Topic: Retro Games where you really should track down the manual?

We're well and truly into an era where an instruction manual being included with a game isn't a thing anymore. I always thought they were pretty cool, as they often featured concept art and story details that weren't included anywhere else in the game.

Can you think of any games where new players should really try to track down a digital copy of the original manual before playing the game.

My pick would be Zelda a Link to the Past. The art is great, and it features an 8 page prologue to the game, which explains a lot of the lore and really sets the scene.

Hard to think about once specific one, but im sure there are lots of great Examples out there that have nice Manuals.

As a kid, the Super Morph and Lagoon Manuals helped me a bit but they dont have THAT great of Art...

Also, if need be there is a Website which features all of the Manuals released in Digital Form.

https://archive.org/download/SNESManuals

Quite nice if you miss a Manual like say... Soul Blazer? And need to take a look into it.

Older games really benefitted from manuals - whether that's because they then didn't have to worry about having a tutorial, or alternatively because (and I'm thinking of the Super Mario Land for the GB manual) it meant that you could see some of the artistic vision behind the actual game. I loved looking through manuals and seeing what things should 'really' look like - the SML manual had pictures of all of the different enemies in it that gave a bit more character to the tiny pixels on screen.

Sim City on the SNES - it's less a manual and more a simple introduction to urban design philosophy.

Of course PC games that had the most impressive manuals. Alpha Centauri had a fantastic manual - not only did it cover how to play the game, it had some in-depth interviews with the developers who gave a lot of insight into what they wanted to achieve. It also had some extensive fiction underpinning the background story of the game and a recommended list of further sci-fi reading that helped to inspire them when making the game.

Gran Turismo on PlayStation is the one that comes to mind right now. It really makes an effort to educate the player in racing practice. E.g. discussing how grip varies under braking/accelerating and turning etc.

Plus any game that came with a colour manual, just to reward the practice of making colour manuals. Doesn't matter how good the game is or the content of the manual, if it's printed in B&W it's always tinged in slight disappointment.

Ni No Kuni for the DS comes to mind. It was an actual book. The title was as much book as it was game.

Such a shame we never got that version in English!

@gcunit When Majesco reprinted many SNES games in the mid/late '90s, one of the many ways they cheapened out was printing in B&W.
I don't know of any original print SNES manual that didn't have at least a color cover (but that was a Majesco reprint for you). Even Capcom's early SNES manuals (seeing the Japanese Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts manual for the first time was a shock at how much colorful and visual appealing it was, compared to Capcom USA's utterly utilitarian manual).
Funny about Majesco manuals... so when there was a point I was even buying cheapo game show ports for the SNES collection, I got an original Wheel of Fortune and a Majesco "Deluxe version". The manuals were practically identical, except that Majesco made some copy-paste errors (which is surprising, did they actually rewrite them and not simply photocopy the originals when making their cheap inferior versions?)