"The Ultimate Walkthrough"

[Reverend Red Mage]

So I was carousing around Borders a week ago and stumbled across this in the Philosophy section.

I read about 5 or 6 chapters of the book.

Now I'm pissed. I pretty much just wasted $17.95.
You will too. Don't buy this book, enticing as it may seem to those of you who are the deep-thinking type.

The yellow flag that should have prompted me to put the darned thing down was that it's clearly flagged as "unauthorized", which is a codeword for "authors likely have never played the games". As it turns out, they obviously haven't; this tome is nothing more than a compendium of undergraduate-level tangent-ridden banal essays that attempt to compare philosophical (and non-philosophical) ideas and principles through the worlds of Final Fantasy. In other words, it generally follows the format of "here's some sort of philosophical/ecological principle. Final Fantasy VII demonstrates it in X fashion." Seriously. That's it.

One of the authors actually made a large mistake in thinking that Cloud and Squall were in the same game. Furthermore, on the back of the book, it claims that it covered titles up to #13; the copyright on the book is 2009. Guess they forgot the Roman numeral for 12 isn't XIII.

If you're remotely curious, then pick it up. Just don't say I didn't warn you.

I haven't bothered searching yet, but I'm sure that denizens of this site have probably done a much better job getting philosophical FF-style. And this shit's free.

</rant>

[DragonHeart]

I've seen this book floating around often enough but I have to say the cover alone turned me off of it. Glad it did since I've heard nothing redeeming at all about it. It's really too bad, considering how well the series lends itself to exactly that type of discussion. Sounds more like the authors were just trying to turn a quick buck by cashing in on the series name.

That said, what I'd really like to see is some actual official content from SE. Not just the games and all that, but translations of things like the occasional light novels and such that they do in Japan. The Ultimania guides as well. Yeah, there's fanfiction and scanlations for that, but still.

~DragonHeart~