Baten Kaitos(tm) Official Strategy Guide [Paperback]

I always buy game guides for role playing since I am the type that likes to get everything in a game.Brady game guides are the most accurate. I have found them to be more so than the Nintendo Guides.Prima being the worst. One of the Nintendo guides I had purchased had so many errors in it that I called the company and had to make many notes in my copy.You will not be disappointed with this guide. It will help you to get everything and do things in the correct order.However the game itself can be played without a guide. I did that until I got my copy. If you speak to all the people in the game, more than once, you can find your way around.

Brady usually does a passable job with their guides for RPGs, but this one is an extreme exception. I can understand and forgive the occasional typo, but this guide seems to be littered with them. It's incredibly annoying to look up boss strategy and see "+80%" damage for "dark" attacks, only to execute a big "dark" attack and see "-80%" on the screen. This transposing of positive and negative effects seems to happen on every 4th boss listing.

The guide itself is also poorly laid out, with the columns walk-through text broken with photos and and running roughshod around distracting side quest text bubbles. Whoever was in charge of page layout should probably try harder next time.

In addition, the charts, lists and directories in the rear of the guide, usually some of the most imporant parts are laid out awkwardly. Sometimes broken up in a illogical manner, sometimes page after page of items, with no breaks and not in alphabetical order. Try finding the entry for "Spicy Curry Magnus" when it's not ordered by healing magnus, nor in alphabetical order!

Overall the guide has helped me complete the odd confusing RPG side quest (which I swear are being designed more and more these days to require a 3rd party guide like this, the game publisher must get a cut). However, if I had known before buying how little it would really help and how much it would sometimes even hurt, I would have passed on it.

I always have confidence in Brady's guides. I don't even buy Prima guides anymore after the really bad experience with the Legend of Dragoon Guide and the full of spoiler Aidyn of Chronicle Guide. Brady Guides don't usually give out any spoiler and quite comprehensive (well they had a pretty bad spoiler for the Beyond Good and Evil guide, though I still find it very useful apart from that).

The Baten Kaitos guide was a little bit of disappointment though. I am not saying that there are heaps of flaws or whatsoever, it is just that things were not really that well organised.

The guide as all the basic things that you need: what you need to do and all the side quests that you can do. Nonetheless, the arrangement of materials could be greatly improved. The story walkthrough is good, but the side quests are quite disorganised in a way that you would risk losing out things that you need to complete your side quests. One of them being the Museum side quest in Mira. Should the guide mentioned when you first get it to keep it for a much later initiated side quest, I would have kept it instead of throwing it away for other side quests (some of them demand a lot of blank magnus spaces if you want to avoid back tracking). It would be good for Brady's to actually build a side quest section with all the references marked inside the main story walkthrough. Readers could then have a choice of whether they want to do the side quests or keep stuff for the side quests at all.

Also there is a boss battle that Kalas was forced into but the guide didn't mention it. It only said get yourself prepared. But if you prepared the wrong character, you are stuff. They manged to do it for the one where Gibari was forced into the battle, but wonder why the Kalas one was missed out.

The boss stragegies and enemy strategies are good, but just in the text. So just read the text instead of reading the elemental + and - because there are a lot of flaws. Weak to light could be -80 in one enemy but marked as +80 in another. So leaving you wondering what they are trying to do. A think a better consistency check is really needed in this guide.

Also the monster list doesn't tell you what usual or most frequent useful items are dropped by the monsters. With a game that involves collection of a lot of cards, I think this is an essential issue that needs to be addressed. Prices of items in the shops are steep so the best way to build up cards is by defeating monster. However, readers won't have a clue what to fight to get what. I need to make the notes myself. This is disappointing for that part was quite detail in the FF VIII guide by Brady's.

The most useful parts of the guide were the experience point vs level chart and the way the teach you to take photos to earn the most money (the only way to be rich in the game).

In all, if you just want a guide to get through the game quickly, this is a definite choice. If you are a person who wants to do everything, this might not be as promising as other Brady's guides.

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