Adding onto the charm they applied to Contact’s inside jokes and boxart, Atlus’ localization team has put together a clever manual worthy of accompanying the offbeat RPG. Contact has been consistently marketed as a DS title that shatters the fourth wall, and the booklet confirms that course with an introduction by one of the game’s main characters:

Hello, they call me the Professor. I’ve created this manual for you to check in case I happen to step out for a minute. I’m not very good at these type of things though, so it might seem a little rushed. I hope you’re able to make sense of my crazy moon language.

The rest of the manual is laid out as the Professor’s VirtuaDiary, its design and presentation an obvious nod to LiveJournal. Pages of neccessary game information are broken up into daily entries, freckled with shots of the Professor and his charismatic dog, Mochi. The VirtuaDiary even comes complete with copy-and-pasted surveys and friend requests from obscure bands, the latter being a MySpace byproduct.

Contact will be on US shelves this September 19th.

Contact’s Instruction Manual (19.5 mb PDF file)

Previews: Games Radar, Game Informer, Gaming Age, & ToastyFrog

source: Rorus Raz & Lunker