Shenmue: Prima's Official Strategy Guide

 (10 customer reviews)

I've had a lot of issues with Prima not delivering a guide with all the info that it could of had. Prima's guides frequently do not deliver all but the bare essentials and can be poorly put together, but the Shenmue Official Strategy Guide does not follow tradition. From start to finish, the guide is absolutely packed full of information regarding the game and solutions to the many puzzles within it. Full, complete, well designed color pages document each event as it should happen with exact date, time and location, along with full color screen shots. It also includes complete index's of all the bonus items you can collect throughout the game and where to obtain them, as well as a full index of all note-entrys that can be imputted into Ryo's journal. As well, it features complete biographys taken from Shenmue Online, that include virtually every single individual you see in the game, regardless of weither you're ever able to interact with them or not. This is not a guide to pass up,...Read more

This is a great strategy guidebook for SHENMUE. It really covers a lot of information in the game. I've already played SHENMUE all the way through and I thought i had covered everything in the game. Wrong! There is a lot that I misssed! There were things in the game that you could get that I just didn't know about. For instance you can win a couple of Sega Saturn games as prizes for Ryo's Saturn at his house! I recommend you to read this book after you've already gone through SHENMUE at least once. You'll be suprised at how much you may have missed. It may even make SHENMUE even more rewarding the second time around. If you loved SHENMUE as much as I did, then this book is a must have!

As per usual, this Prima strategy is great overall, but there's one big problem: the walkthrough and the maps are in two totally different sections. This may not seem like a problem at first, but for those of us that don't have photographic memories, constantly flipping from the front of the book to the back of the book is a real pain. It really becomes a problem in some of the more hectic situations in the game. Other than the map/walkthrough thing, this is a really well-done guide. If you can get past it's one flaw, then I definitely suggest you go and get this guide.