Guide Dang It/Game Guides

Even strategy guides, whether they be unofficial or (in especially evil and/or dumb cases) official, still may have incorrect or missing information causing even the most hardcore gamers to look into the sky and scream "Guide Dang It!"

• Brady Games seems to make their guides half done, requiring you to actually go online for a different source of help, thus a double Guide Dang It! Examples include:
  • Final Fantasy XII. The guide frequently had things like "For more information, see page ???" Those question marks aren't a placeholder, that's the actual content that appeared in the book. Several maps were missing from the book and the font size in another section was very small as well. The only reason anyone would probably want the collector's edition of the guide was for the freebies that came with it.
    • Even more ridiculous was the instructions on how to get the Infinity Plus One Sword. This, the most infamous Guide Dang It in the entire game, requires you not to open four arbitrary chests. They hadn't yet figured out which four and simply tell you what they've narrowed it down to.
    • The guide for FFXII had many more issues than that. Several maps are in error and there's no map at all for most of the Great Crystal (you know, the dungeon where the player's need for a map is very, very dire). It doesn't do anything more than hint at how the monographs actually work (they're items that cause some monsters to drop worthless pebbles and the others to drop very valuable loot, for the curious). No information on character growth over the course of leveling, either. Perhaps worst of all, though, was its complete uselessness with regards to finding the rare game enemies and utter silence on enemies with complicated spawn conditions. And while this isn't related to strategy, per se, the guide was itself poorly realized, poorly organized, and its binding fell apart within months. It's probably not coincidence that a different company made the guide for Final Fantasy XIII.
    • The official guides for Final Fantasy IX only provided very general instructions, such as "walk north to the next room." "While in town, talk to everybody you meet to gather information." Fight strategies, puzzle solutions, or any place where a gamer might actually consult a game guide, required the reader to go to the website and enter a keyword. This was made even worse when the online portion of the guide was later taken offline.
    • For an idea on how bad this was for the FFIX guide, not only was there no help in the book on the final boss, they refused to even put a picture of the boss in the book. Want to know how to beat him and what he looks like? "Go to Play Online!".
  • Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. The locations of oysters, horseshoes, and photo ops were completely mixed up and one of the cars listed was never present in the game. Some say that the strategy guide was based on a beta version of the game.
    • Don't forget the 'Spray tag the gang signs', which are completely messed up. (Don't go by the eye-straining photographs they give, sometimes a beige tag will be on a beige wall and thus blend in).
  • Parasite Eve 2. While this guide was better overall compared to the other guides, some things explained in the guide were suddenly cut off.
  • The guide for the PlayStation 2 game Shadow of Rome left out the entire last part of the game. No, it's not in a sealed secrets section, it's just not there. The writers seemed to assume that the game ended after the last gladitorial match. It doesn't; there's still around 2-3 hours of gameplay left, containing some very tough bosses.
  • Prima's Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards guide similarly ends directly after the battle with Miracle Matter - of course, they threw in an "Or is it?" line along with a picture of the possessed fairy queen, suggesting that there was something more to the story. They actually showed you how to get all the crystal shards in the game, so it's not like they skipped one and got the bad ending or anything.
    • Not only that, but the guide even shows the Trading Card picture of the final boss, and makes the claim that it is "A benevolent creature living in the clouds high above Shiver Star." Which is, of course, an outright lie.
  • The Brady Games guide for Dragon Quest VIII features incredibly sparse tips on navigating dungeons and absolutely no boss strategies. You can't even tell where there are bosses to fight unless you look at the monster section in the back, and that doesn't even list them all. It'd be spectacularly useless guide, were it not saved by its alchemy section and detailed maps, complete with item locations.
  • Thankfully, they redeemed themselves with their guides for the DS versions of IV, V and VI (especially VI), as well as IX, which were all incredibly detailed and helpful. However, even then the IX guide loses a few points for not showing where items and equipment can be bought/found.
