Prolonged Prologue: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
{{quote|'''Gabe''': In the same amount of time it's taken me to get bored of ''[[Final Fantasy XIII|Final Fantasy]]'', I experienced ''[[Uncharted]] 2'''s entire narrative arc. [...]
'''Kiko''': Well, how far are you in ''FF''?
'''Gabe''': I don't know. Like, twelve hours?
'''Kiko''': Come on! At least play through the '''''tutorial'''''.
|'''[[Penny Arcade]]''', ''[http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/4/14/ Purgatory]''}}
{{quote|''"[[Defied Trope|Start as close to the end as possible.]]"''
|'''[[Kurt Vonnegut]]''', Eight Rules for Writing Fiction}}
It is normal for a work to have a beginning sequence that, for whatever reason, is mostly unrelated or just setting the scene for the main plot. This is called a prologue.
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For example, suppose you are playing a videogame. After hours upon hours of fighting your way through hordes of enemies, you've finally beaten their leader. Wait...what's that coming over the hill?! The ''title screen''?! That was the [[Action Prologue|prologue]]!?
Related to [[The Teaser]] (aka Cold Open) and [[Get On With It Already]]. When it's supposed to be funny, that's an [[Overly Long Gag]]. Compare [[Close
{{examples}}
== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==▼
▲== Anime and Manga ==
* ''[[Berserk]]'' took ''twelve volumes'' to go through the Golden Age arc with the Band of the Hawks. Notoriously, the anime ''doesn't get out of the flashback'', as the anime is more focused in telling the story of [[How We Got Here]].
* ''[[Gungrave]]'' similarly spends 15 of 26 episodes on a flashback to before the plot of the video game it's based on to establish [[How We Got Here]]. Sadly, it's by far the best part of the series.
* ''[[Vinland Saga]]'' is also impressive. You start off [[In Medias Res]] with a fortress getting besieged, then there is a flashback where you learn that Thorfinn (the protagonist)'s ''entire'' motive for being with the mercenaries is to kill their leader in a fair duel - because that man killed his father by holding Thorfinn hostage. Thorfinn is seriously that dangerously single-minded. So it's pretty clear that the entire story is about Thorfinn's various adventures while he tries to kill Askeladd (the leader). Then, when everything is said and done and {{spoiler|Askeladd ''finally'' dies}} and you think the story is going to end, you see the chapter title: "Chapter 54: End of Prologue." We're in it for the long haul, boys.
== [[Fan
* ''[[Shinji and
* The ''[[Naruto]]'' fanfic ''[http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5729693/18/Students_of_the_Snake
== [[Film]] ==▼
▲* ''[[Shinji and Warhammer 40 K (Fanfic)|Shinji and Warhammer 40 K]]'' is an excellent example. The prologue alone is many thousands of words just of how Shinji's childhood has been changed by his exposure to the tabletop game ''[[Warhammer 40000]]''. That's right, the fic is ''novella-length'' before Shinji even arrives at NERV!
* ''[[The Departed]]''{{context}}▼
▲* [http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5729693/18/Students_of_the_Snake This] Naruto fanfic goes on ''18 chapters''before the plot get rolling. It even says so in the [[Word of God|author's note!]]
* The Uwe Boll film ''[[Alone in
* ''[[The
▲== Film ==
* Most ''[[James Bond (
▲* [[The Departed]]
* ''[[Indiana Jones and
▲* The Uwe Boll film ''[[Alone in The Dark (Film)|Alone in The Dark]]'' is notable for having the longest text scroll in film, clocking in at about 100 seconds, as in nearly two minutes of spoken word and text. The scroll was inserted into the review because [[Viewers are Morons|test audiences couldn't make heads or tails of the film's plot]], so they wrote the scroll to explain some of it. Audiences then complained that it was too boring, so they added a voiceover. It didn't help much..
▲* ''[[The a Team (Film)|The a Team]]'' took almost ''30 minutes'' to get to the title drop!
