(Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the January 2008 issue of GameCola, back when GameCola was published in a monthly online magazine format.)
Hello everyone, and welcome to Inside the Guide, an article where I discuss writing guides for videogames. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Michael Gray, also know as The Lost Gamer, one of GameFAQs’ most prolific writers.
Given that this is GameCola’s big January issue, I asked myself, “What kind of game should I write about?” The answer was simple. I would have to write about a really great game. A game that’s absolutely fantastic. A game that people call the best game ever. So I turned on my Wii, stuck in a disc, and started writing a guide for:
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
And you, lucky readers, are going to get an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at exactly how I did it. It’s very long, and I highly doubt that anyone will care to learn that I finished writing my section on beating the City in the Sky Dungeon on November 14th, but I’ll try to make a bunch of jokes to keep things interesting.
Oh, and I change tenses with some regularity in this article. Grammarians, try to avoid letting this throw you off.
Monday, October 15:
OK, time to start the project. I’ve beaten Twilight Princess once before, almost a year ago. Of course, I’ve forgotten a lot about the game since then, so I’m going to beat the game again to refamiliarize myself with it. Then I’ll officially start work on my guide.
But this doesn’t mean I can’t do some preliminary work on my guide. I have a general template for my guides, so I got started by fixing it up for Twilight Princess. I filled in the general information section, deleted the “Story” section (the plot in this game is too complicated to summarize quickly), and for the opening ASCII art, I used a generic sword that I have as the art for several other of my guides, such as Fire Emblem 2, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, CIMA: The Enemy, and Athena.
Then, I copy/pasted a list of characters from Wikipedia and used it to create a “Characters” section. I tried to rearrange the characters in the order you meet them (Wikipedia has them in alphabetical order).
Later on, I’ll add sections specific to this game, like a boss section, or a “find all the golden bugs section.”
Thursday, October 18:
Now that I’ve beaten a couple of dungeons in Twilight Princess, I remember the general plot of the game, which allows me to make appropriate sections. There’ll be a section for each dungeon, obviously, but since this game is so big, I’m going to add mini-sections, which I don’t normally do. Naturally, I’m going to have fun with this, and make up ridiculous titles for the mini-sections.
I also added a new section for Wii users. The Wii version is the same as the GameCube version, with one major difference. Link is left-handed in the GameCube version. He’s right-handed in the Wii version. The way Nintendo did this was by flipping the game horizontally. So “east” in the Wii version is “west” in the GameCube version. That’s important to know, so I made a quick section about it.
Also, I noticed that some people (primarily DEngel) put a PayPal link at the bottom of their guides, just in case someone wants to send them money. I like money, and if I finish this guide, it’ll be widely read. Therefore, I threw in a PayPal address right after the “visit GameCola” line in the general information section. Actually, since I’m going so mini-section happy in this guide, I divided the general information section into little mini-sections, one on contacting me for help, one for posting the guide on your Web site, one to promote GameCola, and one for PayPal. I think this works well.
Sunday, October 28:
My TV acted up, so I couldn’t play the game for a while. Fortunately, I just got it working again. I still haven’t beaten the game a second time, and I’m at the Snowpeak Temple Dungeon currently. Well, screw waiting until I beat the game again before writing the guide, I say. So now I’ve started writing the guide, detailing what to do in the second part of the dungeon (this dungeon is split into three parts), room by room.
Things were going fine until I reached the third room and got stuck. I figured out what to do without having to look at any online guides, but I decided to set off the information for each room separately, to help casual readers who only need help with one particular room. The downside to this, of course, is that I have to make up stupid names for the rooms like “Thin Western Room” so people will know which room I’m talking about.
Now I’ve reached the point in the game where Link, because this is a videogame, can’t get a cannon ball through a door. I realize the game is set up this way just to make the puzzles harder, but come on. He can’t figure out how to get a cannon ball through a door? A five-year-old could figure that out! So I pointed this out in my guide and called Link a moron, just to make things more interesting. I always like guides with jokes better than guides with straightforward instructions like “Turn left. Go forward. Go down the second pipe.” Boring!
Anyway, dang! Writing this section of the guide took much longer than I thought it would (as in, it took over an hour). I mean, all I did was write how to get past the second third of this dungeon, and I know that the next third of the dungeon is much longer and tougher. If I don’t pick up the pace, this guide is never going to get done.
