"One to be born from a dragon..." -- Let's Play Final Fantasy II

There are inappropriate ways to do this, and appropriate ways. This is one to be be born from a dragon.

Rydia Roll?

Wait, wait, waitwaitwaitwaitwait...You can actually loot the Baron weapon and armor shops Cid's backyard? I so gotta see actual screenshots of this being done. O.O

As someone who played FF3 and Chrono Trigger before he really got how JPRGs worked, I want to point out that those training halls are garbage.

Yeah, because they're context-less info dumps at the start of the game while you're still trying to get your bearings...

I wonder if we have anyone who played FFXIII before the understood how JRPGS work. Did the game really need a 20 hour enforced tutorial?

The tutorials didn't help me in that game after the first few hours, to be honest.

Man people didn't know about that secret passage back in Baron?

What is this, 1998?

- Eddie

I'm kind of surprised myself by how many people didn't know about it.

I feel like maybe we should start a club. Only cool people like us could join, not those "didn't slavishly press against every wall" people.

Seriously, what else were you doing during your youth? Playing outside?

- Eddie

In-game tutorials are never okay. I know some of you probably think that you know of an exception to this, but allow me to posit lalala I'm not listening as an expert rebuttal.

"But that one time in that one game-" yeah, but that would have been even more fun if the game would have shut up and let me play.

A hundred years from now when people write about the history of video games, they will note three important developments:
1. Raster graphics
2. Random access memory
3. The permanent elimination of all in-game tutorials from all games. Forever.

We're still working on #3, but once we get there video games just might become a viable medium for mainstream entertainment.

I agree, but it's funny that the industry's response has thus far been the exact opposite: "Grandmas might get scared by this game! We'd better beat them over the head with instructions!"

Vexx, because it was a solid platforming level. You can't?

I don't know.

Personally, I am sick and tired of Battle Network and Star Force's mandatory tutorial sequences, but I have to admit they do a good job explaining gameplay mechanics in as few words as possible, even if they have to make Lan/Geo look like simmering morons every time.

Also, I have a friend who never payed attention to them and thus never knew you could run away from a battle.

But couldn't you ditch the tutorial and still have a solid platforming level?

The first level of WarioLand 4 requires you to use every move in the game (at least in theory), and shows pictures of how to do them in the background.

Cue argument about whether it's actually a tutorial. (It certainly makes a good first-level-of-a-Mario-platformer, so I'm fine with it being in the game. And it has secrets and everything!)

For the purposes of what I'm arguing:
Navi = not a tutorial
Those animals in Super Metroid who show you how to do certain stunts = not a tutorial
tooltips and background pictures = not a tutorial

4. The relegation of games to a niche fanbase, accessible only to people who are already in it, and the ultimate stagnation of the form.

It really staggers me how little patience people have for tutorials. Some people need them or prefer them. You might not, but you are not the entire audience for this or any other game. Who are you to say "I don't care if someone else doesn't have fun as long as I don't have to sit through two whole minutes of being talked down to"?

What happens if you've got a new gameplay system that works differently from anything similar in the genre? Just going to jump in the deep end? Head on over to the FFII/Kawazu thread in Television Games and listen to people whine about systems not being clearly defined enough and tell me that there's no place whatsoever in gaming for tutorials and documentation.

Make 'em optional, sure. But there is no reason whatsoever to remove them entirely. There was a time when I needed tutorials for anything more complicated than "run to the right and don't touch the bad things". Just because that's no longer the case doesn't mean I'm willing to deny the current generation theirs. More accessibility doesn't hurt anything. Less accessibility almost certainly will.

This is where I will throw down a link to that article on how the first two screens of Super Mario Brothers 1-1 works as a tutorial without beating anything over your head with text once I get home and can retrieve the bookmark.

If 1-1 was a medium defining flash of insight that never could be repeated, the perfect unreproducible storm of simple interface and complex enough game design, or most developers since just failing at making video games will be left as an exorcise to the readers.

*Slow clap*

I know it's hard to remember now, but how far did you -- or more importantly, your parents -- get in SMB without reading the instructions or being told (by someone who read the instructions) how holding the B button makes you run and jump farther?

The death of manuals and more complicated games require some in-game explanations. Some are handled more elegantly than others, sure, but you gotta tell people how to play the game somewhere.

Hell, even Super Metroid, which is held up as a paragon of the form when it comes to guiding the player naturally and invisibly, has text explanations of how to activate and use every item as you collect it. The implications of those tools are left to the player, but it doesn't expect you to just press buttons randomly until you figure it out.

Running with the B button is a really good point, it's most likely the one failing of SMB in that context. I would think that most players will discover fireballs on their own, and possibly thus find running by experimentation.

I believe there's only one jump that actually requires you to run, but it does make the rest of the game an order of magnitude easier.

