A chat with the man who made getting Biggoron's Sword a whole lot easier.
http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/interview/33491
As long as there are games, there'll be folks needing help. No shame in that, none at all.
We haven't quite mastered the art of the perfect game (though some have come close). Until we do, folks like Casey Loe exist to serve as a guiding light.
Loe is a Renaissance man of video games. He served as a writer at GameFan Magazine and Nintendo Power, worked for 8-4, Ltd. as a translator for entries in Namco Bandai's Tales series, and currently co-hosts Warning! A Huge Podcast alongside Shidoshi and Nick Rox (both former writers at GameFan Magazine). But the body of work that interests me most is his strategy guide writing. He's helped thousands with his guides, be it making the most out of your herbs in Resident Evil 2, or making your PAL card key hot in Metal Gear Solid.
But there's still a lot we don't know about this side of the industry. So naturally, we looked to Loe for some insight.
Casey Loe (pictured above) has written a wealth of strategy guides, including Final Fantasy VII, Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, Devil May Cry, Shenmue, and Super Mario Sunshine.
Nintendo World Report (NWR): Where did your interest in strategy guides begin?
Casey Loe (CL): Do you remember that book that had maps and strategies for all the early NES games, which at one point was a pack-in with the NES itself? I couldn't afford an NES, but I borrowed that book from a friend and would read it almost daily, fantasizing about playing those games. Pretty pathetic, I know. Years later, my first strategy guide was the one that came packed in with Phantasy Star II, which I liked but found incomplete. So I made my own Phantasy Star II strategy guide, xeroxed it, and sold it for $2 over pre-Internet online services like Prodigy and CompuServe.
NWR: What was your big break into the industry?
CL: When I was a writer at GameFan Magazine, an editor named Matthew Taylor pitched the idea of publishing strategy guides. He ended up writing one for Mortal Kombat III, I think, and it sold way better than anyone expected. But when our bosses wouldn't give him a cut of the profits, he quit to start Versus Books. Final Fantasy VII had just come out in Japan and I was fanatical about it, so we agreed that I'd write and design an FFVII strategy guide as the company's first book. It was a huge hit, and I ended up being the company's main in-house writer until it collapsed several years later.
NWR: By the time the guide is complete, how many times have you played through the game?
CL: It depends. Ideally just twice—once as a normal player, to get a feel for the scope of the game and what sorts of coverage would be useful, and then once more to grab the screenshots and write all the data. (That second pass can take hundreds of hours as you have to test basically every possible thing you can do in the game and play each section multiple times, so it sort of counts as multiple playthroughs.) If the budget allows for multiple writers, the second person usually plays through it a lot more than that in order to find secrets and test theories and stuff.
NWR: Are you able to enjoy a game you're writing a guide for, or does the work behind the process make it far too difficult?
CL: Writing a strategy guide is a great way to destroy one's enjoyment of a game, but I've encountered a few games that were so good I'm still able to enjoy them: Final Fantasy VII and the Zelda games come to mind. I wasn't so lucky with Pokémon—even glancing at art from those games gives me PTSD flashbacks.
NWR: What kind of relationship do you have with the developer of the game? Are there ever occurrences where you can provide suggestions for the localized version?
CL: This varies dramatically. Some developers want to be deeply involved, others want nothing to do with the process. Typically, the more involved they want to be, the more of a nightmare it is for us—developers can be hypersensitive about the way their work is presented. On the other hand, when a game is good and you get to be one of the first people to play it, the developers can be very eager to hear feedback and may make balance tweaks or remove exploits based on what we find. My best experience working with a developer was Gearbox, on the Borderlands guide—nearly everyone on the development team contributed little tips and tricks and easter eggs and was really passionate about the book being good.
The worst experiences usually involve Japanese developers. In Japan, most major games release with an "Adventure Guide" that only covers the first half or so of the game, and then the real strategy guide comes out a month or two later. Not understanding that that business model doesn't work in the West, the developers often embargo discussion of certain content until long after the game's release—so if you ever see a strategy guide that has glaring omissions like not covering the game's final section or post-game content, that's probably the reason.
NWR: A lot of your work is done with Japanese-developed games. Is that lead time between its native release and the Western release all you have to write the guide?
CL: Usually, yes. But if the game is a simultaneous or near-simultaneous release the publisher will usually find a way to get you earlier access.
NWR: Is there ever concern that things may be changed in the localized version, or is your work based off that version of the game?
CL: This happens all the time! Fortunately, it's mostly just minor text changes as the game goes through the editing process, but we've had cases where some element of the game's on-screen interface changed and the developer insisted we re-grab every screenshot in the entire guide because of it. Ugh.
NWR: When it comes to writing the guide, how do you manage to be so thorough? Are you in contact with the developer or publisher to ensure you have everything covered?
CL: This varies a lot too. If the game's out in Japan, we may be able to refer to Japanese strategy guides or at least Japanese fan-made strategy wikis. If it's not, we try to get design documents from the developers, which works out sometimes but are harder to get than you'd think. It's really surprising how often developers don't even have basic data like an updated list of all the items or enemies they put into their game! (Or at least, that's what they tell us.) When worst comes to worst, we just have to throw a bunch of guys at the project, desperately scouring the game for data.
The Warning! A Huge Podcast logo, created by Hori-Pooh and Nick Rox, featuring Casey Loe in the center.
NWR: What do you feel is the difference between your work and the guides that appear on sites like GameFAQs?
CL: There are a lot of advantages to a printed strategy guide. It's out there with complete information on the day the game ships, it has photographs and maps and illustrations in addition to text, and in most cases the content has been reviewed by the developer to make sure it's accurate. And to me, there's a big difference between flipping through a book on your lap as you play a game and doing keyword searches on a FAQ on your laptop—but I might just be old-fashioned that way.
