Zelda Strategy Guides Update

One of the many ongoing projects here at Zelda Dungeon is to try to establish a database or archive of all published Zelda material out there, whether it from Nintendo Power Magazine, Official Nintendo Magazine, or even some of the various Zelda related strategy guides that have been released. Today I have quite an update to our Strategy Guides Page and it now has over 80 published strategy guides listed. Each guide on the page has its cover artwork, the number of pages, its ISBN number, along with a short description listing the pros and cons of each magazine. For some guides we have full downloads available, but in the future, I’d like to offer 15-20 page previews of each guide, followed by links to where you can purchase some of the more common ones.

It’s really fun to see the progression of strategy guides over the years, especially on the Japan side of things. In the US, for Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks, there was only one guide published for each game and they were made by Prima Games. Granted the recent Prima Games guides have gotten incredibly detailed with everything you’d ask for in a guide. On the Japan side of things though, for Spirit Tracks there were still four different publishers creating guides for the game and quite honestly, they are all absolutely fantastic. Comparing the guides from the recent games to the guides from the N64 or Gameboy era is just a joke as the quality has risen 10-fold.

So did you ever have any strategy guides of your own? Do you think buying strategy guides is cheating. Do you like just skimming through them? Let us know by posting in the comments below!