Super Mario Galaxy 2: Prima Official Game Guide [Paperback]

There is no question about the success of Super Mario Galaxy and with the strong hype surrounding around Super Mario Galaxy 2, there is a strong need for a strong strategy guide to help you go thorugh the immense and exciting challenges of the game. Unfortunately, for Prima, they've held the books on delivering strategy guides since Nintendo decided to stop making them a few years ago. With Prima's guide for Super Mario Galaxy 2, they have a good display of the graphics on each of the levels of the game, but with all of the challenges of getting comet medals, and challenging stars including the 120 Green Star challenge, there could've been a bit more display to master through the challenging game. While it does have some bright spots like helping you through easily with the boss matches from Bowser's ultimate showdown in a giant-sized form, nice displays of each level in beautiful maps, but overall there just could've been more than should've been added. Still, I do honestly wish that there was more for those hard core gamers, but it is a good buy for anyone whom is a owner of Super Mario Galaxy 2.

Price: C

Maps: B-

Tips: C+

Overall: C+

We purchased this book on Amazon. We discovered that this book is pretty great for anyone who wants to get through the whole game. Here are the pros and cons...

Facts:
1. This Book has 272 pages. The New Super Mario Bros for Wii had 192 Game Pages, but the Super Mario Galaxy Book had 336 Game Pages. It depends on whether you want a long game guide or a short game guide.
2. They had maps of each galaxy, but their maps weren't the best maps in the world. They were OK.
3. I didn't buy the Super Mario Galaxy Game Guide, but I heard that they had a GIGANTIC poster inside it. This book has a "Mini" poster. The poster is smaller than the book itself. If you are buying this game for the poster, don't buy it because you'll be disapointed by a "mini" poster. I didn't really care about their "poster" but I hung it up anyways. ;)
4. You may ask, what's the difference between a premier version of the guide and a collector's version? A premier version is paperback and a collector's version is hardcover. I also heard that the collector's version book includes a star count guide. I don't really know what that is, but you can find out. If you want the book to help you through the ENTIRE game, I would go with the hardcover because it doesn't really fall apart easily. If you use the book a lot the cover tends to fold easily. If you plan to use the guide to help you with a couple galaxies, go for the premiere version. The collector's version is about $5 More, to those who want to know.
5. The maps of each galaxy is on one page, and the actual guide is on another page. This results in flipping back and forth if you want to know everything.
6. There were A LOT of mistakes in this book. There are too many to name. The most funniest mistake to me was the fact that they put a picture of King Lakitu (from Yoshi Star Galaxy)when they were explaning how to defeat Bugaboom! (From Puzzle Plank and also from Honeyhive in SMG1) I wonder why the publisher didn't even spot that error! A lot of the mistakes are minor. You'll probably skip over half of them if you're reading the book. (A friend once told me that the position of four of the green stars are wrong in the book! I haven't gotten that far in the game so I don't know what they mean!)I still think that it's weird that there are SO MANY mistakes in this book! I didn't spot a single mistake in the New Super Mario Bros Wii game guide!
7. WARNING! DO NOT BUY THIS GUIDE IF YOU ARE LOOKING FOR CHEATS OR SECRETS! You won't find one! This guide doesn't have any cheats that you probably heard of in online guides. I know you at least some of you guys have heard of Yoshi's Infinte Flutter Jump. This book didn't have a single cheat. It didn't mention Yoshi's Infinte Flutter Jump. It didn't mention any cheats. This REALLY disappointed me!
8. This guide DOES tell you where all of the Green Stars are. Luckily.
9. So this guide is PERFECT for beginner gamers. This guide is no help to expert gamers. I'm not a beginner, and i'm not a expert. I'm in the middle.
10. I know I said this guide is no help to expert gamers. But this guide is still fun to read for experts! It was really fun to just read this guide over and over again! I think i've read this guide front to back 10 times already and found A LOT of mistakes! The funnest part was (and still is) trying to find more mistakes!

I absolutely loved the Collector's Edition guide to the original Super Mario Galaxy. It was a very attractive book with a high-quality dust cover and a very large poster included. I pre-ordered this Collector's Edition guide to Galaxy 2 hoping for another high-quality book just like the first. But after receiving the final product, my only reaction is: "this is it?." First off, the guide is much thinner than Galaxy 1's; it's page count is closer to that seen in the guide to The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hour Glass (a DS game). The book also has no dust cover. Whereas Galaxy 1's guide had a glossy dust cover and a nice design on the hardcover itself, Galaxy 2's cover is a very simple low-quality white board with the logo slapped on the front. The cover shows no creative thought whatsoever. My biggest complaint is the "mini poster" included inside the back of the guide. Whereas Galaxy 1's poster is roughly twelve times the size of the guide itself, Galaxy 2's poster is smaller than even the inside cover. I imagine that Prima figured they compensated for this by including a tiny booklet that serves as a "star checklist" in order to help the game player keep track of what stars they are still missing (the game itself already has a comprehensive "checklist" on what stars any file has).

If you simply need a guide to Galaxy 2, then save yourself the money and steer clear from the Collector's Edition. If you are looking for a nice collector's guide to an already amazing game then this product will disappoint you. Don't expect anything as great as the first guide. The point of releasing a Collector's Edition along side a Standard Edition is for the sake of satisfying...the collector. In that regard Galaxy 2's guide fails miserably in comparison to Galaxy 1's.

To sum up Prima's work on the CE for this guide: LAZY. Here's to Nintendo in that they didn't treat the actual game the same way.