▲* Most [[James Bond (Film)|James Bond]] pre-title sequences clock in at a few minutes. The one for ''[[The World Is Not Enough (Film)|The World Is Not Enough]]'' is nearly ''fifteen minutes'' long, and actually has a fairly clear cutoff point between its two scenes that could've been the act break. This is because that was originally going to be the end of the pre-title sequence, but test audiences felt that it was lackluster compared to recent Bond movies, so they stretched it out to include the next scene as well, which involved a lengthy, exciting boat chase.
▲* ''[[Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade (Film)|Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade]]'' has what seems like an interminably long prologue set just before World War I, when Indy is a preteen boy. This prologue serves multiple purposes: 1) to set up the Cross of Coronado as a [[Chekhov's Gun]] that turns up (a quarter of a century later!) in the film's ''real'' [[Action Prologue]] with an adult Indy; 2) to establish Indy's fleeting relationship with his father, which lends a certain weight to those characters' later scenes together; and 3) to explain how Indy acquired his trademark fedora, his bullwhip, the scar on his chin, and his crippling fear of snakes.
* ''[[Raising Arizona]]'' begins with an accelerated account of how the main characters met, got married, discovered that they could not have a child, and hatched a scheme to steal a baby. The title screen rolls just as they're driving out for the kidnapping. Essentially the prologue is the first act of the film.
* ''[[Monty
* ''[[Friday the 13th (
* The remake of ''[[Friday the 13th (
* ''[[Halloween (
* The opening credits of ''[[Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind]]'' appear 18 minutes into the film, at the end of the first reel.
* The 2009 ''[[Star Trek (
** ''[[Star Trek: The
* ''[[Blood Night:
* The movie ''[[
* The credits for ''[[The Departed]]'' don't appear until nearly
* ''[[The Deer Hunter]]'' has an extremely long first act showing the main characters' lives in small-town, working-class America before they get to [[The Vietnam War|the actual war]].
* The first sequel to ''[[Silent Night
* In the film ''[[Helldriver]]'', the opening credits are approximately
* Both ''[[Sherlock Holmes (
* ''[[Hugo film)|Hugo]]'' has a very long prologue, which is awesome.
* A full
== Literature ==▼
▲== [[Literature]] ==
* In Stephen King's ''[[IT]]'' a brief teaser chapter leads into the ''rest'' of the prologue, an over 100 pages long story about how the main characters start their return to Derry.
* The ''[[Wheel of Time]]'' series uses these from book
* [[Michael Crichton]], starting around ''[[Prey (novel)|Prey]]'' and [[It Got Worse|getting worse]]. The prologue of ''[[State of Fear]]'' is one third of the book. ''Next'' can be seen as nothing but prologue.
* [[Dean Koontz]]'s book ''[[Your Heart Belongs To Me]]'' was terrible about this. The summary of the plot on the back of the book explains the second half of the book. The entire first half is the prologue.
* [[Your Mileage May Vary]], but even fans of ''[[The Lord of the Rings]]'' will admit that Tolkien takes his sweet time getting the hobbits out of the Shire.
** Justified to an extent; it helps the reader appreciate what they're risking and fighting for; without it, the penultimate chapter lacks much of its impact. The actual prologue, on the other hand, is twenty pages of [[Info Dump]] (including a recap of some of ''[[The Hobbit]]'', an essay on life in the Shire and one on the Hobbits' smoking habits). Interesting stuff, but you can certainly skip it the first time through.
** It's even worse if you consider the penultimate chapter itself to be part of the corresponding [[Ending Fatigue]]. All together, depending on how you define it, the story has somewhere between 80 and 200 pages of exposition, spanning several years (including the [[Time Skip]] in which Frodo spends years in the Shire not really doing anything.)