  • Brady's guide for Final Fantasy VII PC, even though the rest of it is blatantly copy-pasted from the PSX guide (except screenshots are now from the PC version and the maps are now incoveniently in the back), it omits the strategy for Safer-Sephiroth, telling the player to "use what you've learned so far" (if I bought the guide, I didn't do it for basic gameplay explanations, I bought it so I get directions to do stuff!) and directing them to the website if they have trouble. It's just lazy when you consider that they copy-pasted everything else.
  • Brady's guide for Final Fantasy VIII has no strategy for the final boss (other than a "good luck!" message), despite the fact that it has three forms, uses skills that do not immediately make themselves clear on what they do on first application, can destroy your spells, perma-kill your characters, and the final form has a secret spell that can be junctioned. The PC version's strategy guide thankfully included that information.
  • The guide released for the Anthologies version of Final Fantasy V was odd in that it gave instructions on how to beat bosses that were technically viable but still absolutely useless. Instead of giving general tips for a variety of party types to beat a given boss (which you'd expect, since the whole point of the gameplay system is to customize your characters), the guide gave you "tips" like, "Okay, first have everyone master the Ninja job, then switch to Dragoon and have everyone dual wield the best spears in the game." Essentially, the guide was written either for or by munchkins.
    • Other jarring mistakes with the guide include misrepresenting the aim of a particular sidequest (an NPC promises a reward if you ride a yellow chocobo all the way around the world; the guide tells you to stop at Easterly Falls and grab the Magic Lamp, but that's just something you can do on the way - you can go completely around and return to the NPC for a Mirage Vest) and bad directions through the Phoenix Tower (It leads you directly into avoidable battles, which in a very long dungeon with no save points, dangerous monsters, and no chance of escaping from random encounters is a significant problem)
  • The guide for Final Fantasy X goes as far as Braska's Final Aeon, although it was probably made on purpose, as it's pretty hard to lose afterwards. However, it also neglects to offer any information on the Monster Arena bosses.
    • The guide points out that from after that battle you have permanent Auto-life and thus, cannot fail.
  • Ditto FF9. The guide goes up to Deathguise, and then tells you to look at their (now non-existent) website if you still need help.
  • The official guide for Final Fantasy X-2 includes a section on how to earn 100% in one run. Unfortunately, it leaves out many important details, and some instructions are just plain wrong. You'd be lucky to break 95% using it.
  • The Brady Games Mega Man Battle Network 6 strategy guide doesn't include maps. This can be a problem since the areas in the Battle Network series areas are practically all mazes.
  • Brady Games' guide for Star Fox Adventures contains a particularly egregious example. The guide omits any mention of the final boss, Andross, offering no strategies for one of the toughest bosses in the game. That's bad enough, but what really seals it is that the cover of the guide explicitly says that it would reveal the identity of the aforementioned final boss, and implies that it would contain strategies for it. It doesn't.
  • The guide for Mega Man Battle Network 3 does not give any information on what the chips do, instead using the descriptions given in-game, which aren't exactly 100% reliable. Later guides are much better about this. Additionally, there is no map for Undernet 3, which is a rather large place. In addition to that, while it says where to find the Omega bosses, it makes no mention that you must first fight through three waves of Omega viruses before actually taking on the boss.
  • The guide for Xenosaga Episode III completely omits the whole Ha Kox mini-game, only telling you that it's where you get some powerful equipment.
• Prima's guide for Super Smash Bros. Brawl is pretty awful. The author was apparently unaware that ROB's Arm Rotor can deflect projectiles... and, worse, that Fox's Firefox (a move which dates back to the original SSB) can be aimed. Additionally, the fact that Lucario's recovery move can be controlled mid-dash seems to have been omitted.
  • Their guide for the original game was worse. Pretty much the entire Jigglypuff section was dedicated to just whining about how crappy the character was, in particular her "completely useless" down+ B move, which the guide repeatedly urged to never, ever use. Apparently the author was completely unaware that said move can potentially be one of the most powerful attacks in the game if it's pulled off correctly.
  • You think the bios are bad enough? The unlockables section got incredibly lazy after the first few characters. The first few characters listed not only did not get ALL the info on unlocking (they didn't mention that playing 50 or 70 matches were one of the few requirements for challenging Falco and Captain Falcon respectively), but after all 3 of Ganondorf's unlocking methods were listed, every character afterward had their methods listed as "have (name) join you in The Subspace Emissary." Did they just give up and figure everyone used that mode for getting everyone?
