We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.

That's a thing of beauty.

Seriously, Japanese strategy guides are totally worth nerding out about, even if you don’t plan on reading a single word. I’ll give an example I think is really well done, and that I happen to own.

First, an apology about the serial-killer photo quality; even if I had nicer photography equipment, I have no studio space or anything like that. Then again, the back of the book intimates that reproduction of contents is strictly forbidden, and while a handful of unreadably blurry cell phone photos of non-exclusive content for a gushy review totally counts as fair use of copyrighted material in the U.S. (where I live and where the images are hosted), please do not follow the image links if your jurisdiction does not permit such usage![/lawyermode]

Show Content

Spoilerhttps://i.imgur.com/LQ3Cqs1.jpg
This is the Melty Blood Act Cadenza Ultimate Strategy Bible (Ichijinsha, 2006). It’s the guide, but not the only guide; there’s a smaller, A5-ish-size book with more of a beginner emphasis, too (which is also a much more convenient thing to carry to the arcade). I suppose I should’ve included something for scale, but this book is about 240 pages thick and A4-ish-size. It’s hard to tell from this photo, but I have left the obi on; the actual cover doesn’t have that large text.

(dat metallic title )

https://i.imgur.com/7jGQIyU.jpg
Since this is a quality publication, they dedicate entire color pages just for section dividers. Don’t worry, space is not wasted in actual content pages. It’s packed, but divided off into nicely demarcated boxes and stuff, just like a magazine. That’s why they often call these things “mooks”; they’re books with magazine design, more or less.

https://i.imgur.com/swaoMmr.jpg
So after about 20 pages detailing the essential mechanics of the game from the very basics up to the extremely game-specific in gory detail, there’s a lot of pages dedicated to each character. On the first page for each, there’s a couple sentences for the character’s background, little pictures demonstrating the palette selection, and pictures showing what normals and stuff look like. On the rest of the pages, you have the special moves and such, along with detailed advice pertaining to them and the animations depicted as a series of images. And frame data, since after all, this is a fighting game with (at the time) a competitive scene.

Note the size of the text on the left. That is roughly the text density wherever there is text (most of the book is pictures), and if translated into English I estimate it would probably need about 125–175% the space overall (Japanese-to-English space requirements are more forgiving with prose, but prose this ain’t; it’s terse tip text).

https://i.imgur.com/xt5qDwp.jpg
What’s this after these anti-boss strategies? Art gallery!

https://i.imgur.com/I8nsxx9.jpg
On a single spread, we have the game portrait and thumbnail art for who are coincidentally (who were back then) my roommate’s for-fun main, my other roommate’s serious main, my for-fun main, and... the hilarious character.

After that, on non-glossy, greyscale print there is a collection of at-a-glance movelists (technically for transcriptions of speech!) in one section, and in the next, more general tips for fighting with a particular character, rather than the move-specific ones found in the glossy character-specific section. So it might seem a little inefficient and repetitive, but it’s actually more convenient because in the heat of the moment, you’re more likely to need the back section than the in-depth front section. Thoughtfully done.

Although such books will unavoidably contain inaccuracies or oversights here and there (for instance, if a nasty infinite combo arose before a game’s release, it’d have been fixed and never made its way into the guide, but it affects the game in an important way nonetheless; typos have also been known to make their way into guides), they tend to be reasonably authoritative and comprehensive on the whole.

Some English-language strategy guides do manage to cover their respective games in this level of depth (maybe I’ll get to do a side-by-side comparison one day?), but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one achieve the level of elegance in graphical design found in a typical Japanese strategy guide. The ones I’ve seen are always have something up with them; too busy-looking or nasty font selection or whatever. Not to mention they almost never get to show off exclusive tidbits like developer trivia or concept art rather than the generic presskit materials every magazine already got mailed to them (in fact, this sort of thing is so lucrative that Squaresoft back in the day started a series devoted strictly to it instead of keeping it as a mere selling-point for guides). Really, I’d love to get in on translating this sort of stuff for a living, but in the back of my head I don’t think there’d be a strong market for it here at all.