Monday, October 29:
I have a feeling that this article is going to be really, really boring. The only news I have to say is that I reformatted the section divisions in my guide to conform to the fact that this dungeon is separated into three parts. Then I wrote for a while on how to beat the third part of the dungeon, stopping my work after the challenging “push the three blocks into the right place” puzzle. This puzzle was really hard to beat and just as hard to describe how to beat, because the blocks all look the same and there’s no distinct frame of reference. I’m not sure I did a perfect job of explaining how to beat the puzzle; I’ll have to look at some other people’s guides to see how they did it.
I checked the other guides, and they suck at explaining it just as much as I do, except for one that poses an arbitrary frame of reference. That actually works, kinda, so I blatantly ripped that guy off and rewrote my guide so it does the exact same thing.
And then, in a blatant display of the fact that I have way too much free time, I finished the rest of the guide for the dungeon. That means most of one-seventh of the guide is completed. Yay!
Tuesday, October 29:
Crazy news today, folks! I was hanging out in my room, getting ready to turn on my Wii to play Twilight Princess and work some more on the guide when…rumble rumble…EARTHQUAKE!
That’s right—a freaking EARTHQUAKE occurred. A 5.6 earthquake, to be precise. The message here is clear: The gods do not want me to work on my guide tonight. Therefore, I am taking the night off. But don’t worry; I shall sacrifice two bulls to Zeus, an ox to Artemis, and a sheep to Prometheus, and, if the signs are good, I shall resume working on the guide later.
Sunday, November 4:
My TV has been acting weird again lately, so I got a new TV remote, and now I can finally play my Wii and work on this guide again. Yay! However, it seems unlikely that I’m going to finish this guide in time for the January deadline, seeing as all I’ve done is 2/3 of one dungeon. I should make a promise to work consistently on this guide to meet the deadline.
Michael’s Promise To Himself:
I will work on this guide for at least a half hour every single day, unless I don’t.
Great, that’s a promise I can keep! I started today, writing in two whole mini-sections, leading all the way up to the next dungeon, which sounds like more work than it actually is. But I threw in some jokes about Ocarina of Time here, so it’s all good.
Monday, November 5:
I have about an hour or two of free time right now. I guess I could spend it all moping about how I just asked a girl out on a date, and she rejected me. She didn’t actually say that she wouldn’t go out with me, though; she used the “I’m going to pretend you didn’t just ask me out and talk about something else” strategy.
The weird thing is that, as it turns out, she has a boyfriend. What the heck? Why didn’t she say that when I asked her out?
Note to any girls who might read this: If you have a legitimate reason for not going out with someone, tell the person that reason, instead of treating him like dirt by ignoring the fact he asked you out.
OK, now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, I can devote time to the guide. I like the idea of dividing the dungeons into different mini-sections, so I’m doing it again with the dungeon I’m on now, the Temple of Time. This dungeon is split into two sections: In the first section, you go up to the top floor, and in the second section, you go down to the bottom. Naturally, I named these sections “Bop to the Top” and “Getting Down and Funky.” I have to have fun somewhere in this guide.
Unfortunately, there’s not much room for fun, as this is a somewhat boring, straight-forward dungeon. The only time I get to have fun is when we reach the dungeon’s miniboss, the Iron Knuckle. Here, I had fun wondering about how the Iron Knuckle feels about being a miniboss, instead of a full-blown boss. Think about it. The guy spent his whole life training to be a boss. Not just a boss, but the ultimateboss. But, after all his hard work, he never gets to achieve his dream and ends up being a lowly miniboss. The poor guy.
It kinda double-sucks for the Iron Knuckle, because this dungeon’s boss is based off the old “take the weakest character in this part of the game, make it humongous, and call it a boss” formula. The Iron Knuckle is genuinely dangerous, but he only gets to be a miniboss, whereas the real boss is only dangerous because it’s big. That’s not fair to the Iron Knuckle, not fair at all. Don’t you agree?
Hmmm. Maybe there’s a reason that girl didn’t want to go out with me.
Tuesday, November 6:
I finished up the dungeon, which didn’t take too long, because the second half of the dungeon is easier than the first. Then I wrote all the way up to the next dungeon, in a section I called “Some Rather Boring Adventures” because this is a really BORING part of the game.