• Similar to the San Andreas guide, the guide for Vice City screwed up at least one package location, which claimed that it was in one of the movie studios when it wasn't. This guide is also rumored to be based on the beta.
• The Prima Games guide for The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time included almost no information about how to beat several puzzles in Ganon's castle. Likewise, they apparently never got the Ice Arrows, because there's no walkthrough for the optional Gerudo Training Grounds dungeon.
  • It also failed to mention the Big Poe locations. Then again, so did the Brady guide and Nintendo's official guide. Versus was the only one that could be bothered.
• The Prima Guide for Jade Cocoon features a "Monster Compendium" which would make you think they'd have all the minions in there. Despite there only being 171 there are several repeats (including wind and air?? minions), they missed the two secret minions (Sherrick and Tweengo) and somehow missing Arpatron who is the FIRST MINION YOU GET AND ARE REQUIRED TO CATCH.
• Prima's Spore guide shows that they never made it to the center of the galaxy or fought the grox.
• Prima's Pokémon Diamond and Pearl guide was terrible. Being a Pokémon strategy guide, you'd expect them to have a list of all the Pokémon in the back of the guide, right? Well, they did: all 150 Pokémon in the Sinnoh Dex only. That's only the tip of the iceberg.
  • You think that's bad? The official one from Nintendo (who published the games) lists the name, number, Abilities, and locations of Sinnoh's 150 Pokémon. And nothing else. No list of levelup moves, Egg moves, or compatible TM/HMs.
  • And to address all this, they have a second book, the "Pokédex" which has the entire amount of Pokémon, with everything that's not in the original guide. They even have a route-by-route breakdown of where everything can be found, and a post-game guide detailing the Battle tower area. But that's more like One Guide For The Price Of Two.
    • Said book also incorrectly states to give your Pokémon evolutionary stones to hold instead of using them like a normal item on said Pokémon.
  • And Prima did the exact same thing with their HeartGold and SoulSilver guide by covering Johto in one book, and Kanto in another.
    • The National Pokédex section of the Platinum guide lacks TM/HM and Egg Moves for space issues and sometimes refers to Japanese events (Shaymin and Secret Key downloads). It should be noted though that, aside from this, it's actually a very good guide, especially compared to their previous efforts.
  • From before that, the Prima guide for FireRed/LeafGreen is missing so much information, it feels like the author (Eric Mylonas, if you're curious) just wanted to rush through the game as quickly as possible, hating the entire experience from beginning to end. The most obvious things missing are Gym Leader strategies, the entire Sevii Islands area except how to catch Moltres, and the fishing area between lavender Town and Fuchsia City. The last is due to the author's suggestion on taking the Cycling Road there instead because it's faster. In other words, the author attempted to speedrun through the game and wrote what he encountered. This is Egregious because Prima's previous guide, for the Ruby and Sapphire version and written by Elizabeth Hollinger, is incredibly detailed and filled with passion, arguably the best Pokémon guide ever printed in a book form. Here is what Mylonas's guide contains, in addition to the walkthrough:
    • Mylonas's FireRed and LeafGreen guide: Introduction, Using This Guide, Types, Type Chart, Where to Catch Pokémon (grass, fishing, surfing, evolution), Evolution (level-up, trading, items, trading with items), Pokédex (where to catch, TMs and HMs, level-up, Move Tutor), list of TMs (price and assigned move), list of HMs (assigned move), list of Berries.
