Final Fantasy IX Official Strategy Guide | 
 enlarge | Author: Dan Birlew
Publisher: BRADY GAMES
Category: Book
List Price: $12.99
Buy Used: $7.99
You Save: $5.00 (38%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  225 reviews
Sales Rank: 109594
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 208
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 10.8 x 8.3 x 0.4
ISBN: 0744000416
Dewey Decimal Number: 793.9325369
EAN: 9780744000412
ASIN: 0744000416
Publication Date: November 8, 2000
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Softcover. Cover has a tear. Cover is creased. Has heavy cover wear. Ships the next business day, with tracking and delivery confirmation sent to your email.
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Product Description
BradyGames Final Fantasy IX Official Strategy Guide features a detailed walkthrough, support and action abilities, equipment lists and statistics, comprehensive weapons list, bestiary data and side quests. Using this printed guide along with Squaresoft's online guide at PlayOnline.com will enable players to access additional resources for this epic adventure.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 220 more reviews...
 Vague and disappointing guide by a highly regarded source. September 3, 2008
This Brady Games official strategy guide has the potential for all the right stuff, it's just too bad it had to be half baked. Let's start off by giving the authors and illustrators some overdo credit. Dan Birlew lays it all out nicely and concisely. The illustrations and maps look great too. Your guaranteed a "walkthrough" of this game...untill you require specific details in regards to stats and numbers. That's when the editors and publishers take over and ruin the guide's quality. Instead of taking the extra time to present a few extra pages full of stats and simple charts, your given an advertisement with a cheesy code to look on Square enix's official playonline websight. Now to be fair, most of the "playonline" bull rubbish consists of enhanced or finer details that in the end, don't really detract from gameplay. We don't NEED to know what range of stats Zidane's weapons might provide as it's usually best to get ALL the gear you can in this game anyways...they play a role in character development. You can compare and contrast on your own as the guide will at least detail item locations. As I mentioned before, Dan Birlew is not to be blamed. He does his job of providing a competent walkthrough that will never leave you confused and guide you all the way to the end of the game. It's the editor's fault for requiring that the guide be written this way. There is no excuse to have a consumer pay the typical 14.99$ USD price point for a thin and meager guide lacking in it's finer details. Espescially when all the other Brady Games Final Fantasy guides cost around the same price but do a better job. The guide serves more as an advertisement for Square Enix's benefit. And just when you thought this guide couldn't be worse than it already is, just try following it's advise to go to playonline these days...Final Fantasy IX support has been taken off the site completely and replaced with Final Fantasy XI online content. Brady Games has never published anything this bad before and i've seen bad trust me! Pass this train wreck up and either look for an english translated import FFIX guide, or go to Gamefaqs.
Worst of the Worst August 21, 2008
Every page of this strategy guide says (at least once, often 2 or 3 times) "...and to find out EXACTLY how to do this or find that, visit our website!"...what a terrible, terrible, TERRIBLE idea for a strategy guide, and for one of the greatest RPGs ever made too! A real shame.
Not so much a guide as it is a commercial for Playonline July 9, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Totally worthless. All of the in depth info that I buy strategy guides for is missing, with "Go to playonline for more information" tags everywhere. It's more worthwhile to just print out a guide from Gamefaqs.
DO NOT BUY THIS December 27, 2007
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
This guide depends on the Final Fantasy IX online site to function. THIS SITE HAS BEEN TAKEN DOWN. THIS BOOK IS NOW NON-FUNCTIONAL. DO NOT BUY.
A complete rip-off, but not utterly useless December 2, 2007
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
For an "official strategy guide", this book is very short on strategy.
Apparently, the idea with this book was to make it more interactive. It frequently points you to an official Square company website and has you use keywords to find the information you need. "For more strategies against this boss, or to find a special treasure in that room, go to the site and input such-and-such keyword!" Interesting idea in theory. Very bad in practice.
First of all, how many people have the time to leap up to their computers in the middle of the game and hit a website? It can be done, but that is so annoying. The point of having a dead-tree guide is to have the info at your finger tips when you need it. But a huge chunk of the info can't be found in the book. Useless.
And just to add insult to injury, the website is barely functional. If you actually do go there and input a keyword from the guide, there's a good chance that you'll get back an error message telling you the page you want doesn't exist. Gee, how wonderful that the main feature of this interactive strategy guide **frequently doesn't work**. Of course, you may be spared the annoyance of the website not working, because instead you'll suffer from the annoyance of not even being able to find it. While it is still up, it is no longer at the playonline URL included in the book and is not easy to find.
Now, the actual book-portion of the guide does have some good info that you don't have to coerce the website into giving up. For instance, in the book there are tables of all the learnable abilities, organized by which characters can learn them, complete with which items the character can learn them from. That is quite handy if, for some reason, you're hunting down a specific ability for a specific character. There is also an appendix of info about the monsters. This beastiary really is quite complete and, from what I've been able to see, quite accurate. Though, again, a fair amount of info about each monster has been redacted from the book and can only be found on the website.
But the lion's share of the book (the walk through, side-quest info, and treasure hunting) is abysmally lacking. So no, this guide isn't completely useless, but it is mostly useless. Don't waste your money on this rip-off. Web-surf to a Final Fantasy IX fan site or to Gamefaqs instead. It's free and their strategy guides are much more informative.
Pros:
+ Good info on abilities and monsters.
Cons:
- No info on pretty much everything else.
- Partner website is hard to find and almost non-functional.
- Complete waste of money.
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