Final Fantasy XII Signature Series Guide

Average customer rating: 4.0

More stuff than i could ever imagine
Informative and beautiful
Okay, but with serious flaws.
It's a decent seeing eye dog.
Good Except For Spoilers

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Final Fantasy XII Signature Series Guide
BradyGames
Manufacturer: Brady Games
Product Group: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: 0744008379
2006-10-31

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Book Description

<P style="MARGIN: 0px">BradyGames’ <I>Final Fantasy XII Signature Series Guide</I> includes the following:</P> <UL> <LI> <DIV style="MARGIN: 0px">A complete walkthrough of the entire game.</DIV></LI> <LI> <DIV style="MARGIN: 0px">Detailed area maps.</DIV></LI> <LI> <DIV style="MARGIN: 0px">In-depth listing of items and equipment.</DIV></LI> <LI> <DIV style="MARGIN: 0px">Expert boss strategies to defeat even the toughest boss.</DIV></LI> <LI> <DIV style="MARGIN: 0px">Extensive bestiary.</DIV></LI> <LI> <DIV style="MARGIN: 0px">Signature Series guide features bonus foldout and more!</DIV></LI></UL> <P style="MARGIN: 0px">Platform: PlayStation 2</P> <P style="MARGIN: 0px">Genre: Role-Playing Game</P>This product is available for sale in North America only.

Customer Reviews:

More stuff than i could ever imagine.......2007-06-12

I beat this game once, and never knew about all the secrets and side quests that went along with this... this guide is definitely helpful

Informative and beautiful.......2007-06-09

Coming in at over 300 pages, this guide is simply massive. It has room for a very finely crafted walkthrough that fills in all the blanks for the stumped gamer. The opening descriptions of gambits, the license board, etc. can get the reader accustomed to the new functions of the game before ever picking up the controller. The bestiary is monstrous, although a little strangely configured. As someone who likes to explore all options, I particularly appreciate the depth in which they cover side quests, which arguably set the Final Fantasy series a notch above the rest. It's a beautiful guide too, filled with gorgeous full-page pictures and lined with vibrant color. For this price, how can you go wrong?

Okay, but with serious flaws........2007-06-04

After seeing so many positive reviews about this guide, I ordered it, received it, used it, and became utterly disappointed with it. The few great things about this book that other reviewers have already mentioned aren't enough to make up for the many, many, many little things, and some major things, that ruin this book. This is a long, negative review. If you don't want to read it all then skip to the last paragraph.

Final Fantasy XII is a huge game, so it goes without saying that it deserves a huge guide. So is it a huge guide?

Well, uh, the book is thick? No. It LOOKS thick. In fact that was the first thing I noticed when it first arrived at my doorstep. Held up spine-to-spine next to Bradygames' Final Fantasy X-2 guide, it's about 50% thicker, yet they both contain EXACTLY the same number of pages. But I'm just being stupid. It's not about the number of pages a book has.

Content is much more important. I'll start with the walkthrough. With the exception of the boss strategies, I've come to the conclusion that the walkthrough is mostly completely useless. More than half the walkthrough is pure spoilers -- exposition on what you can expect to see during the games many cut-scenes. I mean, honestly, if I'm playing the game, I'm going to see what's happening, so it's really all just a waste of ink.

As for the boss strategies, they're really not all that spectacular. Some are certainly good. But many are little more than a list of attacks the boss might use. And several are so bad that they can be paraphrased into one simple sentence: "Hang in there." How helpful.

The one good thing about the walkthrough is that it adequately prepares you for obtaining the Zodiac Spear (the strongest weapon in the game), by pointing out the treasure chests you should NOT open AS you get to them. This is something I know many people get frustrated over late in the game, so... Good job, Bradygames, for that.

And, I must say, the maps are outstanding (despite the fact that some of them contain minor incompletions). They're clear, and they show the locations and potential contents (they can change) for every single treasure chest in the game. (Although... The map for the Zertinan Caverns seems to be missing...)

But enough of the walkthrough. FFXII is side-quest heavy, so what of the side-quest section of the guide? There's room for improvement.

Mark hunting is the biggest side-quest in the game, so it naturally deserves, and did receive, more text than any other side-quest. And the strategies for defeating them are mostly good. The problem is that -- and this is a surprisingly HUGE problem -- the text is SO SMALL you can hardly read it! Seven pages of size 6 (at the most!) font, and even worse, black ink on a brown background. I don't know about other gamers, but after spending even a couple minutes staring at a TV screen, I don't appreciate having to readjust my eyes to that extreme to be able to read something. WHY they would do something like that is beyond my understanding. If they wanted to save space, they could've cut back on the plot exposition in the walkthrough. If they HAD the plot exposition because they wanted to stretch the number of pages, then they could've used bigger font here to add several MORE pages. It just doesn't make any sense.

