Most helpful customer reviews
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1.0 out of 5 stars
Great game, really bad book, April 13 2004
Once again, the authors at Prima have outdone themselves and set a new low. The game is fantastic and deserves a much better strategy guide than this. The shortcomings in this book are numerous, but I'll attempt to list them all here. It lacks a complete move list for the weapons, it has no useful enemy information, it doesn't describe what the items are or do, it doesn't give the location of all of the Golden Scarabs (which are critical to unlock the original NG games), and the "strategy" is minimal at best. Make no mistake, this is a bare-bones walkthrough with blurry pictures that is the product of minimal effort. This book is reminiscent of something George W. would author if he had his crayons, paper and two hours to kill. How does Prima keep getting book contracts? They must have been the low bidder, which is reflected in the quality of this "guide". Needless to say, this book is woefully incomplete and is certainly not worth the $10.49 Amazon is asking for it. You are much better off getting a free guide on gamefaqs.com that is complete. Prima should be embarrassed by this substandard product, but as long as it sells well and they don't get too many consumer complaints, their strategy won't change.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Less than perfect, Mar 23 2004
Lately it seems while most strategy guides for consoles systems claim to reveal all secrets they never own up to it and this guide is no different. It does have its uses and is somewhat better than average.
For starters this guide does provide a fairly good level walk-through and strategy for battling the bosses, but it leaves out a lot of info out in particular on most of the other weapons you will acquire during the game. The strategy for using the weapons in the game is rather lackluster as it only gives a little info on the weapons you will probably be using throughout most of the game. This said its not as bad as it seems largely because weapons like the nunchaku will not be seeing much if any use once you acquire the Vigorian Flail which essentially functions like a super bladed nunchaku. Additionally the Bow & Strongbow have identical strategies in usage so that's not much of an issue. It does list some of the best moves for the Dragon Sword/True Dragon Sword as well as the Vigorian Flail and Warhammer, but this is average at best and would have better more useful if it had listed more moves and most if not all weapons. It gives a pretty accurate description of where you will find most of the essential items like health and ki items, but it lives out the picture of one of the most important items in the game being the "Life of a thousand Gods" which unlike "Life of the Gods" permanently increases your health without needing nine of them first. Additionally one nice thing about this guide is that they included info for beating the bosses of the original three nintendo Ninja Gaidens in the back of the book which will be very helpful when you eventually unlock the games.
While this one of Prima's better strategy guides in recent memory its not as useful as it could have been. It will provide you with a good basic walk-through for the majority and help you find most items in the game fairly well, but never goes into enough detail on the weapons as well as some other stuff. That said its useful when you need a picture to get you through some tight spots where online strategy guides generally can't help, but you'll probably end up going to gamefaqs at some point when you need a little info that this book left out.
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2.0 out of 5 stars
All Secrets Revealed, My Foot!!!, Mar 18 2004
While following this guide will get the player through the game, it's not as polished as it's portrayed to be. It's quite hard to believe that Prima let this atrocious thing out the door. Usually Strategy Guides offer more than enough information for the consumer, that's not so the case as with this one here. For starters, following this guide leaves the player at loss for several vital golden scarabs and live of the gods. I noticed points in the game where I didn't follow the guide and ended up with a larger lifebar than what was compared at the time with the guides in certain points of the game. The guide even has the nerve to have the player backtrack at times to collect life of gods and elixers that the player could have earlier on in their adventure! Another huge flaw (and possibly thus far the worst) is how Prima didn't even bother to implement an enemy/boss encyclopedia description in the guide!! Yep, so it's practically "no hold's bar" when encountering new enemies and bosses. The player is basically left to figure out enemy strategies in the cold, in the thick of battle (Imagine buying a guide for an rpg game that didn't have an enemy/boss encyclopedia, that's how stranded the player is left with this guide). It's also amazing how the guide gives the reader a brief overview on boss battle encounters for the Ninja Gaiden Trilogy, yet it offers absolutely no clue to the player as to how to access the three games (what on earth is up with that?!). Perhaps the guide wanted the players to try and think for themselves at some points in the game, however that's not what consumers pour out their hard earned cash to buy a guide for. They buy them for precise information that is more than enough to get them through their game. You'd do yourself better by simply downloading a complete walkthrough online than spending (money) on this thing.
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