Guide Dang It! examples from Super Mario Bros..
- While most of the New Super Mario Bros. games are generally easy, there's always one or two Star Coins per game placed in extremely counterintuitive places that pretty much require the player to either be a psychic or use a walkthrough. Some of the worst ones include:
- Any levels with invisible blocks leading to secret areas. The worst one is probably World 5-1 in NSMB2 and its invisible block hidden in a bonus room, which in turn leads to the secret exit and two additional levels.
- Anything hidden behind a fake wall which vanishes when you touch it. To find the ones in a certain underwater level and Wendy's Tower in World 4 of New Super Mario Bros. Wii is basically down to trial and error. Some are even hidden behind a fake wall with breakable blocks in the way, which make the wall seem solid even when it's not.
- The second Star Coin of World 1 Tower in New Super Mario Bros. 2, where the coin only appears when a P-Switch pressed in the lower part of the room is active, and the game doesn't even hint at there being an upper portion of the room. What's worse, there are also some temporary coins spawned by the P-Switch, making players think they've already found the room's reward and not think to explore some more.
- The second Star Coin in World 6-5 of New Super Mario Bros. U is hidden above the level; you must swing on a chain and jump into the sky in a place where there is no ceiling, which warps you to a bonus room.
- The World 4 Ghost House in New Super Mario Bros. U is one big Guide Dang It!. Forget secret exits and Star Coins; this is possibly the only level in any New Super Mario Bros. game where you'll need a guide to find the regular exit, due to the level containing lots of Warp Doors, some of them being hidden behind fake walls and/or having to be reached while a P-Switch is active.
- In the World 4 Ghost House in the first game, there's a room where four blocks on strings fall from the top of the screen when you activate a ? Switch. In order to get the first Star Coin in the level, you have to jump on one of the blocks and wait for the switch to deactivate, at which point the blocks go back up and warp you to the otherwise-inaccessible upper area of the first room. There is nothing that indicates this will happen if you ride the block upward.
- In the World 5 Ghost House in the first game, the level's secret exit and third Star Coin are in a hidden room which you can only reach if you find a set of three invisible blocks, jump onto the center block, and jump while crouching to hit another invisible block that spawns a vine up to the door.
- Finding secret exits in the Mario series can be a challenge on its own, but in New Super Luigi U, two of them (one in World 1-2 and one in World 2-4) are found by ground pounding completely normal looking ground, because it turns out that ground is actually made of Brick Blocks that are obscuring a fake wall.
- Super Mario 64:
- Some stars involve hunting for five "secrets". These secrets include hitting a random [!] Block, standing in a specific spot, and pushing a box. These things do nothing in any other mission in the level, and only by selecting the "Five Secrets" mission will they do anything at all.
- The first slide level in the game actually has two Stars. The first one you can get just by beating it normally. The second one you can only get by beating it within 21 seconds.
- Super Mario Bros. 3:
- A strategy guide mentioned that one could get a Warp Whistle by dropping through a floating white block in stage 1-3 and then running behind the ending curtain. Only one problem: The guide didn't specify how to drop down, and holding down the down button for several seconds isn't something that's immediately obvious.
- The whistle in the first fortress has to be obtained by flying up, over, and around the ceiling, then finding a door in the dark (the camera doesn't follow you over the ceiling, so even though the door is at the very right, you still might miss it).
- The last whistle is in World 2, the desert, and you have to break a rock on the top-right corner of the map that's delicately placed to blend into the background. Without seeing something like The Wizard, your only clue is to Try Everything (because up until that point you aren't told what the Hammer actually does, and there's no penalty for trying the Hammer on every square).
- It's not required for anything useful beyond a few extra lives, but getting the Treasure Ship to appear (or even knowing that it exists) is not something most people would ever figure out on their own. An unknowing player might even trigger one by accident, unsure of what they even did.To elaborate:
- Super Mario Galaxy 2:
- Grandmaster Galaxy is barely mentioned at all, let alone how to unlock it.
- Quite a few of the Green Stars.
- Boom Bunker's Green Star 2 requires you to push the cannon all the way to the left and fire. The star takes about 25 seconds to reach from the cannon, is inaudible from that distance and requires pixel perfect aiming with a Wii Remote.
- Galaxy Generator's Green Star 2 can easily be seen far from the black tilting platform, but doesn't seem to be reachable no matter what you do. The only way to reach it is to go to the edge of the tilting platform, side-flip with Yoshi, flutter jump in the air while pointing up with the joystick, wait one second for the flutter cooldown to reset (which isn't mentioned at all), do another flutter jump, and jump off Yoshi while still holding up.
