While the Japanese absolutely triumphed over the West as far as box art, cartridge variations and colors and overall # of releases, the NES releases often seemed to have way better manuals, fold out maps, etc.
What are some of the best paper items included with Famicom in your opinion?
Any manual that has tons of enemy/boss drawings, and exclusive art in general - off the top of my head, those of Tiny Toons, Holy Diver, Bucky O' Hare, and Samurai Pizza Cats are a few of my favorites. Gourmet World and Don Doko Don 2 also have pretty nice manuals.
Quote from: Nightstar699 on March 22, 2015, 05:59:54 pm
Any manual that has tons of enemy/boss drawings, and exclusive art in general
Yes, exactly. Or sometimes it's cool to know the official names of levels, enemies, items etc that are not actually mentioned in game.
Mother has a *fantastic* manual/map pack in.
Zelda no Densetsu has a terrific manual...and stickers!
Quote from: Shumi Nagaremono on March 23, 2015, 04:04:31 am
Mother has a *fantastic* manual/map pack in.
Zelda no Densetsu has a terrific manual...and stickers!
Oh, yeah Mother does have that huge fold out book.
Some of those first party Nintendo FDS manuals are pretty amazing, I agree. Both Zeldas, Metroid, and Hikari Shinwa etc
I didn't know Zelda had stickers though.
Bumping a decade-old thread because I just learned to my surprise that the instructions that come with the disk-writer version of Metroid, as well as having all the cool enemy art that's in other versions of the manual, also has a FULL detailed map of the game (not the little outlines-of-the-whole-areas map that's in the retail FDS and NES manuals). This changes everything. Well, some things.
https://www.gamingalexandria.com/highquality/fds/Metroid/Metroid%20(Disk%20Writer).pdf
Oh the whole game is there indeed, complete with all items! The illustrations are not in color but that's normal for FDS fold-outs.
Maybe they finally decided the game is too confusing without a map and started to include it with later disk writer versions or something. ;D It might have helped preventing people from giving up on the game and overwriting the disk with something else too.
Nice find and thanks for sharing!
Quote from: P on October 03, 2025, 03:41:03 pmMaybe they finally decided the game is too confusing without a map and started to include it with later disk writer versions or something. ;D
Looks like you were right, as I just saw another (presumably older) version without the map!
Just photos from a sale thread, not full scans.
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Yeah, the last known version of the game (disk version 0, game version 3) is supposedly disk-writer-exclusive so it makes sense that the last version of the manual is also disk-writer-exclusive.