NWR: An interesting term I heard to describe the guides you've written is "conversational." Is this important to you, having a less rigid set of instructions?
CL: That's very important to me. I don't want to be some jerk telling the reader what to do, I want to be their friend on the sofa who's already played through the game and is happy to have someone to share the experience with. That means explaining to the player what their options are, giving my personal opinions about those options, getting a little excited when they get a new item or ability that's legitimately useful, and commiserating with them when the game gets difficult or annoying. (And of course, trying to avoid spoilers.) I hate it when guides are written in an emotionless and authoritarian voice. Why would anyone want to share their leisure time with someone like that?
NWR: Are there any genres you would flat out refuse to write? Any examples of games you've turned down?
CL: I usually turn down books that are focused on competitive multiplayer, since I don't enjoy that type of game and don't think I understand what that audience wants to hear. If I could, I'd turn down all the multiplayer-focused games, since the logistics of getting a large group together to play it regularly are daunting, and the writer always ends up looking like an idiot when the developer rebalances the game while the book is at the printer. But since no one else wants to do those books either, sometimes we all have to take one for the team.
NWR: What has been the easiest and hardest guide to write?
CL: Pokémon books claim both these prizes, I think. Major Pokémon releases are excruciatingly difficult to do, even when all the information is already out there in Japan, because the games are designed for hundreds of hours of play, and there are two versions of each game, and they're full of extremely random events. Wasting an entire day running back and forth through grass to find a Pokémon who may or may not appear 1% of the time feels absolutely awful. Everything Pokémon related also goes through an extremely stringent licensor review process that can be infuriating. I still have a page from the first Nintendo Power Pokémon book I wrote displayed on my refrigerator that is so covered in editor corrections and licensor-mandated cuts that it looks like a redacted CIA document.
But once you get through that first Pokémon book, there's the more detailed Pokédex (which the licensor doesn't allow publishers to release until a few months after the game's release), the Colosseum spin-offs, the third game in the generation that changes almost nothing... Those are so easy to write that they almost make the first games worth doing.
NWR: Based on your work on Pokémon games, is it required of you to 'catch 'em all' for the sake of the guide?
CL: Yeah, usually someone on the team has to. Fortunately, at Versus Books I was able to rely on production assistants who have no other duties but to play the game constantly, and when I did books for Nintendo Power we had access to game testers who had already 100%-ed the game for other reasons.
NWR: Your guides have tended to be of the "unofficial" variety (i.e. not published directly by Nintendo, Square Enix, etc.). What are the benefits and drawbacks of these types of guides versus the official ones?
CL: You might be confusing two issues here... I haven't done an unofficial guide in over 15 years (and neither has anyone else, as far as I'm aware). Virtually all strategy guides on the market are official now—the guide publisher pays the game publisher a royalty to use their name and logo, and in most cases the game publisher provides access to the game and reviews the book's content. When Versus Books got started, we'd write unofficial books based on the import or arcade versions of a game, and then make up a fake logo, hire someone to draw cover art that was evocative of the game but not from the game, and sell it out without permission from anyone. This was a legal gray area, and we did end up getting sued over the Final Fantasy VII book. I don't know if the legal issues regarding unofficial books were ever definitively settled, but it was a shaky way to do business, so I don't think any major publisher does unofficial books these days.
If by "unofficial" you just mean not published directly by the game publisher, I think Nintendo was the only company who ever actually published their own strategy guides. (And they stopped when they sold off Nintendo Power—putting me out of a job, as I was doing a lot of their books at that time). Working at the company that's making the game is great because you get better access to the game and assets, but not so great because you have to follow very strict rules and a very rigorous review process.
NWR: What Nintendo Power guides have you written?
CL: I did Metroid Prime Hunters, New Super Mario Bros., Final Fantasy IV Advance, and a ton of Pokémon books that all blur together.
NWR:What are the differences between writing a Nintendo Power guide compared to Versus?
CL: Versus Books, especially at the beginning, was me working at home in a bathrobe at 2 am, doing everything from writing to shot-grabbing to layout myself, and doing pretty much whatever I wanted with the projects. Working at Nintendo Power involved me putting on pants (the horror), commuting an office from 9 to 5, working with a team of professional designers and editors, and having to get everything approved by multiple layers of Nintendo bureaucracy. It was a very different world.
NWR: Where do you feel the strategy guide market stands now? Can it compete against online resources? Where should it go to remain a viable product?
CL: There's no doubt that the growth of online resources have done heavy damage to the strategy guide industry. Only the top tier of games get strategy guides now, and only one guide per game—not like the olden days when four companies could do a Dino Crisis guide and all make money at it. We've forever lost the segment of consumers who used to habitually buy a book with their game just in case they got stuck, or just for the little section of secrets in the back. We'll never get them back—if you're looking for a few specific pieces of information, there's no way a $20 book can compete with a free Google search. Now, there are still plenty of people who want to use a book more actively as they play, and I think we're still doing well with that audience; I don't know of any advertising-supported online sources that are putting thousands of dollars into each game to make maps and take high-res images and hire multiple professional writers to spend months writing their content.
I think the only way to grow the industry is to tap into a new market of people who are looking for a companion piece to a game that meant a lot to them, and I think we can appeal to this audience with features like concept art galleries, better design, developer interviews, that sort of thing. The recent rise in hardcover collector's editions is the industry's attempt to win over these people, and some of these books really are great. But others aren't—when sales are declining, it's hard for publishers to justify raising their budgets in order to do better quality work, but I think that's what needs to happen.
Topic: Strategic Writing: An Interview with Casey Loe on the Life and Times of Strategy Guides (Read 2096 times)
