Annoying Video Game Helper

You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone.

"I don't really mind the owl, but I find it a bit strange that we never discover a shred of information about who or what he is, or why he would want to help Link. Considering how much of a blank slate it is, I like to imagine that it's Shigsy himself speaking to me directly, bit like a overprotective father. He wants to let you have a good time, but he's gonna make damn sure that you know where the item sub-screen is, just in case."^note He's actually Rauru, the Sage of Light

— Matthewmatosis on The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

"Help" is a relative thing.

The character that has you screaming "Stop helping me!" is usually an Exposition Fairy who either has an attitude problem or interrupts when you really wish they wouldn't. Sometimes it is a party member who's a master of the Useless Useful Spell — or who keeps getting overexcited and killing you with friendly fire. In extreme cases, it's the character the player is controlling, if they're annoying/inept enough; stupid catchphrases and idiotic behavior during cutscenes have resulted in many a player wasting a life by directing their playing character off a cliff, just for revenge.

Unfortunately, these annoyances are never disposable characters. You're stuck with them for the entirety of the game. The best you can hope for is that they do a Face–Heel Turn and become the bad guy's problem. In fact, sending them to the opposite faction might be a good tactical maneuver on your part. However, in that instance, Finagle's Law will kick in and they'll be just as effective fighting against you as they were ineffective fighting for you. C'est la vie. At least you don't have to listen to their voice constantly and you finally have that excuse to kill them that you've been waiting all game for.

In fact, most "guide" characters will try the player's patience if they've played the game through a couple of times — like the tutorial levels, they're not really needed after the first playthrough. And maybe not even then. Smarter game designers will give players the option of turning the character "off" when the player doesn't want their help, or the guide only helping when the player specifically asks him or her to.

This should go without saying, but try to avoid sticking AI sidekicks in here that are simply not perfect. If they can pull their own weight in a fight, but have different priorities and thresholds for doing things than a player might, then they probably don't belong here. (Complaining that the computer is trying to use its healing items on you earlier than you necessarily want it to, for example, does not make them this trope, especially in a game without a Hyperspace Arsenal.)

Compare The Millstone, where the unhelpful "helper" is the cause of difficulties that directly affect the plot. When the "helper" is an intentionally unhelpful or confusing Mission Control, it's Mission Control Is Off Its Meds. Contrast to Helpful Mook, where the enemy is genuinely helpful. Also related to Continue Your Mission, Dammit!, where the game will nag the player to continue even if there's not an actual need to hurry, like in a Timed Mission.

For In-Universe examples of unhelpful "helpers", please see Unwanted Assistance.

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Video Game examples:

• Overwatch

Action-Adventure

• ANNO: Mutationem: If you haven't spent any Grombitz to upgrade Ann's Skills And Perks, Ayane will frequently chime in to remind that you possess enough to gain new skills and stats enhancements.
• In Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon, Professor E. Gadd keeps calling you to gauge your abilities and give you advice, often sounding pushy in the process (and sometimes rushing you on top of it). This can get annoying sometimes, and can be distracting.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • Kaepora Gaebora from Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, and Four Swords Adventures, only shows up a relative few times, and he's not of the "Hey Listen!" variety, but is annoying solely on the fact that his text activates when you walk by certain places, whether you want them to or not. It consists of tens of screens of usually trivial information, that you cycle through four or five times because mashing the A button to advance the dialogue quicker (which doesn't always work) results in him reaching the end and giving a "Do you want to hear what I said again?", which you accept by accident. At least his music is cool, and his dialogue can be mostly skipped entirely by pressing B past a certain point.
  • The annoyance caused by Navi in Ocarina of Time is now legendary, e.g. her incessant cries of "Hey!", "Look!", "Listen!" and "Watch out!" and habit of popping up all the time to remind you where to go next. Navi's substitute in Majora's Mask, Tatl, has a less annoying set of audio cues, but she interrupts you with the same frequency.
  • Tingle in The Wind Waker after receiving the Tingle Tuner. You can play as Tingle if you connect a Game Boy Advance to the Nintendo GameCube. Let joy be unconfined. Pressing the A button on the GBA makes Link drop everything in order to look at a little green marker while it shouts "HAAAAAY" to get your attention. If even forces Link to retract his sail while at sea! Thank goodness you can at least turn off the volume on the blasted thing... The Tingle Tuner can even cause the game to crash by being used mid-deku hop.
  • In the higher levels of Four Sword Adventures Bonus-Game Tetra's/Navi Trackers, Tetra, Sue Belle, or The King of Red Lions (depending who is the current "anchor") will sometimes make Tingle appear to "aid" the players. Every word out of Tingle's mouth sounds like he is goading the player into shutting off the game. (The characters in Navi Trackers are fully-voiced, except for Link of course.)
  • Fi in Skyward Sword is at least as bad as all of these. Much of her supposedly helpful behavior is a either a nuisance (upon getting a new item and clicking past the item description, she is prompted to give a bit of unskippable, relatively slow-moving bit of dialogue that is an almost verbatim repetition of the very same description the player has just read) or outright infuriating (any attempts at exploring by going off the beaten plot path, will prompt her to attempt to nudge the player into going where the plot wants them to). And even worse is when she doesn't take more experienced Zelda players into account: a crack in wall is sight known by all veterans of the series; it means it is time to light up a bomb and attempt to blow it up to reveal a secret. But even if the player approaches the cracked wall, lit bomb in hand, Fi will freeze the action in order to chime in and inform them that they should in fact, try to throw a bomb at the nearby cracked wall — heedless to the fact that player is already trying to do that, and the countdown on any lit bombs continues as she talks). But what really takes the cake for many players is when Link is critically injured; there's already a Critical Annoyance going on, and Fi adds her own alert that she wants to tell you something... she's noticed your health is low and you should find some hearts. The fact that she talks in Robo Speak and If My Calculations Are Correct doesn't exactly do much to endear her either. Thankfully, the HD remaster addresses some of these issues by making her tutorial speeches skippable and removing some of her Captain Obvious explanations altogether to reduce how often she interrupts gameplay.
  • Breath of the Wild:
    • Downplayed with Zelda and the Champions, who frequently chime in to tell you what to do in dungeons, but not how to do it, and generally come across as encouraging rather than patronizing. The one exception is Revali, who is quite passive-aggressive, but seeing as he blames Link for his own death at the hands of Windblight Ganon 100 years ago, he's actually being an asshole to Link rather than the player.
    • A straight example happens during the blood moon, which occurs randomly. Every time it happens, a Cutscene triggers showing monsters appearing with red eyes and Zelda saying: "The blood moon rises once again. Please be careful, Link." This is to let the players know that the monsters they killed have now been respawned. This has caused many players in forums to ask if the blood moon can be stopped to halt the cutscenes. It can't. But at least the cutscenes can be skipped when they start.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: the shades you can summon of the Sages once you've obtained their powers can dip into this due to how you use their special abilities. You have to approach the shade and press the A button to activate the power. Problem is, the shades wander around on their own, especially during battle, so they are invariably not in the place you ideally want them to be in to activate their power. To say nothing of trying to pick up items and accidentally activating a Sage power, which can wind up blowing the item away (Tulin) or exploding it (Yunobo). Fortunately, the shades can be dismissed if you find them getting in the way too much.
• The Cheshire Cat from American McGee's Alice, while technically an aversion of the trope, is no less irritating. His "advice" consists mainly of cryptic insults, such as "There's a nasty name for those who insist on doing things the hard way." Granted, he only appears when summoned, and as such is less likely to induce homicidal rage in the player...unless the player is really in a bind, and all good ol' Cheshire can say is "Alice, you really suck." Sometimes he even gives you advice that is just plain untrue. For example, he tells you that using the Jacks when there are no enemies around is dangerous, like the Dice. They're actually harmless.
• Zip and Alister from Tomb Raider: Legend have a way of "hinting" that reveals exactly how to solve whatever puzzle you were working on, as well as ruining the atmosphere with their babbling. Lara even lampshades this a little, by telling them to shut up when she's concentrating on some particularly tricky acrobatics.
• Mega Man Legends: Roll tended to ramble over the radio at you every time you go into a dungeon. "Remember the last time we went on a dig? I wasn't used to being a spotter and you got trapped underground for three days." She goes off on this while you need to run (or jump) across platforms that break real easily and if you end up falling you have to do a U-turn and start over.
• Beyond Good & Evil:
  • Double H can sometimes get a bit... overly chatty. He enjoys screaming compliments at you in the middle of battle, when not continuously informing you of how he's "Awaiting your orders" — and if things have been quiet for too long, he'll throw in a "Carlson and Peeters!" just to break the silence. He and Pey'j both have the annoying habit of nagging you to do things out of the blue — "Hey, let's go buy that Pearl Detector!" in the middle of a completely unrelated trek to a Looter's Cave.
  • Or Pey'j asking you to give him a PA-1 (extra hit point) when a) it's more efficient to give your sidekick a lot of Starkos (each healing one hit point) and keep PA-1s and K-Bups (healing all hit points) for yourself, and b) he'll soon get captured anyway.
• In a game with otherwise great AI, Minion Master Gnarl from Overlord can get really annoying. Hinting on how to fight the beholders? Fantastic. Repeating the same hint over and over in the same tone of voice, even as I do what you tell me too? That's it, into the forge. He gets even more annoying in the sequel, where the advice isn't even all that useful the first time.
• Taken to extreme levels in the PS2 game Tokobot Plus. Upon gaining a new ability, you will be paused each time for the following: your "helper", Ruby, will wonder out loud what the new ability does, despite having an obvious name; she will analyze the ability's MacGuffin so she can give you an in depth explanation of what it does; after her inane chatter subsides, a window pops up giving a visual explanation of how to use the new ability, then another window pops up and repeats everything Ruby told you, and in case you weren't paying attention the first four times, Ruby will pause you again when you first need the ability and give another explanation of how you use it. This happens for every new move you aquire. In addition, Ruby will speak up about anything else you encounter and drop a hint about it, including: enemies, simple boss fights, obvious plot points, and puzzles. That's right, the game won't even let you solve its own puzzles without trying to help you even before you even start solving it!
• Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time:
  • The Palace Guard who suggests you activate the palace defences. He then proceeds to loudly (and in a distinctly un-Persian accent) help you with the puzzlement, yelling "Careful! Think ahead!" whenever you go wrong. And all for nothing, because he is killed horribly and the defences actually make things harder.
  • Farah isn't nearly as helpful as probably intended.
    • Her attacks with a weak bow that only inconveniences the majority of your foes, has a very low firing rate, and is extremely liable to shoot you in the back (and when that happens, the arrows take out a significant chunk of your health bar). Lampshaded in dialog by the Prince:
    Farah: [after Farah has accidentally shot the Prince during a previous fight] You go ahead. I'll cover you.
    Prince: Please don't. You're liable to hit me.
    • Also, in the opening, where she shouts "useful" tips that replay, after one time:
    Prince: I know! You already said that!
    Farah: No, I didn't!
• The Epilogue DLC for Prince of Persia (2008) has a boss you have to push into a throne. You know this because the Prince will not stop saying "Elika! The throne! Elika! The throne! Elika! The throne!"
• In Spider-Man: Web of Shadows, Mary Jane decides that she's tired of being the one that Spider-Man has to save and she decides to become an action girl. She grabs a shotgun and decides to help you during the Symbiote Black Cat boss fight... except her shotgun does nothing to the symbiotes, the enemies that spawn during the fight rush her and not you, and you fail the mission if she dies. This forces you to constantly break off an already difficult boss fight so that you can save her stupid ass. Made worse by the fact that Mary Jane is very displeased with Spider-Man's use of the black suit and the vast majority of her dialogue in the game is her nagging you.
• In the game adaptation of the 2012 film, The Amazing Spider-Man, Spider-Man himself is a bad case of this trope. If there is an object in the environment that you need to interact with—like turning wheels to drain water from a tank—Spider-Man will remind you every 15 seconds. It's been timed.
• An interesting case of this probably being intentional: In Batman: Arkham City, the Bane "find the TITAN" side mission has Batman (the player character) teaming up with Bane to destroy all the containers of TITAN in Arkham City. The finale of the mission begins with you talking to Bane, telling him you destroyed your assigned six Titan containers, and then a bunch of TYGER security guards or random thugs showing up to fight you; in the subsequent fight, Bane fights alongside you, but is more of hinderance then a help, as he throws around the enemies and swings wildly, hitting Batman in the process. It makes a lot of sense when you discover that Bane was planning to betray you all along.
• This issue pops up in Solatorobo: Red the Hunter so, so much. Every so often, the game will stop dead in its tracks just so Mission Control can tell you exactly what you already know while you're doing it. This becomes less of an issue late game, but early on, especially during repeat playthroughs, you're forced to scroll through walls of text that does nothing but Narrate the Obvious and Forced Tutorials that is inconsistent on what you can skip. It's even worse during sidequests, where they will flat out tell you what the solution is if you're faced with a puzzle, and unlike the main story missions, these never go away.

