Ninja Gaiden: Prima's Official Strategy Guide [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

The guide does do a decent job of telling you where to go and what to do next, however, DO NOT rely on it to tell you where all the items are much less about the secrets. I have thus far counted more than a couple dozen items that they have missed all together, or chests that were missed/mis-labeled.

Some of these items being very very important to character advancement and thus survival during those tough battles. For example, there are two areas in the game where you will have a total of 60 fiends appear to fight you (no more than 4 enemies at a time). The guide labels the first area as having "endless fiends" and the second as having "numerous fiends". For both they suggest that you continue on your way. However, if you stick around and kill all 60 of them, in both areas it will spawn a chest that contains an item known as the "Lives of the Thousand Gods" (an item that permanently increases your life meter by quite a bit). So if you were to follow the guide, you would miss 2 of these, which is just not acceptable.

Also, their boss strategies, are really awful. About the only one that was decent was for the very first boss in the game, after that you would be better off not even reading their strategies for any of the other boss battles in the game, other than maybe to find out what kind of attacks a boss has (just don't depend on their description of how to dodge said attacks).

I'm not entirely sure that the people at Prima were playing the same game that I am, cause it certainly doesn't show.

Don't waste your money on this guide. Instead, go check out gamefaqs.com when you get stuck.

As far as I needed to go...
In the second level of this game, there are VERY FEW valuable items to be obtained. All of these I had previous knowledge of, yet I glanced to see what the strategy guide mention about them. Glancing soon turned into investigating, and I spent the better part of ten minutes reading fine print throughout the whole guide looking for any trail of knowledge of these items. My search turned up short of a single hint that I should take note of it with no mention as to how, when, where, or why I should obtain these items. This was as far as I needed to go to realize that my money had been completely wasted.

If this review can save a single person from buying this guide, then my time has been more than well spent writing this review. You would be better justified spending your money on a case of cheap beer and drinking away your sorrows of knowing that one of the sweetest games to ever hit XBox (or any console for the matter) has the weakest official strategy guide immaginable. Please save a tree and your sanity by avoiding this purchase.