Customer Reviews

Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess Collector's Edition (Revised): Prima Official Game Guide (Prima Official Game Guides)

5 star:		(36)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This review is particularly long. If you want, you can look down at the bottom where I've listed the pros and cons.

When you pick up a guide and its 432 pages the first thing that instantly comes to mind is that this is a huge guide therefore it must have all the information. The thing that usually escapes our mind is where all the information is. This is a really good guide, and there's a ton of information there, but like many incredibly thick guides, the information is all over the place. However, with this guide, the information isn't all over the place in a highly disorganized fashion.

The guide begins with several of the game basics. If there's anything about the gameplay you don't understand this guide can help. After that we get into all the weapons and equipment you'll be using, the characters you'll meet and the enemies you'll encounter. For the enemies they've got what's called a "threat meter" to tell you just how hard the enemy is, and they've also got tactics on taking them down. Very useful stuff.

Afterwards we get into the walkthrough, and this is where the guide hits a high point as well as a low point. The walkthrough is huge. Over 300 pages of this guide are from the walkthrough alone. Is it good? You better believe its good. There's a ton of detail here. Each chapter begins with an overview of the area you're in and displays a map that looks like it was taken straight from the game. It also list the items to obtain, as well as showing you what your character should have when you get to a certain point. Along the bottom the guide details the tasks you should be doing, similar to some of BradyGames RPG guide books, only this one seems to be done a little better.

How the task objectives work in this guide is simple. At the beginning of each section if you look at the bottom of the page you'll see a set of eight tasks. Usually no more and no less. For task one it might say, "Enter Ordan Villiage." Now in the main text of the walkthrough itself you'll want to find the section that says, "Enter Ordan Village." That explains the task in better detail. It's easy to use. The walkthrough also has character bios for new characters as you meet them.

There's more to the walkthrough. Each section of the walkthrough has what's called "missing links" which detail optional things you can do in an area.

The guide also calls out new enemies as you encounter them and there's a threat meter displayed for you as well. Also, each time you come across an item, be it for the first time or tenth, they have a description of it. Every time you get your first small key in a dungeon, the guide gives you the same explanation the game does. In addition there are call outs to new weapons, abilities, etc. It's all here.

The maps look as though they're pulled straight from the game, and are only displayed at the beginning of each chapter. This is one of the guides few low points. When reading in sections it might tell you to go back to chamber five or something like that. Well, if you're a little lost, you'll have to flip all the way back to the map at the beginning of each section in order to figure out just what they're talking about when it comes to Chamber 5. This wouldn't be so bad if some of the sections for each dungeon weren't 40-50 pages. However, the good news is, the maps do indeed have a legend each and every time you come across it. The legend tells you all the rooms, all the items in the dungeon and where you'll encounter the characters.

Boss strategies are pretty helpful. They tell you how to down your foes, but they also give you some handy tips for dodging some of their attacks.

The walkthrough also points out the location of heart pieces as you go through the game. Up in the corner of each page is a heart meter that shows you how many hearts you're suppoed to have by the time you get to a certain point in the game. So you'll know if you missed any pieces of heart. By the time you get to the Goron Mines, for example you should have five hearts. If you don't, you know you obviously missed something.

The location of the golden bugs is also revealed, as well as the Poe Souls. They each have their own specific call outs.

Is there more to the walkthrough? Well, there are indeed, spoilers. If spoilers bother you, this guide has a few. Also, throughout the walkthrough there are author notes that don't really serve any purpose other than to describe the turmoil the authors went through on some of the puzzles. Some are funny, but many of them are a complete and utter waste of time. The walkthrough is definitely one you need to use as you play through the game. If you put it down for a while and go about the tasks on your own and then suddenly need it, it's a hassle to find just where you are. Especially if you do some of the tasks out of the order described. Again, these sections are LONG, so you'll be doing a bit more reading than playing. This is the huge downside to the guide. There's so much of it that it's sometimes overwhelming. If you miss something (say a heart piece or golden bug) then you'll spend of a lot of time flipping and reading through the walkthrough to find it.

The walkthrough may be well done, but it's extremely exhaustive, slow going and long. A lot of the information doesn't have to be there. It probably would've been better had they organized it the way Nintendo Power organized their guide. The Nintendo Power guide is much more user friendly... but Nintendo Power is designed for the Wii version, not the Gamecube. All the information is there, but like many guides that are incredibly thick, it's all over the place. The difference here is that Prima did a much better job organizing it. It doesn't separate from the fact that there's a lot of page flipping, however. I'm not one to be bothered by page flipping, but in this guide it actually did become annoying.

The legendary checklist at the back didn't detail the location of Poe Souls or Golden Bugs, which could've helped in many cases. The heart checlist is pretty good, though, telling you where to find them. The checklist also details on finding equipment and items. So it's not so bad.

This is a very well done guide for Twilight Princess, it's just very big with a lot of infomration to swallow, and a lot of page flipping. It's a good guide, and helpful to anyone, but there's so much to swallow, and you'll spend of lot of time doing it.

