Dark Souls III Collector's Edition: Prima Official Game Guide

Im giving five only because the other reviewers have gone off the deep end on these one and two star reviews. These children have been pampered by future press - although it is true that they make the best guides.The DS3 does not equal the quality and production values of the future press guides. However I am ectastic to have this guide for such an affordable price. It has everything you need to beat the game, get all endings, all items, spells and equipment, and npc questlines. The strats are decent enough but could be improved. There is tons of useful information for real souls players, i.e. not these pitiable reviewers. I have 142 hours in my first playthrough because with the guide I could keep exploring and collecting items and finding new things to do. These pillow biter reviewers are just giving one/two stars to anything that's not the absolute best. They have no real objective reason to give this book fewer than 3 stars.

Wow, what a bunch of negative reviews here. Get over it people! Bandai Namco chose to utilize Prima for it's strategy guide publisher. Live with it!Don't give credence to all these negative, useless reviews. Yes, I am a Dark Souls fan, but listen up! With future patches, improvements, etc., a lot of content in the game will change. Some important changes have already been made with new patches.And besides that fact, if you wanna get your hand held from the first frame to the last bit of the game, then you lose MOST of the fun; lose most of the learning, exploring possibilities in this fantastic game!Putting all this aside, this strategy guide is well put together, with endless color illustrations, photos and charts, etc. The pages are of a good quality and the binding is great, keeping the edition secure and intact. (one review here said that pages fall out of the book but that is a COMPLETE lie).The volume also matches PERFECTLY with the other volumes on the series. Anyone can see that. Prima did a great job in matching up the cover and hard cover texture with previous hardcover editions. Yes, I have the Dark Souls II from Future Press as well.The pages are NOT warped. This misconception is from the actual printing of the COLOR photos and illustrations throughout the book on good quality paper (not extra heavy paper). What are the Prima haters expecting? Card stock thickness pages? In that case, the book would weigh well over 15 pounds for its 400 pages!! That cost is also passed on to the customer, so keep that in mind,If you're expecting to have your hand-holding experience with this guide, you won't get that. What you do get is a well organized, well written guide with enough information and illustrations to help you get through the game. After all, I bought the game to ENJOY it, not solve it in one day! This is a "reference" book, purely for what it is intended to be.Oh... as an added bonus, this volume III edition includes a custom Journal with the matching hardcover texture as well. This journal book quality is excellent, too, by the way. Very nice! Something we did NOT get with the collector's editions of Dark Souls II from Future Press. Oh, my!True, this isn't a Future Press product, but get over it already! Take up your beef with Bandai Namco, the publisher of the game WHO chose to use Prima.

One of my favorite parts about From Software games are the accompanying hardback guides that are always polished, with detailed maps and strategies. Up to this point I've purchased four hardback guides for From Software games: Dark Souls, Dark Souls 2, Bloodborne, and Bloodborne The Old Hunters. Unfortunately, I did not notice until it was too late that the DS3 would have a different publisher. Prima has really dropped the ball with this one, the guide seems like it was rushed out the door with little to no editing. I'll just list some of the things I've noticed so far after only looking at it for maybe 20 minutes:1. The pages are warped and thin, it seriously feels like they may fall out if the guide is opened to a page too many times.2. There are markings on the sides of the pages indicating which chapter of the guide you are currently in. This also reveals that Prima apparently forgot to include three chapters??? There is no chapter 1, 2, or 10 to be found.3. The maps have NO enemy locations. Zero. When Future Press was making the guides they had a really nice system for marking where weak and strong enemies appeared on their maps, but there is no such demarcation to be found on the Prima maps.4. For each area there is a sort of "complete" map that shows the entire area's map. This map does have item locations on it. However, when breaking down the area section by section the "section" maps have no item locations, forcing you to return to multiple pages before where you are (a clear issue when the book already feels ready to fall apart).5. The "complete" maps of each area have a bizarre and complex system of symbols used to show locations of various things in the area, but the symbols are small and look similar to one another.6. The way the text and pictures are organized is just... ugly. Some pictures are split across the binding, some are stretched to be a full page (despite clearly not being taken at a high enough resolution to make it look nice blown up). The text is cluttered and every other word is bolded to indicate something important in the section... but how about just make the maps more complete instead of making the text a mess to navigate?Overally, I honestly cannot believe this made it out the door, there are just so many issues and it is clearly incomplete (how do you just forget three chapters?) Considering the price I just can't see any reason to get this guide, you can find all the important information online in the wikis anyway. The whole reason these guides are nice to get is that they are usually nice QUALITY and have detailed, thought out maps. This cannot be said for this guide. Seriously, buy at your own risk.