    • Hollinger's Ruby and Sapphire guide: Introduction, Using This Guide, Battling (against wild Pokémon, against Trainers, the menu choices), Double Battling and how certain moves differ from single battling, Status Anomalies, Type Chart, advice to put different move types onto Pokémon, Multipliers (type-based, critical hits, STAB, weather, item boosts), Physical vs. Special Attacks, Natures, Effort Values and Vitamins, Using HMs in the overworld, Catching Pokémon (grass, tall grass, surfing, fishing, diving, Rock Smash, breeding, swarms), Poké Ball types, Evolution (leveling up, stopping evolution via level-up, Elemental Stones, trading, trading with items, happiness, and the special cases of Silcoon, Cascoon, Milotic, and Shedinja), Breeding (the species that hatches, Egg Moves, hatching Eggs), Egg Group Charts, Pokémon Contests and how to play them, Pokédex (stats, how to catch, where to catch, TMs and HMs, Abilities, type-based strengths and weaknesses, Level-Up moves, evolution line), Moves as used in battle, Moves as used in Contests, TMs and HMs (locations, price, and assigned move), Contest Combos, Item Chart, Mail Chart, Poké Ball Chart, Secret Base Items, Items as held by Wild Pokémon.
  • On top of that, there are numerous errors in the FR/LG guide itself, such as listing Pidgey's rarity as "Only One," the occasional reference to the nonexistent Full Revive item, and the wrong pictures for some Pokémon.
  • The Pokémon Black and White guide is particularly amusing. For $20, you get a walkthrough, a list of every enemy trainer in the game, how-tos for some of the more obscure evolutions, 50 pages dedicated to basic strategy you'd find in the manual, a list of THINGS YOU CAN SAY IN THE EASY CHAT SYSTEM (because god knows you need to know if you can say "Cleffa" before you go online) and a removable type chart, for when you need to paste the type chart on your wall. There's no list of the Pokémon or the moves they can learn. They chose to save that for Volume 2.
    • The hardback Special Edition guide, released at the same time as Volume 1 for $10 more, does include the Unova Pokédex (Snivy to Kyurem, and Victini), but no item or move lists like those found at the end of other Pokémon guides, and no entries for Pokémon found after finishing the game.
    • On top of all this, the guide on how to clear the Abyssal Ruins might as well not be there. All they give is a picture of the first level that isn't very detailed. Two huge things wrong with this; 1) The Abyssal Ruins has more than one floor, and 2) While they show where the items are, they don't say what they are, instead dividing them into two vague categories (things you sell and things used in battle) and telling the player to "figure [the rest] out yourself". No mention of how to move the pillars, either.
  • Hold on, what about Brady's guide for Ruby and Sapphire? Among other things, no maps for the Trick House, and a Pokédex that consists of the names, height, weight and "species" of the 200 Hoenn dex Pokémon. No moves, no stats, absolutely nothing of in-game value.
  • Prima's Emerald strategy guide was good and bad at the same time. There are no maps for the Team Aqua Hideout, it doesn't list the Gym Leader rematch teams neither the Frontier Brains ones for the Gold symbol battles (the Silver ones were listed), and (at least in the Italian version) every pic in the guide (included maps and the extremely needed Braille key for the Regi quest) is low-res and blurred.
• Prima's guide for Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga details how you need to get the GameBoy Horror SP before fighting the Pirahna Bean boss to get a rare piece of equipment. They give you general locations of a few Invisible Blocks containing Hoo Beans needed to get the item beforehand. However, they don't give you the exact details for finding them, because "it takes the fun out of finding them all for yourself," which is probably why you bought the damn guide in the first place. Oh, and the guide doesn't have any maps, instead going for a "higher-quality" version of the in-game maps.
  • Furthermore, the guide leaves out several locations of Hoo Beans, to the point of not showing enough to get the Piranha Suit. Luckily, this forum post details the locations of all of the hidden Hoo Bean blocks, including the ones the guide left out.
• The Official Nintendo Guide for Animal Crossing: Wild World blantantly omits the entire Nintendo Set, which includes the Master Sword, Triforce, Arwing, and Metroid. In fact, that guide is chock-full of errors.
