Note: Unless otherwise stated, all images in this article were scanned from my own collection.
Role-playing games and strategy guides go together like pepperoni and pizza. There's just so much going on in your traditional RPG that having a convenient book with all the information on weapons, armor, spells, and treasure by your side is common sense. Besides collating this kind of data, an RPG guide can also be a time-saver by letting you know where the hidden goodies are, when you've hit the point of no return on certain quest lines, what level you should be prior to tackling a given area, or how to kill that boss that shrugs off everything you throw at it. Sometimes the game isn't all that helpful in pointing out where you need to go or what you need to accomplish in order to move the story forward -- sometimes this happens because you missed a chat with a critical NPC, or maybe the translators made a mistake during the localization process, but either way a guide can take the frustration of running around in circles, spamming the 'X' button.
Previous entries in the Final Fantasy series were no exception to this, going as far back as Nintendo Power's official game guide for the NES original. As the RPGs got bigger and more complex, it became more difficult for a single gamer to explore every avenue a particular title had to offer. It's one thing to pour forty hours into a game to get to the end screen, but dumping four hundred hours into a game just to see where all the little side-quests and dialog choices take you is ridiculous. That, of course, is where guides come in the most handy: eliminating all the save/choose/reload stuff you'd otherwise have to take upon yourself as a player.
And holy cow, if you were going to buy the guide for any late-90's RPG, it was going to be Final Fantasy VII. While Final Fantasy VI on the SNES was no slouch in the length department, the whole game still fit on a single cartridge that utilized a few megabytes of ROM space. Final Fantasy VII, on the other hand, filled three whole CDs, each capable of storing hundreds of megabytes of data, and while most of that space went to the FMV cutscenes, high-resolution pre-rendered backgrounds, and the lower-res polygonal models populating them, that still left an awful lot of space for dialog options, side-quests, character abilities, magic spells, and secrets. What's shocking isn't that somebody published a guide for this game, it's that multiple somebodies took it upon themselves to publish guides for this game, and literally all of them screwed something up in the process.
Versus Books, however, could lay claim to one thing publishers like Brady and Sybex couldn't: they got sued over their Final Fantasy VII book.
Was it worth it? Let's take a look.
To Guide or Not to Guide?
The Completely Unauthorized Final Fantasy VII Ultimate Guide actually comes in two flavors. Both of them tout a $9.99 cover price, both of them come with a free giant poster bound into the book via a detachable perforated page, and both of them will set you back a ruinous sum of cash should you want to add a complete copy to your collection today.
Version one, the first edition, is the one you see pictured in the thumbnail above. The back of that guide features your normal back-of-the-book copy explaining how much you'll miss out on if you ignore the guide, along with a spiffy picture of Sephiroth giving you the stink-eye:
The second printing of the guide is almost the exact same book, only with more abusive boasting about what they have that the official guide from BradyGames didn't:
And they're just getting started with the trash talk. The back cover ditches the Sephiroth artwork in favor of heaping more derision on the competition:
If all that posturing, thoroughly 90's braggadocio, and frantic art style seems somehow familiar, that's because author Casey Loe and publisher Matthew Taylor both worked for Diehard GameFan magazine. GameFan set itself apart from the competition by discarding the editorial neutrality enforced upon competing mags like Nintendo Power, EGM, and GamePro. While the editors hid their personas behind pen names like GamePro's writers, publisher and editor-in-chief Dave Halverson encouraged writers to be honest to the point of brutality in their assessments of the material they were looking at, mainly by being completely up-front with his own thoughts on the industry and the quality of the software plopped in front of him. GameFan was the epitome of a "politically incorrect" publication, often latching on to trends other mags ignored, touting import-only titles, and featuring whatever the hell they wanted to on their covers instead of bending over backward to accommodate advertisers or game publishers.
Taylor clearly took the GameFan sensibilities with him when he left to found Versus Books.
What's hilarious about this is that while The Completely Unauthorized Final Fantasy VII Ultimate Guide does truthfully contain all the things it disses the BradyGames guide for omitting, it makes a number of mistakes itself that render it the less-than-perfect companion it wants to be. Particularly egregious on this front is the write-up on page 100 concerning the Emerald Weapon and Ruby Weapon bosses added to the game for the US release.
The first printing of the guide completely flubs this information:
Nothing about the secret to removing the 20 minute time limit when fighting Emerald Weapon, incorrect information about the bosses' item drops (calling them "Emerald" and "Ruby" instead of the Earth Harp and Desert Rose), etc...
The official guide from BradyGames (or at least my copy of it, which is admittedly a 14th printing--good lord, how many reprints did this guide go through?) points all of this out on pages 188-189.
Clearly somebody at Versus realized the error, because the second printing reads quite a bit differently:
Then, just because it was left it out of their guide the first time around, at the bottom of the page about the Weapons, they print the "All 7's Fever" trick, where getting one of your characters to 7,777 HP means they'll unleash a basic attack every round that inflicts 7,777 damage per hit. Why is this here? They claim it's just a bonus to make sure people are paying attention, but really I suspect it's because they couldn't figure out anywhere else to stuff it that made sense, so...there you have it.
Guide
Honestly, I'm not surprised to see mistakes in books like this. As RPGs evolved, they turned into more than a single person could handle. Casey Loe is credited with design, layout, graphics, and text for this book, and much like the official guide from BradyGames, its publication date was rushed to coincide with the game's US debut. A game the size of FF7 is way too much for a single writer to tackle in that short a span of time, so it's not surprising we'd see errors and stuff overlooked no matter who was at the helm.
Lawsuit aside (the mistake Versus made was overuse of resources like screenshots and derivative artwork which, being an unofficial guide, they did not have permission to use), this is one beautiful strategy guide, and certainly lives up to its reputation for being light on spoilers and filled with info the other guides didn't have. The secret to adding this one to your library? Find one missing the poster and you'll pay considerably less.
There are walkthroughs available on GameFAQs nowadays that tear all the professionally published guides to shreds in terms of content, but they're written with the benefit of twenty years' hindsight and an entire generation of gamers who share information freely among themselves. Today's RPG guides often have five or more editors all working in conjunction to collect screenshots, collate data, and pen the walkthrough. Back in the day though, these tasks were all commonly handled by one person. The Completely Unauthorized Final Fantasy VII Ultimate Guide is a testament to both dedication and insanity before a looming deadline, the likes of which we're unlikely to ever see again. It put Versus Books on the map, which led them to a lucrative career of writing guides for other hit games like Neverwinter Nights, Resident Evil 2, and Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn. And if nothing else, a good condition copy complete with the poster, if listed on eBay, could pay your grocery bill for a month or two.