Action Game

• Angie from Trauma Center: Under the Knife
  • She makes an already frustrating game even worse by her constant mewling of "Doctor!" or "What is that?!!" (It's a lung, Angie, you've seen one before). More annoying still is that when she starts talking, you have to stop what you're doing and press the "Call" button to move her monologue along so you can get on with that heart transplant. Extremely annoying when playing a mission that requires speed. Thankfully, she's a lot less annoying in the Wii remake, Second Opinion.
  • She gets worse in Under the Knife 2. Despite having performed the same operation dozens of times before, she feels the need to interrupt your intense concentration with repetitive instructions that don't serve any purpose beyond throwing you off. This is especially prevalent in the last few missions, where a single mistake can lead to immediate death. When your heart is racing and your fingers sore from gripping the stylus so hard, the last thing you need is Angie yelling "USE THE ANTIBIOTIC GEL" to mess up your focus.
• Sparks, your operator in Enter the Matrix, has a habit of sending irrelevant IMs in critical moments... and to make things even more frustrating, when his IM screen is visible, you don't heal or restore focus.
• MadWorld with Agent XIII. Worse in the tutorial since EVERYTHING stops just to listen to him go on about how you can kill people THREE TIMES.
• Zone of the Enders: The Second Runner. You will hear, "I suggest using [subweapon the game thinks is useful]," and "Damage level exceeding 50/75%," and, "Use Dash to move out of the way of enemy attack and then counter attack," so often that not having to hear it anymore will be your motivation for finishing the level after long enough. However, you can press the joystick buttons to answer the AI, the Left one saying yes and switching you to that subweapon quicker. Whereas the Right one has answers more along the line of "Stop bothering me!". You can do this with most things that are said, even if its just tossing out a one liner when she's saying the Vector Cannon is charged.
• Pommy from Bomberman 64: The Second Attack! can't attack an enemy without the attack backfiring and stunning him 9 times out of 10, and if you're too close to him when he attacks he ends up stunning you instead. He also gets in the way of your attacks and any objects you're trying to move, hindering your puzzle-solving and enemy-killing. If left to his own devices he'll wanter around aimlessly, usually away from where you need him to be. Oh, and every boss fight you get into, he just hides in the corner, leaving you to do all the work. He does have Evolutionary Levels that make him more useful, though.
• Issun in Ōkami tends to repeat every plot-related hint three times in red text. Except that's not all that's grating about him. It's been counted and Issun says "You hear that, Ammy?" some 60ish times during the game and it's due to the fact that Amaterasu cannot understand animals. And if THAT wasn't bad enough, how about the fact he can be downright stupid at times like thinking Rao was alive after seeing her spirit warn you about the imposter, then again when Amaterasu goes through the Spirit Gate, being bewildered at how nobody recognizes him and refers to Ammy as "Shiranui", asking where "Sakuya" is (she's the kid you just met Issun) and so on.
• Your allies in Blast Corps every time you try to destroy a building in a way you're not supposed to, usually by ramming it to death if you are not in the Ramdozer. "Try something else!" "Is this such a good idea?" Screw you! I got this giant missile on a truck riding down the tracks and—*NUCLEAR EXPLOSION*
• Sonic Spinball constantly reminds you of things you have to do before you can access certain areas, or when certain enemies are coming.
  • Toxic Caves: WORM BAGGED. WORM BAGGED. CLUCK ALERT!
  • Lava Powerhouse: BUST DOOR FIRST...BUST DOOR FIRST...BUST DOOR FIRST...
  • Showdown: Hit other targ—BUST BLOCKS FIRST! BUST BLOCKS FIRST! BUST BLOCKS FIRST!
• In Honkai Impact 3rd, various tutorials are given by a character that's relevant to the content. Otherwise the default is the helper character Ai-chan. The problem with these tutorials is that these are basic tutorials on how to navigate the UI. Granted while the developers do change things up with each event and new people do pick up the game still, but by the time you've played a few events, it's obvious what does what. Worse, almost all of these tutorials are forced, meaning once you start it, you have to complete it, even if it this means "go here to start a level, pick your team, then press start!" There's also no way to disable these tutorials. Ai-chan will also remind you to do weeklies on the home screen, which gets old real fast after a few weeks and especially if you're already done for the week. And like the tutorials, you can't turn this off.

Adventure Game

• Cedric the Owl from King's Quest V is a particularly infuriating example. Not only are most of his warnings about really obvious dangers ("No, Graham! Don't!"), they are generally given only when it's already too late to stop yourself. For extra annoyance, you actually have to go rescue him a few times to continue on in the game - and he never does something remotely useful himself.
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the video game, had the option to ask for help at any time from Terry Jones. At first his hints are almost useful, but eventually he just gets more and more infuriated as the game progresses, tired of helping you. Eventually he stomps out of the game and is replaced by Michael Palin, who is just as useless. Monty Python's Complete Waste of Time, having no plot at all, had no help and no rules, except when you broke them. You were then sent to "The Penalty Box" where a nude Terry Jones played a taunting organ piece to mock you.
• In The Hobbit (1982), Gandalf and Thorin are necessary to help Bilbo out of certain traps (you're too short to escape on your own); Thorin also has to survive until the party reaches Smaug's lair so that he can use the key to the side door. And Bard must be waiting at the Long Lake to shoot Smaug when he arrives. However, all these characters are prone to wandering off, telling you "No" when you ask for help (even in time-critical situations), and being killed or captured by wandering enemies (Played with in that one of the most annoying things they do is abandon you for no reason.) It was an ambitious game that let every NPC to have their own AI to make the world feel more alive but then you get things like the above.
• The Journeyman Project Pegasus Prime uses an AI Biochip, replacing a simple text message window from the original, Turbo version. However, this feminine persona is generally useless because of her tendency to warn you of blatantly obvious hazards, her strict, no-nonsense demeanor delivered in robotic Mad Libs Dialogue, and she often repeat things that have already been said before in-game. The only useful thing she ever does for you is stopping an Alternate History version of Commissoner Baldwin from tampering with your mission. On the plus side, you can cut off her present speech by pressing any movement key And an easter egg exists within the game of acquiring a copy of Arthur with toggles to turn both him and the original AI on or off at will.
• Wizard's Spell on the ZX Spectrum lumbers you with a companion called Zod, whose main characteristic is saying "That sword looks heavy" and taking it from you, leaving you unarmed.

Driving Game

• In the "Getaway Driver" missions in Driver, your passengers are prone to shout things like "Do something! We got us a tail!" when up to three police cars are slamming into you from all directions.

First Person Shooter

• Your AI ally from SiN Episodes: Emergence had a rather annoying habit of finding more mooks to shoot at her, and then drawing their attention to you, the not-invulnerable player.
• Regardless of how many times you have played Battlefield 2 (and the game keeps track), every time you start a game you still get told how to use all of the basic game functions, with text boxes that block parts of the screen.
• In TimeShift, for 90% of the game you have freedom to take your time and experiment, but in latest portion of the game, where you're escorting the rebel leader, the guy will not shut up, constantly complaining about how you're taking too long to reach your next goal while you're in the middle of a fire-fight. Even using your time powers to move at super-speed it seems impossible to speedrun to the objectives without hearing at least one complaint from this guy.
• Descent:
  • The levels in the first two games were made up of complex 3D mazes, which some players of Descent 1 found easy to get lost in. The Guide-Bot was developed for Descent 2 as an Anti-Frustration Feature to address this problem. Unfortunately, what was supposed to alleviate frustration ended up becoming a frustration on its own. The Guide-Bot makes a lot of sudden turns and unpredictable zig-zags while guiding you that make it hard to follow. It very often forges several rooms ahead of you (some of which are either massive caverns or very long tunnels) before turning back to get the player. If it sees the player not actively following it, the Guide-Bot will "poke" them with a flare...which damages the player's shields and pisses the player off. Sometimes its pathing AI will glitch and get it stuck on a pillar or wall, forcing the player to track it down and waste a missile or two to dislodge it. Thankfully, there are commands to order the Guide-Bot to stay away from the player until needed, but many players will just leave it in its prison cell or destroy it.
  • The big improvement to the Guide-Bot in Descent 3 is that instead of a prison cell like in Descent 2, the Guide-Bot was stored in your ship, and could now be deployed and recalled at any time. The trouble is that its AI remains otherwise unchanged from Descent 2 when deployed, and it returns to its cargo hold by slamming into your ship at full speed, damaging your shields in the process. At least now it's more careful with its flares and apologizes if it hits you with one. Most players just keep the Guide-Bot docked and figure out their directions without its help.
• Daikatana. A selling point of the game is another computer-controlled character would follow you around for almost the entirety of the game. Unfortunately, the AI is awful and likes to run into walls and other useless things that you would be perfectly able to handle on your own if you didn't have to worry about your other character. Worse is that if either of your NPC teammates die, it's game over, which is just icing on the cake of their own sheer stupidity and the fact that, at least in the first episode, your weapons are all designed in such a way that they're just as dangerous (if not moreso) to yourself and your teammates than they are to your enemies. Pretty much every modern port of the game includes a feature to either make companions invincible or remove them entirely; the latter option is considered the easiest, because it means they don't grab your health, ammo, and armor.
• Rainbow Six: Vegas 2:
  • The Player Character (Bishop) and his/her squad are "assisted" by an NSA agent who infiltrated the terrorist's penthouse, who helps by falsely claiming there are no snipers on the roof of the penthouse (getting one of your support staff in the helicopter shot in the face), closing down the elevators right before you can use them to rappel down to where you need to be, shutting off the lights during a tense situation, and generally distracting you at multiple points (to the point where Bishop actually once shouts at him "radio silence!" when he tries to start talking about something unimportant). Later, when Bishop's squadmates are recalled back to replace Logan Keller's lost squad, Bishop decides to track down the apparent terrorist mastermind, Alvarez Cabrero to an oil facility, and the NSA agent shows up to accompany them. The agent's help mainly consists of him distracting you during tense situations again, failing at giving you reliable intel, asking you to go do something else for him, and generally being completely useless. Justified in that the NSA agent was The Mole, The Man Behind the Man, and the Anticlimax Boss all rolled into one convenient, easily hateable package.
  • The squad itself is terrible at their jobs. Keep them nearby and they will forcibly block your path of retreat as a grenade drops at your feet or five-plus tangos materialize on the other side of the room and start unloading on you. Send them up ahead and they'll prioritize getting to and staying on that point over everything else, even surviving long enough to get there, or clearing the area of nearby enemies once they're at it. Tell them to rappel or fast-rope from railings and, when they don't try to walk through you to get to it, fail to phase through you, and give up while telling you they "can't do that", they'll force you to walk them through every single step of getting onto the rope and walking down it - often once each for both of them, since even if there's five or more rappel points right next to each other and you point to a specific spot on the ground rather than the rappel point itself, they'll both insist on taking the same rope. Try to strategically move them up from cover to cover, and on the rare occasions they don't choose to move up via whichever path requires them to try and push you out of your cover (or get stuck on you again and decide you really wanted them right on top of yourself), they'll get stuck on thin air. The worst part of all this is that both games have you work with an entirely different set of operatives for the first mission who are not nearly as suicidally-incompetent as Mike and Jung are, leaving one to assume that all of the above is intentional.
• Halo:
  • Halo: Combat Evolved had 343 Guilty Spark, which made irritating comments, gave useless advice, and hummed slightly nasal tunes like fingernails down a chalkboard as he led you along. "Luckily" you didn't have to bear with him forever, as he turned out to be one of the bad guys and proceeded to try to kill you at every opportunity afterward. Subsequent games have him helping you again (and being a bit more useful), but he once again goes off the deep end at the end of Halo 3, and you get to kill him this time, much to the joy of several players.
  • A less extreme case is in Halo 3 on the final level. As you drive up to the jump you'll need to make to get into the hangar, Cortana urges you to gun the engines, which would be good advice, except that anyone with half a brain would have already been gunning the engine for the entire level, thank you very much! Thankfully, Cortana is usually an aversion of this trope.
  • In parts of Halo 2 and 3 where Sgt. Johnson has hijacked a Scarab or the like, he tends to shoot instant-death lasers into the area where you're fighting. 2 at least makes this easier in that it's more of an Escort Mission with an escort that's pretty much invincible - stay out of his way and there's no problem.
• In Deus Ex, allies and enemies can talk to you over your infolink, and for the entirety of their voice clip you cannot quicksave, which can be pretty tiresome at times. It's even lampshaded in the original game: after Tracer Tong drones on and on through the infolink about the Illuminati and the clues you've uncovered that point to them - all while you are desperately trying to escape both hordes of enemies and numerous environmental hazards - J.C. (your character) berates him for it when they meet face to face. Tong seems blissfully unaware that he has done anything wrong.
• Team Fortress 2 - Every time there's a change in the mission objective status, the Administrator has something to say about it. This quickly gets very annoying on Control Point maps with a highly contested CP. And then there was the "OVERTIME" bug, which would cause the announcer to repeatedly announce "overtime" every time anything happened regarding the central control point - even just someone stepping onto or off of it.
• In early builds of Left 4 Dead, AI characters could heal you with their health packs, which would freeze you in place for several seconds. When they pull this stunt during the last sprint to the rescue vehicle, it can easily get you killed. Valve thankfully patched it so you could cancel the healing by pulling out your own pills or first aid kit. However, this means that in instances where you're trying to conserve health supplies, you, the only one currently focused on actually shooting the zombies, have to put away your gun and stop shooting the zombies until the AI takes the hint. Also, the AI will gleefully toss you pain pills if you don't have any while you are low on health, but they will usually do so while you are shooting and you will likely down the pills without even trying.
• Left 4 Dead 2 has a Charger, which will plow through you and the Spitter, who can spit acid on the floor and damage anyone standing in it. It can become quite common for an AI survivor to try to heal you and you see a Charger running towards you or a Spitter spits on you as you are being healed, forcing you to take damage until the AI either finishes healing you or is also hit by the spit and forces them to move.
• Half-Life 2:
  • "Don't forget to reload, Doctor Freeman!" is one of the more useless reminders, coming when you're in the process of doing just that, you still have half a magazine, or even when using a weapon where there's no manual reload option in the first place. This is thankfully absent from the Episodes.
  • Intentionally averted in Half-Life 2: Episode One with Alyx. Originally she was to frequently tell Gordon (and thus the player) to hurry up/go faster/something similar, but when the developers realised that if players didn't like Alyx they wouldn't like the game, as she spends almost all of the game following the player, this was removed.
  • After popping out of a room to throw a grenade into a sunken gun turret, you may find that when you moved outside, an NPC 'teammate' stepped into the doorway. Now you have to gently, politely push them aside and shuffle back into the room. While taking bullets.
• The tutorial instructors in Call of Duty "Switch to your other weapon, it's faster than reloading!" Particularly annoying if you're trying repeatedly to get the achievement. The message will play even if you've already switched to your other weapon and thus the magazines are running dry on both.
• Fallout:
  • Dogmeat in Fallout 3 doesn't have any tactics beyond "stay here and don't move" and "immediately attack anything within range." This frequently leads to him leaping between you and an enemy ... just as you're unloading several shotgun shells or lasers in that direction. Other companions don't fare much better, especially if they decide for you that you want them to use melee weapons, which frequently means your trips through the wasteland are interrupted by realizing they've rushed off to engage enemies so far off you can't even see them beyond the markers on your compass.
  • The anonymous young lady who abruptly cutscene-stops you every single time you enter Megaton and almost every time you leave a building in Megaton to spend five minutes to zoom-lock the camera on herself and tell you just how much you're appreciated and to give you a (usually) cheap and barely useful item. Forget the Talon Mercenaries, this is the game's real punishment for having overly high Karma.
  • In Fallout: New Vegas, the Old World Blues Stealth Suit Mk II becomes this. She/It will inject you with Med-X at the start of a fight (which can easily get you addicted to it if you let her/it) and will inject you with Stimpaks very frequently, even if you don't need it (possibly getting you sick AND burning expensive items when they weren't needed). In addition to this, she regularly cracks the joke "Starting combat... just kidding." Especially bad when in an already tense situation.
  • Dogmeat is unfortunately not much better in Fallout 4 at times, simply because he has the ability to find and retrieve items nearby. Whilst this can sometimes be something useful or interesting, it may occasionally just be a packet of cigarettes. Worse, however, is that Dogmeat disregards anything between himself and the object of interest; he'll gleefully run across landmines and through laser tripwires to bring it back. If you happen to be in the wrong place at the time, this can easily lead to dormant security systems deciding that you are now a threat.
• Far Cry 3 really wants you to follow the main quest line. A huge pop up box will "helpfully" appear on the screen every couple of minutes to remind you to go to the next mission, although a later patch removed it.
• NETRICSA, Sam's implanted AI from Serious Sam, with the stupid blinking mailbox icon forcing you to go out of the game just to shut it up. It takes almost every opportunity to do this, not just every time you kill an enemy and pick up a weapon for the first time, but in response to countless environments throughout the game. And the information is always something the player either already knows or can figure out almost immediately or something completely unimportant. It doesn't help that Serious Sam is a game DESIGNED for First-Person Shooter veterans who don't need ANY of this help, and can easily fool someone into recommending a game to an FPS newbie —bad idea. And it gets even worse in Serious Sam II when she becomes Suddenly Voiced.
• Bioshock Infinite has help messages that pop up when it detects that the player is having difficulty with a given section. However, these messages interfere with Elizabeth throwing supplies (like health) to Booker during combat, creating situations where the help messages can kill you.
• Goldeneye 1997 gives you Natalya, who has a nasty habit of wandering in front of your bullets when a legion of troops has you pinned down and you can only shoot your way out. Any mission she dies in automatically fails, so her lack of awareness has frustrated many a player. When she finally gets her own gun late in the game, she's about as adept at firing bullets as she is at dodging them, so she'll just alert guards to your presence without dispatching them. Made even worse in Control, where the guards actually start trying to kill her.