  • Case in point, Animal Crossing: Wild World is so vague to a point of being nigh spoiler free of a game it's supposed to be in-depth enough to explain things (sometimes, to a point, it is chock full of errors, such as referring to Kapp'n as a parrot over a tortoise/kappa). Rather than go into details of the things you'd expect a strategy guide to cover, it skips out on some features of the game and glosses over the other parts it does make reference to. For what it did cover, it gives you a full list of all the possible neighbors, their mugshots, and an idea of which of the personality groups they fall into (give or take a few typos), as well as mentions how neighbors would give you their portrait if you are close to them, but doesn't mention anything of how to go about approaching the neighbors to get their portrait, much less for each individual personality group, or how to maintain friendships, the results in doing so, or what to do to prevent a neighbor from moving away. It tells you Wendell will give you a random pattern from a small group of patterns if given a specific kind of food (fish, fruit, etc), but only gives you a very small portion out of the entire library of what kind of patterns he'll give you (as opposed to the strategy guide of the first game, which would display all of the patterns Saharah and Wendell would offer back when they would give out carpets and wallpaper). There is a catelog of all the gyroids possible, but hardly a word of how to get them for those who didn't already learn how from the previous game (much less that gyroids tend to show up after rain or snowfall). You'd get pictures of some of the faces and hairstyles possible for the questions from Kapp'n you answer or the responses you give to Harriet, but no details of how to get specific faces (and the advice they do give is wrong anyways ^[1], specific hairstyles, or how you could get hairstyles meant for the opposite gender other than a passing mention that you could unlock them. It mentions Dr. Shrunk's ability to grant the player emotions to use, but not how many they can have at any given time, not that he could replace them, or even what are all the emotions the player can have. The list goes on, but this is the stuff it did have. As for what it didn't cover?
    • No mention of the furniture limit you have in your house, whether or not it's specific to that room or the entire building, and next to nothing about Feng Shui or that the colors of your furniture and where they're placed had to do with your luck, which is funny, as the latter case is mentioned to be important (especially in terms of the Happy Room Academy's grading points), but apparently not important enough to list in and of itself (also funny in that the strategy guide of the previous game had devoted an entire section to this subject).
    • Hardly anything of how to go about having a perfect-ranked town and the factors that play into getting it (such as the number of trees on the lot, flowers, etc), a full checklist of flowers but no idea how to get specific kinds or how to grow hybrids of specific types (every flower is categorized into two groups, those that "can be bought at Nook's", and those that "grow in the wild", and the vague advice that "if you plant different colored plants of the same type, you may find that a new flower will grow nearby in a new color!"), and absolutely no advice on the Flower Fest (including, say, what criterea Tortimer would judge a house on, such as whether or not hybrids or gold roses are taken into account, what patches of the map qualifies as "yours", what happens if you were to destroy/steal your neighbor's flowers, if groups or rows of one color or type play any importance if not also the size of your "garden", if non-flowers, such as jacob's ladder, clover, dandelions or turnips hold any impact on this, etc.)
      • Among other things, there were also references to turn to a page that had nothing to do with why you're looking there in the first place (such as advice that going to page so-and-so would lead you to how to make a personal bank (not to be confused with the post office's bank) like Redd, only to lead you to pages that barely skirt between the post office's mail section and the outdoors section), lies that transferred from the website to the guide (at one point, the main website advertised "Gardening tips galore in the official player's guide!", which said advice can be summerized as "plant flowers, water flowers, rare flowers are good, running over them is bad, take out weeds when you can".), or missing sections of things ideally ommitted due to them being unlocked by promotions, yet were blatantly showed off in the game itself (such as the aforementioned special items above, including the Arwing and the Master Sword, which were displayed in Pudge's and Lucky's house as their default furniture respectively and can potentially be obtained by them through chance without the promotions behind either two objects).
• Similarly, the Prima guide for The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons (otherwise a very complete and high quality guide) botched the directions about how to change the seasons in the Lost Woods to get to the Noble Sword.
• In an infamous example, the official guide packaged with Earthbound stated that the Gutsy Bat, Ness's ultimate weapon, was dropped by Kraken. This weapon, like several other pieces of ultimate equipment, were dropped by specific creatures at a 1/128 rate. Unfortunately, the game features both Krakens and Bionic Krakens. The Bionic Krakens actually drop the Gutsy Bat, while the regular Krakens do not. Adding insult to injury, regular Krakens are only encountered at the very end of Magicant, so if you attempted to obtain this on console with the official guide's advice, you could spend 30-45 minutes to kill 3 of them...and they never respawn unless you reset and redo the entire dungeon.