Why is it boring? Instead of doing something interesting, Link acts as a messenger boy, being sent back and forth between various places. Here’s a list of everywhere you have to go:
Go to Kakariko Village.
Go to Telma’s Bar.
Go to the Doctor.
Go to Telma’s Bar.
Go to South Hyrule Field.
Go to Kakariko Village.
Go to Hidden Village.
Go to Kakariko Village.
Go to Hidden Village.
Go to Kakariko Village.
Go to six different places, two in West Hyrule, two in East Hyrule, one in South Hyrule, and one in Gerudo Mesa.
Go to Kakariko Village.
I simplified things, obviously, but it’s still a long and boring part of the game. Actually, now that I think about it, Mark Freedman forgot something when he wrote about RPGs. Have you noticed that everyone likes to send the heroes on stupid little side-quests? It’s like, “You’re going to save the world? I don’t care. I want you to give this letter to my friend in another town. Now deliver that letter right away, loser!”
What the crap? Why aren’t any of these people grateful that you’re saving their lives? Why do they boss you around instead of doing their own work? And why is it always some stupid job like finding a missing cat that you get forced to do? Stupid RPGs.
Sunday, November 11:
Happy Veterans Day, everyone! I’d take the day off, but I broke my promise to work on the guide every day, and my punishment is to work on the guide during a national holiday.
Actually, it’s punishment enough just to have to work on this dungeon, the City in the Sky, which is a real toughie. What makes the dungeon tough is figuring out just what the hell you’re supposed to do, and I’m not going to lie, I had to use someone else’s guide to figure that out.
Anyway, I worked on the guide for forty minutes or so, but since this dungeon is so hard, there’s a LOT left to do. I’m not looking forward to doing it….
Monday, November 12:
I had some free time to work on the guide for an hour, so I did so. It was boring work, with a couple of rooms where it’s easy to figure out what to do (such as reach the door on the other side of the room), but very hard to describe it step-by-step. I stopped after reaching the miniboss, which is usually the halfway point of a dungeon. So it took over an hour and a half to get halfway through the dungeon. Great. This dungeon is even less fun than I predicted.
Monday, November 12 (continued):
I’m going to put in another half-hour on the guide before going to sleep. It was boring, and stupid. Now I’m going to sleep.
Tuesday, November 13:
I’m going to do another hour on the guide. To help relieve the boredom, I’ll do some minor formatting work in dividing this guide into sections. It’s not interesting, but at least it’s a break from this dungeon.
I ended up doing an hour and twenty minutes, and I reached the last third of the dungeon. Almost done! I think there’s only one more hard-to-get-through room before the boss fight.
Wednesday, November 14:
I have one of those really nasty “midterms that count for half of your final grade” tomorrow, but I so do not want to study for it, and besides, everyone in the class is an idiot, so the curve will put me ahead of all of them. So I decided to work on the guide instead of study.
After an hour, I made it all the way past the boss fight. YES! THIS CRAPPY DUNGEON IS NOW OVER! Now I get to play the game for fun for a while, before resuming work on the guide.
Thursday, November 15:
Good thing I didn’t study yesterday, because the midterm was easy. It took me twenty minutes, and it was supposed to be an hour-long midterm. Since I finished the midterm so early, I had free time to go back to my room and play all the way through the next dungeon, without touching the guide.
Now, I’m going to go back and go through the dungeon again, this time writing everything down in my guide. Hopefully it’ll make writing the guide a little smoother, seeing as I know what to do ahead of time.
Sunday, November 18:
I’m away from my Wii for the day, so I can’t play the game. Instead, I’m going to make some fancy “Golden Bugs,” “Heart Pieces,” “Equipment Upgrades” and “Poe Locations” sections, by copy/pasting the general information from other guides, and then fixing up the information to fit my standards.
(Gets attacked by a fit of laziness)
Actually, no, I’m not going to do that. I just made the sections headers, which is easer. I’ll finish the real sections later.
Tuesday, November 20:
Guess what? I’ve got the day relatively free, so I can have a massive guide-writing marathon and write a big chunk of the guide. That’s how I finished my “Prince of Persia” guides, so hopefully it’ll work here.
(Three hours later)
It didn’t work. Even though I knew what to do beforehand, it took me three hours to get through the dungeon, the second-to-last dungeon.
Just for the record, THIS is why I don’t normally write guides for 70+ hour games—it takes way too damn long to write guides for them, especially since it takes twice as long to write a guide for a game than it does to play a game.