As for the rest of the side-quests, they're pretty good. Except for one, which would have been nice if they had mentioned IN the walkthrough that you have to complete half of it at a certain point in the game, otherwise miss it entirely. But that's just one slip-up for an otherwise nice section of the book.

Then there's the item lists. Not bad, but it fails to tell you where you can find most of the Loot, so you have to search through the Bestiary beast-by-beast to find what you're looking for.

So that's it for the content. But really, all that nitpicking I just did doesn't hold a candle to the book's more serious problem: construction. Aside from the ink that smears from just the slightest moisture on your fingertips... I've only had the book a month and already the pages are falling out. I've had Bradygames' FFX guide for about five years now -- the pages are torn, wrinkled, stained, and the cover's half faded, yet not one single page has ever fallen out. I've had the FFXII guide for a mere month, I've handled it with the utmost care, and it STILL fell apart on me.

I know this is a ridiculously long and negative review, but... Bear in mind that the things mentioned within the many 5-star reviews here are absolutely right, but these are the things they missed, which all add up to a waste of money.

Incredibly poor construction, a walkthrough that's mostly plot exposition, and you can find most of the information in this book, and much more, in various online FAQs and whatnot. But if you get the book, all this information is somewhat organized into a nice, pretty package. And the maps are outstandingly helpful. 2 stars, because it's just not worth $16.49 (the current price). If it drops to closer to $10, then I might bump it up to 3 stars.

It's a decent seeing eye dog........2007-06-04

Wether or not it's all the detailed complexities in the way that RPG games are designed nowadays that warrants the reason why we sometimes have to buy game guides in order to complete them, or wether or not game designers just wanna make more money from us so they create these (sometimes very good, sometimes very lame) game guides for us to use. I don't know. But, for me personally, I don't like to read guides when I play a game.

The reason why I don't like using a guide while playing games is that guides actually take me AWAY from PLAYING the game itself when i'd rather just play through it and figure things out on my own, and then, because I constantly have to refrence a guide during play time, I loose focus on the game's story, and RPG's are notorious for making me have read a guide in order to figure out which equipment is best to use, how to level up, where to find a treasure, which way is it to the bathroom, blah blah blah, yada yada yada, oink oink oink, etc etc etc. I moreover wanted to get involved in the story of Final Fantasy 12 and the characters, but I found myself constantly having to look at the guide to figure things out too much, as everyone out there reading this small review who has ever played an RPG game know what i'm talking about.

The guide itself is good, and it did helped me get through the game as I tried very hard not to read it until I either got stuck or frustrated. It's very detailed, and in some areas the FONT is WAY TOO SMALL. In addition to wearing my glasses, I had to get a magnifying glass to read the section about the Notice Board Hunts and Bestiary. (C'mon Brady Games. For the money I paid to get the book, would it have KILLED you to make the font a litle BIGGER!?) Some of fetch quests were annoying, and some of the puzzles were difficult... no... IM-POSSIBLE to figure out on my own. So the guide was a great help in figuring out these things as it should have been because... well, it's a guide. And that's what its supposed to do.

It's a good book. And you won't go wrong for using it. But sometimes I think that RPG game designers have a very clever way of designing games that are nearly impossible to complete without using a guide, which for me personally, takes away some of the surprises that games have to offer and the fun of completing and figuring things out on my own. I wish that RPG game designers could make their games balanced enough to play without the use of a guide. But, due to the nature of RPG games and what's involved in playing them, this will never happen. The book is a decent seeing eye dog. So break out your little white stick with the red tip on it, grab this dog, and play the game. You're gonna need it for seeing many things you definately won't see when you play the game. Highly reccomended.

Good Except For Spoilers.......2007-05-29

For the most part, this is a good guide. It includes maps of almost every level (though sometimes the treasure chest markers skew the map appearance), tells you where to go and what to do to trigger the various events, covers all the side quests, and includes tons of other important info. Unfortunately, BradyGames also decided to completely spoil the story in this walkthrough. They describe every scene, within the text, making it hard to avoid having the upcoming story ruined before you get there. It is very possible to write a spoilerless walkthrough, but unfortunately this isn't one of them.

So if you don't want the awesome story ruined, I'd suggest looking for an online walkthrough. I just wish I'd been warned before I wasted my $20 on this guide.

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