Forced Tutorial: Difference between revisions

 

Why are there forced tutorials in recent video games? Perhaps manuals do not exist (or game developers know [[Viewers are Morons|gamers]] [[Truth in Television|often]] [[Read the Freaking Manual|don't read them]]), therefore, it is a good idea to force the player through a tutorial to teach them how to play. Or, perhaps the writer has crammed most of the exposition into the [[Justified Tutorial]]. Either way, [[But Thou Must!|Thou Must Do the Tutorial]], for the 15th time.

 

* ''[[The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time]]''. We love the game, but we all hate [[Ninja Butterfly|Navi]]. Yes, Navi, I know how to look around corners, ''shut up''!

** Kaepora Gaebora is arguably worse, because Navi's explanations are usually only a few lines long, and trying to skip them doesn't accidentally trigger her to repeat it all over again.

''Remember, all it takes to scroll is just moving your '''scroll bar''' up or down by grabbing it with your mouse, but you can use the '''arrow keys''' or '''scroll wheel''' if you so prefer.'' }}

 

* ''[[Spider-Man (film)|Spider-Man]] 3'' has a forced tutorial with a narrator that actually insults the player's skill, ''regardless'' of the player's actual skill. The fact that the narrator is none other than ''[[Bruce Campbell]]'' softens this somewhat.

** Actually, this is true with several Spidey games. There's a forced tutorial in ''Spider-Man 2'' where Bruce orders you to jump off a bridge, constantly berates you until you actually do it, and then ''[[Refuge in Audacity|verbally abuses you for being dumb enough to jump off a building when told.]]''

** What makes this even better? If you do well enough on the first tutorial, you skip the rest. To clarify, the first tutorial teaches you things any veteran DW player would know (who will probably do well enough to skip the rest of the tutorial), while the rest teaches things exclusive to the online version. It's completely possible to complete the tutorial before you are taught flasking, an absolutely vital thing to know if you have plans on winning matches.

 

* The first ''Driver'' began with an unskippable tutorial that had you doing driving tricks in parking lot. You couldn't start the game without proving you could do some nigh-impossible turns in a tight time limit with other cars as obstacles.

** None of which are useful in the real game.

** Atomica in ''[[Burnout]] Paradise'' will interrupt your driving every minute with a tutorial lecture. No, he will not [[Stop Helping Me!|Stop Helping You.]]

 

* The ''[[Call of Duty]]'' series plays with this concept. In ''Modern Warfare'', the player must pass through a killhouse modeled after the first level. In ''[[Call of Duty]] 2'', the player is a newly-drafted Russian Infantryman literally just off the truck. The tutorial consists of shooting plates and bottles in a makeshift shooting range, throwing potatoes into a destroyed building's windows for grenade practice ("Grenades are more valuable than you'll ever be!") and [[This Is Not a Drill|destroying a German armored car which has just entered the area]].

** The tutorial mission of ''Modern Warfare 2'', though in-story it's justified: the first part is a shooting range, where you're showing the local militia how to aim and shoot properly. The second is an obstacle course, which you must go through because a general is hoping to recruit someone into his task force.

 

* ''[[Plane Shift]]'' qualifies, but only on your first character with a given account. There's a limit of four characters per account, so if you want to have five or more characters, you have to do the tutorial again for another set.

 

* ''[[Sonic Heroes]]'' has the tutorial level automatically inserted at the beginning of Team Rose's storyline.

** Considering there was already an optional tutorial...

* Played with in ''[[Jak and Daxter|Jak II]]''. The first stage is your usual in-game tutorial (of the "escape from prison" variety), but it's integrated into the actual game in a way that you don't notice it... perhaps because you don't ''have'' to perform the actions he tells you, they're just told to you in the audio very conversationally, but you're totally free to just do the escape like he's not even talking.

* ''[[De Blob]]'' does a lot of hand holding, at least early on. Example: could you guess that a big blue sign stating "30" would require 30 paint points and a blue blob to activate? Too bad, the game will tell you this before you get a chance to prove your brilliance.

 

* The tutorial pops up whenever you start a new game in ''[[Katamari Damacy]]''. Which is annoying in the first place... until it gets to the text examples that you can't skip. Because gamers can't read good? Heck, that should be a trope...