Saturday, November 24:
Time to start work on the final dungeon. Dum de doo….
Hey, wow, this was surprisingly kind of easy. Well, not easy, but quicker than the other dungeons, as a lot of the dungeon here is completely optional. I skipped the optional stuff, leading straight to the final boss fight.
Now that I’ve beaten the game a second time, I just…I dunno. It’s a good game, but there’s no real sense of satisfaction in beating the game. I’m not sure why. Maybe because there aren’t any characters who are actually involved in the plot. Instead, the characters involved in the ending of the game are Ganondorf (who we have not seen before) and Zelda (who we have seen a grand total of twice).
Hey, I just thought of something. How the HELL does Zelda know who Link is during the ending of the game? She’s only seen him twice, and both times, Link was in Wolf Form. What the heck was Zelda doing the whole game, anyway? Hiding away in a tower in the castle? Why didn’t she use her magic powers to, I dunno, try to help save the world, instead of letting Link do all the work? Stupid Zelda.
Sunday, November 25:
I went back and re-did the stuff that I skipped in the last dungeon. As I thought, it’s totally optional, and it contains some tough puzzles, with rather useless rewards. Accordingly, I kept it out of the guide.
Now it’s time to go back and write how to beat the first half of the game, which should be slightly easier. But since I already spent my daily half-hour’s work playing the game…I’ll do it tomorrow.
Tuesday, November 28:
Time to start things over, and write how to beat the first half of the game. The opening part of this game contains a three-day introductory period, so for fun, I named them after the three days in Majora’s Mask. I’m cool like that.
Now that I’m replaying the game, it’s kind of obvious to me that the opening section of the game contains some absolutely useless information, such as how to jump over fences while riding your horse, and how to use a hawk to fetch items. All that information is leftover from an earlier version of the game (because Nintendo finished this part of the game first). In the rest of the game, all this stuff was left out, but for some reason, Nintendo didn’t go back and cut it out of the opening sequence, too. Weird.
So, naturally, I made jokes about how you’ll only use the information you learn here once, and that’s it. Stupid game, making a point of teaching the players how to do things you only need to do once.
Thursday, November 29:
Did more work on the guide today, and got to the end of the first three days. Whoopie.
Friday, November 30:
I wasn’t planning on working on the guide, but I’ve got a lot of time to kill now, thanks to the new, super-fast Comcast High-Speed Internet. Let me explain about this. I’m working with a somewhat large file (200 MB) on the Comcast.net server. Now, my Comcast Internet connection says it’s working at a speed of 100 MB a second. So that means it should take about two seconds to work with the file, right?
Wrong. Comcast wants a LOT more than two seconds to work with the file. As in, over five hours. Here’s a chart that easily explains the discrepancy between how fast my Comcast should go (according to Comcast), and how fast it does go:
Michael’s Comcast High-Speed Internet
Projected Speed Actual Speed
100 Mb/s 50 Kb/s
Stupid Comcast. Anyway, this means I have a LOT of free time to waste while waiting for my file to finish, so I spent some of it working on the guide.
Anyway, I got to a kinda cool part of the game: the first time where you meet Zelda. In retrospect, it’s not too cool, because you only meet her twice in the entire game, and both times, you’re too busy trying to figure out what the hell is going on in the game’s storyline to enjoy meeting Zelda.
Why is this, I wonder? Zelda’s the title character of this game (one of them, anyway), and you hardly ever see her. Why? Is Nintendo worried they’ll make fans angry if they put too much of Zelda in the game?
Saturday, December 1:
Did more work on the guide, and named one section “You Have Now Entered…The Twilight Zone” as a joke on the old Twilight Zone TV show that I only saw one episode of, and I named another section “Til Kitten’s Out of Jail,” which is a lyric from They Might Be Giants’ song “Out of Jail.”
Sunday, December 2:
Worked on the guide all the way up to the first dungeon. Nothing very interesting happened.
Monday, December 3:
To prepare for this dungeon, I watched a speed-run version of it. That way I knew exactly what to do ahead of time, which helped a lot. At least, the “knowing what to do ahead of time” worked better here than when I tried it on November 20th.
Either way, it still took me over an hour to reach the dungeon’s miniboss fight, which is pretty long considering this is the first dungeon of the game. Needless to say, I’m not going to try to use speed runs to help me write this guide ever again.
