Okay, I cannot be the only one who sees strategy guides as completely pointless, right? This came up in a random conversation with a friend about the Deus Ex Strategy guide, and it seemed like it would be fun to write an article yelling about it pointlessly.
The first issue I always have with strategy guides is mostly if you a playing a game why are you getting someone else to hold your hand through it? Games are made to come with some kind of challenge to overcome, and the Strategy guides eliminate that challenge. It kills, at least in part, the point. Mind you, if you are the kind who only cares about the game’s story, I guess this doesn’t apply to you.
The next point is the practicality of it all. You all do know GameFAQs is a thing right? You can find detailed methods on how to beat them without ever needing to buy anything. Plenty of people offer tips and advice for free there for those who don’t want to have their hand held, and just need a little advice on how to proceed, or even more detailed guides for breezing through the game than any Strategy guide will offer. Quite frankly Gamefaqs message boards far outclass these guides in terms of quality. The internet has made these guides obsolete.
Now that being said, there are a couple things I could see having a guide for, but this applies to a very small number of games. The first being something along the lines of Dragon Quest Medal hunting. This is boring, and it doesn’t offer a challenge. All you end up doing is wasting time searching every single corner of everything in hopes you find a medal and not ten gold pieces. It’s is infuriatingly unfun, though I do enjoy the rest of the game. Then is a convenient thing to have directly next to you to find them and eliminate the chore, not that it's anything worth paying for.
The second applies to games like Disgaea and Pokemon. I forget what guide this was, but it had the line ‘These strategies are written for those who are playing on normal. If you are playing on hard you probably just bought this guide for the charts anyway’. Aside from amusing me greatly, Disgaea and Pokemon’s appeal is being able to build so many different kinds of parties (Well, one of the appeals anyway), and something like Pokemon comes with the frustration of, without an outside of the game source, you will never know when your Pokemon evolve if it’s level based, when you need to use a stone, gender-specific evolutions in some games, etc. With no in-game method to figure it out (A design flaw I have always disliked about Pokemon) and online guides not being efficient to keep track of everything, having that book next to you to figure all this out is great. It eliminates the frustration, and you can just ignore enemy strategies or suggested teams and all that stuff. You can just get to what you wanted to play the game for, to begin with.
This does not apply to a whole lot of games, however. There are so few games a Strategy guide is ever warranted for, yet companies keep making them for games. And many of them suck anyway. Why do you people keep buying them? It confuses me.