** In ''We Love Katamari'', you have to do the tutorial level twice to find one of the cousins (and thus achieve [[One Hundred Percent Completion]]) - the tutorial ends with your character rolling up Ace and his katamari. To get the [[Last Lousy Point]], you need to play again {{spoiler|as Ace. Since he can't roll himself up to complete the tutorial, he'll roll up The Prince instead, which puts him on the list of people you've rolled up.}}

* Many of the ''[[Eggerland]]'' games start with a series of painfully easy levels introducing each gameplay element to the player. In the western-only ''Adventures of Lolo'', these go on for OVER HALF THE GAME. Argh.

 

* Most ''[[Final Fantasy]]'' tutorials are skippable, either by avoiding them entirely, or by skipping them once they start.

** The tutorial in ''[[Final Fantasy XII]]'' about the license system isn't skippable. (It is, however, thankfully short.)

** ''[[The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall]]'' is nice enough to let you skip their tutorial, but you still have to fight your way out of Privateer's Hold. Ironically, the tutorial is broken anyway and you never get to see the last two or three tips.

** Made really subtle in ''The Elder Scrolls III: [[Morrowind]]'', where the best thing you have for a tutorial is being told to take an enchanted ring from a barrel and being told that there will be no more tips after leaving the office.

** ''[[Fallout: New Vegas]]'' averts this. After character creation, you're pointed towards an NPC who will "teach you how to survive in the wasteland," i.e., run you through a tutorial quest. You can opt out and strike off into the Wasteland at any time - in fact the only sign of the starting area's tutorial-ness is a warning that will pop up when you leave town, asking you to confirm your character build.

* ''[[.hack GU Games|.Hack//GU]]'' has two forced tutorials, because some NPCs refuse to take "I know this already" as an answer.

* ''[[Knights of the Old Republic]]'' forces you to play the ''Endar Spire'' level, but a good chunk of the [[He Knows About Timed Hits]] dialogue is skippable. ''KotOR 2'' allows you to skip the tutorial altogether.

** Because of a bug, it's better to do the tutorial in ''KotOR 2'', as you can obtain inventory items the developers didn't want you to have by finding them during the tutorial, then going back to the cockpit and choosing the "skip tutorial" option.

* [[Golden Sun: Dark Dawn]] forces you to listen to incredibly slow paced tutorials on everything from psynergy usage to Djinn setting to switching party members. This is the ''third'' game in the series.

** Even more annoying since a) ''The Lost Age'' let you skip the Djinn tutorials and both previous games more or less let you figure out shopping (yes, Dark Dawn has a ''shopping'' tutorial), equipment, and Psynergy on your own, and b) ''Dark Dawn'' sets up several situations that look like they'd be obvious "skip tutorial" options and then [[Bait and Switch|nags you for taking those options]]. What the hell, Camelot?!

* ''[[Task Maker]]'' subverts this by giving an option to skip the Tutorial level. However, it may be useful to play the tutorial anyway, because doing so will result in gathering a much wider inventory than is given to players who skip it.

 

* ''[[Black and White]]'' has a particularly long one, made all the worse by the fact that the nature of the game (wanting to try out new and different creatures raised in new and different ways) means that the average player will want to restart multiple times. Can be avoided by saving immediately after finishing the tutorial, and was eventually fixed in a patch that allowed players to skip straight to the creature selection after playing the tutorial once.

** They seemed to forget this lesson with ''Black And White 2'' however; not only did the release version have a long, tedious and unskippable tutorial, the tutorial itself suffered from a [[Game Breaking Bug]] that made it totally impossible to start the game unless you had one of a few very specific types of mouse. The patch made it possible to skip the tutorial... at the cost of a 3,000 point penalty.

* You have to complete the tutorial mission in ''[[Uplink]]'' in order to get enough of an Agent Rating to take on any other missions, although you don't actually have to step through the Tutorial program to do it. The password for the test machine never changes either, and it's the only machine in the game that doesn't have negative consequences for being traced. Meaning you can finish the tutorial in less than thirty seconds after starting the game, without buying any of the hacking software you'll eventually need.

 

* ''Virtua Tennis 3'' forces you to play a bunch of tutorial events before you can enter your first actual tennis match.

* The three minute long unskippable video tutorial on installing and removing and maintaining the wii motion plus that plays before ''Wii Sports Resort.'' Very annoying especially as it plays ''even if the wii motion plus is already installed''.

