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24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Buyer Beware, March 10, 2004
This review is from: Ninja Gaiden (Prima's Official Strategy Guide) (Paperback)
In my experience, strategy guides have been getting progressively worse over the years, but this one takes the cake. The guide does do a decent job of telling you where to go and what to do next, however, DO NOT rely on it to tell you where all the items are much less about the secrets. I have thus far counted more than a couple dozen items that they have missed all together, or chests that were missed/mis-labeled. Some of these items being very very important to character advancement and thus survival during those tough battles. For example, there are two areas in the game where you will have a total of 60 fiends appear to fight you (no more than 4 enemies at a time). The guide labels the first area as having "endless fiends" and the second as having "numerous fiends". For both they suggest that you continue on your way. However, if you stick around and kill all 60 of them, in both areas it will spawn a chest that contains an item known as the "Lives of the Thousand Gods" (an item that permanently increases your life meter by quite a bit). So if you were to follow the guide, you would miss 2 of these, which is just not acceptable. Also, their boss strategies, are really awful. About the only one that was decent was for the very first boss in the game, after that you would be better off not even reading their strategies for any of the other boss battles in the game, other than maybe to find out what kind of attacks a boss has (just don't depend on their description of how to dodge said attacks). I'm not entirely sure that the people at Prima were playing the same game that I am, cause it certainly doesn't show. Don't waste your money on this guide. Instead, go check out gamefaqs.com when you get stuck.
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Great game, really bad book, April 13, 2004
This review is from: Ninja Gaiden (Prima's Official Strategy Guide) (Paperback)
Once again, the authors at Prima have outdone themselves and set a new low. The game is fantastic and deserves a much better strategy guide than this. The shortcomings in this book are numerous, but I'll attempt to list them all here. It lacks a complete move list for the weapons, it has no useful enemy information, it doesn't describe what the items are or do, it doesn't give the location of all of the Golden Scarabs (which are critical to unlock the original NG games), and the "strategy" is minimal at best. Make no mistake, this is a bare-bones walkthrough with blurry pictures that is the product of minimal effort. This book is reminiscent of something George W. would author if he had his crayons, paper and two hours to kill. How does Prima keep getting book contracts? They must have been the low bidder, which is reflected in the quality of this "guide". Needless to say, this book is woefully incomplete and is certainly not worth the $10.49 Amazon is asking for it. You are much better off getting a free guide on gamefaqs.com that is complete. Prima should be embarrassed by this substandard product, but as long as it sells well and they don't get too many consumer complaints, their strategy won't change.
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A Complete Abomination, March 31, 2004
By A Customer
This review is from: Ninja Gaiden (Prima's Official Strategy Guide) (Paperback)
This is the worst strategy guide I have ever purchased. The money spent on this guide is questionably the worst "investment" I've ever made. I had read that this guide didn't list many weapon statistics and techniques...it doesn't. I had read that the guide wasn't very descriptive on how to defeat certain enemies...it wasn't. I had read that the guide was weak on listing the extra unlocks in the game...weak it was. Knowing all of this, I still purchased the guide with one desire: a walkthrough that I can glance at to make sure I pick up every item along the way. And with a cover that states "All Secrets Revealed" and "Official Strategy Guide", I figured that much I could expect without hesitation. However, I learned a valuable lesson today, and that is that "Official" no longer means anything. As far as I needed to go...
In the second level of this game, there are VERY FEW valuable items to be obtained. All of these I had previous knowledge of, yet I glanced to see what the strategy guide mention about them. Glancing soon turned into investigating, and I spent the better part of ten minutes reading fine print throughout the whole guide looking for any trail of knowledge of these items. My search turned up short of a single hint that I should take note of it with no mention as to how, when, where, or why I should obtain these items. This was as far as I needed to go to realize that my money had been completely wasted. If this review can save a single person from buying this guide, then my time has been more than well spent writing this review. You would be better justified spending your money on a case of cheap beer and drinking away your sorrows of knowing that one of the sweetest games to ever hit XBox (or any console for the matter) has the weakest official strategy guide immaginable. Please save a tree and your sanity by avoiding this purchase.
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