Which Japanese Tales guidebooks have no English equal?

Japanese Tales publishing runs on a simple rule: every release gets its book. Enterbrain's Famitsu line, Shueisha's V Jump Books and Bandai Namco's own official guides covered mothership titles, ports and remakes alike, with full walkthroughs, complete skit lists with trigger conditions, enemy and item data, and interviews with the designers and composers. A major release often received more than one, a fast strategy book at launch and a perfect guide after.

The books that matter most are the ones with no possible English counterpart. The Destiny remake and Director's Cut guides document a game never localized. The Vesperia PlayStation 3 guides document Patty, the full-party Flynn and a hundred scenes the West waited a decade to play. Rebirth, Destiny 2 and Innocence guides are the only official printed records of mothership titles that never crossed the Pacific at all.

Even where English guides exist, the Japanese books run deeper. The BradyGames volume for a game covers the Western version; the Japanese perfect guide for the same game covers the Japanese version, which, as the version pages in this section show, is frequently a different and larger game. Skit documentation is the sharpest example: the trigger conditions for hundreds of optional scenes are printed in full in Japanese guides and nowhere in English.

For a collector of this series, the guidebooks are not accessories to the games. They are the archive of the complete series, the one Japan got, and they are why a Tales shelf that stops at the discs is missing half the story.