Piggyback's Dragon Quest Guide Is Their Best Yet

Recently we haven't found ourselves with much of an excuse to play on our Playstation 2, apart from the likes of Buzz and Singstar. These however, only appear when we are honored with guests and feel the need to challenge their minds or punish them with our singing.

So when we noticed Piggyback were bringing out a guide for Dragon Quest: The Journey of the Cursed King, we realised a few things. If they're doing the guide for it then it must be worth a go, and if it's 238 pages long like the press release states - then it must be a massive title!


Piggyback don't make just any guide for any game, and they're not any normal type of strategy guide. Looking at their past portfolio of guides you'll find the Metal Gear and more recent of the Final Fanstasy series, as well as the Gran Turismo's and Wind Waker. It's likely that if you've played one of these games you will probably have picked up one of these guides. If so you'll remember that they're wonderfully finished and contain the best information and the prettiest of colours. Aaaah.

We love them! In fact we have probably everything they've done! This newest addition just shows that they haven't let up over the years.


You can begin by throwing out the manual the came with the game, you don't need that rubbish! The guide tells you in detail how you need to get prepared with detailed control information and some early hints and tips for getting around the game. Then you can get tons of info on the characters you'll be controlling - they've all got their good and bad points, and to be honest there's some stuff here that we didn't even realise we could do within the game.

The good thing is that you don't have to flick through the walkthrough to find information about a specific weapon or item and where it's location is. This is separated into a table, you can easily find out what the point of the item is, who to use it against, how much it's worth etc. They've done the same with the monster's guide, each monster is pictured with full detail about it's HP, EXP and even a little info of how it may act in-game.


As for the walkthrough itself, this weighs in just under a hundred pages - half of the entire book. We've tried not to use it as much as we can, but it's hard not to when trying to play so many games in such little time!

We first used it around the Waterfall Cave section as we had a special moment and couldn't figure out what we were doing, and arriving at the boss we decided to use the guide to help us best him quickly.


We haven't yet finished the game because it is huge and while the guide is helping us get through it quicker - THE GAME IS HUGE! Kudos to Square for making another great RPG.

The guide is beautifully presented in full colour and you can tell the guys spent over half a year putting this thing together, it's just incredible. In the days where you have freedom of this sort of information at Gamefaq's you wonder why you need to buy a guide, but here is your reason. You have all the information at your fingertips and you knows its accurate. The walkthrough's are clear and illustrated, and if you need to know the strengths and weaknesses of that sword, or that creature - it's all there, indexed.

So in a nutshell, we're once again in love with the wonderful guys at Piggyback. Their commitment and attention to detail shines through in this guide yet again, and we're sure it's a bargain at £12.99, especially in the days when Prima throw out their guides at the same price. Amazon.co.uk are selling the guide for £8.97! Woo!

If you are still thinking to yourselves why bother getting this over using a free option like a guide on the Internet, well check out the free 13 page sample at Piggyback's website.

If you've got Dragon Quest you NEED this. If you haven't got Dragon Quest yet - why are you waiting? Don't tell us you bought the Fifa World Cup game...