Comments on: Editorial: A Guided Tour

By: Java

Java — Fri, 09 Jan 2015 01:11:07 +0000

Like Lusi, I quickly made it a personal rule to never use them during the first playthrough. I wanted any surprises the dev had in store for me to materialize with their full effect. Otherwise, I bought them mostly for the art and pictures because I liked to draw* them.

*read: be a human Xerox machine that rendered copies in lower quality.

By: Lusipurr

Lusipurr — Thu, 08 Jan 2015 22:11:44 +0000

As a general rule, I only buy guides for Square RPGs and Pokemon games. In the former case, I have a collection, and in the latter case, it is the only really easy way to rapidly find the countless things which are needful in a Pokemon game: specific pokemon, items, NPCs, etc. In these things, even the internet takes longer than a list in an index which is open on the table.

As for the former, I never use a guide on my first playthrough. This is a personal rule. Later on, when I am coming back through the game, or seeking to do everything in a later playthrough, I’ll open up the guide as a way to ensure I don’t miss any obscure thing. Of course, in some cases even guides aren’t helpful with this, whether they come from the internet or not. Final Fantasy X-2 is notoriously awful to get 100% in a single playthrough. I found it a hateful task.

By: Bup

Bup — Thu, 08 Jan 2015 21:10:22 +0000

One time I tried to write a guide on GameFAQs, because I was annoyed with having to scroll through all the information about the game’s mechanics and characters and all that BS that is written at the beginning. I gave up after like a page.

By: Ethos

Ethos — Thu, 08 Jan 2015 20:30:59 +0000

This is an interesting topic for me. I never particularly used game guides, and when I bought a huge one with excitement, I only ended up using it for occasional reference. I would use FAQs when I got stuck, and would eventually tend to try and only use guides/FAQs on a second playthrough. Writing your own guides, however, seems awesome to me. It’s a great way to pay attention to the game and to gain more from it, I feel. My younger brother took more detailed notes on games, but I remember beating the elite four in PKMN Yellow over and over and over again and recording the levels of my party each time. There was no functionality, but there was something satisfying about recording data made from both the game and how I was playing it.

I absolutely don’t OPPOSE them, per se (because what a silly stance that would be to take), but I am starting to feel like the best games teach their own gameplay and provide satisfaction to those who explore them, so I do feel like very good games in particular would suffer from excessive use of guides. Or maybe not. Maybe it would be a great way to quickly understand the game the first time so that the second time the player would be free to observe and absorb everything else with all his expectations in the right place.