  • The Earthbound guide further stated that the "Broken Parabolic" item could be repaired into Jeff's ultimate weapon, but did not specify where to obtain it. The end guide item tables vaguely suggested that it was found in a treasure box (it was not). Not only did the actual item drop from a fairly difficult enemy (another 1/128 chance, and the enemy caused explosion damage on defeat, every time), but it was actually called the Broken Antenna. The official guide for this game had quite a few other minor errors both in text and photos, due largely to the fact that writing began while the game was in beta.
• Prima's guide for Dragon Age: Origins has several glaring flaws. Among these are absolutely no information on the companion sidequests aside from small snippets in each character bio, containing at least one falsehood, (It claims that Sten will abandon you if you defeat him in a duel at Haven, when in fact it actually raises your approval with him), and leaves some key details about certain quests out. (For example, nowhere does it say that its possible to make Wynne immediately hostile if you bring Morrigan along for the Circle Tower quest.) On the plus side, the guide's data tables for talents and items are decent enough.
• Prima's guide for Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation repeatedly tells you to use the revolver and laser sight to take out skeletons in the Coastal Ruins and Catacombs, while forgetting that you don't actually get the revolver until the first Cairo level, City of the Dead. Apparently Prima used the All Guns cheat to write their guide.
• The Brady Games strategy guide for Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater featured a section that lists the location of the 64 Kerotans. Hitting all the Kerotans is one of the two methods for unlocking the Stealth Camouflage. The only problem is they only list the location of 61 Kerotan. The missing three have a section...but all it shows is a picture of a Kerotan with the words, "Find Me!". There also seems to be absolutely no mention of the Tsuchinoko or the method for unlocking the EZ Gun for difficulties other than Very Easy. They also give you the WRONG method for acquiring The End's special boss camo, twice!
• The Prima guide for the original Grandia is a monument to They Just Didn't Care, lacking, among other things, any information on how to beat the many bosses in the game, any mention of some of the secret dungeons, any maps for any of the non-secret dungeons, and loss of synchronization between the guide text and the photos near the end of the game. Ultimately, the guide ends before the final boss is reached.
• The Prima guide for Digimon World deliberately omitted information on three Digimon from both the American and British types. Because of this, these three are considered secret characters by many and forums are flooded with questions on how to obtain them. The British version, otherwise pretty detailed, also forgets to mention the requirements for the second part of the Grey Lord's Mansion quest and gives one location for where you can encounter Nanimon (there are five, and you need to visit all to recruit the character).
• N64 Magazine put out a fantastically useless guide for Body Harvest which among other things didn't include the location of any of the Weapon Crystals and skipped over all the bosses.
• Nintendo Magazine System's guide for Turok had duplicate pages in the Treetop Village stage, leaving figuring out how to get one key up to the player.
• The Nintendo Power Guide for Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles goes up to Raem's first form; after this, the advice they give for the last boss (They don't show an image or anything) is that it requires you to clear your head and your memories ( letting the boss do that will result in a game over). It doesn't help that the fight in question is a Guide Dang It.
• The Prima guide for Ogre Battle 64 was so incomplete and error-prone that there is a guide on GameFAQs solely devoted to pointing these errors out. Notable flub-ups include claiming you couldn't recruit a number of classes, including the titular Ogres, when you actually could, listing the locations you had to take specific characters to in order to get certain items, without telling you how to get said characters in the first place, and failing to mention the chaos frame, the scale that determines the ending to the game.
• The PSM guide for Silent Hill was based on a beta version of the game, where some of the puzzle solutions and/or hints were different, for example the astrological sign puzzle in Nowhere, which initially was a numerical order puzzle, but changed to a "count the appendages" puzzle in the final version.
  • The guides for the game featured in Tips & Tricks and its competition, Xpert Gamer, made the same mistake, as they were all based on the beta version. At least T&T corrected it, if not all of these three magazines.
• When the first Kingdom Hearts came out in Italy, Disney Italy made their own strategy guide... except it lacked everything. No maps, very vague (or missing) boss strategies, just two pages per world, and there's no guide for the last part because "we don't like spoiling it".
