What is a Perfect Program Zelda guide?

Perfect Program is the name on a line of Japanese strategy books from Takahashi Shoten, published under its GAME BOOKS branding. The line covered the Nintendo 64 Zeldas, including an Ocarina of Time volume in February 1999 with a painted cover of Ganondorf on horseback.

Here is the distinction this Library insists on: Perfect Program books are third party publications. They are not Nintendo Official Guidebooks, and Takahashi Shoten is not one of the licensed guide publishers, Shogakukan, Enterbrain, Nintendo DREAM, Kadokawa and the rest, whose books make up this Library's verified guide census.

That is not a judgment on the books themselves. The Ganondorf painting on the Ocarina volume is a genuinely striking cover, and copies circulate among collectors who hunt Japanese Zelda paper. It is a judgment about categories: a census that mixes licensed and unlicensed books without marking them stops being a census.

So the Perfect Program volumes are documented on this page, admired as objects, and counted separately. When this Library says 109 verified Zelda guidebooks, the licensed rule is what keeps the number honest.