Hack and Slash

• Gauntlet and its progeny: "Warrior needs food, badly!", "Warrior is about to die!", "Use magic to kill Death!". Not actually bad advice, most of the time, but usually obvious and unnecessary.
• In Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening, when you get the boss of Mission 19 down to half health, your brother, Vergil, shows up to help you beat the boss. At this point, the battle becomes ten times harder, since they mapped the button you use to control Vergil (which is useless anyway since he mirrors your moves for the most part) to your Style button, depriving you of many of your more powerful moves, which far outweighs Vergil's meager contribution. Plus, you can't use your Devil Trigger; no healing or extra damage for you.
• In Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 2:
  • When an oversized mecha shows up on your side, the giant mecha's Beam Spam and shockwave attacks hurt you just as badly as they hurt the enemy mooks. Even worse, you can't even get the giant mech to stop by killing it, because it's on your side!
  • Your A.I. allies' idea of attacking bosses is to run face-first into said boss and hit it with only basic moves, usually getting their ass handed to them. This is particularly bad in missions that fail if said ally dies.
• Allies in any Dynasty Warriors have no input from the player and can cause trouble for them. This is particularly frustrating in 2, where enemy officers can recover health or get temporary power-ups when knocked down... which is what any fully executed combo will do to them (and the only one which doesn't stuns them, meaning any subsequent hit will knock them down). When fighting alone, this could be avoided. When fighting with allies around... yeah, good luck with getting a quick win there.
• Allies in Hyrule Warriors are frequently a hinderance for several reasons. They're no good at pursuing objectives but will try anyway, which usually ends in a Game Over because a mission-critical ally tried to pick a fight with a powered-up enemy Captain and got beaten into the ground for it. The game warns you when important characters or locations are under attack, but you might not get the message because helpful warnings can easily be delayed or interrupted by dialogue from your allies. Even the basic, unnamed troops can unintentionally sabotage you if they decide to form a raid group to capture enemy keeps. These supposed helpers actually make it harder to capture keeps because doing so requires killing enemies inside the keep, but it won't spawn more enemies if too many of your own troops are crowded inside, especially in the 3DS port.
• Nick from Lollipop Chainsaw must always point out the obvious, and keep repeating himself endlessly. A perfect example from Chapter 1, when trying to keep the zombies away from the bomb cake: "Keep those zombies away from the cake!" "Keep those zombies away from the cake!" "Keep those zombies away from the cake!" "Keep those zombies away from the cake!"

Light Gun Game

• Lost Land Adventure have you enlisting a guide and veteran adventurer named Jack early on, whole role in the entire game is never. SHUTTING. THE. HELL. UP. Each and every level is an otherwise exciting shootout against assorted enemies... while Jack repeatedly inserts his commentary into gameplay, whether the player wants it or not, pointing out obvious onscreen clues while players are trying to concentrate ("It must be the head!", "Let's try this way!", "It's not safe! It's not safe!", "Ah! Ah! Look out its dangerous! AHHH!"... why thank you, Captain Obvious), shouting at your player while you're trying to battle a boss ("It's going to eat us! Ahhhh!!" - said while you're trying to concentrate on shooting a Sand Worm boss before it can swallow you) and having contributed nothing to the players during boss battles, then boasting before a defeated boss, "That's not so hard!". Also, one of Jack's favorite lines is, "I need a vacation!" which he'll complain into your face at the end of each level, despite your player doing all the hard work and Jack only being the driver.

Platform Game

• A webgame Overlord's New Mansion, has various books describing game mechanics... plus a helper that starts dialog while you are above a pit, telling you to be careful about the pit you wouldn't have fallen into if the dialog window didn't appear - not too much of a loss, as the overlord respawns at the start of the level. Also, the helper does laugh when you do get killed elsewhere.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • In Super Mario World the Princess occasionally pops up to shout "HELP!" and throw you a super mushroom in the final fight with Bowser, which is nice as long as you don't have a more useful power-up in reserve that the stupid mushroom will cheerfully replace.
  • FLUDD from Super Mario Sunshine chimes in occasionally to give you advice, via a text box and the audio cue "Mario!". Whilst this can be annoying at times (especially because the advice he gives isn't usually that helpful), he's nowhere near as annoying as some of the others on this list because his text box doesn't intrude on the game or distract you too much.
  • In the Super Mario Galaxy series, there is an on-screen indicator to shake the Wii Remote / Joy-Con at incredibly obvious places (such as spinning in a launch star), even more in the second game. Three things make this extra annoying: It makes a sound which gets grating fast, it always pops up, even if you have already been to the level, and it has the tendency to pop up after you have performed the indicated action.
  • In Super Mario Galaxy 2, Rosalina is replaced by Lubba, who will constantly suggest you take a break whenever you're having trouble with a level.
• The Sonic the Hedgehog franchise has an ample supply of these:
  • Anyone who's ever played Sonic 2 or 3 & Knuckles knows just how much of a useless furry liability Tails is as your tag-along, thanks to his Artificial Stupidity; while he can be used as a nifty little immortal Red Shirt against enemies, more often than not he gets in your way, pushes buttons or destroys enemies/collapsible areas that you were wanting to use as platforms, and stupidly runs into ludicrous danger on his own. Making matters worse, when a second player tries to control him, the AI constantly attempts to take back over.
  • The Sonic Adventure duology:
    • Tikal appears throughout SA1's stages and hub areas as a glowing ball of light which dispenses hints when bumped into. Many of her hints are rather obvious in context, and consequently tend to only be at all useful if you stopped playing the game for a long time and need to quickly discern where you left off. Hints also stop your movement, leading to time loss or even death if you are in mid-jump in front of a Bottomless Pit. Additionally, some challenges require the player to finish stages without any hints - the challenge often comes less from playing without the extra help, and more from dodging the hints themselves, since accidentally touching one disqualifies you immediately.
    • Tails tags along in some SA1 stages, picking up things whether you want them or not, such as animals that you can take into the Chao Gardens^note you can only bring the last 10 animals you found back to the Gardens, so if Tails picks some up, he can push desired ones out of the queue, among some other undesirable moments.
    • The floating help TVs in Sonic Adventure 1 and 2 cause the button which is normally used for attack/pick up/put down to instead function as "tell me info I probably know already" if you're near them. This can cause issues if you try to do anything else which uses that button while standing near a TV, leading to such things as trying to put down the animal you're holding, only to be stuck standing there reading "Welcome to the Chao Races" or some such just long enough for a Chao to come over and grab the animal, thus altering its stats, appearance and behavior in ways you didn't want it to.
    • In Sonic Adventure 2, Omochao provides "hints" which consist mostly of overly obvious statements and are often difficult to avoid, and as a result has driven many a player to frustration, leading some to dish out Videogame Cruelty Potential against him. Apparently as a reaction to peoples' negative opinions on Omochao, he appears in Sonic Advance 3, but you have to press up on the + Control Pad to pick him up and get his help, doing so stops time, and many of his lines are vague hints regarding the locations of the hidden Chao, which are needed for unlocking the True Final Boss. He also receives some Take That, Scrappy! moments throughout the franchise due to his infamous behavior in his debut.
  • Some later games pair you up with other main characters, so this concept ends up making Tails and Knuckles a lot more annoying than they needed to be, especially since their hints are less avoidable than those provided by Tikal and Omochao.
  • In Shadow the Hedgehog and Sonic Heroes, you usually had to touch a "?" symbol to activate your partner's help, much like Omochao in the Adventure games. While it is still too easy to accidentally touch the help spot, no games in the series force you to hear the majority of help spots.
  • Sonic Unleashed also uses the "?" symbol in the PS3/360 version, but in the Wii/PS2 Version, Chip will stop the game to tell you something important if necessary, like how to turn a lever, even if you have already done that.
  • A ROM hack of Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic the Hedgehog OmoChao Edition, turns Omochao into a Most Triumphant Example of this trope. Why? Because he stops time to make a Captain Obvious comment for most of the actions you can do in the game while the 1up jingle plays. The more stuff he says, the longer it takes for the jingle to stop.
  • Shadow the Hedgehog actually has Exposition Fairies that compete for your attention, one trying to convince you to take the Hero Mission and the other trying to convince you to take the Dark Mission! You cannot stop them from competing—even if you choose one mission, the helper character for the other mission will pop up in the stage at another time, and this continues back and forth, back and forth... and they will talk the entire time.
  • Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood mostly plays this straight by making Tails the designated tutorial exposition character. It also subverts it by allowing the player to shut him up, with some dialogue options that make Sonic sound like a complete jackass.
  • Sonic Generations:
    • Omochao will start speaking once you pass him. In the challenge missions, this can be annoying. Even the first level of the game, he pops in to say that he's there to help. Luckily, you can turn him off.
    • For the final boss of Generations, all your friends will warn you about the homing shot. It's so bad that it will drown out the one line of dialogue that is actually useful!
• Donkey Kong Country
  • The role of Squawks the Parrot in the original Donkey Kong Country is a variation on this theme. Appearing only in the darkness of the "Torchlight Trouble" level, his role is to illuminate a small portion of the screen... And to shine his little flashlight in the player's eyes whenever your character turns around. Stupid bird. Likewise for Glimmer the Anglerfish in the second game. Possibly even worse, since it's a swimming level. Fortunately, these issues were fixed in the Virtual Console releases of the games.
  • In Donkey Kong 64, Squawks also shows up to give you a brief tutorial whenever you first see something or use an ability. Normally annoying (yes, we know each new character has five bananas to find in each stage), but it gets even worse when you factor in that it doesn't stop the action around you. Dazzling Addar's Let's Play of the game demonstrates this, as such a tutorial directly costs him a race.
• Professor Chops qualifies in Donkey Kong Country Returns. Die five or eight times in one level, and he will appear at the beginning of the level and at every checkpoint jingling and waving his little flag trying to get you to use the Super Guide option. The only way to make him go away is by beating that level... and then, if you go back to the level to get items and die a bunch again, he comes back.
• Spyro: A Hero's Tail has Trina the fairy, who pops up whenever Spyro comes across something he hasn't before. She doesn't speak, but her text bubble takes up almost half the screen, often obscuring the very thing she's trying to explain about, and continues to stay on the screen unless you move away from that new thing. Then if you go back to it she pops up again with her infernal text bubble still in place.
• Mega Man X has Navigators, or characters who would sit in Maverick Hunter HQ and serve as your character's Mission Control. Unfortunately, the first and most recurring one, Alia, put a bad taste of this mechanic in the mouths of players in her Mega Man X5 debut. Whenever she decided she needed to talk to you about something, the game would force you to stop and listen, often interrupting a precision jump or maneuver and throwing off the player's timing^note especially in Burn Dinorex's and Spiral Pegasus's stages, where she does this in sections where you have to move quickly to beat a very short time limit to tell you nothing that you couldn't have already figured out on your own. Future titles in the Mega Man X series would add options to ignore Alia, with Mega Man X8 giving you the option to just not have a Navigator at all.
  • Of course, X8 also goes to lengths to make the Navigators less annoying when you do use them. Alia is no longer the Captain Obvious she was in X5, and will actually point out things of interest. The two new Navigators, Layer and Pallette, are actually somewhat useful; the former tells you boss weaknesses, while the latter points out secrets and hints at solutions to puzzles. All three can also be Promoted to Playable in the game, though none can be upgraded with Metals.
• Mighty No. 9, following on the worst traditions of its spiritual predecessor, has a lot of moments of characters popping in to interrupt the gameplay to explain the obvious or just provide exposition or banter. This is particularly lethal, as not only can they drown out in-game audio cues, but the large text box they use to talk with can end up literally covering up the fight.
• Psychonauts has Crystal and Clem, two psychotic cheerleaders — sort of. They only appear in a few places, but when they do, they mercilessly cheer and scream for Raz, much to his chagrin. The first time you encounter them, they're rooting for you while you play a mini-game. Your reward for finishing said mini-game? Getting them kicked out of the level. In contrast, your actual Exposition Fairy, Ford, will generally only chime in with unwanted advice when it's really obvious that you have absolutely no idea what you're doing. It can still be distracting, though, if you try to listen in at the same time you're fighting off a giant lungfish. However, if pressed for more and more cheers, Crystal will eventually break down into tears, admitting that she is a godawful cheerleader and her life is a sham. They can also be seen mixing poison in glass vials they will hide behind their backs if the player gets near. It's pretty heavily implied that they're both extremely suicidal and cannot even stand themselves.
• Bottles and his relatives from the Banjo-Kazooie games are something of an in-world example. Aside for the skippable tutorials at the beginning of each game, they only show up to the teach the bear and bird duo new movements; if they have collected the correct number of notes. However, this doesn't quite stop the moles from being threated by Kazooie, who mocks and insults them on a regular basis.
• Conker's Bad Fur Day while nowhere near as bad as some examples, repeatedly tells you to press 'B' on context sensitive buttons even though most of them have a big fat 'B' written and clearly visible right where you should stand. Also, when picking up stuff like the slingshot and confidence pills, you have these menus with incredibly slow text scrolling and you have to wait for Conker to read the instructions (he often takes long pauses) until you can move on.
  • A surprising notable aversion is Gregg the Grim Reaper, who you first see in a cutscene following Conker losing his first life. The cutscene goes on for two and a half minutes when all it had to explain is "collect tails for extra lives", yet it's regarded by many fans as a highlight of the game for being a Crowning Moment of Funny and Greg has since become an Ensemble Dark Horse of the game for it.
• In Kirby & the Amazing Mirror, you get three other little vacuum blobs to "help" you out. In reality, they are Too Dumb to Live.
• In the climax of Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped, Aku Aku holds Uka Uka off while you take on Cortex. Only problem? Aku Aku helps form half the danger of the fight thanks to Friendly Fire.
• This is a problem with the Grimmchild charm in Hollow Knight. It summons a Familiar who shoots fireballs at any attackable targets... including the Mantis Villagers after you've made them friendly (probably resulting in you being chased out by a horde of angry mantises), the Ooomas (who explode when killed), and Millibelle, a harmless bug trying to run a banking service (who will rather sensibly hide once she's been burned). Of course, Millibelle is actually trying to scam you, so Grimmchild was right on the money with that one at least. Shooting mantises and Oomas is still unhelpful.
• Rayman:
  • In Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc, there's Murfy. The good news is that you'll only see him for one level. The bad news is that he won't shut up for the entire duration of said level and you can't skip his dialogue.
  • Weirdly, he was really tolerable in Rayman 2: The Great Escape, having his advice appearing briefly on screen without interrupting your action at all and only appearing in person when you either encountered his helper stone for the first time or called for it with a certain button while standing on said stone. One has to wonder why they went several steps back in the next game ...
• In Epic Mickey, Gus Gremlin worked just fine as a helper. But in Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two, he is fully voiced and just keeps on saying the same words of advice as you attempt to solve a certain puzzle or fight a certain battle, and it gets very tiresome and very distracting.
• Mocked in The Angry Video Game Nerd Adventures with Naggi the Fairy, an obvious parody of Navi who appears in the tutorial level to explain the basic controls, which only pisses off the Nerd because he has played dozens of other games just like this one and doesn't need the controls explained to him. The game doesn't give any indication of this, but at the very end of the level before the goal, she suddenly becomes killable, allowing you to take out your frustrations on her and by extension all of her ilk. You even get an achievement for it!
• One of the more common complains about the post-PS2 Ratchet & Clank games is the frequency with which characters will talk to you about where to go, what you should be doing, and when enemies start attacking you.
• A common complaint of PAW Patrol: On A Roll! is that Ryder never shuts up.

