We’re now moving on to another Nintendo Power Guide, which is issue #17 overall, and their 3rd guide. – this one for one heck of an epic game – Final Fantasy, which, while all the later incarnations of the system will be (to varying values of fantasy) Fantasy games, this game will certainly not be the final game in the series.
This guide is organized incredibly well. Aside with the strategy guide organized by unofficial “acts” of the game, we also have an overworld map with notes indicating what chapters and page numbers in the guide are related to what areas. This is fantastic, and more RPG strategy guides need to organize themselves in this fashion. It’s a small thing to do, but it’s incredibly helpful. We also get some helpful “how to use this strategy guide notes” which are nice, since this is, basically the first RPG strategy guide. There is no GameFAQs, though in theory you could write a FAQ and put it up on a BBS, but considering the size of most FAQs for RPGs (which be a little more useful than a FAQ for Mario Brothers, since you didn’t have gifs and jpgs), it would take a long time to upload on your dialup modem.
The original art sucks, by the way. Would Square not let you use Yoshitaki Amano’s art? Lord knows you used it in the magazine previously. Anyway, even if you have a more recent release of the game, whether it’s the Playstation version, the Game Boy Advance version, or the PSP version, the maps here are still incredibly useful. The spell information may be a little out of date, and the level cap is higher, and there aren’t maps of the new dungeons, but that’s okay. The general overworld map information is useful, and the monster information is still pretty good (though I’d probably recommend getting one of the more recent guides anyway). However, if you can’t find one of the more recent guides (not inconceviable) but you can find this, pick it up – it’s still useful.
So, it’s not a bad issue, and tomorrow I’m going to try and review the original Final Fantasy, though I’m going to be using one of the re-makes, either the DS version of the PS1 version of the game. I’ll catch you all then.
