More Than Games: Guides!

Misconceptions, misconceptions misconceptions. Strategy guides are considered glorious to some and reprehensible to others. Some claim that game makers started putting in activities in their games that would force you to buy a strategy guide to figure out(wrongly accused is the chocobo racing in FF7 for example). Others call them a crutch that bad game players use to make up for their lack of skill. I myself kind of look down upon using a guide on the first time through... but I game for the surprises, and hate spoilers with a passion. I can accept that there are people out there that just do not play the way I do. But this post is about collecting, and strategy guides are just as collectible as anything else in the industry. Some companies have made limited runs of a guide, or made special hardback editions of the guides, and if you like to collect, it is viable to go for these. Monetarily? Probably not. You're probably going to pay more than you'll ever get back for these, but there are reasons to collect.

From Game Collecting with Rick

What I have here is an art book, Final Fantasy 9's US artbook. Most art books of the PS1 era stay overseas. They are hard to come by, so for those that love "the chase" will love importing this kind of stuff. For the average collector, that is just a bit too far. Once you pay 40 dollars for an art book, you have to import it from Japan most likely, and what happens if your book is damaged in the transit? Not a happy thought to a collector.

From Game Collecting with Rick

This beautiful page of Vagrant Story artwork is not from an art book. This is the strategy guide. Many strategy guides are wonderful collections of character and landscape art. The hunt comes in because you have to find the ones that actually have this kind of stuff and not just screenshots of the game.

From Game Collecting with Rick

Strategy guides are also useful to breath some new life into a game you have played many times and years before. You can find stuff you did not know about, and perhaps even find whole stories you had never found before. Suikoden is a series where people want the strategy guides to gather all the characters. Suikoden has a kind of Pokemon collector's line to it, and if you collect all the characters, you open entire chapters of game play. Bad translations, especially in the first and 2nd game, have made it almost impossible to get all of them without a strategy guide. Sure there are Gamefaqs, but why not get some excellent artwork found in the guides as well.

From Game Collecting with Rick

Guide hunting for the average game is cheap. As I said, this is not a monetary collection market(as of 2011). Five to seven dollars will get you the guides to most games. There are a few famous guides, but they almost always are more infamous than famous. The Brady guide to Final Fantasy 7 spoils the story of the entire game in the first 10 pages. Why not own that little bit of game history? The newest is the Mortal Kombat guide. A guide with very high quality photo paper and binding, but almost no helpful information. Its production cost is so high, they confirmed they will not be printing another set. So it will become rare, and even if it is not particularly helpful, it is very pretty. Cheap, plentiful, tons of options, beautiful artwork and even rares to track down. Sounds like another home run for a collector's market to me.


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