Puzzle Game

• If GLaDOS weren't so well-written, Portal would have been one of the most annoying experiences in the entire god-damn world. Trapped in a lab facility, your only companion a cube that doesn't ever speak to you and a passive-aggressive ice inhibitor... you're really lucky Old Man Murray wrote the script, you know that? It helps that GLaDOS does give some genuinely helpful information at times (mostly when the developers found playtesters had difficulty understanding concepts necessary to some puzzles, for example conservation of momentum) and is a gloriously funny Deadpan Snarker. Besides, at the end you do get to kill her. Unless she really is Still Alive...
  • Portal 2 averts this by giving your AI companions absolutely hilarious dialogue throughout the game, but it plays the trope for meta humor during the third act in the form of the automated announcer who continues to insist, despite the villain's denials, that the facility is about to blow up. For bonus fun, when the reactor explosion countdown timer fails during the Final Boss fight, the announcer is so determined to be helpful that it activates a Self-Destruct Mechanism to remove the uncertainty of not knowing when you're going to die.
• In the Brain Age 100 math problems exercise, an attention shattering noise occurs after solving a set number of problems.
• The first puzzle in Myst IV has Atrus constantly telling you how to solve it. There is not one second of continuous silence from Atrus until you have solved it. His repertoire of helpful advice isn't particularly long, and it gets very old very quickly.
• In Super Hexagon, whenever the current record is broken, the game feels the need to announce it on the spot with "Excellent!" Due to how easily it can break one's concentration, that "Excellent!" may very well be immediately followed up with (zap) "GAME. OVER."

Racing Game

• Burnout Paradise: Shut Up Atomika, we do not need your Forced Tutorials interrupting the high-speed stunt driving every 3 minutes.
• F1 2018 has the race engineer talk to you on track for certain updates. Although the default setting seems to be only for critical information, some radio options treat the engineer as if the trope is in effect. The option to silence him is "Shut up, Jeff", and the achievement for doing so is "Seriously, JEFF!"
• Ridge Racer has a frequent "Hey! Somebody's right on your tail!"
• Daytona USA 2, meanwhile, often has "Hey! Someone's drafting you!"
• LEGO Stunt Rally has the in-game assistant of "Mr. X", who serves as an instructor to the player. Fair enough, but it can get annoying hearing him repeatedly explain the functions of every single button every time you scroll over something. Fortunately you can turn him off if you get too sick of him.

Real Time Strategy

• AI War 2: Almost any faction that you can set to your side can give you a bit of grief. It's downplayed, since you need all the help you can get and they're a valuable distraction at worst (and overwhelming threats even bigger than you at best), but minor factions on your side tended to kill Warp Gates belonging to the AI with reckless abandon in previous versions. It helped to cut down on waves, but it would reflect quite badly on your AIP since the AI knows they're on your side, possibly causing an unwanted amount of it and forcing a few alterations on your playstyle. You can turn the AIP increase off in the game's options, thankfully, though you'll still get it if you claim the planet. And made worse if you let them kill enemy Command Stations with another option, increasing the AIP gain even more (on the plus side, "free" planet!). And finally, even if it's not their fault, the AI sometimes reacts very badly indeed to their presence and growth, leading to Extragalactic War units getting unleashed on you. Afterwards, they were patched so that they wouldn't kill Warp Gates anymore... in exchange for attracting even more attention from the AI, who now tosses dedicated task forces into the galaxy for the sole purpose of killing your newfound friends and anything you send to protect them.
• Zyzyx in Sacrifice. "Your creatures are under attack!" "Your creatures are dying!" "Your building lies in ruins..." etc. He would be endurable if he didn't say those lines over and over again in the same tone, or if that last phrase didn't sound like it carried the subtext "and it wasn't a particularly good building either." A patch for the game added, amongst numerous improvements, the option to disable Zyzyx's help.
• Medieval II: Total War was essentially advisor-free (you could disable it completely, and if you didn't it only gave you the advice once). Life was good. And then a patch introduced a battle commentator giving you the play-by-play. "The battle is swinging in our favor! If we can press on, victory is ours! Our forces are badly blooded! KILL YOURSELF, KILL YOURSELF AND THE IMMERSION YOU RODE IN ON, YOU PATHETIC MORON!". Adding insult to injury, the voice was in culture-dependent silly accent. Making things even worse is the fact that the battle commentator doesn't actually say anything useful. Due to the massive scale of a number of the battles, you'll hear him say that you've destroyed half the enemy force UP TO 3 TIMES!
• Age of Empires II has an example that's a combination of Annoying Video Game Helper and Stop Asking for Help From Me. Now, the normal You Require More Vespene Gas type messages in the game are okay, most of the time, because you really do require more of the resource when you get them. But in the Saladin campaign, you have to defend two allies, Aqaba and Medina. Theoretically, Aqaba and Medina will tell you when they're being attacked; one of the win conditions is that you need to make sure the Crusaders don't destroy Aqaba and Medina, so accurate messages about when they're being attacked are, in theory, helpful. In practice, you start this level with virtually no resources or military units, meaning you'll be stuck listening to them scream for help when there's nothing you can do, since you need to save your handful of underpowered cavalry for when your base gets attacked. Also, they'll sometimes broadcast the voice clip even when there's nothing left on the main landmass to attack them. This gets old fast, and it just puts the icing on the cake of That One Level.
• Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos
  • In the second human campaign mission, you build a base and train an army to kill the Blackrock Orc leader. Uther the Lightbringer helps defend your base from orcs that periodically attack it. Oh yeah, he also has a 45 second shield that he pops whenever somebody hits him. So the orcs start attacking your towers instead. Thanks, Uther.
  • In the first undead mission of the Frozen Throne, the player has to prevent anyone to escape the map through three paths, requiring to switch between three bases, heroes and armies. If that wasn't difficult enough, anytime enemy units will come anywhere close to one of the exits Kel'Thuzad or Sylvanas will interrupt the player's concentration by yelling about it. Even if you had let units at the passes specifically to deal with this.
• The Riftbreaker has two of them. Ashley and Mr. Riggs like to remind you every minute or so that your carbonium storage is full, build more carbonium storages. Same with steel storage. And your uranium storage and your... To add insult to injury every time you load into a savegame reminders for every single resource will be given one after the other.

Rhythm Game

• During the introduction cutscene to every stage in PaRappa the Rapper 2, NPC Boxy Boy shows up to remind you how to play the game. A nice bit of help before stage 1 starts; annoyingly patronizing when he shows up in the final stage. It can be skipped with the Start button, but you still have to sit through his entrance and exit lines before the cutscene proceeds.
  Boxy Boy: C'mon, Parappa, relax! It's practice time!

Roguelike

• Any party member in Elona who has spells that can hit multiple targets but lacks the "Control Magic" skill. Control Magic is required to prevent friendly fire, so if your pet doesn't have it, expect to get hit a lot. Especially annoying when the pet has fire or ice spells, since getting hit by one has a chance to destroy a random item, including potentially valuable ones, unless you have the appropriate blanket (which has limited charges).

