I love physical strategy guides. I didn't use to, mostly because I saw them as an unnecessary cost on top of the already purchased game. If I got stuck I could check a walkthrough on GameFaqs. With the introduction of touch screen phones it became even more convenient to whip the phone out whenever I got stuck.But times change and I've slowly grown tired of scrolling through anonymous .txt files. And the convenience aspect of the phone is out the window. If the game is long then it's quite a hefty body of text that needs to be navigated through searchable chapter codes. Fiddling around with ctrl+F on a phone isn't a seamless process to say the least, it's mostly just a chore. And the ASCII-art maps were certainly getting on my nerves...
So I opted for other forms of walkthroughs often hosted at the bigger gaming sites more centered around being browsed through a smart phone. But this, too, changed from bliss to nightmare fairly quickly. Their walkthroughs were divided into chapters which I then had to navigate while dodging loads of ads and filler text (which they use to be able to serve even more ads). I felt almost abused by all the dumbed down content paired with heaps of ads and "Skip in 3... 2...", "I want to continue as a guest" and "No thanks, I don't want to join for more benefits and/or disable my adblocker" and what not. That's when the thought of a good old printed guide popped into my head once again.I looked up a few previews of printed guides online and they were filled with everything you'd ever need to know about the game they covered and the pages were decorated with beautiful pictures and graphics from that game. I immediately saw the appeal on a whole new level. How the added expense was more than justifyed. And with that I changed my stance on physical strategy guides. The climate on the modern corporate internet is so predatory, manipulative and consumer focused that I'm more than willing to pay $20 to get a physical copy of a guide. A guide I can read without interruptions, a guide I can find my way around without cumbersome screen fiddling and failed gestures. A guide filled with illustrations, charts, maps and all sorts of creative and colorful things without watching an ad every other minute or giving up my privacy.
My latest purchase is a FFX guide that is said to arrive any day now (but it's sent from Denmark, a.k.a. the country where all post services go to die so you never know), and therefore that game will probably be my next review.