- Fleet Glide's Green Star 2 is hidden inside a pillar to the far left and you have to delay Fluzzard as much as possible until the pillar falls and you can collect the star. You'd normally reach this part after 45 seconds, the door which you need to pass through closes if you're not there at 50, and the pillar falls after around 58.
- Hightail Falls's Green Star 2 forces you to run off the edge of a wall, climb on it and long jump into the distance. You can't see the star until you jump off the wall, which isn't that intuitive.
- Getting the first episode of Grandmaster Galaxy simply requires getting all the other stars in the game, which is intuitive enough. Getting the second episode requires putting 9999 Star Bits in the Banktoad's bank, which isn't hinted at all.
- Super Mario Galaxy has a few levels where you race against a clone of Mario. The game never hints that there is a speed boost you can get at the start of the races — kinda like in Mario Kart, but with a less intuitive process: start by holding forward, then hold Z when the countdown hits 2, then press A as soon as the countdown finishes. This is in fact required in "Cosmic Luigi Forest Race" and "Underwater Cosmic Luigi Race".
- Super Mario Odyssey has a big open world with a lot of Power Moons, many of which are insanely tricky to find or obtain. Here are some of the craziest:
- The Moon at the start of the cave section in the Moon Kingdom is really high up on the wall above the pipe, with no obvious way of getting there. You get it by taking a Banzai Bill all the way from the end of the level back to the start, hoping it doesn't run out of steam before you hit that ledge. It also leaves you with basically no room for error.
- Quite a few Moons found by the dogs aren't marked at all until the dog starts digging, and the one with a Moon (rather than a few coins or a heart) can be a completely nondescript patch of land miles from where the dog initially appears.
- A few more Moons are found on platforms covered by fog in bonus areas, like the one accessed by having Yoshi eat a fruit blocking a pipe in the Mushroom Kingdom. Some give off a tiny glow that's easy to miss, but others are literally "drop down, trust there's ground there".
- The second Goombette Moon in the Sand Kingdom is hard to get. Normally, she'd be on a platform the player has to reach with a Goomba stack, but in this case she's at the very edge of the level far away from anything else. This means that not only is she easy to miss herself, but once you find her location, you have to bring a Goomba all the way from the other side of the level to actually get said Power Moon.
- The Moon hidden in the Cap Kingdom's block-pushing bonus level may be the trickiest one to find in the entire game. It's inside a compartment in the back of one of the blocks you jump across. Unless you randomly decide to turn back at just the right spot, it's incredibly easy to miss.
- An entire section of the Wooded Kingdom known as the Deep Woods requires jumping off a cliff, which would normally kill you. You can't teleport while in the section, suggesting that it serves as a kind of penalty area, but several moons and transformations are only available there. One of those Moons involves capturing the nearby Coin Coffer and using it to fire 500 coins at a nondescript sapling marked only by five fossilized coins (and you'll likely need more than 500 unless your aim is perfect).
- One of Mario's Idle Animations involves sitting down if left on a seat, something you will likely only find by accident. There is one instance in the entire game where this is actually useful: "Bench Friends", the Metro Kingdom sidequest with the depressed man sitting on the bench. Doing this animation rewards a Power Moon. One could spend hundreds of hours and never figure this one.
- Piranha Plants can be Captured by throwing a rock at them so they eat it and can't eat Cappy. The only real hint for this is that Piranha Plants often have rocks near them.
- Good luck finding all the regional (purple) coins. The various hint systems can help with Power Moons, but getting hints for the regional coins requires using a Bowser amiibo.
- The various "Found with (KINGDOM) Art" Moons that require using Hint Art signposts and backtracking to find them. Many of the Hint Art Moons are easy enough to solve, but some of them are so vague that it could take days to figure them out.
- Super Mario Sunshine:
- Progressing through the game is itself a little obtuse. In order to get to Corona Mountain, the final world, you have to beat the seventh episode (all Shadow Mario chases) in each world. Unlike Super Mario 64, the amount of Shine Sprites you have is ultimately irrelevant and getting to the seventh episodes requires only beating the prior six episodes, meaning that the Shine Sprites found in the hub or traded with Blue Coins, as well as the eighth, secret, and 100-coin episodes, are a waste of time to non-completionistsnote .
- Blue Coins, ten of which equal one Shine Sprite in an exchange with an NPC, tend to be hard to find. While they are not needed to beat the game, they will drive Hundred Percent Completionists batty, as they will search every nook and cranny, squirt water at anything that moves or doesn't move, and do all this for every episode in every level. Oh, and there's no in-game checklist for them at all, you can only see how many you got in a level — and if and when you do give up and resort to a guide, you'll have to pray you can remember which ones you've already gotten.