Role-Playing Game

• Mario & Luigi:
  • Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story:
    • Toadsworth spends the first battle teaching Mario to do things (even if you've already done them), and after you get inhaled by Bowser, Starlow (and to an extent, the Emoglobins) crank the tutorials out of control. It gets to the point where the tutorial for digestion is longer than the actual digestion, since you only do the digestion mini-game once. Bowser himself gets annoyed at Toadsworth constantly interrupting the battle. One can only imagine how Midbus feels when Fawful keeps breaking in and effectively telling Bowser how to beat him up.
    • The Emoglobin's Verbal Tic of replacing every other noun with "globin" really doesn't help.
    • Bowser getting annoyed at exposition becomes a Running Gag throughout the third game, especially with Starlow, or rather 'Chippy'. It helps that for once, Starlow is portrayed as being rather annoying and in-your-face in-game, rather than well-intentioned ineptitude.
  • Played with in Mario & Luigi: Dream Team in the boss battle against the Wiggler. Popple (who is supposedly fighting alongside you) "helps out" by annoying the Wiggler, making it VERY pissed and causing its attacks to become a lot harder to evade. Remember this is Popple, the selfish and cowardly "Shadow Thief", who antagonized the Wiggler because he assumed he was a security guard and tried to get the Bros. in trouble so he could steal some more things.
• Subverted in Suikoden II. Apple, a returning character from the first game, offers her services as a strategist in your first few early engagements. She does a mediocre job at first, then flat out fails spectacularly at countering the enemy's strategy a couple times later on. The aversion comes when she apologizes, decides she's just not ready yet, and only helps if you explicitly ask her to from then on. However, without her you and everyone else in the fort would be dog meat, and the help she gives later when you ask for it is generally helpful. Really, her only shortcoming is a lack of confidence in herself.
• In System Shock 2, Janice Polito's speeches are much louder than ambient sounds. For example when main character leaves Cryo Recovery. Hybrids are groaning somewhere nearby. Player cannot see them, but hears their footsteps approaching. He sneaks, trying to find them... then Polito blows his speakers all of a sudden, telling about an elevator being shut down. This is likely deliberate, though (like with the maybe-allies above).
• Mother:
  • In EarthBound Beginnings and EarthBound (1994): Ninten's and Ness' father would occasionally call and ask if they would like to take a break. Which, even if they reply yes or no, it would still be some time before he calls again and advise for some rest.
  • Mother 3: After playing for a significant amount of time, Leder's bell will ring in the distance and suggest some resting before letting the party continue.
• Fable:
  • The Guildmaster from the first game frequently offers advice that's either not applicable or so obvious you couldn't miss it. "Try to get your combat multiplier EVEN HIGHER!" "Hero, your health is low... do you have any potions? Or food?" "Your Will energy is low, Hero. Watch that." Also, there's the hallucinating boy, one of whose random phrases is "Your health is low... What?! Who said that?"
  • Similarly, Whisper and summoned minions do relatively low damage compared to you and have a tendency to Kill Steal, preventing you from getting experience from that monster.
  • Fable II:
    • The unhelpful notices of the first game are referred to in a loading screen that states there are rumors that the Guildmaster was found dead with "Your health is low" carved into his forehead.
    • The dog from Fable II often borders on this trope as he barked and tried to alert you to treasure even when you can clearly see in right in front of you. This quickly becomes irritating. Likewise, its AI is supposed to prioritize combat over treasure hunting, but will sometimes glitch causing it to run off and bark incessantly at a treasure in the middle of battle.
• Ultima VII part 1 and 2 are notorious for the fact that your party members are unable to feed themselves, unlike in the previous games. Even if their backpack contains plenty of food, they will start whining about how hungry they are constantly.
• Mass Effect:
  • Mass Effect: The Alliance Marine Corps, Citadel Security and several random aliens manage to keep the galaxy safe, despite the fact that they tend to aim straight at their target and blast away, disregarding any obstacles in the line of fire, like walls, rocks, ship hulls, the back of the player character's head... Fortunately, this is easy enough to mitigate by simply ordering them to move away, and when they do have a clear line of sight at their targets, they do a lot of damage.
  • The "help" messages with the Cerberus logo in the sequel constitutes better proof than anything that the organization is inherently evil. "Press F to finish the mission. What's that? You want to explore and I'm covering up your Dialogue Tree? WELL TOO BAD!"
  • Mass Effect: Andromeda had so many complaints about your AI companion SAM interrupting Party Banter to alert you to various things that BioWare reduced the frequency dramatically in the first major patch a week after release.
• The King of All Cosmos in Katamari Damacy; no, thanks, really, I can clearly see how big my little sphere of proto-star is, right now, you don't need to comment on it every five minutes. However, some of this is actually a disguised loading screen, to let the game reshape the world once your Katamari is big enough to go new places.
• While not technically a character, the narrator from the Baldur's Gate games for PC definitely counts. "You must gather your party before venturing forth." Fortunately, there's a mod for the game which removes the voice.
  • Neutral guards can be helpful to deal with some hard enemies... until they steal your kills and the associated xp.
  • Especially annoying because the range your party members must be within to avoid it is so low. What do you mean "gather the party"? They're right there!
• Arcanum, NPC characters are almost as dangerous to you as the enemy.
  • Where there is NO WAY to get your NPC followers to retreat. Even as they whine about being on the verge of death or even begging for retreat, they'll stand there and keep bashing on the enemy until they die.
  • And if given any consumables such as healing items, they'll gulp them as soon as anyone takes as much as a scratch.
  • Or Virgil wasting all his Fatigue trying (and failing) to heal your high tech-aptitude character with his magic.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • Donald Duck would heal you at the slightest thing instead of saving it for when you're properly injured. That said, you could alter his use of magic to "Only in an emergency" — in which case he will save his Cure spell until your Critical Annoyance alarm goes off. He also loves casting Stop, which freezes enemies, but prevents them from taking damage until the effect ends, at which point they take all the damage inflicted while they were Stopped at once, delaying the death of weak enemies you could have easily beaten without the spell's help. Worse, he will use it during Olympus Coliseum's Timed Missions, delaying the death of the final enemy and wasting precious time.
  • In Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, the Donald card will make you bang your head against a wall. The card casts two random spells from Fire, Blizzard, Thunder, and Cure, with the possibility of casting the same spell twice. This is completely random and doesn't take into account things like elemental absorption and your current HP, so he has a 25% chance of healing any enemy that absorbs an element (and a 12.5% chance of healing it twice), and he can waste his spells on healing you when you don't need it.
• In Planescape: Torment, unless you maintain tight control over her Fall-From-Grace would run up to the enemy and slap them^note Okay, it's a magic slap, her default and only attack, when she should be hanging back and healing instead. More annoyingly, her spellcasting AI had her cast her weakest healing spells by default, regardless of a party member's injuries. This meant that she'd quickly expend all her Cure Light Wounds spells trying to heal one of the fighters instead of simply using a single casting of Heal or Cure Critical Wounds, wasting both time and spells.
• Tales of...:
  • The in-battle voice triggers can be cool, if not helpful, but Tales of Vesperia takes it too far. Other characters will warn a unit when his TP is getting low, which could be helpful for newbies, but aggravating to a player who knows how to watch his TP but, for some reason (say, holding a boss still) chooses not to. And all the more annoying when the player is put down for it, generally by Rita. Worse is when a character is berated for running away from an enemy for some length of time, again usually by Rita or Raven, since most of the times that situation will come up, it's because the running character is trying to kite the enemy - keeping its attention while not letting it hit himself or another unit. Other useless "help" messages include "I don't think going back is such a good idea." "Oops, made a wrong turn!" "We shouldn't be going this way." "Are you sure it's this way?"
  • Tales of Symphonia takes the .hack//G.U. and Kingdom Hearts problem of overactive spell casters and healers to a whole new level. If your spell casters waste all their magic either healing 1 hp of damage repeatedly or attacking the boss/enemies, they bum rush that enemy and get wasted in under a second. Fortunately, you can alter that behavior, there are many options like "save" (always leaves at least 75% TP) and stuff... at least for the offensive spells.
  • Tales of Legendia: If it gets any closer... It interrupted the Eres!
• Linu in Neverwinter Nights has a particularly frustrating form of this. It's called the "Harm" spell, and it's used to heal undead. Does Linu realise it doesn't seriously hurt undead? No. No she doesn't.
• The Status Effects in Dawn of Mana are bad enough, but your Fairy Companion will very unhelpfully ask "are you okay?" every damn time you shake one off.
• In Dragon Age: Origins, city guards and other neutral characters whom one might expect to help out if a fight breaks out in their vicinity often do. This help is usually un-needed but not specifically unwelcome. However, you better hope there aren't any neutral mages nearby when you start a fight. Their idea of help consists of throwing a fireball into the middle of the battle and then repeating it as many times as necessary.
  "Collateral damage? That's a good thing, right? The more the better."
• In Riviera: The Promised Land, when the game starts you get a prologue chapter full of tutorials; fair enough, you just started the game. But when you're 5 hours in the characters (now the girls, when in the prologue were Rose and Ledah) are still giving you information about stuff you very most likely already know about. Even the tutorial doesn't come as practical - do we really need a long text rambling about how the number next to an item's name indicates the remaining amount of them?
• Golden Sun is completely free of this...except for one section. Lamakan Desert. It introduces a dehydration mechanic requiring you to find oases to keep from getting heatstroke and taking about a third of your health in damage. Which would be tolerable, except your party members constantly complain about the heat.
• Golden Sun: Dark Dawn:
  • In Tanglewood Forest, Isaac coaching you to use Djinn for advantages is understandable since there may be new players who don't know how that aspect works, but still comes off as annoying to veterans and anyone who's realized the monsters can be oneshotted with Karis's Whirlwind. In the same part of the game, Garet's AI will get trigger-happy with summons if you have enough Djinn on standby (like if you'd wanted to adjust Matthew's and Karis's classes), regardless of the enemy you're facing.
  • Cutscenes frequently have the characters discussing what to do next, when it should be obvious. Once they do realize they need to (obvious action), they talk about that ad nauseum.
  • Amiti is occasionally scripted to autonomously pop out and use his Insight Psynergy to show the solution for a puzzle. Sometimes, this is helpful, like telling you how to knock down Djinn in high places. Sometimes, it is obnoxious, like telling you how to solve the entry to the Ouroboros labyrinth... which is the exact same "empty the basin" puzzle he watched you do for every room in Barai Temple.
• Cha-Cha in Monster Hunter 3 (Tri) is actually pretty useful with the right mask and skills. Plus he also heals you and often serves as a distraction for large monsters, giving you the space to heal or ready an attack. On the other hand, his habit of running straight forward in front of you when attacking the same monster makes him highly annoying for Gunners, especially when trying to use special ammunition that's usually very limited in count. Also occasionally blowing you up in the middle of a combo when using the Feylyne Mask (thankfully, his bombs don't hurt you).
• The Borderlands series:
  • Borderlands: The Claptraps will keep bugging you about new missions that popped up, even though you already signed up for all of them or are in the middle of another mission. They will always repeat this every single time you go from one region to another. According to the developers, the Claptrap's Robot Revolution DLC is partly meant for players to vent their frustrations on the little buggers since they're the main enemies of the DLC. Depending on how you see it this works because now you can kill waves of them or it's terrible because you now have to deal with waves of these trashcans yelling the same lines over and over at the top of their shrill little voices.
  • Borderlands 2:
    • The character Gaige's special ability is based around getting bonus points every time she kills an enemy. This only counts if she kills the enemy herself, so having her robot ally Deathtrap land the final blow will rob you of your point for that enemy.
    • On one particular mission, there is a related issue where you need to hurt Varkidss and watch it go into a pod of sorts. You are then to inject the pod to let the bug mutate and then kill the monstrosity so Sir Hammerlock can research them for his book. It's possible to blow the pod up prematurely, however, and of course this happens to be the area of the game where you have a computer-controlled sniper ally take out enemies for you whether you want him to or not. Said sniper can also inadvertently get the player killed by sniping an enemy the player needed for a Second Wind. Especially on True Vault Hunter and Ultimate Vault Hunter mode, where enemies are stronger and better armored, it's a common strategy for players to keep an enemy alive but low on health in case they need a quick kill revive. And Mordecai just loves picking off enemies who are low on health (itself an annoyance, since the player doesn't get XP if an NPC gets the killing blow).
    • Any time an NPC fights alongside you can cause a headache. The NPC's do almost no damage at all, but it's somehow always enough to kill that weakened enemy you were aiming to get a Second Wind from. Lilith is the worst offender, as she can appear from nowhere, meaning you can't plan around her when choosing a target..
  • Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!:
    • An early mission has SC4V-TRP (or "Scav-trap") asking you to take out a rival gang so you can join his master Red Belly's own. He will constantly nag you to finish the job, even when you've completed it and returned to him! The only way to stop him is to leave the area completely.
    • Pickle has a tendency to chime in on any mission where he is the quest giver, even after his echo is cut off in 'Sub-Level 13.' This wouldn't be so bad, but he talks more than any other character.
• Pokémon:
  • In Pokémon Black and White, Fennel pops up to give you a tutorial in the Pokémon Dream World...every time you reset your computer's cookies. Just cleaned out your PC? Switched computers? Cue Fennel blabbering on about how to plants seeds/water your garden/use the share shelf...even though your garden is ready to harvest and your share shelf is full. Oh, and did we mention you only have access to the Dream World for an hour, after which it boots you off until exactly a day later? If you then rush to the Tree of Dreams to collect the Pokémon you want to download, you'll be stalled by Fennel telling you how magnificent the tree is, and how to make a wish. Which may cost you the Pokémon if the time runs out, especially if your internet connection tends to lag.
  • Similarly, the original Pokémon TCG video game for the Game Boy made you sit through the long, detailed and complicated tutorial with every new character. No skip option. In fact, if you beat the game as fast as physically possible for the game, it eats up half the play time.
  • The catching tutorial in every main series game. They're not so bad the first time around, but they can get annoying after multiple playthroughs of the same game. At that point, you've probably caught your first Pokémon. Or a few. Or several. Even if you're new to the franchise, it's pretty simple.
  • In Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, there are three points where an NPC will instantly transport you to a location that required some backtracking to get back to in the original games: after the Meteor Falls event, you'll automatically be sent back to Fallarbor Town and then will have the option to be taken back to Mauville City; after getting the fourth badge, you'll have the option to be taken directly to Petalburg City; and after getting the fifth badge in Petalburg, you'll automatically be taken back to Mauville. Generally speaking, if the game gives you a choice in the matter, it's a shortcut you actually want to take, and if it doesn't give you a choice, it's one you don't. ^note In the original game, the event that you're transported back to Fallarbor for took place on site at Meteor Falls instead, and it was probably equally efficient to head onwards through Meteor Falls and loop back through Rusturf Tunnel, with the added bonus of exploring new areas—but since you're in Fallarbor now anyway, Mauville's definitely closer to the Cable Car to the top of Mt. Chimney. Going directly to Petalburg and the fifth badge after getting the fourth one is a huge timesaver as at the moment there's almost no straightforward path between Lavaridge and Petalburg, but after getting the Balance Badge, you gain the ability to Surf, so it's more convenient for exploration purposes to remain in Petalburg. It's particularly noteworthy about being taken straight from Petalburg to Mauville is that the player's mother gives the immensely useful Amulet Coin after beating Norman and players have now gone from "30 seconds biking" to "Half the map away".
