What Strategy Guides Does Terranigma Have?

Terranigma's guide story is three different publishing cultures around one cartridge. In Japan, Enix supported Tenchi Sōzō the full Enix way: an official guide book and a separate world atlas, part of the merchandise line documented on the books page. In Europe, Nintendo folded the guide into the product itself: the German and French editions shipped in oversized big boxes containing an extensive player's guide written by Nintendo of Europe's Club Nintendo editorial staff, the same treatment given to the era's other big PAL role-playing releases.

The German guide, the Spieleberater, was thorough enough to draw a complaint from a reviewer: Mega Fun's Rene Schneider praised the game and criticized its strategy guide for revealing so many puzzles that it lowered the fun. A guide that spoils its own game is a period artifact in itself: it assumes a player who bought the box for the book as much as for the cartridge.

North America, which got no game, got no guide and almost no coverage. The contrast with the game's brothers is the sharpest way to see what was lost. Soul Blazer was covered by Nintendo Power in volume 40 (September 1992), seven pages plus a Now Playing review scoring it 3.875 out of 5. Illusion of Gaia, which Nintendo published itself in America, got featured coverage, a bundled T-shirt, and catalog merchandise. Terranigma, finished in English but orphaned when Enix America closed, appeared in American print mainly as an import curiosity: GameFan previewed Tenchi Sōzō in its Japan Now column in July 1995 and interviewed Quintet in January 1997, writing about a game its readers could not buy.