* ''[[The Scarlet Letter]]'' has what is called "The Customs House," an elaborate prologue detailing [[Literary Agent Hypothesis|how the author discovered the manuscript.]] It's about a quarter-to-half the length of most printings of the book. Furthermore, the first actual chapter is called "The Prison Door," the entirety of which is spent [[Exactly What It Says
* In ''[[
* The book ''[[Spring Moon]]'' starts with a prologue about the main character at the age of about eight, and recounting the despair and suicide of her servant and friend. It has ''no'' bearing on the plot, except for [[What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic|some symbolic and thematic value]] - but it is at least an excellent short story all by itself.
* ''[[Life of Pi]]'' takes around a hundred pages just to get to the point where the blurb begins.
* ''[[Tristram Shandy|The Life and Opinions of
* The first ''[[Bionicle]]'' book, ''Tale of the Toa'' dedicates six chapters to describing how each of the Toa discover themselves, their surroundings, meet their people and each other, until they finally all come together and kick off the plot.
* In ''[[Haruhi Suzumiya|The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya]]'', an unnecessarily large amount of time is spent on the SOS Brigade preparing for a Christmas party that {{spoiler|the audience doesn't even get to see}}. A few important plot points are established, but most of it can be seen as unnecessary padding. Kyon even lampshades it, observing that it was "too long for a prologue." The movie adaptation, despite mostly being very [[Adaptation Distillation|well made]], makes it even worse, as, [[Your Mileage May Vary|arguably]] very little actually happens until about an ''hour and a half'' into the film.
** ''The Dissociation of Haruhi Suzumiya'' goes even further, with a prologue that takes up about a third of the book; half of it is spent recapping everything about the SOS Brigade and most of the side characters, while the other half consists of Koizumi walking Kyon through a [[Flash Back]] and berating him for being [[Selective Obliviousness|Selectively]] [[Oblivious to Love]].
* ''[[Harry Potter and
== [[Live-Action
* ''[[Alias (TV series)|Alias]]''{{'}}s prologues would frequently go ten to eleven minutes. The show
▲* ''[[Alias (TV)|Alias]]'''s prologues would frequently go ten to eleven minutes. The show is more radical in its first two seasons. Frequently episodes would end with the 3rd Act cliffhanger and the 4th Act would be knocked on to the next week where it would serve as an extended prologue pushing that episode's 1st Act into the 2nd Act's slot (roughly minute 11 to minute 22) the 2nd Act would then push the 3rd Act back so that the episode ended on the 3rd Act cliffhanger and so on...
* One ''[[Monty Python's Flying Circus]]'' episode begins with a behind-the-scenes documentary on the making of the movie epic ''Scott of the Antarctic'' that goes on for about two thirds of the show before we see John Cleese's BBC announcer and the opening titles.
* According to [[SF Debris]], you can usually tell how much a particular ''[[Star Trek]]'' episode will suck (especially a ''[[Star Trek: Voyager]]'' episode) by the length of the teaser; the longer the teaser, the more you're urged to run for the hills.
** That may be accurate. The teaser of Scorpion - which introduces Seven of Nine and pits Voyager and the Borg in an [[Enemy Mine]] against [[Cosmic Horror|Species 8472]] - was barely ten seconds if that.
* ''[[Flashpoint]]''{{'}}s prologues are generally about five to six minutes, though in some cases up to ''ten.''
== Theatre Productions ==▼
* ''[[Into the Woods]]'' begins with a musical sequence introducing the characters (and setting up the plot) that lasts for 12 minutes on the original cast recording. Seeing as that takes out several lines of dialogue, it could be even longer.
==
* [[Square Enix|The Company Formerly Known as Squaresoft]], developing mostly story-heavy role-playing games, has a knack for this:
** One of the most notorious examples is ''[[
** [[Kingdom Hearts (
** ''[[Vagrant Story]]'' has an extended prologue culminating in a fight with a dragon. There's no clue this is just a prologue... unless you press the Start button and the game ''skips the rest''.