I think there's a blurry line between "basic instructions" and "beating you over the head with an unskippable tutorial." If you pull back too much, you always run the risk of alienating non-gamers. I actually like the optional RPG tutorial rooms like you had in FFIV, VI and Chrono Trigger, especially for the time period before RPGs were as popular. But the main reason I haven't replayed Twilight Princess yet is dreading the 4 hours spent in town without a freaking sword.

I really like how Conker's Bad Fur Day sorta subverts all this with it's humorous instructions from a drunk scarecrow and breaking the fourth wall with the "context sensitive" button.

I have no idea what the rest of you guys are talking about.
What I'm saying is tutorials are bad.
You're all citing hints and exposition. Not tutorials.
When you're ready to talk about the same thing I'm talking about, I'll be here.


I am shocked and appalled at the notion that anybody had to discover that by looking at the manual. You have two buttons. It's not rocket science.

What are you even saying here? This is utter nonsense.

Possibly. What made it stand out was it was an abstract, linear experience (with, I THINK optional tutorial messages) which felt like it belonged in a different game. So yeah, I guess what you're saying is you wouldn't count it among your maligned tutorials.

In-game tutorials are fine, and actually better sometimes than anything else, but (Important!) they should be optional. (I can't remember the RTS that came out between Warcrafts II and III...but I remember it had "heroes" to summon like III, had standard humans v. orcs, and the human basic warrior took 2 population while orc took one. It taught you was the difference between move and attack-move, showing you how a human warrior could get killed by his enemies while ignoring them versus him killing them on the way.)

I don't see the difference. A tutorial is the game directly telling you "Press X to do [whatever]" or "Here's how [whatever] works". Once a game gets sufficiently complex, I'd argue that they're basically unavoidable.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that if a tutorial helps even one person who would have otherwise been turned off or confused by the game, it's a welcome inclusion. The most intrusive tutorials in the history of video games are what? A few hours? That really ruining an otherwise good game for you?

See comic books. If you keep out everyone who's not already in the club (by raising the barriers to entry too high), the hobby eventually becomes ghettoized and marginalized and has to sustain itself by pandering to the whims of the most ardent portions of its fanbase. I'd argue that it's more or less impossible to substantially advance the form under those conditions.

If you make games too complicated and don't give people any help, they're not going to teach themselves. They're going to find something else to spend their time on. Gaming's too insular and niche as it is; it doesn't need to go any further down that road.

But you are coming at this from the perspective of knowing how SMB works. If you had never played it before, you didn't know that you could HOLD a button to make him run faster. I've SEEN a young child recently try to play SMB blind, and it's not so obvious.

Or how about this: Holding Up and pressing B for a subweapon?

But these are "instructions" and not "tutorial," so it's kind of moot to this argument I guess. My only question is where, exactly, is the line?

If it's optional, then it's not part of the game. It's "tutorial mode". I'm saying it shouldn't be in the game.

Personally I've never encountered a tutorial mode that wasn't useless in terms of figuring out game mechanics, but I guess if you can't figure out the input (eg if you have never used a mouse before) then it can come in handy.

Like I said earlier, the Battle Network games. And Star Force as a maybe.

Once you've learned how the game works, the tutorials become "Oh God I have to sit through this again?" . However, if you don't understand how the game works, Folder building, countering/adding, the Navi Customizer, Styles/Souls/Crosses, and pretty much everything beyond movement and the Megabuster is going to be a big mystery.

EDIT: To be certain, there are some games where tutorials aren't strictly necessary, and good old fashioned trial and error can give a player all the knowledge he needs.

Thing is, having to test out every button to see if something happens is a huge pain in the ass. And that's not even getting into stuff like fighting games, where the lack of a tutorial can lead to the absolute destruction of a new player.

Dude, I was four when I first played SMB. I've been there. I had never played a videogame before. It wasn't so bad. I survived. Every other kid my age did the same thing. Every single one.

You've just demonstrated that you know exactly where the line is. You can play a game and determine whether you're being tutorialized or not. Either the level/area/segment is designed entirely around teaching you how to play, or the game interrupts you and takes the reins out of your hands in order to teach you how to play.



So don't make the game too complicated. Many companies have been following this route and as a result lots of people are playing games who would never have played games before. If it takes a lot of time and effort to learn, the masses probably aren't going to bother learning it anyway.

Are you sure this isn't just the case for games that you happen to like? Wii Fit, Rock Band and Windows Solitaire are plenty mainstream. RTS games and JRPGs are each suited to a particular niche, just as comic books and romance novels are each geared toward subsets of the "reading" hobby.

Now that I understand what you're saying, I totally agree: No mandatory tutorials in the main game. Ever.

Toad: "He knows Timed Hits!"