Final Fantasy III Player's Guide

My favorite video game related book ever! I'd recomend it to those who don't even have the game or want it.Unlike most guides where you have to have the game to understand it, you cold read this just for pleasure reading since it gives you such a detailed idea of the game and it's characters. I got another FF3 guide and it came nowhere close. And it doesn't give away all of the story. And even if you know the story half the fun is in the challange of battles and level building and the feel of exploration.

This is, without a doubt, the best game guide I have ever read. It is so smooth and well-written that it reads like a novel, and it quickly became my favorite book when I started reading it. My friend let me borrow the game, and I was uninterested at first, but the guide added so much to it that I kept it and ended up buying it from him. That's what makes a good strategy guide, I think. It sure made this one good.

When I was a child, my uncle, who was 19 at the time, was playing "Final Fantasy 3" back when we numbered the Final Fantasies improperly, and he had this book. Before I even played the game, I read it. Then I read it again. And I read it again. It felt like a novel. Aside from the obvious intent of being a game strategy guide, parts of the prose is fantastic, and Olafson gleans so much from the story - theme, character, bits of dialogue that on first glance you wouldn't notice bearing as much meaning as they do in many of the scenes. Olafson doesn't get everything right. He can't. He tells what he knows, and what he knows, seems less to be gaming and more to be literary. I would get into arguments when "Final Fantasy 7" came out - which is better, Seven or Six, and I would argue Six, although Seven at the time had the best graphics there were (ugh) and thrilled me with its own story. But I had gotten something out of Six, with the help from Olafson, nobody looking at it briefly could...Read more