** [[Final Fantasy]] 1 has the first mission which can take a decent amount of grinding to accomplish (most FAQs recommend getting to level 5) and is implied to be the primary goal, but then you get the real start and a new opening scroll.
** ''[[Final Fantasy IV]]'' opens with a long scene, after which you head to your room, followed by a number of smaller scenes, a long scene occurs as you sleep, another long scene when you awaken, then a text scroll. All in all depending on how fast you read, it can take you more than twenty minutes before you get to actually start wandering around the world.
** ''[[Final Fantasy VII]]'' doesn't start properly until you're out of Midgar, which can take anywhere between four to five hours, during which time the city is introduced, characters are met, vital exposition is dumped, and villains are introduced and killed off. Most players don't seem to mind, though, because even though the Midgar sequences are very linear, it's chock-full of action and intrigue relating to Shinra and AVALANCHE, to the point where some players feel that the opening is practically the high point of the entire game.
** ''[[Final Fantasy XIII]]'' is basically the same as ''VII'', but so, so much more. Instead of growing your characters during the absurdly slow paced opening city level, as you do in VII, you are basically [[Second
*** Which is probably why this one includes a [[All There in the Manual|reference guide]] on the main menu. First time players interested in understanding what the hell the characters were just talking about can check it and find quick summaries of not only the plot (scene by scene), but relevant background information on locales, individuals, and organizations.
** ''[[Final Fantasy Tactics Advance]]'' begins with an explanation of why Marche's life sucks, then you get into a forced tutorial, then it is explained why the lives of the rest of the cast suck too, you get to see why Marche's brother's life sucks the most and then you get another forced tutorial, this takes at least 30 minutes, and you can't even set the GBA aside and come back later because you need to manually skip through the text.
** [[Radiata Stories]] has the beginning of the game taking orders from your superior in The Radiata Knights, this takes up about
* ''[[Dragon Age]]'' has a unique prologue for each character, generally about 45 minutes to an hour to play and then a second prologue that all characters share. Now, some if not most of the prologues are widely considered by many to have better plots than the whole rest of the game; the follow-up prologue at Ostagar as a Grey Warden recruit? Its considered to be below par with the rest of the game, with being forced to replay it once per playthrough hardly helping
** Made worse for [[PlayStation]] 3 players at least: a glitch sometimes prevents a player character from collecting the Menacing trophy (10 successful uses of the Intimidate skill), requiring trophy-seekers to start from scratch. As opportunities to Intimidate are rare, this necessitates repeating about 3 or 4 ''hours'' of gameplay just to collect one trophy.
** Lothering might count as a ''third'' prologue, as you're railroaded there after Ostagar, although there's nothing stopping you heading straight to the world map and getting started on your quest proper. There is quite a bit to do there though, and it's not a good idea to put it off too long. {{spoiler|After completing one Treaty Quest, the Darkspawn reach the village, and literally wipe it off the map.}}
* The ''[[Wild
* The Tanker part of ''[[Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty]]''. Reportedly, Kojima intended the ship to be the setting for the whole game before concluding it was too small. There's even an option, after completing the game, to play just the Tanker section, and it has its own set of post-game titles.
** The Virtuous Mission prologue of ''[[Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater]]'' has you visit multiple regions of the game, and introduces most of the cast, before the actual Snake Eater mission.
* ''[[Star Ocean 3]]'' takes five to six hours before you are dumped on an actual planet and start real fights.
** ...which in itself is an extension of the prologue. You won't meet most of the characters until you land on Elicoor, and the events that happen on the first planet are never mentioned again.
* ''[[Persona 3]]'' has a little over an hour of cutscenes (and one battle sequence) between the start of the game and your first opportunity to save.
** If you thought an hour of exposition before any fighting was a tad much, just wait until ''[[Persona 4]]''. It takes between two to four hours before the game takes you [[Railroading|off the rails]] and lets you choose what to do with your day (the real meat of the game).