Thursday, December 13:
I took a break from this guide, and wrote a guide for “The Adventures of Willy Beamish.” Now that I’m done with that, I’m back to working on this monster of a guide, which has reached over 80 pages already. Wow, and there are still three-and-a-half dungeons to go!
Saturday, December 15:
Whoops! It turns out I just made a minor screw-up in the last dungeon. I forgot to get one of the two pieces of heart in the dungeon. Oddly enough, it is absolutely impossible to go back and get the heart piece now that I’ve beaten the dungeon. I’ll have to wait until Link gets the Clawshot two dungeons from now.
This was an odd update to my guide, because I don’t have access to the game right now (someone else is using the TV), so I did it all by memory. Good thing I played ahead a little bit last time I had the game. Now I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to see if my memory of what to do is any good.
Actually, wait, scratch that. The person using the TV just left the house. Now I have the TV, and I can write some more of the guide. Dum dee doo….
Hey, it turns out I’m rather accurate! Not too many mistakes! Cool. Anyway, I continued the guide until I reached the point where you open the Death Mountain portal, then I went back to my room to take a break (and recharge my computer’s batteries).
Monday, December 17:
I’ve reached another one of the really boring sections of the game where you have to go back and forth between areas as a messenger boy.
So to relieve the monotony, I put in instructions on how to get an optional heart piece here. But then I checked someone else’s guide, and…WOAH! There are six golden bugs and three heart pieces you can get, all of which I somehow overlooked. Whoops!
So I copy/pasted the various instructions on how to get the things, and made a small “Collection Quest” section, which tells you how to collect all those various items. Also, I saved a copy of this other person’s guide so I can make a “Collection Quest” at the start of every section, which lists all the heart pieces/golden bugs/poes that you can get. I was going to do this later on, but there’s no reason not to do it now.
Thursday, December 20:
I didn’t do much work on the guide today, because I had a girl over at the house. That’s right—an actual human girl came to my house! Who said that the people who write videogame guides have no social lives?
Anyway, all I did was rewrite the “collection quest” section. You didn’t expect me to keep the instructions copy/pasted from other guides in there, did you?
Friday, December 21:
I only did about five minutes of work on the guide, because I went to go see Army of Darkness at the movie theater tonight. In case you don’t know, that’s an awesome horror/comedy flick that came out in 1993, but for some reason, they were showing it at the local theater in 2007. I dressed up in all black to see the movie, because I knew the goths would come out in droves.
Now, I know some people think goths are freaky, but I think they’re great, so I had a really good time, and so did everyone else. Army of Darkness rocks the house.
Saturday, December 22:
For the first time in what feels like a long while, I did a big chunk of work on the guide because I got enough free time. I got all the way to and through the second dungeon, which is incredibly linear. All right! Two more dungeons left!
Coincidentally, I found out the best way to use online videos to help me write the guide. If you’ve read through this entire page, you know that I’ve tried to use speed runs to help me with writing the guide, to no avail. But while searching for screenshots of the game, I came across a bunch of files uploaded by TSA (from TheHylia.com), which constitute a video guide for the entire game. Now I don’t even have to play the game to write the guide; I can just watch the video and describe what happens in it!
Of course, I actually played the game while writing my guide, and resorted to using the video to write the guide once someone else took over the TV. Once they were done, I double-checked what I wrote was accurate, and in a few cases, I had to rewrite stuff. So writing a guide completely based off of someone else’s video is not 100% accurate, but it’s much better than nothing, especially when I want to write the guide but can’t use the TV.
Sunday, December 23:
I did a lot of work on the guide, all of it incredibly boring stuff. What I did was (finally) start the pieces of heart/equipment/golden bugs/howling stones sections, listing all the things you can get in the order you can get them. This involved a lot of copy/pasting instructions from earlier in my guide, and then editing them to fit nice and neat.
This took a long, long time, and it bored me out of my mind.
Afterwards, I did more filler work, by watching the video guide and writing general instructions on how to get through the next few parts of the game, when you do the twilight section of Lake Hylia. I don’t like how TSA did it in his video guide, so I’m going to rewrite pretty much everything. At least I’ll finally get to play the game again. Fun!
