A mini-essay on the relationship between "official" material and "canon" material:
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It seems apparent that some things are produced by Nintendo's game developers, which never find their way into the canon material. For example, we can only assume that official art was all drawn by one team, which worked with the game developers. But not all the official art makes its way into the manuals. Some of it can only be found in guides - any guide which Nintendo gives permission to, not just official guides. So in the case of official art, I think we can safely rely on its canonicity, regardless of where it is found. After all, the same team drew all of it, and it is not their fault that not all the art is found in sources we consider to be canon.

I think a similar situation exists with regard to enemy names. It appears to me that the original game development team created all of the enemy names in one go. But not all of these names found their way into the manuals. The manuals have only limited monster lists. On the other hand, official guides usually have complete lists of monsters, coupled with official art and sprites. I think such a state of affairs argues for the canonicity of *many* enemy names, regardless of where they are found. I think we can trust non-canon material for things as simple as official art and enemy names, even if we can't trust them about anything else. I mean, all they have to do is get the official art and list of names from the original game creators. I don't think the guide writers invented any of the names themselves.

On the flipside, we shouldn't put too much trust in the names guides give us. Most of the time, it is fairly obvious when a guide writer has invented a name, deviating from the standard list of names. For example, the Link's Awakening guide gives the name of "Rope Snake" to the Rope, and calls the Vire the "Winged Demon." When guides deviate from what we already know, it is safe to ignore them. But in most other cases, the guides are a pretty reliable source for official enemy names.

While it is true that most enemy names seem to correlate to the names given in Zelda games, not ALL names have this advantage. In other matters, the guides may delve too deeply into the storyline when handing out names, and surpass their authority. For example, the official Oracle guides call the Dark Realm the "Sacred Realm." I think that the guide surpasses its authority by doing this. The games don't call this location the Sacred Realm (there is no reference to a Sacred Realm in the Oracle games), and I doubt very much that the game creators told the guide writers that this was the Sacred Realm. I would consider this to be an invention. So, we can safely ignore the guides when they try to go beyond what the original game creators gave us. When guides attempt to go too far, one should revert back to evidence from the canon.

So, to make myself perfectly clear: I accept the enemy names given in guides, not because I accept what the guides say, but because I believe that enemy names were created by the original game developers, as part of the games' original creation process. I believe that everything else in the guides was created by the guide writers after the game was already done, so I don't accept it as part of the canon. It is true that I don't have evidence that my belief is true, since nobody has attempted to determine the authorship of guides. But this attitude toward guides seems pretty reasonable to me, and I don't think we can do too much damage by accepting it.