behold an excuse for me to buy three games twice this is a bit of a strange Trend Nintendo did uh around the first year or so of the Nintendo switch's lifespan uh these are uh what many would deem starter packs for Nintendo switch games so these three right here are the Heavy Hitters of the first year of the Nintendo switch of course we have breath of the wild then Splatoon 2 and finally Mario Odyssey but of course the first thing I thought about when I played Super Mario Odyssey is I don't know where to start thus Nintendo put out these re-released versions of the game including strategy guides in these uh slightly larger cardboard boxes but strangely uh this wasn't the first time they did this for these two games in particular it's around the holiday season of 2017 Nintendo put out like the Explorer Edition of breath of the wild which included this exact guide and a full-blown map then a couple months later in early 2018 I believe on the same day as Kirby star allies a Nintendo put out a Splatoon 2 starter Edition with this strategy guide and a pack of stickers and then in the fall of 2018 they re-released the needs to without the map without the stickers and put out a Mario Odyssey starter pack with a traveler's guide each time they did an addition like this it would cost 60 dollars so you know why not it's not like these guys cost any extra money but they actively took away you know an element up in in the re-releases you don't get the stickers and you don't get the map with uh with this version and it costs the same exact amount of money I mean it's whatever did they even need to include the guides to begin with no well at that point what's the point of these additions anyways these are just kind of strange oddities at this point and they're kind of hard to find online there's only a couple of listings I could uh I could get my hands on and even then they're getting up there in price are they worth it now oh God no especially the Mario Odyssey guide I got a bone to pick with this one it's pretty Bare Bones so it's just a basic cardboard container we get the Mario Odyssey Travelers guide and a copy of game and an interesting aspect of the copies of the games included in these bundles is that uh they're they're different designs box art wise a couple of Nintendo switch games that uh come inside larger cardboard boxes have this where uh the actual game case doesn't have the SRB logo it doesn't have a standard back and all that it's a unique design which is pretty interesting though it always bugs me because you know like like why what's the point of this like come on just makes me feel weird when I pull this game off the shelf and it doesn't have an ESRB logo like it looks naked in the back of the box is like no text I mean sure that's fine more room for beautiful art I guess but uh honestly speaking I I feel like uh the marketing riddled back of the standard box uh it just looks a little more appealing than just basic promotional shot of uh Bowser's airship in the game but the inside uh is pretty much the same as per usual with Mario Odyssey the main star of the show here is the Traveler's guide now I feel you're about to say wow look at how thick that is that's a pudding thick guide if I've ever seen one it actually ends around um here it honestly ends pretty abruptly too I mean look at this you have the snow Kingdom and then uh French I guess they wanted to avoid spoilers but there's no actual like end to this guide it just kind of just kind of stops there which is uh pretty pretty weird if I'm being honest and the actual guide itself it's fine it's it's well laid out and everything uh the little little elements like this just kind of confuse me it's just pretty roughly low resolution photoshopped out uh models of Mario here which is weird for like an official Nintendo guide in the year 2018 when this released it's fine it does the job sometimes again help a low resolution artwork but uh still a little weird because that's kind of the only place where the artwork is a pretty low res I think this would have been a lot cooler if they uh really leaned into the brochure style of Mario Odyssey how uh in the game when you pause and enter the map screen of any Kingdom it just kind of looks like a travel brochure and this has some elements like it kind of looks like like a travel brochure but I think it just would have been cool if they leaned a little more into that because this is uh you know like when we get into the actual Kingdom stuff here uh it's it's a little more of a basic layout rather than like oh man this is a this is a hell of a brochure a deep wood secret so this is like talking about how in the wooded Kingdom and Mario Odyssey when you kind of go down deep into like the uh the darker areas of uh of the wooded Kingdom uh you know you you can get that through the whole underground of it uh but but the picture they show here like I I can't see anything it's pitch black what are they trying to show here I mean this isn't bad I'll gladly take this as a little freebie and that's what it was you know it didn't cost any more than the standard copy of Mario Odyssey uh but it just feels a little basic especially How It Ends so abruptly and it's literally only like 40 pages this was obviously done just to kind of give uh Mario odyss platoon into and breath of the wild kind of a bit more life on store shelves uh like oh a shiny new edition of the game that way Nintendo could put out another press release uh the games would appear in like the store catalogs or on the brand new release shelf or just the fact that uh there's a bigger box on the Shelf so then like oh man look at that it catches your eye a little more but Mario Odyssey never had that before Zelda and Splatoon had releases like this and these are kind of a slimmed Down versions of that I don't actually have the breath of the wild explorers Edition and Splatoon 2's starter guide and honestly from what I can tell the Explorers Edition is even harder to find it's really damn hard to find that online this one is still kind of hard to find but it's not nearly as hard as the version that comes with the map I'd honestly argue that the collector's edition of breath of the wild is easier to get than this uh it's gonna be more expensive but uh this one