* In ''[[Guild Wars]]: Nightfall'', what is more or less the prologue of the story takes you most of, if not all the way, to the max level. In fact, you figure that when you catch up to the [[Big Bad]], you're going to stop her from releasing the [[Sealed Evil in
** The same can be said for any of the Guild Wars campaigns. Prophecies begins in an idyllic map of decent size with several zones, hours of gameplay (if you do everything), and enemies up to level 10 (of 20). Many were entirely surprised when this turned out to be {{spoiler|set 2 years before the ACTUAL game, which begins after that idyllic land is destroyed by magical crystal meteors, and maybe the size of 10% of the real game's map.}} Factions was similar to Nightfall in that it brought characters to near-maximum level before the prologue ended, though story-wise it was clear that you had only begun to uncover the real threat.
* ''[[Knights of the Old Republic]]'' has the very long section on Taris, exploring three levels of the city, dealing with Sith oppressors, swoop gangs, outcasts and slavers, before {{spoiler|the planet is destroyed}} and the plot starts. What makes it worse is that you still have a non-Jedi class before you get to Dantooine, and you'll probably want to hold off leveling until then, to get more Jedi levels.
** Surely the Endar Spire, the small, linear, tutorial-like level that precedes Taris is the prolouge. And the story begins immediately, in media res even, and takes a break on Taris to allow the player the chance to explore a wider, freer world.
** And [[Knights of the Old Republic]] 2 gives you Peragus. Big, almost depopulated mining station. REALLY big. And REALLY depopulated. If it wasn't bad enough already, half the time you're running in your underwear, with a mining laser. Alone. (Except you count voices in your head and com links as your party.)
* You spend the first few hours of ''[[The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess]]'' learning your controls as Link and Wolf-Link. You don't have any idea of what's going on until the end of the segment, and you're not free to explore the overworld until after the first major dungeon.
** This is true for a lot of ''Zelda'' games, actually. You can't explore the overworld in ''[[The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time|Ocarina of Time]]'' until the tutorial (obtain sword/shield) and first dungeon (Deku Tree) are finished. ''[[The Legend of Zelda:
** Not to mention the biggest offender in the series: ''[[
*** Which is thankfully skippable with the use of the dancing scarecrow in the observatory, as he is able to make Link skip ahead to the third day by dancing with him.
** ''[[The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
* ''[[Fate/stay
* ''[[Umineko no Naku Koro
** You could argue the entire first episode is this Trope. The main story in latter episodes revolve around the Meta World that is just introduced in the first episode ''epilogue''.
* The story mode of ''[[Star Wars Battlefront]] 2'', ''Rise of the Empire'', involves various missions centred around a group of clone troopers liberating various planets from the droids {{spoiler|and eventually taking part in Order 66}}. A cutscene after that event shows Vader's armour and an ominous image of the Death Star while the central character explains what the squadron did after the battle, which could be a perfectly valid ending to a game that's already full enough to be a game itself. Then the second opening crawl starts, finally introducing the actual ''Rise of the Empire'' storyline.
* ''[[Narcissu]] Side 2nd'' spends the first four chapters (out of 19) introducing the main characters, before the opening movie plays.
* While it's not technically a prologue, the beginning of ''[[Heavy Rain]]'' has you going about your ordinary life for several hours before the actual plot starts.
* ''[[
* ''[[
* ''[[Endless Frontier]] EXCEED'' is split on chapters. The first three are named "Prologue 1", "Prologue 2" and "Prologue" 3 and take an hour minimum each (Note it's a ''long'' game, especially for a portable system), during which you [[And Now for Someone Completely Different|take control of several characters]], defeat several bosses, get plot and exposition going off just fine and gameplay elements are introduced and explained.