Pros

+Incredibly detailed walkthrough! Tons of information to be found within these pages. Heart pieces, golden bugs, poe souls, items, puzzles solutions... it's all here!
+Helpful boss strategies
+Useful maps
+Great strategies for taking down enemies

Cons

-While all the infomration is in the walkthrough its all over the place. Organized, but it still calls for a lot of page flipping to find everything. You'll more than likely be spending far more time reading the walkthrough than playing the game. There are also some spoilers found within the guide

I ordered this product December 13th, and already received it January 5th: it was shipped to the Netherlands.

The magnificant Zelda-emblem on the cover shines in gold, as do the pages on the outerside of the book. The cloth map is nice too. The guide dóes specify it's Wii-version only.

The pages of the book are incredibly detailed; the authors sometimes even make notes where they got stuck in the game, which is fun to read. Every little bit of open space is filled with tips, pictures or artwork, for example. I would have liked to see more artwork in this guide, however.

Sometimes the authors repeat (unuseful) information (character desciption or messages about obtaining an item in the game). This was not disturbing to me, though.

Of course, Zelda games should never be played using a guide (finding the way on your own satisfies the most!). However, this guide is a great collectors item and in my opinion a must-have. I think the price is very reasonable; you probably would not regret to purchase this book.

First off, let me point out that I am a HUGE Legend of Zelda fan. As soon as I saw this "collector's edition" guide, I preordered it. The guide looks great, the cover is beautiful, and the artwork and design is fantastic. Once you get past all that, however, and begin to look through it, you realize its many faults. The guide has no index, and all the locations of different items are scattered seemingly randomly throughout the entire book. Want to find one specific heart piece? Well, have fun checking through all 400 pages until you find the one you want. How about that one poe soul you can't find? Same deal. It's nigh impossible to find any specific thing in this book.

Then, you get to the walkthrough itself. So lets suppose you get into a dungeon, and want to know where to start. So you look at the guide, and it tells you to go into the north door. So you go through the north door, and look at the guide again. It says "You'll need to go here later, but for now, just go back the way you came." It will take you all over the place, half the time just making you look around, or exit through the same door you came in by. This is INCREDIBLY annoying when you want to actually BEAT the dungeon.

I have never been disappointed with a prima guide before, but there's always a first time. If you want a guide that looks pretty, but lacks organization and content, go for this one. If you want a guide that will actually help you get through the game, try the nintendo power one.
I'm planning to take out the pages of this guide, and use the cover for something more worthwhile. Like a binder.

For a walkthrough of the game it does a decent job, you will get to know what's under every patch of grass, piece of rock etc...However I have some complaints:
1.The pictures are overall too small to see clearly, might as well leave out some pictures to make others larger.
2.Sometimes the guide tells you a more cumbersome way to solve certain puzzles or bosses--following the guide will get you through, but you will spend more time and lose more hearts.
3.The book itself is printed in excellent quality, but the cloth map is an absolute joke with loose strings coming off the edges and made of the thinnest roughest cheapest material ever. Very disappointing.

If you are looking for a well-organized guide just for getting through tough parts of the game, Nintendo Power's version is sufficient. If you don't care about picture size and would like a hardcover quality print, get this one. But don't have high expectations for the quality of the cloth map.

Guide was great at laying out the optimal path through the game. That said there's a bunch of useless information in here. I really don't need to know about every patch of grass that comes my way that may house a heart refill. The world map that's included was very handy. The guide would describe something and I would go where I thought they were explaining and be way off. Then I remembered the world map and it was really helpful. I got the most out of the game with the guides help despite the shortcomings. I just got use to skipping all the useless stuff.

Extremely helpful for those using the guide from the very beginning to the end of the game. You will know where every single heart, poe, and golden bug is before you face the final boss, and you will have explored every nook and cranny before you beat the game.

However, for those like me who beat the game and then got the guide to fill in all the missing pieces, the guide was slightly difficult to use. I had to go back in the guide and fish for the exact pieces of hearts, poes, and bugs that i didn't have, which wasn't an easy task seeing as how there was no specific section for each item. The guide would be better if there was a section in the back for hearts, poes, and bugs, so that you can easily pinpoint where you need to go so that you don't have to go through the whole guide to see which things you missed.

I bought this guide after I had already bought the Nintendo Power guide because I wanted more information on the Cave of Ordeals and I wanted the cloth map. Although the Nintendo Power guide is cheaper and shorter than this guide, it is much easier to use with excellent maps, better art, and a table of contents. Still, the walkthrough on this one is more detailed and will hold your hand through the entire game telling you exactly how and when to get EVERYTHING, while the Nintendo Power guide helps you through the main events, leaving collection of every single rupee, heart piece, and bug up to you (with a convenient checklist in the back to tell you where everything is and to help you keep track of what you haven't gotten yet). The only practical way to use this guide is to use the walk through cover to cover, as going out of order or looking up specific things is very difficult. This is not a reference guide for people who prefer to churn through dungeons fairly quickly and then go back and get what they missed later.

Bottom line: Get the Nintendo Power guide instead unless you really want a detailed hard back walkthrough with a cloth map.

