Final Fantasy XIII-2 Official Guide Collector’s Edition Overview
As promised in an earlier post today I am going to do a quick overview of the Final Fantasy XIII-2 Official Guide Collector’s Edition. There is a little story behind this guide book, and it begins in March 2010 when Piggyback published the collector’s edition of Final Fantasy XIII’s guide book. Piggyback is not a new company, and obviously it wasn’t the only company to release a guide book for Final Fantasy XIII. What Piggyback did, however, was understand that Final Fantasy fans don’t want a simple book devoid of pictures and filled with gray pages of walkthroughs – we have the internet for that! No, Piggyback understood that we fans want a book that will be collectable in itself. They made a superb collector’s edition guide, using premium glossy paper, tons of full-page colored pictures, a hard cover, all the tables and graphs we FF fans so love, and not a page in grey. The book was also designed to be spoiler-free. For example, if an area had a boss in its end, the book would portray the area on two page, and make the boss on the next page, so you could have just abstained from flipping the page if you didn’t want to spoil the surprise that the boss encounters presented. My only real problem with Piggyback’s guides is that they seem to come with black lines along the cover. I don’t know why they do, and it certainly isn’t comforting to receive a shrink wrapped book with dirt beneath the shrink wrap, but since this is a hard cover we are talking about I managed to clean the FF XIII guide book and the newer FF XIII-2 book quite easily with a wet tissue.
Ironically the collector’s edition of FF XIII’s guide book sold out within a month, while the game itself was over-produced and more than common month afterwards.
And now a new game is here, accompanied by a new guide.
I really think this picture of the clockworks (a more elaborate variation of it is used in the game loading screens) should have been the game’s symbol. It looks awesome.
Piggyback continues the tradition it began by creating another superb book, choked full with colored pictures and lots of information. As this is the official guide book it begins with a foreword from the director Toriyama Motomu.
As a spoiler-free guide the book don’t show bosses on the same page as their area. It also makes sure you don’t miss any collectables the might be found in your current area.
The walkthrough is followed by lots of tables and graphs. There’s a full mapping of the Crystarium, as well as character growth charts, and lists of paradigms for specific bosses and other strong foes.
The book comes in a hard cover of course, and also contains two quality bookmarks.
To be honest I’ve only started playing the game recently and so wasn’t able to truly enjoy the depth this book has to offer yet. But as a fan of Final Fantasy in general I really appreciate the love Piggyback put into making this guide. It has a premium feel, and fits neatly alongside my FF XIII guidebook.