Pamphlet Shelf: Difference between revisions

A common variation on this is to imply that the tiny portion that the player gets to read is merely an excerpt. Curiously, it also seems that not only does every book contain only one page of interest, every bookshelf contains only one book of interest.

 

 

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* Taken to its irrational conclusion in ''[[The Legend of Zelda]]: [[The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask|Majora's Mask]]''. The grandmother in the inn offers to read you one of two bedtime stories. The longer tale of the two could easily fit on one or two pages of a real book. The process of listening to the story takes ''twelve ingame hours'' and requires you to equip a magical mask if you don't want to fall asleep in the process.

 

* Averted in ''[[Myst]]'' and its sequels. Although most of the books in the original game were burned and could not be read (the library being burned is core to the plot), it was a shock to be treated to several journals over 20 pages in length. There isn't nearly that volume of reading in the sequels, but ''Mysts 2-5'' each have at least one diary to read, and most have several that can be found. Indeed, finding and reading the diaries is critical to understanding the plot in a game with maybe fifty lines of dialog.

* ''[[The Neverhood]]'' contains a ''twenty-seven-screen-long'' Bible of sorts. Although not quite enough to fill a book, it comes damn close.

* ''[[Quest for Glory IV]]'' has the shelf in the run-down Adventurers' Guild, which actually does contain some pamphlets. Rather than making the player [[Pixel Hunt|hunt for each book]], however, interacting with the bookshelf simply brings up a list of the readable books.

 

 

* Justified in ''[[Zork Nemesis]]''; with most of the many books lying around, you can only read a few pages, but often the last page will end mid-paragraph, implying that there's a full-length book the player character is too lazy to read all of.

 

* During the Inventing tutorial in ''[[City of Heroes]]'', one task you are given is to read a specific book. The entire contents of said book are sufficient to fill one dialog window, and no more.

* In ''[[World of Warcraft]]'', information comes in two forms, items in your inventory and books lying out on tables. Items are often letters or notes specifically given to you and written in full (sometimes brief, sometimes verbose) details. Books (both in inventory and more often out) are not quite as full as a book should be, although they contain numerous pages worth of lore. Few if any books have the equivalent of one paperback novel's page of text.

* Played straight, averted, and subverted in ''[[Mabinogi (video game)|Mabinogi]]''. Books are only available for purchase from NPCs, or awarded from quests. The only library doesn't have any readable books. Reading the books gets a visual book with pages that must be turned manually. Length ranges from a single (short) page, to well over a dozen or more. Some of them are guides to various in-game functions, which are useful to read; some are skill-granting artifacts or quest items, which don't ''need'' to be read, but which can contain useful info on how to use the skill, or on the quest storyline; and some are completely extraneous, containing nothing but backstory or flavour text. Most of the longest books are the extraneous ones, and the newbie guides.

 

* Averted in ''[[Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge]]'', where the library mostly contained irrelevant books, and finding the useful ones was part of the puzzle. On the other hand, the book of quotations ''did'' contain remarkably few quotes.

* ''[[Super Mario Galaxy]]'' has Rosalina's book, which is slowly unlocked over the course of the game. {{spoiler|It contains Rosalina's biography.}}

* In ''[[Spyro]]: Shadow Legacy'', various books have the plots of previous games, or other in-game information, boiled down to about three sentences.

 

* ''[[Dragon Quest]]'' has obeyed this trope from time immemorial; ''[[Dragon Quest VIII]]'' may count as [[Lampshade Hanging]], as the hero opens every book to the middle (after flipping two pages) and never turns the page, so he's clearly only reading the page he needs to read out of the book.

* ''[[Fable]]'': One sidequest early in the game asks you to collect books for an elementary school teacher for him to read to the youngsters. You don't get to read the entire books yourself, but when you hand each one over to the teacher, he reads them aloud to the children, and all of them actually are that short.

** ''Fable 2'' has some actual pamphlet, but all the descriptions of the books simply ''tell you'' what they're about in a quick synopsis.

* ''[[Mega Man Battle Network]]'' and its sequels.

* Averted in most of ''[[The Elder Scrolls]]'' games, in which every book shown is readable, and books often just contain backstory and lore sometimes not even related to the particular games' storyline. Othertimes, they contain [[In-Game Novel|full-fledged short stories]]. They do cheat a bit by padding the shelves with multiple copies of the same book.

** The exception to this is ''The Lusty Argonian Maid''. Yes, because it is exactly what it sounds like.

*** That, and ''Boethiah's Pillow Book'', which is entirely represented by:

** Skill books even contain these stories, instead of just adding to the skill.

** In addition, a player with coins to burn may purchase, one at a time, the Super Luigi series of books. Like in the Pamphlet trope, these books are rather short; however, they are completely irrelevant to the quest at hand.

* When larger books are read in the ''[[Fallout]]'' series, an appropriate amount of time passes while the [[Player Character]] peruses them.

** Played with in Lenora's Gym in ''[[Pokémon Black and White]]'', as you only read a few lines from each of her books, but she's hidden vital clues to solving the Gym's puzzles inside some of them.

* ''[[Final Fantasy IV]]'' has a few of these, most notably at the library in the Land of Summoned Monsters.

* ''[[Geneforge]]'' has a lot of books that are so heavily damaged only a small section of them remains legible. Later games in the series offer other explanations for the speed of reading (Shaper training allows one to learn new things very quickly) and the brevity of the books (most books are composed largely of things over your character's head).

* Subverted by ''[[Arcanum]]''; while there are quite a few short books in the game used to move the story along or used in a sidequest, there are also entire libraries of books that have no connection to the plot and merely exist to create a feeling of depth. Some of them are quite long, at least by in-game RPG standards.

* In [[Dungeon Siege]] and especially the expansion, there are numerous books lieing around to read. However, there's always only a single page that remains legible for [[Apocalyptic Log|various reasons]].

 

* ''[[Harvest Moon]]''

 

 

* ''[[Final Fantasy Tactics]]'' averts the trope with the Germonik Scriptures; choosing to read them leads to Ramza summarizing the contents, after noting that it took him quite some time to get through it.

 

 

* Parodied in ''[[Turnabout Storm]]'', when [[My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic|Twilight Sparkle]] gives [[Ace Attorney|Phoenix Wright]] a "'detailed' encyclopedia" on the different species of ponies. It's literally three bullet points long, and Nick finishes reading it in "[[Memetic Mutation|ten seconds flat]]". Justified in that the book is meant for very young readers. This gets brought up again a little later, when Nick mistakenly calls Rainbow Dash an earth pony.

 

** As does [[Captain SNES]] in [http://www.captainsnes.com/2002/06/25/152-wish-i-could-get-that-much-sleep/ this strip.]

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Acceptable Breaks From Reality]]

[[Category:Pamphlet Shelf]]