Saturday, January 24, 2009

Note about Status of Rune Factory 2 Guides

I have my own methods of writing guides and they are not foolproof by any means. Originally, I wrote a single Comprehensive Guide for a game, but then began to write little 'mini-guides' for specific aspects of the game as well. I found the little 'mini-guides' very convenient when playing a game myself as they allow quick reference to specific information. I therefore usually create a Comprehensive Guide for any Harvest Moon game that contains information on EVERY aspect of the game, but create reference guides that deal specifically with Courtship and Marriage, Item Lists, Cooking and any other aspect of the game that would benefit from a quick reference guide. For HM DS and Cute DS, for example, I wrote the 101 Sprites Guide, giving the method by which every Sprite is rescued as well as the 60 Easiest Sprites to obtain in order to allow the player to marry. For both Rune Factory games, I created a 'Caves and Bestiary Guide' to enable players to access information about the dungeons and Monsters inhabiting them quickly.

The problem with this inevitably is that any corrections or updates must be made to more than one guide. In a game such as Rune Factory 2, the sheer volume of facts makes it difficult for me to edit my guides effectively while I remain engaged in the basic creation of them. At present, I still am adding new information to each of my Rune Factory Guides. I try to update the information in all guides, but sometimes miss a lacuna. Worse still, if I copy and paste any information from one guide to another, I am in danger of erasing an update from the guide that is overwritten. This in fact has occurred with respect to the Caves and Bestiary Guide for Rune Factory 2.

At present, if any player fails to find information in the Caves and Bestiary Guide, please refer to the General Guide... I am working now on the screen-by-screen walkthrough of all Caves/Dungeons in Rune Factory 2. In doing so, I am able to edit the guide properly to some extent. By Friday next, I hope to have the Caves and Bestiary Guide completed, with ALL information as to each screen in each Cave/Dungeon, all Inquisitive Waltz locations with a full list of items obtained from each, ALL Monsters on each screen and a complete list of the fish one can find at any fishing location on the screen.

My personal deadline both for Animal Crossing City Folk and Rune Factory 2 is the beginning of March as I will begin to work on the new Valkyrie Profile and Rune Factory Frontier then.

The truly vital information has been added to all my Rune Factory 2 guides but as a perfectionist at heart, it vexes me to find that I have neglected to add a Monster to a list, even when that Monster is not very different from others that were added and even when the War Trophy it drops is the same as that given by its 'cousins'.
I hope these omissions will be rectified by the end of this weekend.

I offer my apologies, therefore, to players for the incomplete and imperfect nature of ALL the Rune Factory 2 Guides at this point in time. In particular, there is a tremendous amount of information in my game journals that still needs to be added to the Courtship and Marriage, Characters and Request Guides. It is not 'vital' information but consists primarily of actual quotes by characters in response to gifts as well as the actual text of all Request Events.

I have to confess that I doubled the amount of work I do on these games and further confused my own memory banks when I began to make videos about various aspects. I often presume that information has been added to a guide when in fact I only made a video about the particular aspect of the game. Again, it will take time to go through all the guides to make certain that nothing has been neglected.

(It is not only the Guides for Rune Factory 2 that remain incomplete. I still need to work on the Island of Happiness Guides to add all the alternate heart events to the Courtship and Marriage Guide, inter alia.)

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi, Freya! Thanks for being a perfectionist. I haven't started to play RF2 yet, but I am glad you have put so much of your time on the guide and want to thank you. I have told you this before and I am telling you this now: you are awesome. Your love for the games and the help you give to everybody who needs it when playing them, these are truly amazing. Thank you for being such a wonderful person (and forgive my English, my first language is Portuguese).

Ravenshadow said...

I would just like to say that I love your guides and ever since I found them I have been happy with the detailed information that they contain.

Slip-ups happen, and I am sure that no one can fault you with the occasional one considering the amount of information that your guides contain.

Just a thought though... Have you ever considered adding an index to the top of the guides with quick reference tags to make the guides easier to look through, other than using the find/search method?

Anonymous said...

I would also like to show my appreciation for your blog and all your guides. RF2 is my first Harvest Moon game and I would have been so lost if I had not found your blog and your guides. Thank you for all the hard work and time you put into this, it does not go unnoticed. You rock!

Freyashawk said...

Thank you, Ana. Your support and understanding, as well as the fact that you bothered to post a comment, means a lot to me!

Freyashawk said...

Thank you, Allison and Chyrstal both.

Are you speaking of something other than a TOC, Allison? I do intend to add a decent Table of Contents to each Guide when time permits. I know it is annoying not to be able to go to a section instantly without being obliged to use the Windows method of 'find next'...

IGN does not permit links in guides that would allow more than a Table of Contents according to my understanding. I once asked about that...