Full transparency: I played with guide and map from beginning to end. I'm sure that there will be a huge difference in the experience by playing with it or without it.
But it's a fun game even with a guide, without a guide, you have to draw maps yourself, discover places, dungeons, mazes, NPCs and stuff by yourself. The guide spell it out for you, where you have to go, clues, passwords, etc.
While I see the appeal of discovering things by yourself, I just don't have time to explore and draw everything by myself. Not to mention the environment looks mostly the same and some of the clues are very cryptic. Oh and there are a lot of hidden path that looks like a wall but you can actually pass through. As far as I know, there's no way of knowing this except by bumping into every wall you see.
My time with the game is spent mostly on grinding, because this game is stupidly hard on a certain point. Without the guide, I imagine the grinding will be spent while chartering the world and dying a lot of times because the game doesn't tell you when you are very underleveled for a certain area, until you got decimated by the enemy.
A very fun thing about this game is that after a certain level, you unlock magic that can easily break the exploration. You can phase through wall, teleport anywhere (within 9 tiles of you), and fly anywhere in the overworld. This, combined with the guide made the game a lot of fun because you can just skip the exploration and go through the actual meat of the content (quest, boss fight, superboss fight, etc).
But it's a fun game even with a guide, without a guide, you have to draw maps yourself, discover places, dungeons, mazes, NPCs and stuff by yourself. The guide spell it out for you, where you have to go, clues, passwords, etc.
While I see the appeal of discovering things by yourself, I just don't have time to explore and draw everything by myself. Not to mention the environment looks mostly the same and some of the clues are very cryptic. Oh and there are a lot of hidden path that looks like a wall but you can actually pass through. As far as I know, there's no way of knowing this except by bumping into every wall you see.
My time with the game is spent mostly on grinding, because this game is stupidly hard on a certain point. Without the guide, I imagine the grinding will be spent while chartering the world and dying a lot of times because the game doesn't tell you when you are very underleveled for a certain area, until you got decimated by the enemy.
A very fun thing about this game is that after a certain level, you unlock magic that can easily break the exploration. You can phase through wall, teleport anywhere (within 9 tiles of you), and fly anywhere in the overworld. This, combined with the guide made the game a lot of fun because you can just skip the exploration and go through the actual meat of the content (quest, boss fight, superboss fight, etc).