Strategy Guide Review: Pokemon X and Y (GamerGuides)

The Pokemon games are both numerous and huge, and with so much to see and do it’d be easy to put your 3DS down for a little while and look for help. If that sounds familiar to you, and you’re lost in the worlds of Pokemon X and Y then you might want to take a look at the strategy guide offering from GamerGuides. Sitting proudly in among their latest releases, the Pokemon guide covers pretty much everything you’ll be needing on your route to victory.

One thing that stands out in this guide, and something which the folk at Gamerguides are clearly very proud of, is how great the screenshots look. Scattered liberally through the guide, they’ve been taken on a specially modified 3DS, meaning the screenshots come straight from the console itself – you won’t find that in most online guides. But obviously it’s no good looking pretty, a guide needs to actually guide after all.

PokemonXY

I don’t know a great deal about Pokemon, so I gave this guide to a friend of mine who knows far more about the franchise than I do, and he was thoroughly impressed. Short of a checklist to mark off what you’ve found and where you still need to go the guide was thorough, complete and crystal clear in terms of the instructions. There are instructions on where to find things, detailed rundowns on various enemies and what attacks to use or avoid in order to easily defeat them, warnings on dangerous things to avoid and guides to the extra activities that you can carry out even after finishing the main game. In that final example, the level of detail was staggering at times, with some well thought out and clearly communicated tips. There were also one or two grammatical stumbles here and there, but nothing that would put you off while reading it. The main thing that was missing was a Pokedex, an encyclopedia of sorts which lists all of the Pokemon and key info about each one (at least, I think that’s what he said it was…) – these are apparently extremely handy when playing something Pokemon based, and the absence of that was an issue for him.

pokemon-x-and-y-coverThat said, it’s not as if one of the more traditional guides will fair much better. The official Prima guide, often regarded as the premium strategy guide in the bag, also omits the Pokedex. It still doesn’t make it a good thing, but it’s certainly not going to make people jump ship away from this guide. The benefit of this is how it also sits happily on the iPad app alongside your other GamerGuides purchases, and allows you to find and flick through info in a very smooth and easy to use way. True you don’t get the nice glossy book to flick through, but you also pay less than $8 for it so you can easily forgive that.

The Pokemon X and Y guide is another very worthwhile addition to the GamerGuides portfolio. If you’re into the Pokemon games, want to make sure you’re finding everything there is to find and play the game to its full potential, this guide is a must. It looks great, it reads well, and it’s genuinely helpful. What more would you want? Find it at GamerGuides.com

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