Strategy Guides

This page will cover both Strategy guides hosted on this wiki as well as recommended guides by outside sources.

Guides on this Wiki

General Audience

• Anno 1404: Colonial Spain... with tips!
• Dragon Quest: Explaination and tips on this wildly popular RPG series

• Dragon Quest IX: A popular starting poing of the Dragon Quest series
• Dragon Quest VI: Are you preparado enough to live your dreams?
• Dragon Quest VII: Over a decade of laughter, tears and RAGE.

• Dwarf Fortress: A quick Intro to understanding this complex strategic sim
• Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time: Getting ahead in this RPG/platformer
• Final Fantasy IV: The After Years: Huge guide with characters, spells and more
• Legend of Mana: A quick explaination of the game and a few basic tips
• Legend of the River King: Epic guide to being the best fisherman EVAR
• Robot Unicorn Attack: No, really. There's some neat tricks for this one!
• Minecraft: tips for Newbs for the game made for people scared of Dwarf Fortress.

Games that may have some mature/offensive content

• Dungeon Keeper: Less of a guide and more something to tell the differences between Games
• Kenka Bancho: How to be awesome without becoming a Shabai Shabazo
• Killing Floor: Lists of zombies, teammates, and a quick review

Guides Under Construction You won't get full info out of here, but you're welcome to help if you have the time and know the game well enough to add some great info.

• Harvest Moon: An attempt to explain the differences between many very similar looking games.

Reccomended Outside Guides

A list of outstanding Strategy Guides that are just so well done they deserve to be on some kind of recommendation list.

If a game has had:

• a re-release of some sort (a port or re-arrangement with notable added/removed content (Example: Super Mario Advance 3: Yoshi's Island))
  

-OR-

• an alternate version (through regions or systems) (Ex: The Lost Vikings Sega MD version vs SNES version)
  

Then please specify which version the guide is used for.

Reboots (Ex: Splatterhouse (2010)) and full-blown remakes (Ex: Ys: Oath in Felghana) should have their own entries separate from their original games.

If by some chance a guide can serve well enough or even entirely for an alternate version or release of a game, then please specify the systems and extents in the game guide's description, along with any other notes you see fit, especially regarding original printed releases (i.e. extra goodies like CDs, pinups, and other such rarities).

The Hall of Fame

Cover	Game	System and/or Version	Publisher	Description and notes
	Dragon Warrior III (DQ3)	Game Boy Color	Prima	Dragon Warrior 3 (aka Dragon Quest 3 due to copyright issues) has a bigass world and an absolute fuckton of secrets to find, and this guide will help you track them all down. From the hidden goodies to the hard-to-reach Pachisi loot, no stone will be left unturned from your journey's end up to the last post-game challenge. It also tells the workings of the personality test at the beginning, which is essential to determine your Hero character's ideal stat growths. As expected, bestiary, items, and equipment are also included, but each also has artwork to go along with them, making for a nice visual feast. Spells are also noted in approximate level learned (due to DQ3's alternate spell-learning system from the series norm) and also their effects and range of damage/healing. In addition to the colorful map-filled walkthrough, there's also a handy checklist to help recall where you last left off and where to head next. One of Prima's best guides, and a handy aid to your quest. Translation differences aside, you can also use this for the Super Famicom (SNES) version of Dragon Quest 3, though the personality names and test results are harder to translation-match than the towns and items.

The Wall of Shame

Cover	Game	System and/or Version	Publisher	Description and notes
	Final Fantasy IX (FF9)	Playstation	BradyGames	You thought you were rid of it? Think again. Anyone who even glanced through this shit-heap was scarred by it, and the rest are pained enough just by hearing stories of it. Nobody wants to remember it, but at the same time, we can't ever let ourselves forget it. Possibly the best example of how NOT to do a strategy guide. Released at the turn of the millennium, Square got the "brilliant" idea to make a bare-bones printed guide that largely contained key-codes to access the actual meat of it ONLINE-ONLY. Some speculate that this was to gain further supporters for their then-new playonline service, which lead into FF11, and might have ended up affecting FF10 (somehow). Whatever the reason, it lead to a bunch of well-deserved backlash; and, since then, it seems neither Square or anyone else has repeated this stupid mistake (or so we hope). The biggest hassle of this was that the dial-up internet connection was the then-standard and while broadband was technically a thing, it was both expensive and not offered in as many areas. Just imagine trying to find out how to save Blank and then suddenly someone decides to call and talk for hours and there's not a damn thing you can do about it. The best part of all this is that the actual webservice isn't even up anymore and SE's own mirror is a 404. You can find some user-made mirrors around the net, but hell, the guide wasn't even that great in the first place (Westerners "discovered" a "hidden" event years after it was actually noted in Japanese guides). So, honestly, just stick to the FF Wikia's guides or gamefaqs, for your own sake.