I just don't think a lot of people know about or really care about but here it is the breath of the wild explorers guide so this guide compared to Mario odyssey's is a lot more in depth as in uh they fill up the entire thing with content it's nearly 100 pages and none of it is other languages or anything like that uh but I will argue that the uh format of it is definitely not as interesting as Mario odyssey's looks pretty basic uh that's kind of a problem I have with breath of the wild and tears of the Kingdom's UI design in general it's very clean very easy to tell what things are but like man italicized aerial text and yeah the layout of this uh it's nice it works it does the job but it's just a little Bland when uh it's just kind of like this text throughout the whole thing uh it does the job but uh this is definitely more of a very light walkthrough of the game it doesn't really walk you through specifics other than the core concepts of the game it just kind of helps you uh you know set out and understand what all these things are what are these shrines what are core rocks all of that other than that it's a pretty basic guide that's just here to kind of get you started it even you know advertises the DLC pack here I would say Mario odyssey's is definitely a lot more fun to flip through uh the beginning of this guide is pretty cool we have like a slight history of Zelda here with just a much more interesting design and layout and then it goes into the breath of the wild stuff and it just kind of feels like a fifth grade level non-fiction book but then we have Splatoon 2 one that I have not opened yet this is an Immaculate condition uh I actually had to settle for playing breath of the wild and Mario Odyssey used uh which uh you know gur but Splatoon 2 baby I found this brand new you know what that means Clank somebody pops out the box cutter they're either they're opening up a Splatoon 2 starter pack or you should run or both there we go no going back now I almost forgot breath of the Wild's different case design without the SRB logo you just have a guardian here and then Splatoon twos uh we have this kind of cool little uh logo collage this little sticker-esque book looking thing which would have made a lot more sense if they included the sticker pack with this but I digress we have the splattergy guide this is my first experience with the Splatoon 2 splattergy guide and uh yeah this feels like it's probably the best put together of of all of the guides uh it's pretty it's pretty pretty embarrassing that I could tell uh that by just kind of giving it a skim I mean it was actually reading guides these days you kind of want to look through this uh for the design and just kind of skimming things here and there and uh one thing I've always really loved about Splatoon is that they always go all the way with making everything feel uh coherently Splatoon whether it's the graphic design the world the characters all of that whenever something is Splatoon themed it always looks Splatoon themed whereas with like the breath of the wild guide I mean yeah there there was some Zelda Insignia there uh the titles had a Zelda font and there is some uh borders that were you know Zelda themed but uh for the most part that could have been for anything yeah this is definitely really well put together really colorful really great uh this this really reminds me of some of the best manuals from back in the day which uh yeah this is kind of what this is this is kind of Nintendo uh making up for the fact that uh they never do manuals anymore because that's what this pretty much is and to some extent that's what the Zelda one is Mario odyssey's one uh instead of uh strategy guides this feels a little more like you know like pretty premium instruction manuals so yeah they would have been doing this regardless back during like the wee days and GameCube days uh but regardless this was kind of a cute cool little thing for them to do in uh 2017 and 2018. I don't think it made much of a difference in terms of sales considering that you know they they put these out and then that was pretty much it I didn't do it for any of the other Nintendo switch games but I think it was kind of a cool little tactic to get people interested in these games again even though these games are kind of the Evergreen titles of the switch lineup you know are you really gonna have no reason to play Mario Odyssey in 2020 2021 all that you know but keeping in mind how these cost the exact same price as the games by themselves this was kind of cool pretty unnecessary All Things Considered I mean like you don't need guides with these games at all I I think breath of the wild is probably the most like non-user friendly at the beginning even then it's pretty goddamn user friendly but hey I don't think people buy guides for the actual guides themselves it's kind of more so to flip through something and just see uh something that you appreciated and uh you really like explain to you in a certain way and hey you might even learn something about one of your favorite games with a guide but at that point sometimes I gotta ask like why not just do like art book or just like a map with breath of the wild instead of the guide you know I mean like they did that with the Explorer Edition they included both but I I would have assumed the map would be a lot more uh you know cheap to just include here you might also not even need the big ass box here you might have been able to fit that in the game case itself but I think saying that you're including a guide just holds a lot more value it just seems like oh wow that sounds useful and in terms of fitting something into the game case itself I think half of the reason for doing this is to have a bigger shelf presence with these cardboard boxes you know and at that point Why not pick these up they're only 60 bucks and you get something free with it even though these versions of the game are actively worse deals than when they release breath of the wild explorers Edition and Splatoon 2 starter Edition but hey if it wasn't for these cut down re-releases we might not have gotten the Mario Odyssey traveler's guide version oh thank God it cuts off at the snow Kingdom because it's it's just so cool I don't think I could have taken anymore