  • The Rotom Dex in Sun and Moon and Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon (especially the latter) may very well be the new Navi in terms of sheer annoyance to the player. It constantly gives "hints" (often things that even a series beginner would know halfway through the game like to remember to go to Pokémon Centers) to the player seemingly every time the player moves, such as closing a menu or leaving a building, blocking the mini-map until it finishes giving you a message and often parroting the same hints over and over again. The icing on the cake is that there's no way to make the Rotom Dex stop giving you these useless hints.
  • Sword and Shield: Max Raid Battles are definitely some of the more difficult parts of the game, with exclusive Pokémon forms being locked behind them. Without an internet connection (or friends to help locally), you're given three randomly chosen AI partners. If you're lucky, you'll get okay ones. Other times, you'll get ones that are useless or actively harmful. For these reasons, their very inclusion can often come off as Fake Difficulty:
    • The AI partners are chosen completely at random by the game, and there is no way to even know which ones you'll be stuck with until the battle begins, so you can't even reliably prepare to counter their idiocy. This also means that you might get Pokémon that are terrible against the enemy Pokémon. Don't be surprised if someone brings something with a type disadvantage. You might also get a genius who brings e.g. Torkoal with the Drought ability (which makes it summon harsh sunlight that increases the power of Fire-type moves) to a battle with a Fire-type enemy. Torkoal also makes bringing in a Water-type risky, since the same harsh sunlight will weaken Water-type moves.
    • The battle ends once four Pokémon on your side are knocked out, and the NPC mons recover about a turn or two after being knocked out. This means that any weak and useless teammates will happily revive themselves just to get knocked out again until you reach the cumulative limit of four and automatically lose through no fault of your own.
    • Poké Kid Freya, while she has three attacking moves, somehow thinks the best course of action in a lot of the Raid Battles is to not use any of them and just spam nothing but Helping Hand. The power boost from it is hardly noticeable, and most of the time she'll use it when the Dynamaxed 'mon has their shield up, which artificially lengthens the fight.
    • Gentleman Martin has a Solrock, which has two attacking moves in Psychic and Rock Throw. Unfortunately, like Freya, he almost never uses his attacking moves. Instead, his strategy is to set up for an attack, but he never does, instead spamming Cosmic Power while sometimes throwing in a Rock Polish for some variety. Stat-boosting moves like Cosmic Power and Rock Polish are absolutely useless in Max Raid Battles since the Dynamaxed opponent has the ability to get rid of all stat boosts on your side of the field, which it does often, so Martin effectively wastes all of his turns.
    • Cabbie Alfie brings a Wobbuffet to battle. Wobbuffet is a unique Pokémon, as it's unable to deal damage directly, only through counterattacks. This makes it an extremely poor choice for a Max Raid Battle, as it's hard to tell if the opposing Pokemon will even target it or not, and what moves they'll have. It's already a crapshoot hitting them, but Alfie somehow makes it even worse, as he spends the fights either spamming Safeguard (which is nigh-useless considering a lot of Raid 'mons never even use status effects) or Amnesia (a stat-boosting move, which is useless because (1) Wobbuffet already has high defenses, and (2) the Dynamaxed opponent can and will get rid of all stat boosts on your side of the field). On the rare occasions it does manage to hit, it can do a good amount of damage, but a lot of the time, it ends up falling in Awesome, but Impractical.
    • Beauty Catherine's Togepi has three attacking moves, but constantly spams Life Dew (heals all allies by 25%), even when all allies have full HP. This is also an issue for Backpacker Amelia's Clefairy, who has the same move.
    • In addition to Life Dew, Amelia's Clefairy will also spam Follow Me. While a useful move that can keep the other NPC allies from (initially) taking damage, Clefairy itself will be most likely to fall first, and it isn't exactly a bulky Pokémon. This is even more annoying if you get both Amelia and Alfie — if she uses Follow Me, she'll force the opponent to target her Clefairy even if Alfie's Wobbuffet is targeted and he picks the correct counterattack. At the very least she gives her Clefairy a Focus Sash to hold.
    • Black Belt Oscar has a Hawlucha, which is a fast and strong (albeit frail) Pokémon with three attacking moves. Unfortunately, for reasons beyond comprehension, it will often forego using any of these moves to use its fourth move, Feather Dance, a move that harshly lowers the opponent's Attack stat. The problem is that Raid Pokémon in 3-star raids and higher, once they take enough damage, put up a barrier that nullifies moves that lower stats, with 5-star Raid Pokemon putting up barriers twice. If the RNG is not on your side, you'll be seeing Oscar's Hawlucha waste turns using Feather Dance on 5-star Pokémon, potentially making it as annoying and useless as Solrock or even Wobbuffet. It doesn't even get a Focus Sash to offset its frailty, meaning it'll often feed two free KOs to the Raid Pokémon.
    • Pokémon Breeder Kit's Dhelmise is pretty troublesome just because it can't take a hit and is very slow, making it rapidly use up your 4-KO allotment. Many of the trainers bring a Focus Sash so they can survive at least one attack, but Dhelmise doesn't even get that. If it doesn't immediately faint, it likes to use Slam, which misses 25% of the time.
    • A more situational example is Office Worker Dean and his Throh. It only knows Fighting and Normal-type moves, which means he'll be completely useless in the event the game sticks you with him in a Raid Battle against a Ghost-type.
• Persona:
  • Fuuka, your Mission Control in Persona 3, insists upon giving you by-the-action updates of how many enemies are left, whether or not they are knocked down by, or got killed by, or survived your latest attack, and whether or not an attack you've used against that foe a bajillion times already is super-effective or no, and your status effects, and so on and so on, all of which is already clearly visible to you on the screen right in front of you and also painfully obvious. She will also constantly remind you that one of your team members is injured, to the point where letting them die becomes almost satisfying. Mission control's "help" becomes even more absurd if you are also injured — sometimes even closer to death than your teammate — and Fuuka will tell you, "I'm worried about Akihiko-senpai!" Well, thanks. She'll also ask you if there's a healing item for any character caught by a status effect, even if that character has the equivalent skill and will be more than able to heal during their turn. If you're the only one suffering from a status effect, she'll either tell you to fix yourself or count the number of enemies, but not tell your team members to help you. Fuuka's chatter is particularly annoying because it's clearly generated at random, so not only do you have to endure her stock phrases every time you fight, you'll also be treated to the same information with intonations that are completely at odds with the situation. And then, sometimes, she's just wrong: go to Monad alone on a New Game Plus and there's a good chance at least one victory will end with her congratulating the team.
  • And it returns in Persona 4. Rise calls you Senpai every five seconds. It's as if they wanted to compensate for the fact that her voice acting is a million times better than Fuuka's by having her talk a million times more. Though her predecessor, Teddie, can be plenty annoying in his own right, since both of them are, like Fuuka, repeating information you already have on the screen (and unlike Fuuka, they don't know anything more about the enemy's strengths and weaknesses than what you've learned by trial and error).
  • Combat in Persona 3 is also full of these moments. With Manual Leader, A.I. Party in effect, there's no way to make it through the initial playthrough without at least one mission turning into a murder-suicide. It is possible to become familiar enough with the AI that you can reasonably predict what your allies will do, but even that isn't foolproof. To wit:
    • God help you if you've knocked a group of enemies down and know that an All Out Attack won't finish the job. Since attacking again puts the enemy on its feet, your best move is to leave the enemy down, causing it to waste its turn standing up. Your allies, however, have other ideas. If no one in your party is injured enough to trigger the Healer to, well, heal, then that person will attack with their weapon, give the enemy their turn back, and leave you to take massive damage. During the final boss fight, you have to put your party members on Standby in order to keep them from repeatedly damaging themselves with reflected attacks. It's very annoying until you figure out that you can set their basic parameters to prioritize knocking the enemy down.
    • Junpei is one of the game's offensive powerhouses, but physical attacks are cast from hit points. Although he tends to maintain a higher-than-average number of them, he also will refuse to conserve them, even if you equip him with his ultimate weapon. Why use a sword that does 450 damage with 100 accuracy when you can use 50 of your last 200 HP to do less damage? Despite having fire skills, he'll still tend to use physical attacks instead of elemental ones, even if the opponent is weak to fire. There's something to be said about the fact that fights sometimes become much, much easier once your team is dead (including the Healer, who never got around to healing you, as they were busy with reincarnation).
  • Persona 5: Morgana has to constantly remind Joker that he has to finish a Palace or go to sleep after a Metaverse journey can be really taxing. Royal tones it down, but it can be grating.
• In Custom Robo, at the beginning of almost every fight Harry will give you advice whether you want it or not. Occasionally he gives you good tactical suggestions and what to do against certain enemy types, but most of it is useless or obvious. Furthermore, he also asks if you understood all of it, in case you want to hear it again. On a few occasions, you can confuse him with odd responses ("Wait, who are you again?" "Sorry, I was sleeping.") but those will always set him off advising again.
• Final Fantasy:
  • The Guest Star Party Members in Final Fantasy III are usually fine, but trying to steal Phoenix Downs while Desch is there is an exercise in frustration. Particularly when you think you're okay and then he shows up several turns in to kill the monster. Also, the guests are sometimes conspicuous by their absence when you could really use a healing boost or an extra punch against a boss.
  • Quistis in Final Fantasy VIII likes to explain junctioning and limit breaks in nauseating detail — at one point, she asks Squall something to the effect of "Do you know how to use your Gunblade?"/"how to junction magic?", even though after Squall has taken on his rival Seifer, the summon Ifrit, numerous monsters, the military of one of the most powerful nations in the world, and a gigantic robot; and now has graduated to being a full-fledged member of the most elite fighting force on the planet, it's not too outrageous to assume that he knows how to fight.
  • The AI partners equipped with The Wanderer's Sigil: Cheer in the Comrades multiplayer expansion for Final Fantasy XV. Cheer is an ability that grants up to five boosts to the party, with the spell replacing a players ability to cast offensive spells. Should you be playing with AI characters instead of other players, there's a chance either Sadda or Mat Kishimoto can join you on a mission along with two other AI, and both of them always have Cheer. However, they will constantly spam the ability more often than help you fight, purposefully going up next to your character and using Cheer over and over again. This even happens in harder missions when the other two party members die, leaving you to fight essentially by yourself. While the other AI characters are smarter when using their sigils, you'll likely be yelling at these characters and dreading seeing them spawn in your camp.
  • Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles has that little furry Moogle that's supposed to help you out in single player mode. Thing is, he gets tired easily (every ten minutes to be exact!) and starts to lag heavily behind, even though he's carrying your sole protection from the miasma. The last thing you want to hear is "I'm tired, kupo! It's your turn!" when you've got two Flan and three Goblins after you, with two hearts left.
• In Dragon's Dogma, Pawns will repeatedly remind you of things you already know from experience, like wolves roam in packs, goblins hate fire, a fall from high up means death, and that treading in waist high water will kill you, repeating these "suggestions" to you over and over again, sometimes, in a row.
• The Elder Scrolls series in general has the starting/character generation sequences. They are really helpful on your first playthrough, since they double as tutorials and introduce the game's plot. On your second playthrough, you start to hate the sequences. Mods abound that speed this up by removing the tutorials and plot events.
  • Oblivion
    • Followers have a bad habit of rushing any enemy they see. This can have one of two effects: 1) They rush an enemy that's way too strong for them, or 2) they run in between you and the enemy just as you're using a power strike, killing or seriously injuring them. If their survival was important to the quest you need to restart from the last save now. Hitting your partner also has a tendency to cause them to attack you, meaning you have to yield to them to get them to stop. Thank the nine for "Essential" partners (who can't be killed, only knocked unconcious).
    • One horse, Shadowmere, is marked as Essential. She also has a bad habit of rushing every enemy in sight, meaning you need to worry about the above issue with your freaking horse, which is much easier to accidentally hit and isn't a very good fighter. While she won't turn hostile on you, hitting her sometimes counts as "Assaulting a Guild Mate" which will get you kicked out of 3 of the 4 guilds (you can no longer get kicked out of the Dark Brotherhood after the mission you get Shadowmere in).
  • Skyrim has the same problem with followers as Oblivion, especially the melee fighters. Their entire strategy is Attack! Attack! Attack! which causes problems for every fighting style. Fighting with them in confined spaces makes them easy to kill on accident, they act as meat shields for enemies (especially frustrating as heavy hitting, low mobility two handed fighters) and they can hit allies who will become hostile. Quest giving Non Player Characters can be murdered by your followers after being hit by friendly fire during a fight with a mudcrab or something, causing you to fail the quest. The best you can do is equip your followers with overpowered weapons, so you can assume they'll take care of the enemy and turn your attention elsewhere.
  • Something which occurs with companions in both the Fallout and Elder Scrolls games: They're useless to stealth focused players. The companion will either attack an enemy that you're trying to sneak up on as soon as their A.I. detects the enemy, the enemy will notice your companion before you because their sneak skill is inferior to yours, and either attack the companion or come to investigate and blow your cover, or the companion will start attacking the enemy as soon as it becomes suspicious and again, blow your cover.
• Star Ocean: The Second Story provides a story example, where the party gets the bright idea that cheering on Ashton will help him to defeat a dragon. Instead, it eventually bugs him enough that he turns around and politely asks them to stop, which the injured dragon promptly capitalizes on and in an act of self-preservation, fuses itself with him. Whoops.
• Ni no Kuni has some blatant explanations in its repertory, from telling you how to walk, to things like how to talk, open your inventory or what purpose does the minimap on the top right corner of the screen serves (hint: you can see your surroundings in it). Some of them are necessary but the big majority is plain outright obvious. It quickly becomes irritating, especially because they will pop up frequently for an hour into the game. Good thing they disappear shortly after that and that the hand-drawn sketches that come with them are pretty to look at (this last thing can be even more insulting to the player, as the game assumes you need the extra help of a sketch to grasp the concept of things like walking).
• Intentionally played for laughs in South Park: The Fractured but Whole as a pre-order DLC. During the game, Towelie appears and gives the New Kid tips about the basics of the game as well as how to fight in certain condition based battles. After you beat him during one of those condition based boss fights later in the story, he continues to popup and give tips. Only he now does so while high off of the weed he sells and mostly talks nonsense. Of course, if the player doesn't want to deal with him then they can turn him off in the options menu.
• Etrian Odyssey V: Beyond the Myth: Necromancers' Wraiths and Rovers' Hawk and Hound can attack enemies, which does little damage but is still usually an acceptable supplement to your own party's attacks. Unfortunately, these attacks also wake up sleeping enemies, which means the sleep ailment is much more unreliable for any party containing these classes. And the Eternal Tyrant, the final boss is weak to sleep, so these "allies" will most likely deny you some precious opportunities to heal and reapply buffs during this difficult battle.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 3: As if the tutorials weren't already invasive enough^note albeit as the result of the game attempting to fix the issues its predecessor had, most Heroes will express a desire to eat whenever your party passes by a canteen. This was likely meant to be a reminder for the player to cook stat-boosting meals whenever possible, and ordering food at canteens allows Manana to learn new recipes, but the problem is that those lines will trigger even when you already have an active meal effect (only one can be applied at a time), including when the characters literally just ate a minute ago.

