Xenosaga Official Strategy Guide (Official Strategy Guides (Bradygames)) [Paperback]

Take characters, for instance. You can build basic traits (strength, etc.), spell casting, technical attacks, and personal skills. You can don mechs, upgrade weapons, and tune your engines. To, while maps are important to finding everything, the real test of a guide is how well it brings all the rest of the confusion together.

I have to hand it to Birlew and Parkinson for managing to present all this material in a manner that makes good, usable sense. This is a 224-page guide, and you will wind up reading most of it. For the most part it is clearly written, well illustrated, and contains only a few glaring errors. None of the latter are disastrous, just irritating when you are trying to figure something out.

I have no qualms about using guides. Especially in a case like Xenosaga, where the designers obviously were planning an all out war with the players. Games like this scream out for maps and lists and charts, and here they are. One of my measures of the quality of a walk-thru if it extends enjoyable game play, and this effort meets that criterion head on. Well worth the cost.

The first thing I noticed about the guide were the first about 60 pages of the guide are dedicated to a few of the miscellaneous things. The game basics and such. This may not seem like much but the guide explains the basics of the game a lot more clearly than the instruction booklet does.

Character profiles are great. They tell you when characters learn techs in an easy to use chart and they also give a small bio for them without spoiling what their main role is in the quest!

An weapon/armor/item list is availible. Easy to use table that tells you what you should buy and what you probably shouldn't. We all know that in Xenosaga you could spend quite a bit of money and you don't get much. This guide will help you save your money.

A.G.W.S data for them all. This also suggest what you should and shouldn't buy for them, as well as who should pilot them and what attacks you should focus on using.

The walkthrough was perhaps the most helpful part of this guide. This is where a couple of my small gripes come in but believe me they're very small. The walkthrough is easy to use and here's a nice thing to do in using this guide, while a movie scene from the game is playing take the time to read the guide. You'll notice that a lot of the info is extremely helpful.

Most noticeable are the boss strategies. These are VERY helpful strategies but this is where my first gripe with the guide comes in. The boss strategies are extremely helpful on offense. It's great to know what you can do to the boss but it would also be nice if they told me what the boss could do to me in return. Other than that these strategies are unbeatable.

Before you begin each section you'll see a list of enemies, maps with a very handy key, and a step-by-step objective and items list. VERY helpful walkthrough.

My second gripe is minor depending on how you use the guide. The screenshots aren't always clear. Some are rather fuzzy (the smaller ones). It's also nice that with each new area you come to there are mini-bios for the characters who you'll meet there. So the guide is very imformative. The best part? The guide has NO spoilers to the amazing story that unfolds!

Now for those mini-games, side-quests and secrets. The guide will help you to understand the mini-games and play them to success. If you're like me you don't play mini-games much. The guide also covers just about every secret and sidequests there is, again it doesn't spoil the plot.

Clearly this is an extremely helpful guide. You'll love the guide. It's great to use for the game. Just remember that you won't know what to expect from EVERY boss (there's one that can kill you in one hit and the guide WON'T point it out).