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Tutorial Failure: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
{{quote|"It's not that hard. You just have to use abilities they won't discuss and techniques they haven't entirely taught you via controls they never quite explain."
|'''[[Penny Arcade|Tycho Brahe]]''', on ''[[The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings]]''}}
[[Video Game Tutorial|Video game tutorials]] are meant to quickly and easily improve the player's comprehension of the game he or she is playing. Ideally, they should explain everything the player needs to know to play the game without hand-holding. They should be succinct and easy to follow. But what happens when a tutorial fails to do its job?
Then you've got a
This trope is for those tutorials which do a completely inadequate job of what they're supposed to
{{examples|Examples:}}▼
== Real Life Examples ==
* In the original release of ''[[Dungeon Lords]]'', the tutorial told the player about a great number of features that '''were not in the game.''' Later patches added some features and removed references to the ones that never materialized.
* When the player does enough damage to the first boss enemy in ''[[Fable]]'', the boss falls to the ground and starts writhing in agony. At this point, the [[Voice
** Many pieces of clothing that the player can acquire have item descriptions that say they possess a special effect, when they in fact do not. The Will User's outfits are described as protecting the wearer against magic (they don't) and the Assassin's Outfit is heavily implied to increase the player's sneaking ability (it does not.)
* In ''[[The Legend of Zelda]]: [[Phantom Hourglass]]'', the game tells you to "draw little circles at the edge of a screen" to perform a roll. In reality, the technique is more like wiggling at the edge of the
* ''[[Pokémon Red and Blue]]'' and all of its associated media insist that ghost types are the best choices against psychic types. One trainer in Sabrina's gym even says "Psychics only fear ghosts and bugs!", which is, at best, a [[Half Truth]] in the original Pokemon generation. Not only are the only ghosts in these games weak to psychic attacks due to their secondary poison type, and not only are there no strong ghost attacks, but psychic-types are outright immune to ghost attacks. Furthermore, there are no strong bug attacks, and many bug Pokemon are also part poison. Ghost and bug types are thus in many ways the ''worst'' choice against psychics.
** A more minor case from the same game is its continued insistence that rock-types are immune to electric attacks. In reality, it's ''ground''-types that are immune to electric moves; rock takes normal damage from them. Most people didn't notice, since the most common rock-types are also ground-types; unfortunately, every non-ground rock-type in that game was either water or flying, making them all ''weak'' to electric attacks.
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* ''[[Final Fantasy VII]]'' gives the player some infamously poor advice in its very first boss fight, owing to the game's poor translation: When the boss goes into a defensive stance, the game will tell you to "Attack while its tail is up! It's going to counterattack with its laser!" This is ''supposed'' to be an if-then statement, but thanks to each sentence being in a separate text box, it's generally interpreted as advice followed by an explanation, which is the exact opposite thing.
* Good luck figuring out ''anything'' in ''[[Final Fantasy Tactics]]'' from the utterly incomprehensible in-game tutorial. A shining example of [[Blind Idiot Translation]].
* In ''[[Recettear]]'', Tear suggests you sell items at close to the highest price you can get customers to accept. Doing so is a horrible
* In the instruction manual for ''[[The Legend of Zelda (
* Good luck finding your way through the desert in ''[[Breath of Fire 3]]'' following the in-game instructions: the initial instructions to get through it are correct, but the ones given in your camp are wrong, and due to the sheer length of the segment, it's almost guaranteed you'll have to quit the game at some point during it and end up reading the wrong set of instructions when you come back later. Made worse by the penalty for failure; mess around in the desert too much and your partys' max HP will be reduced ''permanently'' with every step.
* Almost all "examples" given by official ''[[Dungeons and Dragons]]'' sources are wrong.
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** ''[[Red Hand Of Doom]]'' advises the DM to play one antagonist as a "masterful liar". This is pretty much impossible, as she has no ranks in bluff.
* The Firewalker DLC for ''[[Mass Effect 2]]'' featured on-screen tool tips that gave the wrong keys for a number of necessary tasks to use with the Hover Tank (jumping and mining, specifically). This was presumably the result of a minor case of Porting Disaster.
* The in-game instructions for the fishing minigame in ''[[
* Feel free to completely ignore the on-screen instructions in the Star Destroyer level in ''[[Star Wars:
* The first ''[[
* A major complaint of ''[[The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings
** The game does come with an unusually thorough instructions manual which makes a tutorial largely unnecessary. Of course most people nowadays are not used with using manuals, any more.
** Improved in patch 2.0, which includes a mini-adventure that explains things like alchemy, the quick menu, targeting, signs and a few combat tactics - though this in itself was an issue for some people, as in a few cases the tutorial would not trigger abilities you needed to continue, locking the player.
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* Most [[Paradox Interactive]] titles are incredibly complex games with lots of mechanics that aren't really intuitive and user interfaces that hide the information. Their tutorials require you to click through walls of text, every few tutorials interrupted by one or two interactions with the actual game.
** There's also the fact that Paradox seldom bothers to update the tutorials to reflect their endless expansion packs, most of which alter gameplay more than enough to make the tutorials useless.
* One of the loading screen hints in ''[[Neverwinter Nights 2]]'' says some classes multiclass better than others. This is correct and sound advice. What is wrong is that it follows this by giving the Monk as an example of a class that doesn't, which is completely wrong. It says Monks gain lots of abilities at high levels, which is true but these abilities are all terrible while the abilities they gain at low levels are useful for a melee class or divine caster.
== Fictional Examples ==
=== Live Action TV ===
* It's hard to be certain, but it appears that the unreleased [[Augmented Reality]] game at the heart of the South Korean series ''[[Memories of the Alhambra]]'' -- despite its groundbreaking design and programming -- offers what could at best be called an "inadequate" tutorial upon initially entering it. (If it's even a tutorial at all!) It takes main character Jin-woo an entire night (dusk to dawn) and dozens of attempts to finally beat the boss and level up for the first time. Some of that was certainly due to Jin-woo's arrogance and stubborn refusal to listen to the friends/employees who were acting as his [[Mission Control]], but judging from the bits of game interface we see, he gets almost no welcome, almost no explanation, and very terse and uninformative instructions as to what to do next.
{{reflist}}
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