Wednesday, December 26:
Christmas was a load of fun, but I really need to step it up if I want to finish this guide before GameCola’s January 4th deadline. Personally, I’d rather play my new copy of Super Mario Galaxy that I got for Christmas, but duty calls.
So I spent extra-long on the guide today, working from 12:00 a.m. to 2:00 a.m. (the only time when my family members do not object to me using the TV) and getting all the way to the point where you get the Zora Armor. I know two hours is kind of long, but keep in mind I covered the entire in-between dungeons section that rests between dungeons two and three.
Thursday, December 27:
Before starting the third dungeon, there’s a window of opportunity where you can collect various items. So I copy/pasted instructions on how to get the various available items, and now I have to waste a lot of time wandering around and verifying/re-writing the instructions the other guides gave.
Friday, December 28:
Kept wasting my time wandering around and getting items. It’s important to do this so I don’t end up making any goofs in these sections. I’ve already made three goofs when it comes to listing the heart pieces in chronological order. Hopefully, I won’t make any more.
I skipped getting a few of the heart pieces in my game, while explaining how to get them in my guide. That way, I can hurry up and start the third dungeon, which is the Water Dungeon, so you know it’s going to be hard to beat.
Sunday, December 30:
I just noticed that I haven’t made many jokes in the last five or so entries of this journal. Let me rectify the situation:
Q: What’s the difference between an octorok and an onion?
A: Link doesn’t cry when he cuts up an octorok.
Wa ha ha! With that joke to lighten the mood, let me say that I made it all the way through Lakebed Temple in one go! It turns out that it’s incredibly easy to beat when you know what you’re supposed to do ahead of time. Thank goodness! Now that means there’s only one dungeon left!
Q: How many dungeons does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: Arbiter’s Grounds, because it comes with the Spinner.
Woah, that joke sucked. Sorry, but I wrote down the joke question before I realized I didn’t have a joke answer, and I had to make one up off the top of my head. Dang!
Monday, December 31:
Did a lot more work on the guide—it’s amazing how much I can do based off the video walkthrough, considering that the video walkthrough skips things with great consistency. So I wrote a lot on the guide, then I played the game to double-check that what I wrote was totally accurate.
It mostly was because, duh, I wrote it. And now it’s 2008. Only three more days until the January 4th deadline to finish the guide and this article! Can I make it in time? Well, since you’re reading this article on GameCola, the answer is obviously “yes,” but pretend it’s not to add some dramatic suspense to my quest to finish this guide in time! Only one more dungeon, and endless collection quests to go!
Tuesday, January 1:
So today I checked to see my guide is currently 172 pages long. Damn! Maybe I’ll beat 200 by the time I’m finished!
I worked on the collection quests, which turned out to be slightly easier than the last few times. As there are fewer and fewer items to collect, writing out all the available items gets easier and easier. I worked ahead quite a bit, and verified my instructions for everything that’s possible to get before you enter Gerudo Mesa.
I started the Poe Souls section. With the pieces of heart, I listed them semi-randomly, but with the Poe Souls, I grouped them by location, and put the locations in the order you first visit them. I really shoulddo that with the pieces of heart sections…but that’d be a lot of work. Instead of working, I just put a little “these are listed in no particular order” disclaimer on my Piece of Heart section.
Wednesday, January 2:
My guide is so long that my computer kept overheating whenever I opened it in Word, due to all the spelling/grammar errors. The spelling errors are words like “Hyrule” or “Clawshot,” which Word doesn’t recognize as real words, and the grammar errors are caused by splitting a ton of sentences in half, due to the 60 characters per line limit.
So I had to split my guide into two separate Word documents, one with the stuff I’m finished doing and one with the stuff I need to finish. That cut down on the number of errors, so my computer doesn’t overheat.
I wrote instructions for the rest of the dungeons, with the help of playing ahead and using the video walkthrough. Now the entire guide proper is finished. All that’s left is to finish off the annoying collection quest sections. BOO!
Thursday, January 3:
I finished writing up all the collection quests, but I didn’t verify all of my instructions for them because it’d take a few hours, and I want to get this done. DONE! DONE! I’m finally done with this stupid guide! It’s now available to read on IGN and GameFAQS, and now my work is DONE. Party time!
The final version clocked in at 192 pages and 76,668 words. Holy cow. I don’t think I’ll attempt such a monstrously large project ever again. At least, if I do, I won’t do it with a deadline, so I won’t have to rush things so much at the end.
