I’m very proud to say that I defeated the boss the first time without any of these accessories. It wasn’t a pretty win by any stretch, but a win is a win.
It’s so funny to see how I use guides less and less. Two years ago, I wouldn’t have thought about making a single step in Lost Odyssey (yes, I know the game didn’t exist two years ago, but just go with me here) without glancing at the guide’s infinite wisdom. Now I use them for maps and laughing at how difficult I’ve made things for myself.