I have only a couple real requirements from game guides: They must be organized and intuitive to use, and they must enhance my experience with the game. That's really about it. This guide from Prima for the masterful Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess passes these categories with flying colors. This is a fantastic guide, and the collector's edition of it makes what was already a very practical, enjoyable guide a beautiful, extravagant one that really thrilled me as a massive fan of the Zelda series.

In the beginning, you get your basic introductory section which helps orient the player to the fictional Zelda universe, training to acquaint the player with the controls and gaming mechanics, and a bestiary. After this is the huge walkthrough itself. The walkthrough is broken up into chapters, which is broken up into a few (usually 8 exactly) main objectives. Every page has tabs showing what objective you should be at on any given page, and to the side there is a tab showing what moderately-important-to-essential-items/collectables you should have collected up to that point in the chapter. In the upper corner of each left-side page is a meter showing how many maximum heart containers you should have at that point if you've been following the guide closely. At the beginning of each chapter is, generally speaking, the well-drawn maps to the areas you'll be exploring in that chapter. It's all very well organized, meticulous, and thorough. If you are even half-diligent in using the guide, you won't have any excuse missing stuff while playing the game.

Generally, when I use guides while playing games like this, I only keep them open next to me for reference to make sure I didn't pass up any collectables or if I'm hung up on a particularly difficult puzzle or sequence. As has been pointed out in other reviews, this book is huge, clocking in at almost 500 pages! However, each page is jam packed with helpful information. The descriptions of puzzle solutions were very succinct, accurate, and helpful. The boss strategies are exceptional! One thing I have to point out about the book I didn't expect would please me was the writing itself. You can tell that the two authors loved every minute of their time playing the game and making this guide. That enthusiasm really shined through throughout the book, and helped make my own personal experience with the game (I've beaten it thrice before) a very enjoyable on. It's always great when someone loves their job and it shows in their work. Kudos on that! The guide is also quite pleasing on the eyes. Concept art is always great, and the overall aesthetic design on the pages is really, really nice. Quite luxuriant, really.

The book is also organized quite well. As soon as something becomes attainable, be it a heart-container, a golden bug, a new item for inventory, or a poe soul, the book goes into great detail to get it all. That said, this is a very thorough, meticulous walkthrough of the game. I don't like to read guides more than I play, so generally I just try to keep the page open to whatever area I happen to be in at any given moment (only really following the guide in those "treasure hunt" chapters), and I found the guide to be quite complementary to my style of guide-gaming. It was really easy and intuitive to tell where I was and what collectibles and special items I could have access to.

Speaking of collectibles, any item you can imagine is given its own icon that really pops out off the page and stands out so you can make sure you don't miss anything. I was able to play the game, collecting pretty much everything it had to offer, and make no mistake, Twilight Princess is a massive game with a lot of well-hidden secrets. None of them were sheltered from my completionist machinations. Not only that, but the revised edition of this book added "legendary checklists" to the back of the book, making pretty much every item and its location easily available for reference, just in case you missed it in the walkthrough portion of the guide. It feels so good to know you went through a game like this, seeing everything the developers put in with the hopes that a select few would go to the effort to see it all.

Are there problems with the guide? Well, depending on perspective, sure. For instance, if you truly follow the guide as closely as possible, you'll more than likely have to keep flipping pages from where you are at to the maps at the beginning of the chapter to know what the guide is referencing when it tells you to move from one chamber to another, especially in temples/dungeons. Me? I didn't really use the guide in temples/dungeons for anything other than to make sure I got every collectible and piece of heart-container in them. I personally believe Zelda games should be experience without instructions on how to solve every puzzle and get through every second of the game. Still, those who don't share my beliefs and want constant consultation will find the page-flipping bothersome. Another complaint is that the authors will at times add in notes that literally only tell you how much trouble they had with a particular puzzle when playing. Most are a total waste, but some are amusing. Those are about my only complaints though, and very minor compared to the strengths.

Lastly, is the quality of the collector's edition itself. The hardbound cover is gorgeous, featuring some beautiful gold-foil tapestry borders. Gracing the front is a gleaming gold Hylian crest. The pages are gilded gold too; absolutely gorgeous! The book looks like it was made by the scribes of Hyrule themselves, and that is a big compliment. It also comes with a cloth overworld map, but honestly, this is pretty poor quality, and not exactly good for decorative purposes, but exceptional with helping you precisely locate all extras in the overworld. It's a complement to the game in a practical sense. Overall, an exceptional guide for Zelda enthusiasts and collectors.

In all honesty, this has got to be one of the highest-quality guides I have ever used in my life. It's meticulously detailed without resorting to being spoiler filled, the organization is exceptionally intuitive and easy to use whether being used to follow along every step, or just as a reference, and the collector's edition touches make this an ideal guide for any gaming/Zelda enthusiasts. Buy it, absorb the wisdom of the tome, and venture out to push back the shadow and save the world of light!

I love this guide... It is the best guide for a game ever. You need it.

This book is beautiful and very well written. The one complainant I have is that it fell apart within the first week of using it. It is still usable but a chunk of pages falls out each time I open the book.