* ''Microcosm'' had an [[Opening Scroll]] that explained the star system the game was set in, the [[Mega Corp|Megacorps]] that ran them, the struggles between them and the current covert shenanigans, ''and'' a short movie panning over the [[Cyberpunk]] city, showing aircraft landing and setting up the plot at length. All told, [[Play the Game, Skip
* The exposition for ''[[Suikoden V]]'' takes about eight-to-twelve hours.
* The opening to ''[[Harvest Moon]] Save the Homeland'' drags on for quite a while, which doesn't help the game's status as one of the least popular in the series (that and removing the [[Dating Sim|marriage and family]] aspects). Add to that the fact that the game has [[Multiple Endings]], and you can't skip the cutscenes on your [[New Game
* The unskippable intro to ''[[Valkyrie Profile]]'' last for thirty minutes if you don't bother reading any of the text. If you want the ''complete'' intro, you have option of watching it on the main title with that being twenty minutes.
* ''[[Golden Sun: Dark Dawn]]'' takes nearly
** This was a problem in the first ''[[Golden Sun]]'' too. The opening scene establishes most of the plot, yes, but the talking-to-fighting/puzzling ratio is way off.
* ''[[
* In ''[[Breath of Fire 3]]'', the first few missions take place in a very small portion of the map with very limited access to shops, fishing spots or masters, and after {{spoiler|1=raiding McNeil Mansion}}, your two allies pull a [[Wutai Theft]] and aren't seen again until the second half, and any [[Level Grinding]] you did with them is wasted. After that, you're sent on a very linear mission that only allows you access to one part of the map at a time while you assemble your team, and it isn't until you defeat {{spoiler|Stallion}} that you have full access to the majority of the continent and can start properly building your team.
* ''[[Okami]]'' begins with a ten-minute cutscene explaining the legend of Orochi, then a lengthy tutorial with your [[Exposition Fairy]] chirping at you all the while. But [[It Gets Better]], I swear.
* ''[[Advent Rising]]'' lets you witness the destruction of Gideon's [[Doomed Hometown|Doomed Homeplanet]] through his eyes. It takes pretty long.
* ''[[Lufia and The Fortress of Doom
* The first chapter of ''[[
* The prologue for open world ''[[Kingdom Come: Deliverance]]'' is both hours long ''and'' on rails while never clearly communicates when the rails have ended (resulting in an explicit order with an exact time to start a quest that's both [[Take Your Time|indefinitely delayable]] and mechanically expects you to have gained experienced before starting). Amazingly, it was originally ''even longer'' before several scenes cut out and repurposed for an optional side story showing them [[And Now for Someone Completely Different|from the view of another character]] ''because'' the prologue was too long.
==
* Averted in [[Missing Episode|'The Long Lost Prologue']] of ''[[
{{quote|'''The Palm Tree
== Web Original ==▼
▲== [[Web Original]] ==
* ''[[The Gungan Council]]'' typically has roleplays to introduce new characters. They are are supposed to be simple in order to get a new character instantly acquainted to two or more established characters. Roughly 200 words is enough per post. Some have start with ''1,000'', and keep this amount up through over 15 posts and essentially almost writing enough to create a novella off the bat.
== [[Western Animation]] ==
* ''[[
▲* ''[[The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes (Animation)|The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes]]'': The Avengers don't officially form until the end of the seventh episode. Furthermore, Captain America doesn't join until the ninth episode, Black Panther doesn't join until the eleventh, and Hawkeye doesn't join until two episodes after that, meaning that the core team of eight Avengers that make up the first (26 episode) season doesn't assemble until the end of the thirteenth episode. However, the first seven episodes feature plenty of action by the heroes working solo and do set up the season nicely, so this is a case where [[Tropes Are Not Bad]].
▲* A full 10 minutes go by in ''[[Lilo and Stitch]]'' before the title and opening credits show up.
{{reflist}}
[[Category:Pacing Problems]]
[[Category:Beginning Tropes]]
[[Category:
[[Category:
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