 

* The first level of the third ''[[Thief]]'' game is a tutorial for Xbox players who never played ''Dark Project'' or ''Metal Age'' on the PC, and it's a follow-the-blue-footsteps lesson on sneaking, manipulating the environment and so forth that Thief veterans have no choice but slog through because you can't turn off the tutorial; you have to do exactly what the level says (follow exactly this path, distract the guard exactly this way) or it will reset back to that part of the lesson to make sure you get it. Especially jarring since the first level of the first game was also a tutorial, but you can solve the challenges however you like (walk across carpet to reduce noise? Nah, running leap over the noisy floor works just as well in half the time!) and the ''Thief'' games are all about finding your own way past obstacles.

** To make matters worse, the tutorial forces you to knock out a man, thereby denying a pure [[Pacifist Run]], and a guard will always see you at the end, thereby denying a pure 100% unseen [[Self-Imposed Challenge]].

* The tutorial and opening cutscenes chew up the first hour of ''[[Assassin's Creed]]'' and no, you can't skip any of it.

 

* ''[[Eternal Darkness]]'' forces you to scroll through the tutorials, even if you've already reached [[New Game+]].

* ''[[Dead Space (video game)|Dead Space]]'' tutorials are little windows that pop up explaining something. You can't do anything else until you dismiss them. This is normally not a problem until the one about being in a vacuum pops up - every second spent reading is one less second you have before your air runs out!

** ''[[Dead Space 2]]'' is a little less annoying about this, using the 'learn or die' method for many concepts or using pop ups in quiet areas.

 

* ''[[Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard]]'' starts off with a forced tutorial level. Of course, the game being a loving parody of videogames, your character lampshades this ("Like I don't know how to shoot a gun."), and even pats the game designers on the back a little. ("I gotta admit, this moving-forward-into-cover thing is kinda cool.")

 

* The seventh ''[[Fire Emblem Elibe|Fire Emblem]]'' game forces the tutorial the first time down, but after you finish the game once you can skip it, or play the tutorial levels without the tutorial, thus allowing you to gain more EXP and make the rest of the game cake. Sure, Western players would need to learn how to play, as this was the first game to be released outside Japan... But what about Japanese players? Well, they hated the tutorial, though it could be skipped by linking to the previous game.

** The sixth ''[[Fire Emblem]]'' features an optional tutorial.

** Exception: In ''Fire Emblem DS'', only Normal Mode has a tutorial (the tutorial part being optional) with extra prologue chapters. In the Hard Modes, you start right in the original's first chapter, with all the basics in a menu command.

* The first ''[[Advance Wars]]'' game only required one tutorial mission to be completed (the [[Fog of War]] tutorial, it was fairly new for Japanese players anyway), but ''Advance Wars 2'' and ''Advance Wars DS'' force the tutorial.

* ''[[Front Mission]] 3'' and ''4'' have short tutorials, with the player acting as the test pilot for the demonstration of a high-end military Wanzer in the former, and as a fresh pilot being introduced to a research operative group in the latter.

 

* ''[[Grand Theft Auto Vice City]]'' pulled this off a little bit by combining it with [[That One Boss]], soon-to-be getaway driver Hilary. His insanely difficult race is basically a training level for the eventual cop chase after a bank robbery. Why? He dies before he does any useful driving and forces the player to do all the fancy work.

** And the race is much more difficult than the actual getaway. Just by virtue of reaching that stage in the game the player must have the skill to pull off the getaway.

** But you do get a prize for doing it well enough, so it's not a total time waster.

** It's [[That One Level|horribly frustrating]] though.

* ''[[Prototype (video game)|Prototype]]'''s compulsory Memory In Death level. In subsequent new playthroughs, it's usually more fun to find other ways to complete the objectives as opposed to adhering to the action prompts as you would've done those actions to death previously in earlier games.

* ''[[Saints Row: The Third|Saints Row the Third]]'''s "Takeover The City" level is a sudden tutorial on how to buy shops in Steelport, how to take out gang strongholds, and how to avoid the fallout of your rampage by hiding in said shop. Other than getting the shop in question practically for free, your reward is a mere 500 dollars. The whole mission seems like it should have come much sooner, especially considering the previous mission, among other things, had the player chase a Morning Star lieutenant halfway across the city via helicopter and rewarded him with a new safehouse and six thousand dollars.

 

== [[Web Comics]] ==

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[[Category:Video Game Difficulty Tropes]]

[[Category:Self-Demonstrating Article]]