Final Fantasy IX Official Strategy Guide

To push registrations to their new website, Playonline.com, Square and Bradygames have made this hint book link to "additional" hints on the playonline website. Now that'd fine and dandy if it wasn't for certain things:

1) When I buy a hint book, it's expressly so I DON'T have to go to websites to collect up all the hints and tidbits to complete a game. There's not a page that goes by in this guide that doesn't have a callout box suggesting you go the website and learn an even BETTER way to defeat this monster, or where the last of the umpty-umpth Magic Thingy is hidden. I bought the book to learn these things;

2) as of the moment (either from overload or over-fancy design, I can't tell yet) the website you're supposed to link to is DEAD slow. And there's no easy way to collect all the hints at once; yu have to enter these search codes listed in the book, resulting in a LONG visit to the site, racking up lots and lots of hits for Square to crow about.

Now, what's...Read more

The strategy guide business is one of being partly an aid and partly a souvenir. It's not often that a guide manages to fail on both counts. Especially when the underlying game is one as complex and varied an RPG as Final Fantasy IX. I'm not sure what was going on at Squaresoft's planning tables when they thought this out (other than a desire to save pages) but the guide is missing many of the key elements that should make a player willing to but it.

Rather than provide a detailed walkthru, the information is split between the book and an online web site. All the real details, advice, and solutions require stopping the game, going online to find something out and then returning to the game. Since my Playstation is in one room, and the computer is in another, I wound up using the guide for high level order of play information and figuring everything else for myself. Since the game isn't particularly hard to follow through without a guide using it to amplify the playing...Read more

Well this is a fine mess, you pay for the book and then it refers you to an online address that you must register for and doesn't work. I suggest you save you money and use the great sites like gamefacs.com and rpgamers.com.