  • On a much lesser scale, the version published in North America actually doesn't include that much info on how to beat the Ice Titan, or the absolutely final form of the final boss. Of course, given that it's actually just a repeat of a previous form with the addition of Donald and Goofy more or less just makes it an excuse boss.
    • The guide for the first game also has a few tendacies of making normally simple and straight-forward tasks needlessly convoluted. A prime example is getting an item hidden on top of Cid's shop in the main district of Traverse Town as early as your first visit. The guide instructs you to do a very complicated method of jumping onto the roof of one building with perfect aim, leap onto another building with perfect aim, and very, very carefully position Sora with absolute precision so he'll land directly on the item. Or you could, you know, grab one of those nearby crates just behind its next door neighbor, plop it by the building the item in question is resting on, and then jump on the crate and then on the roof for profit?
• Did you know there was a Bradygames game guide made for World of Warcraft, too? Yeah, obviously a guide for an MMORPG, or even a constantly changing game with numerous free patches and updates, wouldn't be that much of a good idea...the original guide had some maps (which are always useful), guides, levels for skinnable creatures, profession lists, and a list of some equipment. But it also listed talents and abilities that weren't in the game (or were removed), doesn't mention Silithus, only really gives you the idea of what level you should be by the level of the skinning creatures and mobs, doesn't tell you how to obtain equipment, gives inaccurate class information (when the guide was published, the Feral and Balance tree for Druids was broken), and most importantly, doesn't tell you HOW to do the quests - you know, the stuff people are more likely to have difficulty with (like Mankrik's Wife and Fiona Longears). There are also no maps for dungeons; those who kept struggling with Uldaman would have loved a guide like this to tell us what we were in for. Basically, don't buy a guide for an MMORPG; they only have so much pages. It's better to use wikis or fansites. (The World of Warcraft guide is 432 pages - taking pages and quest walkthroughs from wikis would easily make it over 4,000)
  • Largely ditto for Guild Wars. The Bradygames guide had maps and info for quests and missions, which have been only slightly altered from the game's launch (though you can almost always find a player to team with that knows them inside and out already). Everything else was extremely general advice, or was hopelessly obsolete within the first few months, including the way PvP works.
• The Prima guide for MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries was basically just screenshots and lists of mission objectives with points of note. Even the typeface was unusually large, as if they didn't know how else to fill up all those pages.
• The Prima guide for Super Mario Sunshine is very good overall, but suggests doing something that doesn't work in one of the Pinna Park levels. The level in question requires that you climb up the ferris wheel through an obstacle course of electrical enemies. The guide suggests to, instead, get to a different location and jump through the ferris wheel as a short cut almost to the top. On any other level, this works just fine; however, the level in question has the ferris wheel spinning twice as fast as it normally does, making it impossible to jump through the gap.
  • While we're on the subject, the Nintendo Power guide does not make a mention of being able to walk on the sidewalls in that one bonus level in Delfino Plaza with the FLUDD-powered leaf boats and DEATH WATER. Although this minor oversight might be due to Nintendo accidentally leaving it in, since Nintendo Power does tend to somewhat care about the completeness of their guides.
• Prima’s guide for The Legend of Dragoon contains numerous typographical errors, describes enemies and items that do not actually exist in the game, and makes only the vaguest mention of the Bonus Bosses. It was obviously a rushed first draft, because at one point, it tells you to consult the “provided map” to navigate a confusing dungeon… except there are no maps to be found anywhere in the guide. However, that certainly doesn’t excuse it from spoiling every single plot point in the walkthrough. That said, it has HP totals for every monster in the game, and its boss fight strategies are usually pretty decent, so it isn’t a complete failure. So long as you don’t read ahead.
• Prima's guide for Lego Star Wars 2 was incomplete in many ways; it skips the minikit where you need to drive a car up a ramp in one room, skips the power brick that is behind the x-wing at the beginning of one of the levels (or under one of the wings, depending on the version) and even skips the whole "driving around the road puzzle" in on the Dagobah stage, saying the power brick is already there.
