Worst/Most Difficult Tutorials

[Professor James]

What games do you think have the worst tutorials either due to sheer difficulty or unclear or even false information.

My vote goes to Jet Set Radio's tutorial. Finishing it is a pain in the ass since you have to string 50 moves in a row. some of the lessons it gives you are generally unclear and could be better and more specific. And finally, it has completely false information for one lesson. It tells you to in order to do a trick, you must push forward then backwards when it's really backwards then forwards.

I also heard Driver 1's tutorial was hard for similar reasons.

 

[Indecipherable]

Basically anything I ever played in the late 80s or early 90s.

Probably the most impenetrable game was one of the B52 Flying Fortress games on my 386. The manual was several hundred pages of pure technical jargon and if you could actually fly it in the game you could fly the real thing. You couldn't use the time lapse / advance time button without setting all your navigation goals which was probably a three year course in and of itself. If by some miracle you made it to the bomb target it was a mission to open all the bomb doors and take manual command of the plane from the bomber's eye view. I couldn't even take off in the plane without letting the computer do it for me...

To the best of my recollection there wasn't a tutorial of any sort.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Witcher 2 before it was updated, basically the tutorial is scrolling text at the side of your screen while you are being chased by a fire spitting dragon and trying to make your way through a dozen soldiers.

I died 20+ times in that first minute of gameplay.

 

[distortedreality]

The Witcher 2 pre-nerf. Was ridiculously hard, especially for a current gen title.

Edit - damn sneaky ninjas.

Um - the first mission in Hitman 2 maybe? Can't remember if there was a tutorial prior, but I remember watching a friend take hours to complete the mission, was brutal on new comers to the series.

 

[Pearwood]

Bayonetta's tutorial on Normal teaches you the basic mechanics of the game. Bayonetta's tutorial on the highest difficulty teaches you that life is unfair and often painful.

"Do 3 torture attacks!"

Eh no problem... wait... why are you spawning in fucking Gracious and Glorious?

Demon's Souls is another good example, although if you fuck it up you don't have to start from the beginning.

 

[Bad Jim]

Shogun Total War. The first in the Total War Series. One 'simple' tutorial supposedly teaches you the importance of high ground. You have a bunch of archers on a hill while a group of melee soldiers advance towards you. You stand your ground and rain arrows down on them. Some of them die, some continue advancing up the hill. You fire more arrows. More soldiers die, but many are still alive. Then they reach your position and hack you to bits. I think the problem is something to do with selecting small unit sizes ie 200 archers beats 200 spearmen but 30 archers will miss more vs 30 spearmen.

 

[Scrustle]

The license tests in Gran Turismo were always a massive pain in the arse. They require you to have a vastly greater driving skill to pass them than you need to actually win the races that you need to do the test to unlock. That's fucked up.

I hate games that do that. Making the tutorial harder than the actual game, but force you to do it before you're allowed to do anything else. Huge waste of time and effort.

 

[Shocksplicer]

Ninja Gaiden (XBox). The first mission basically serves as the tutorial. It's also one of the hardest levels of the entire game, and if you know anything about Ninja Gaiden you know that's saying something...

 

[happy_turtle]

The Europa Universalis series, for a game that's so in-depth and complex they really provide jack all in the way of tutorials. They still expect you to print off the 100 or so page pdf manual and have it by your side all the way through the game.

 

[dudagato]

In Rhythm Heaven Fever, i could never get the damn purple monkey combo right.

 

[Macemaster]

Call of Duty, It didn't prepare me for the blight of 12 year olds...

 

[DoPo]

Well, I can't think of anything truly bad at the moment (old games don't count, really), so I'll go with Assassin's Creed 2. You have to race your brother up a building there before the tutorial teaches you how to do that. If you'd plaid AC1, you'd know, but otherwise, new players would have a really hard time.

 

[Pink Gregory]

Ninja Gaiden (XBox). The first mission basically serves as the tutorial. It's also one of the hardest levels of the entire game, and if you know anything about Ninja Gaiden you know that's saying something...

Quite literally ninja'd.

ho ho ho.

But yeah, Murai, whatta bastard, story-wise you don't even have to kill him, yet he's probably one of the more difficult bosses in the game (the MOST difficult honour goes to Alma *shudder*)

 

[CAMDAWG]

The license tests in Gran Turismo were always a massive pain in the arse. They require you to have a vastly greater driving skill to pass them than you need to actually win the races that you need to do the test to unlock. That's fucked up.

Agreed, although I never really thought of the license tests as tutorials.

OT: Back in soul calibur 3 there was a particular tutorial teaching you to do a "guard impact" or something, which was essentially just a counter, performed just as the opposing attack makes contact. Now, I'm a pretty average soul calibur player, and I could hardly get the timing right for one, and the tutorial wanted me to do it five times in a fucking row. Didn't take too long for me to say "fuck that shit", and started playing on easy mode.

 

[Ultress]

Castlevania:Order of Ecclesia and Raidoi Kuzunoha 2,on hard,they expect you to be quite good at the game really fast seeing as how the first encounters of the game are brutal.

 

[Hargrimm]

The Europa Universalis series, for a game that's so in-depth and complex they really provide jack all in the way of tutorials. They still expect you to print off the 100 or so page pdf manual and have it by your side all the way through the game.

Same with any Paradox grand strategy titles basically.

They actually implemented tutorials since Victoria 2, I believe.
But they are so goddamn boring that I wouldn't force my worst enemy to go through any of them. My first time through I even managed to break one of the tutorial scenarios somehow and had to start it from the beginning again.

The best way to learn these is to watch/read Let's Plays and experimenting anyway.

 

[The Wykydtron]

What games do you think have the worst tutorials either due to sheer difficulty or unclear or even false information.

My vote goes to Jet Set Radio's tutorial. Finishing it is a pain in the ass since you have to string 50 moves in a row. some of the lessons it gives you are generally unclear and could be better and more specific. And finally, it has completely false information for one lesson. It tells you to in order to do a trick, you must push forward then backwards when it's really backwards then forwards.

I also heard Driver 1's tutorial was hard for similar reasons.

Oh god I just remembered Jet Set Radio. It's like the tutorial was the entire game... I have no idea if that game was stupidly difficult or if I was way too young when I played it. Maybe a combination of both I guess.

It was still pretty darn fun when you aren't rushing around for an hour trying to find that one place you missed to complete your vandalisation spree.

OT: League of Legends. The tutorial... While it explains the basics of laning it has nothing that will stop you getting instakilled online.

I can't remember if it teaches you how to tower dive... That would be fun! It would also be a nice little nod to Orianna's backstory, seeing as how the original Orianna got killed by a tower dive training exercise gone terribly wrong.

Not to mention how the shop with a huge amount of helpful (or not so helpful) items is left in the dark with only a set of frankly shit recommended items. There are a load of crappy filler items literally nobody uses that some poor noob might accidentally buy.

Stop buying Ionic Spark all of a sudden guys! It's not good unless you're Teemo!

You really don't want to ask your random pub teammates wtf you're supposed to be doing. It doesn't end well.