EarthBound Player's Guide

The EarthBound Player's Guide is a massive guidebook that was packaged with EarthBound as a set, which also doubled as the game's instruction manual. It contains 128 pages, detailing many maps and shops, along with fake newspaper articles. It contains artwork of some of the items in the game, as well as detailed information and clay models of nearly every enemy that appears in the game (though they do leave out some enemies and even bosses). Its size was one of the factors that increased the size of EarthBound's box. The back of the guidebook also includes scratch-and-sniff cards--this is what gave the the game the slogan, "This game stinks". The screenshots depicted in the game appear to be from an earlier version of the English localization, showing many things that were changed for the English release, as well as some subtle text differences.

The EarthBound Player's Guide was made available online when EarthBound was released on the Wii U's Virtual Console. It is the only Nintendo Player's Guide that has been released online. It has been optimized for viewing on the Wii U Gamepad.

Content Summary
(provide synopsis on guide contents)

Gallery
(use photos from google and the official pdf)

Trivia

 * On page 17,  is mentioned as being one of the games available at Onett's arcade.
 * On page 111, there is an image of Ness nude on the bottom-left of the page. This is an oversight from Mother 2, in which Ness was nude in Magicant.
 * In the guide, there are various differences from the final game, including Ness being naked in Magicant and the metallic eraser statue instead being the metallic octopus statue present in Mother 2. One explanation for this is the possible fact that during the creation of the guide, the only available english-translated EarthBound copies for reference were prototype cartridges such as the one seen here, where not all of the english changes were finalized yet.