• The guide for Dragon Quest IX is actually pretty good aversion of this trope - while it doesn't cover everything you'd want, you'd probably only find yourself looking up guides on GameFAQs to find stuff about grotto maps and how to complete come quests in specific. The game guide still tells you how to do several of the ones in the base game without DLC, too. Did we also mention that this is for a Nintendo DS game and that it's over 400 pages? That's a lot for a handheld game!
• Prima made a 2 pack guide for the GBA Golden Sun games. I don't know about any other copies, but one of the maps in mine was missing, and a jacked up image of a different map was in it's place.
• The official Nintendo Power guide for Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles led you up until the penultimate boss, and states that the final battle requires to clear your memories. It doesn't tell you anything about the final boss. Images of your family appear and you cast cure on them. They turn into "???" magicite, which will cast a level 3 spell or make you invincible for a while. Every image you turn into magic takes away one of your memories. I never lost all of them, but it will probably either make the images quit appearing or you will lose. On the upside, the battle is too awesome to spoil. Also, the book lists pretty much every single other variable possible in the game.
• A nice aversion: The Versus Books "Perfect Guides" that were around a lot during the N64 and Gameboy Color days were in fact, perfect.
  • Versus Book's otherwise quite well-done guide for Final Fantasy VII includes all the directions you need to get the Chocobuckle spell... and then uses the wrong formula for how it deals damage. In the international release it does one point for every time you've fled from battle, while in the Japanese release - where Versus got their formula - the damage is reached by multiplying the user's level by the times fled from battle.
• Prima's guide to Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Eternal Duelist Soul goes into They Just Didn't Care territory, especially when it comes to the four Bonus Boss duelists. They did not publish an unlock condition or even a description for two of them ( Simon Trusdale and Solomon Moto (Yugi's grandfather)), and while they included a vague strategy for Pegasus, they neglected the unlock condition. The rest of the guide wasn't so hot, either, as they missed a number of cards.
• The Nintendo Power guide for Final Fantasy Tactics Advance gives no strategy for most missions out of the numbered 300. In other words, the missions to unlock Shara, Ritz, Babus and Ezel are without coverage, as well as the missions dealing with the corrupt Judges. There are also 6 semi-unique characters that the guide does not mention anywhere.
• The no longer valid after patches variant is lampshaded in Dark Souls, the patch notes for 1.05 contain "Official Guide nerfed".
• The The Legend of Zelda Majoras Mask Prima guide says that when you need to return to the first room of the Great Bay Temple to change the direction of the water flow, you should use the Song of Time as a shortcut. If you didn't know, it's actually the Song of SOARING that's supposed to be the first-room shortcut. The Song of TIME takes you all the way back to the First Day, outside the Clock Tower in the middle of Clock Town. Now imagine if it was your first time playing the game...
• The Prima Guide for TimeSplitters 2 had a few problems. The big one was the entire (very helpful and extensive) Mapmaker guide told you how to make a map using the Gothic tileset - which unfortunately was Dummied Out before release, making the entire sample map they teach you to build (and various reference screenshots) completely irrelevant. In addition, some of the strategies for missions outright say "this is a good method for finishing the challenge, but you won't be able to get a gold medal with it", before offering no other alternative. Fortunately most of the time it is possible to get a gold with the methods provided anyway.
• Many guides from gamefaqs.com fall under this premise. Many of them are clearly guides for the japanese game versions and thus contain information about features that were modified or removed entirely. Why else would a game guide use all japanese names when the american version does not, or advise you how to play minigames that were Dummied Out in the international export?
  • Another frequent offender is advice that doesn't tell you anything useful at all. That impossible to find button for the locked door? It's not all that useful to be told to "unlock the door by finding the button and pushing it," when it doesn't explain where it is.

1. ↑ according to the guide, the only mention they've made of how to get a specific face is "if you answered all your questions rudely, you might end up with a permanent scowl.", which 1) there are no faces with permanent scowls, or even angry-looking eyes and mouth sets for that matter no matter how rude you think you can be, and 2) exactly what would qualify as "rude" if you hear a remark about how heavy the rain is, and your only two responses were "I'm sick of the rain, too!" and "I think it's calming."?