- One of the secret Shine Sprites in Pianta Village can only be found if you stand on the platform atop the tallest tree, look straight up, and spray water at the sun. After you spray it, a Shine will pop out. A Blue Coin in the same area requires you to find a different spot and spray water at the moon. A villager hints at these (and bear in mind that talking to villagers is optional in the first place), but only obliquely — she only talks about the moon in Episode 5 and the sun in Episode 8.
- At least two secret Shine Sprites can only be found by spraying normal looking sand in random places with water.
- One of the Shine Sprites in each level, including the hub, is acquired by collecting 100 coins. The game fails to say that not all episodes in a level have 100 coins. You also don't have the added benefit of blue coins equaling five gold coins, since they serve a different purpose entirely in this game, and some of the regular coins are obtained in non-obvious ways such as spraying innocuous objects with water or defeating certain enemies in specific ways so they drop more coins than when you defeat them normally.
- The game utterly fails to tell you that you can get goodies if you spray the birds around the levels or eat them with Yoshi; your only hint is that spraying them makes the same distinct sound that plays when you spray other things that have adverse reactions, like Shadow Mario, his Graffiti, and Proto Piranhas. Green birds transform into coins, blue birds transform into Blue Coins, yellow birds transform into Shine Sprites, and red birds transform into Red Coins (but that only happens once). Once you figure out the general pattern, though, you can find the related secrets pretty easily.
- Yoshi can eat the bees that emerge from the beehives in certain levels. This in itself is something that a player is likely to discover. However, you can get a Blue Coin by knocking down the beehive with spray or a stomp and then having Yoshi eat all those bees as well, which is also something that's not likely to occur to the average player (in part because knocking down a beehive seems like it would be a bad idea).
- In Ricco Harbor, you have to spray a normal-looking solid wall by the lighthouse in order to make a blue Shine Sprite symbol appear, which then yields a blue coin. It is not hinted at, and the only likely way to find it without a guide is by just randomly spraying the wall.
- One Blue Coin in Sirena Beach will pop out when you spray the flower garden at the top right of the hotel's exterior. Another Blue Coin in the same level requires you to ground pound in front of one of the tiny slot machines in the casino, which also causes coins to pop out when done with the other slot machines.
- Sirena Beach's third shine, Mysterious Hotel Delfino, requires getting Yoshi so you can get past enemies Mario can’t defeat. Problem is, he only wants pineapples, which the fruit stand (in)conveniently doesn’t have. In order to find some pineapples, you have to navigate this maze of a hotel by doing some very counterintuitive actions that the guests only give you the vaguest clues about. Just finding the first step in this mission can be hell for a first-timer.
- "Yoshi's Fruit Adventure," the eighth level of Ricco Harbor, is easily one of the game's hardest. As the title implies, you need to use Yoshi to remove an orange juice generator that's blocking a Shine Sprite near the top of the level's construction site. Problem is, there's no way to get him up there...so you have to spray Cheep-Cheeps with juice, which turns them into moving platforms. Oh, but be sure to use the right color: a Purple Yoshi will make platforms that move vertically, while a Pink Yoshi's juice makes them move horizontally, and you have to change from Purple to Pink halfway through the mission. There are three issues with this. 1: There is absolutely nothing in the game that tells you spraying the fish with juice will turn them into platforms; 2. This is the only level in the entire game where this skill is required; and 3. Since the Shine is being protected by orange juice, which only Yoshi can remove, you cannot complete the level without somehow stumbling onto the secret. Exactly how Nintendo expected players to figure all of that out is a mystery.
- Super Mario World:
- Unless you have incredibly good skills with the cape, the only way to access the Secret Exit in the Cheese Bridge Area is to have a cape and Yoshi, float underneath the Level Gate, then dismount and jump upwards on the other side just as you go off the screen.
- Chocolate Island 2 is a unique example: Unlike any other level in the game, there is a point in which the layout changes based on the time left when the player enters a pipe. Most players who've gone through the game and weren't going for 100% Completion probably didn't know that there were alternate sections of the level. While the Secret Exit requires you to speed through the first two sections as quickly as possible and get into a pipe with 250 seconds or more on the clock, there are several other rarely-seen sections (like the final non-secret exit one, which has Dynamic Difficulty based on how many Dragon Coins were collected in the sections prior to this) that can also trip players up. Your only hint in the game is the message block at the level's start: "Here, the coins you collect or the time remaining can change your progress", which barely explains how it works.