Simulation Game

• Ace Combat
  • Hazawa in Ace Combat: Joint Assault always ruins your concentration when engaging in intense combat. She also tells you if a missile is inbound when your HUD can do that in a less annoying fashion. Worst of all, she has the most annoying voice in the game. You can also change your operator, not that it matters.
  • One of the more potentially derailing features of Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War is a "yes/no" answer input when your squadmates ask you questions. If you're say, climbing in altitude as fast as possible to avoid being blown up by a heat seeking missile on your tail, it can be quite annoying to suddenly have your squadmate pop in and casually ask if you want them to provide you with some cover. NO, REALLY, YOU THINK SO?! Unfortunately the game lacks a "no shit" response to questions of that nature. And despite the "squadron based" nature of the game, in actuality you usually end up doing 90% of the important stuff since your squadmates aren't smart enough to concentrate their fire on the big fracking sub that's firing one-hit kill missiles at you and instead insist on picking off the insignificant little targets instead no matter how often you hit ATTACK! or tell them what to do.
• Viva Piñata:
  • Leafos is your guide throughout the game, and starts out as being quite useful, giving you the tools you need to work the garden. As you level up, she congratulates you on your "improvement" in the way a nursery school teacher might praise a three-year-old's fingerpainting. Slightly annoying... in the "What right have you to comment, you were cowering in the house when thugs showed up and trashed your father's life's work" way. However, mild irritation isn't the last of it. Several species of pinata will fight if put in the same garden together. One solution, other than selling one of the warring parties or moving them to a different garden, is to build a fence. Which will probably need a gate. Which Leafos will wander through in her meanderings around the garden and leave open. The first you'll probably know of this is when the battle music alerts you to the fact that two of your pinata are kicking the living daylights out of each other. Call yourself an expert, Leafos? Any farmer or riding school instructor would kill you for leaving a gate open!
  • She also has a tendency to lie. Considering that some of the rarer or more exotic pinatas require more obscure and/or bizarre methods to obtain, unless forewarned a statement like "I heard you can turn a Pretztail into a Mallowolf if it eats a Doenut" can sound legitimate, when it's nothing but a bloody lie.
  • Patch the doctor is annoying for a different reason. He heals your sick pinata (probably after they've gotten into a fight courtesy of Leafos). However, another character, Dastardos, will "euthanize" a sick animal if Patch doesn't make it in time. If both doctor and Dastardos appear at the same time though, Patch will stop what he's doing and let Dastardos kill your animal — right under the good doctor's nose. Feel free to beat Patch with your spade at this point; it's the least he deserves.
• Black & White, the villagers (for whom you are supposed to be the patron god) have a very, very aggravating habit of moaning about their needs. "We need more civic buildings!" "We must have homes!" "Must... have... food..." They make being a sadistic, human-sacrificing divine terror so... satisfying. The sequel and its expansion pack don't improve on this one at all, especially since the voice of your conscience just has to reply to every looped comment by the antagonist in Battle of the Gods. "The undead are coming!" ...and remain completely harmless, just like the last twenty-five times.
• City-Building Series
  • Caesar II, in which you play as a Roman governor working your way from the provinces all the way up to Rome, was plagued by an annoying man who kept telling you that "Plebs are needed!" every three seconds that they were.
  • Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom used the same basic idea but in China. It was better about not annoying the player, but it had a habit of randomly "forgetting" to tell you important events (building collapse, lack of food) while the popups for, yes, lack of population would get spammed.
• Dwarf Fortress had the annoying notices of the screamingly obvious moment when you have struck Microcline. Thankfully, in the 2010 versions it no longer pauses the game, and you even have the option to remove the announcement log spam entirely (which you'll want to, once you hit the caverns.)
• SimCity series:
  • The advisors in Sim City 4 can be this way. Sometimes their advice is good ("You don't have enough fire stations to keep the town safe" or "Some random person's house/this random office building/this random factory^note It's usually a factory tbh has come ablaze, ya better put it out"), but it's mostly them working at cross-purposes^note E.g. your Health & Education advisor telling you to build more schools and your Finance advisor telling you you're spending too much money or telling you something you either already know^note E.g. "you won't get dense development without a municipal water supply" or can't do anything about.^note E.g. there's a congested bridge at a spot where space/terrain constraints keep you from either upgrading the bridge itself to increase capacity or building a reliever bridge or other alternate route. And even if you can do something about it not a minute later they'll berate you for doing what they advised to do a short while ago.
  • For SimCity 2000: "SimCopter One reporting heavy traffic. SimCopter One reporting heavy traffic. SimCopter One reporting heavy traffic. SimCopter One reporting heavy traffic..." At this point shooting down the traffic copter with the Center tool sounds less of a cruelty and more of a blessing.
  • Doing virtually anything in SimCity 3000 would result in sniffles from your Financial Advisor.
• Thankfully, the developers of The Gungan Frontier realized some players would react this way, so you can tell your Ninja Butterfly to "take a nap" indefinitely. Given that said Ninja Butterfly is Jar-Jar Binks, you'll probably do so very quickly.
• Maniac in the Wing Commander series is this deliberately. His A.I. is programmed to be aggressive, with no regard for tactics at all. Consequently, he will go up against capital ships in a scout-class ship, regardless of how ineffectual the weapons are, refuses to retreat when ordered to, even if he's clearly doomed, and, most egregiously, will lock on to your target and cut in front of you the moment you open fire, then yell at you for shooting him. It's clear he's meant to be this bad in an early mission briefing:
  Halcyon: ... if Maniac gives you any static, you have my permission to shoot him to pieces.
  Maverick: Should I use missiles, sir, or ship's guns?
  Halcyon: Guns, Maverick. Save your missiles for important targets.
• In the game Kinectimals, Bumbles is the guide of the game and will tell you every single time what to do no matter how far you get in the game! Fortunately, there's an option to make him a lot quieter, so that he essentially only pops up for new actions.
• In The Sims 2, the nanny NPC can be like this. She usually has two extremes. Not taking care of your children at all: Instead she will bake cakes (and ignore them if the baby starts crying, thus causing a fire) or watch TV. Or, she will pay too much attention to the baby, waking them up to feed and bathe them, and then putting them on the floor instead of in a crib. This page details exactly how unbelievably annoying nannies can be.
• Rune Factory 3: Any of your NPC companions who carry weapons that do elemental damage^note  Carlos, Kuruna, Pia and Shara have water-based weapons, Marian uses a fire-type staff. Nothing is more frustrating than finishing off a tough ice monster only to have Kuruna or Carlos smack them with their water-based weapon and revive them. You can give them non-elemental weapons to eliminate this (all except Shara, who wields a watering can). But that still leaves those Non Player Characters who use magic, smacking them with revivifying attacks. The only options are keep whacking away till it stays down or dismiss your NPC.
• In Top Landing, if you're out of alignment with the runway, an automated voice shouts "EMERGENCY, ____ TURN, ____ TURN" until you get back on track. Easier said than done in later stages when the wind picks up, and in the final few stages when you start out in the emergency zone.
  • Truth in Television. Real aircraft in such situations have automated warnings just like this. Sully has several examples, especially prominent in the simulations when things start going very badly.
• In LEGOLAND, the player's personal assistant Jonathan will helpfully read out all of the labels for you. All of them, every time one pops up, which is whenever you mouse over a button or attraction, which is 90% of the game. Without turning the voice volume all the way down there is no way to make him go away. Even given that it's a children's game, it's still incredibly tedious and repetitive.
• "Betty", the Computer Voice in the X series. Every time you enter a star system, she helpfully pipes up with its name. Every time one of your fleet or one of your stations comes under attack, she'll announce its location, repeatedly, for as long as the battle continues.

Sports Game

• In Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, specifically the 4th game and Underground, would always remind you to press Start on your controller to restart the goal you just failed every single time, without explaining the reason why you failed the goal you were doing.
• In Wii Sports and Wii Sports Resort, the game feels the need to explain every minigame to you every time you play it and occasionally tells you to take a break and do something else. However, these are skippable. The really annoying thing is the mandatory three minute video that plays every time you put Wii Sports Resort into a new Wii. It tells you how to connect Wii Motion Plus... and how to disconnect it... and how to connect the nunchuck.

Stealth-Based Game

• Metal Gear:
  • Several of the Codec contacts in Metal Gear Solid act like this, but 99% of the time you're allowed to ignore them if it's not vitally plot-related. Unfortunately, it usually is. Damn you, Meryl!
  • Unfortunately in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, the person you need to call to save your game is Rose: Raiden's clingly, obnoxious, emotional, whiny, and loquacious significant other who feels the need to inflict an entire novel of sitcom-level relationship drama on you every single time you want to save. While you can skip it, they're so ridiculously long that this still takes longer than it did to actually listen to Mei Ling's proverbs in the previous game. If that's not enough, there are also many, many, many times where she just radios you up for the hell of it or butts into a conversation you're having with Colonel Campbell. It will get to the point where just hearing her say "Jack" will make you twitch.
  • In Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, you can shut Otacon up and cause him to almost have an aneurysm — in the 'Follow the Resistance member' segment of Act 3, it's possible to reduce Otacon to sputtering, angry silence by shooting the resistance members you encounter. Otacon starts off with a warning, then a sharper warning, then a pained cry of "Snake!?!", and finally, he just sputters and hangs up on the Codec. Beware, though — shoot too many of them and it's a Nonstandard Game Over.
  • Rose and Meryl aren't nearly as bad as the painfully useless radio cast of Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, though. Their roles are 1) tell you to call other people and not to bother him, or tell you he's changing his frequency again for absolutely no reason (the Colonel), 2) tell you that you have no chance to beat this game and you might as well curl into a ball and die (Kessler), 3) ramble at you about the number of species of pigeons that exist (Norden), 4) complain that 'now isn't a good time' and refuse to help you (Holly), 5) talk to you about the ergonomics of video gaming and dispense useless military trivia (Miller), and 6) deliver one of the first major death speeches in the entire series (Gustava). To his credit, Miller comes up with solutions to all of the bizarre Kojima-logic puzzles Snake has to complete, and will give you hints before flat-out telling you the illogical answers, too. Also, towards the end, he asks Snake out to have a cheese fondue dinner with him, thus making himself the mandatory male-borderline-love-interest character of that Metal Gear.
  • Metal Gear was much more straightforward with this: Diane would tell Snake which weapon worked best on each boss (provided that her overprotective big brother wasn't monitoring her call), Schneider would tell you the locations of many important items in the areas where you needed them, and Jennifer was important enough for being the only character who can provide the Rocket Launcher and Compass. The only dead weight was Big Boss himself, who only provides uselessly-obvious advice on items and weapons ("A Handgun? You know how to use it"). That was intentional, seeing as he was the Big Bad of the game and deliberately trying to screw you over so you'd fail.
  • In Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater you need EVA to fly the WIG. The only problem with needing her help? She gets impaled on a tree. Then you get to hear her bitch about how hungry she is. Plus her saying "Snake I don't want you to kill The Boss", among other things.
• The Assassin's Creed series makes extensive use of Puzzle Pan during platform-jumping sequences. The trouble is that in some places, the camera tries to be a bit too helpful in angling itself to show you the intended pathway forward; as the directional controls are relative to the camera, not the character, it can very easily result in missed jumps.

Survival Horror

• Steve Burnside from Resident Evil – Code: Veronica often screwed over the player with his incompetent "help".
  • Claire needs a pair of decorative Gold Lugers to open a door. When she finds them, she gets caught in a deathtrap — which resets when she puts them back. Later, Steve finds them and takes them, and refuses to let go, making Claire run to save him. To top it off, once she saves him he refuses to hand over the guns unless Claire gives him "something fully automatic" — which sends her on a wholly unnecessary fetch quest.
  • When Claire actually finds the guns, it causes her and Steve to be dropped into The Dragon's trap. Steve then takes the guns and shoots about ten zombies, a wall, and his zombie dad. He doesn't give you the automatic guns, and the Gold Lugers he does give you have no ammo.
  • Steve finally manages to get the drop on and disarm The Dragon Alfred, and has him at gunpoint for about 30 seconds — but does not pull the trigger, because he's freaked out about Alfred being a transvestite! Not only that, but the pause gives Alfred time to run away and set the base's self-destruct mechanism. While Claire and Steve escape, Alfred is able to set the autopilot on their plane remotely, sending them to Antarctica.
  • While in Antarctica, Steve messes up operating a drill, flooding the room they're in with toxic gas — because he was busy staring at Claire's butt. This sends Claire all over the complex to find a gas mask.
  • After all that, Steve turns into a huge monster and tries to kill Claire, forcing her to use ammo and/or herbs to get away from him which really should be used by Chris instead, since he's the one that has to kill the Big Bad, Alexia.
• Sheva Alomar of Resident Evil 5 largely owed her Scrappy-ness to this in single-player mode where she was controlled by some very "special" AI. Aside from moments in the game that were tailor-fit to require two people (like carrying a lantern or needing to hold a gate open), she's rarely useful and often a hindrance as she drains your ammo and curative items and you may have set up this lovely minefield to blow any zombies that come along into little chunks only you turn your back for one second, and discover that Sheva picked up every single mine you laid down thinking they were discarded items, and triggers a Game Over if she dies. It's really telling that people actually made a Solo Mod not for the Self-Imposed Challenge, but to put an end to her "help" and play the game in peace... and yes, the game is actually much easier without her help. Chris also counts if you play as Sheva in the New Game Plus.
• Inverted in Lifeline, where you are the helper telling an AI character what to do via a USB microphone. Unfortunately, voice recognition has never been a precise technology, and in getting Rio to do something you'll often end up repeating your instructions enough times to make Navi look like a mute. Also played straight, however, as Rio will repeatedly ask you for advice in a way that hints at what you have to advise her to do.
• The Suffering. The game encourages the player to help the other survivors they find on the prison island. Shame the other survivors tend to crazily wound the player while trying to destroy monsters. Only one apologizes.
• Eternal Darkness uses an Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors system of sorts in its spellcasting, with the game's Ancients each being strong against one and weak against another.. Just about every chapter in the game has a piece of scenery, such as a carving or a painting, which dictates how this cycle works. It's helpful at first, but by the time you're still seeing it in later chapters of the game, with the Flavor Text saying that its meaning "isn't readily apparent", you have to wonder how badly the game believes that Viewers Are Goldfish.

Third-Person Shooter

• Star Fox series: Between your teammates getting in your line of fire and you constantly having to save Slippy's butt, you have to wonder whose side they're on.
  • Star Fox: If your wingmen go down, they don't "get better". And while you can beat the game on its hardest setting WITHOUT any wingmen, they do tend to help mop up some enemies you might miss, allowing you to pass more missions with 100% of enemies shot down (and earn more continues). And the noises they make indicating their mortal distress is just plain depressing.
  • Star Fox 64
    • You have Peppy randomly shouting "hints" like "Do a Barrel Roll!" and "Try a somersault!" at you in the middle of battle which may be helpful on occasion but not at the frequency of those comments.
    • Depending on which route you take in Sector X, Peppy may end up with enemies chasing him twice, and if you don't make it through the warp gate, Slippy jumps in shortly after the boss hits half of maximum HP and immediately gets knocked flying into the desert planet unless you can take out that other half really quickly. On the "positive" side, the necessity of this plot point means you get Slippy back at the end of the level if you lost him on Katina/Fortuna or earlier in Sector X.
    • In Sector Z, your wingmen will attempt to destroy the missiles for you, impairing getting the medal. Each of the six missiles is a major source of points, at 11 points each, and you don't get credit for missiles that are destroyed by your wingmen. If it weren't for the requirement that all of your wingmen be alive to get the medal, you'd be wishing for them to be dead.
  • Prince Tricky from Star Fox Adventures was doubly annoying in that you only need him to dig up stuff and to light stuff on fire, which he needs special blue mushrooms for. When he is low on food, he will constantly complain about how hungry he is. And then when you are trying to avoid some enemies, he will helpfully chime in with "BAD GUY!" and "COOOOOOOLLLLL!" And if you tried to vent your frustration by hitting him, he breathed fire on you.
• The tendency of idiotic AIs to spout meaningless "helpful" hints is spoofed in Super Smash Bros.. Melee:
  Slippy: Hold A to charge up shots!
  Peppy: Cut your way though with a boost!
  Fox: Aren't you guys thinking of something else?
• Splatoon:
  • The first game has this in the form of the Squid Sisters. The duo show up in a cutscene whenever you turn on the game to alert you what stages are currently in rotation. They also do this every time the maps switch in the rotation. Funny dialogue and worldbuilding aside, these scenes are both unskippable and useless: your Wii U Gamepad also has this information, in addition to telling you what ranked battle mode is currently in play, something that the Squid Sisters fail to inform you. Downplayed in Splatoon 2 with Off the Hook, who only interrupt you when you first turn on the game; probably because they realized interrupting you to detail all the available modes when you're likely already in the battle menu and said information is right there would be a bit too much.
  • Sheldon from the game's weapon shop has similarly unskippable cutscenes, explaining the use of any new weapons you unlock. This becomes a problem if you haven't been to the shop in a long time, and end up with a lot of new weapons available: Sheldon will make you sit there while he explains the uses of ALL OF THEM. Splatoon 2 even lampshades this while now giving you the option to speed through his dialogue at the push of a button.
    Pearl: A new weapon has been added! Aw, man. That means we have to listen to Sheldon nerd out again...
    Marina: I mean, I like him and all, but slow down, crabman!
• Ghostbusters: The Video Game:
  • The entire movie cast has moments of this. The 'busters never truly die if at least one is still standing and are capable of reviving each other if need be. Unfortunately, your teammates are incompetent and take their sweet time to walk over and save anyone, meaning that you will be forced to spend most of your time in tough missions running around and reviving everyone or risk quick death.
  • The shouted advice can be nifty at times if you haven't already checked Tobin's or used your PKE meter/goggles, but damn does it get annoying to hear the same advice being shouted to you when you've already been making use of that same advice for some time or already thought of it long before they started hollering it to you. Or when the Big Bad is spewing slime or other dangerous substances at you and you simply can't stand around in one place for too long lest you die. Particularly egregious when Rookie is the only one who can fight the level boss because the boys are either taking a break, or trapped several floors up.

Turn-Based Strategy & Tactics

• DEADLOCK 2 defaults to giving you a status report every turn filled with absolutely useless information. And whenever a status report appears, your advisor springs up and says useful things like "Everything is going fine", or "Something happened", or "Hey, look at this", or a thousand of similarly useless messages. Mercifully, an option is available to restrict status reports to appear when something actually worth of note happens, which reduces them drastically, but when they do appear the advisor is still there.
• In Devil Survivor you'll occasionally have an ally controlled by the game for a battle. Unfortunately it's pretty common for them to attack enemies with skills you want to crack, enemies they kill don't provide exp or money, and if they die it's generally game over.
• In the tactical turn based game Frontline Tactics, any solder set on 'Overwatch' fires if an enemy takes an action in his line of sight. MGs have a cone of fire, so hit not only the target, but those standing nearby. A medic healing a comrade is enough to trigger the overwatch fire, hitting not only the medic, but also the man he was tending, often for double the number of Hit Points he had healed.
• An update to the single-player mode of Magicka added an Exposition Fairy who, as a parody of Navi, would often interrupt with "Ey! Lisna!" and caption pointing out the blindingly obvious. Her actual purpose is to revive you if you die, since you have no teammates to take care of that.
• Fire Emblem:
  • The three paladins that escort Princess Lachesis during her introductory chapter in Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War will rush out to defend the princess and get themselves killed, even if it's usually more advantageous to wait for the threat to come closer before acting.
  • Pent in Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade is introduced as an NPC surrounded by dozens of enemies trying to kill and rob him. Fortunately for Pent, he can defend himself. Unfortunately for the player, letting Pent do his own thing will mean you miss out on searching for buried treasure, and you'll likely also miss the sidequest, which requires earning 700 experience — something Pent can't do as an NPC.
  • Chapter 5 of Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn gives you three AI allies that start a good distance ahead of your party, and hits you with a Non-Standard Game Over if any of them die. Two of them are frail and all too often will prioritize killing enemies over staying safe and healing, while the third - who is Nigh-Invulnerable and who you want attacking enemies - instead does what the other two should be doing. Especially on Hard Mode, it's not only possible but frequent for you to lose without any sort of actual player input.
  • In Fire Emblem: Awakening, it's quite possible for a character to be killed entirely because of the assistance of another character, because it means that an enemy is killed by a counterattack that would otherwise have left it alive, freeing up that space for another enemy to come in for a finishing blow.
  • Neutral units across the series tend to be this. They count as "Ally" units and are supposedly there to help the player's army. Only, the vast majority of the time, they're horribly under-leveled for the map they're on, so the Ally Phase will generally be spent watching them suicidally charge into the enemy and slowly die, taking up a lot of time. And in the event that they do manage to get kills, they'll just steal the EXP from defeating the enemy units (when EXP is usually quite limited in Fire Emblem). And if the enemy they killed had an item they would've dropped? Well, now said item is lost forever to you, all due to the ally's "help."
• Super Robot Wars games have this, as NPC allies don't get XP or currency, which can frequently result in the more bloodthirsty among them chewing through half a map's worth of usable resources. Tobikage is particularly notorious for this, to the point of his Leitmotif having the unofficial nickname of "HIDE YOUR WALLETS." In the worst cases, they can even end up charging in and killing characters you're supposed to be keeping alive.
• Valkyria Chronicles 4: Tank driver Miles stays out of the way during combat, but makes an approving remark every time you upgrade a piece of equipment. You upgrade equipment a lot during the game, and he makes an approving remark every time. It is common to upgrade a lot of different pieces of equipment in one go, and he makes an approving remark after each one. He also has a very small set of approving remarks to make after you upgrade equipment, and you will soon get fed up of hearing them.
• X Com Enemy Unknown: "Commander, you may want to instruct your men to exercise restraint when using explosives."

Visual Novels

• Danganronpa features the series-wide green text tutorials that explain each new mechanic as they’re introduced. At first, they’re actually fairly helpful, especially in the first game since the gameplay is definitely unique. However, even there they’re longer than they need to be because despite not being a character, they have a personality and they try to be funny and encouraging. However, they start getting annoying when they’re explaining returning mechanics in the sequels. They really cross the line in Danganronpa: Ultra Despair Girls however when they decide to start making jokes about the player masturbating to a sexual assault scene/minigame being done to the protagonist by a victim of child molestation.

Wide Open Sandbox

• Mission Control in Crackdown continues to repeat various gameplay hints even when they're no longer relevant, such as explaining how to increase skills that are already at maximum.
• Otis from Dead Rising always seems to pick the worst times to call you on the radio to inform you of a new mission that's become available or whatever (like when you're surrounded by zombies or in the middle of a fight with a psychopath). When you answer him, Frank becomes incapable of fighting or even jumping until the call is over, and will also automatically drop any weapon that is too big to store in your inventory. And if you hang up on him, he calls you again, complains "Don't hang up on me like that! That's rude!" and restarts his entire speech from the beginning! VG Cats explains it with style, as does Something Awful. Otis was made even worse by the 360's controller. If you didn't press the D-pad just right, you could drop your weapon or bring up an in-game menu. Pressing the D-pad just right is a lot harder than it sounds in the middle of a zombie-infested mob. The annoying controller made the whole thing feel like it was Fake Difficulty.
• Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas features this in the San Fierro series of missions. Every once in a while, one of the villains sends minions on drug runs from San Fierro to Los Santos, and you are able to intercept them and steal their money. It wouldn't be so bad except that when it happens, the phone rings, CJ automatically answers it, and the following conversation has become ingrained in many a player's head:
  CJ: Hey Cesar. The yay leavin' San Fierro, right?
  Cesar: Right, but they're using bikes, CJ, and they go cross-country!

You can then choose to either go after them or not, and given how far away you have to drive to get them, a lot of players don't find the monetary award worth it, so these calls become especially annoying.

• While a few Non Player Characters do call you at inopportune times in GTA Online but none have earned quite the hate that one of the newer ones, Long John Teabag, has. LJT assists with the businesses added in the Bikers update, which is is all well and good. Where the annoying part comes into play is that LJT will constantly update the player on the statuses of these said businesses, almost always making several back to back calls to update you on the status of each business. It’s gotten to the point that many people recommend shutting the businesses you have so as to avoid LJT altogether.
• LEGO Dimensions:
  • After the player rebuilds X-PO, he develops a tendency to snark at the player, while covering the bottom of the screen with pop-ups that remind him/her which Adventure World and/or Level each character on the Toy Pad unlocks. For players who don't have trouble remembering this info, this habit could become obnoxious. Players who frequently hit the Hint Stones have to hear X-PO's snarks even more often, as he delivers one while the hint appears. (These pop-ups and hints also appear before the player rebuilds X-PO, but with no audio accompaniment, and a question mark where his picture later shows up.)
  • Also, in the Sonic the Hedgehog level pack, there's Omochao as an in-universe example. He constantly gives Sonic hints... which are things that should be obvious. Sonic takes the opportunity to snark at Omochao for this.
• Fiona Taylor was okay in the first Mercenaries game, but in the sequel, it gets to the point where you're blowing up her car every time you walk out of the base, just to annoy her as much as she annoys you.
• In Saints Row it's great when your followers pick up better guns...unless it's a rocket launcher and they try to shoot the car that's next to you.
• Scarface: The World Is Yours. Careful in the trainyard when one of your employees is driving away. He will run you (or your lackey) over without a moment's hesitation.
• In The Godfather games, your allies' firepower can be annoying when you're trying to get a specific Execution Style. Some other times all you want is to run away without escalating a situation, but they just have to open fire...
• Terraria:
  • The guide NPC who functions as a newbie hint guide. Unfortunately, he likes to path around the players and can enter their normally safe houses, bringing the monsters howling at the doors inside with him. Non Player Characters running from monsters who have gotten into their homes can also run to your house and open the door that kept them out.
  • The baby slime summoned from the rare Slime Staff. It has Gameplay Ally Immortality and hits rather fast and can kill weaker enemies quickly. Unfortunately it can also negate your attacks due to the Mercy Invincibility the mobs have while being pummeled by the slime, thus your attacks don't always register. During hardmode, it quickly becomes obsolete due to its low attack power, and the higher defense hardmode monsters have. By that point you'll probably be better off killing things on your own rather than rely on the slime.
  • Some summons in general can end up being this, especially the fast attacking ones like the Stardust Dragon. They can constantly trigger enemies' and bosses' Mercy Invincibility which will leave you no room to get any hits in for yourself, which in turn can drastically lower your damage.
• Red Faction Guerrilla has a mechanic where, due to your character being a rebel leader, going around and causing trouble (in a game principally about this) will cause a number of reinforcements to join your side. Only they can't aim, they're pretty weak, and they don't show up in enough numbers to threaten the usual enemy response. Oh, and if they die, you take a morale hit. More than a few players have expressed a desire to turn them off.
• Buddies in Far Cry 2 will actually make the game harder instead of easier with how the system is implemented. You cannot bring any of your buddies with you in free roam even if some of them are just freeloading at the bar doing nothing. Your best buddy is only there to offer you 'subversion versions' of the faction missions, which actually makes them more complicated to complete and after you got it done, you have to come save their asses after they get in trouble every single time. Sure, you get safehouse upgrades for doing them, but there's nothing that you can't find at weapon shops or checkpoints that you'll come across anyway. Your second best buddy is actually more useful than your best buddy since they actually will come to save your life once you're on the verge of death, though after that you have to 'reset' them to rescue-ready status at the safehouse every time, and since your second best buddy won't show up at the bar, you're locked out from doing their personal missions until they're promoted to your best buddy (or someone else becomes your second best buddy instead), which makes them useless. Oh, there's also this little fact that they're all backstabbing bastards who try to kill you in the final mission, forcing you to put them down and thus make the entire thing pointless. Really, it's actually more beneficial for you in the long run if you let your buddies die early on instead of letting them live and makes your game harder, and the only real reason you would keep them alive is solely for immersion.

Unsorted

• Thanks to the infuriatingly uneven AI of the game, your partners in Yu-Gi-Oh! GX Tag Force 2 are very much the embodiment of this trope; they make so many stupid moves that leave you at a disadvantage, one has to wonder if they're programmed to actively sabotage your game.
• 3D Movie Maker has McZee, who is despised by certain sectors of the userbase for his annoying goofy tone of voice and this trope combined (this game is originally targeted at kids after all...). It's no surprise then that some users have expressed interest in creating videos of McZee getting offed.

Other Media examples

Fan Works

• Sword Art Online Abridged: In-Universe with Keita's guild, two of which are NPCs from uncompleted quests and one of them the tutorial NPC, who offers "help" such as as "Remember to jump. Jump!", "don't use drugs, unless they're steroids, in which case, use lots of drugs", and how long you've been playing (in a game where people can't log out by accidental design). In addition, in the finest traditions of Artificial Stupidity, they repeat their lines over and over, get stuck in doors and walls, set off obvious traps when set to auto-loot, and escape an unwinnable fight... with the rest of the party's teleport crystals.
• Sonic the Hedgehog 2: Special Edition (Docfuture's parodic Let's Play of a game that doesn't actually exist) includes a Hint Mode that's on by default, where gameplay gets interrupted by unskippable Metal Gear-style radio calls. The messages are either too distorted to understand, or in untranslated Chinese, or just insultingly obvious. Then Tails takes over as the game's Exposition Fairy, starting in Hill Top Zone, but spends far more time insulting you than actually helping you. Eventually, Tails gets brainwashed into actually trying to kill you. Of course, this is framed as Tails retaliating for Docfuture's mistreatment of him in earlier levels, so it's implied that Tails would actually be helpful instead of annoying if Docfuture had treated him better.

Gamebooks

• Black Vein Prophecy: Izkhao can sometimes be unreliable and screw you over instead of assisting you, such as accidentally causing you to be paralyzed by poison or abandoning you to a horde of savage Kreehuls.

Live-Action TV

• Limmy's Show has Jingle the Jester in one of the "Adventure Call" sketches (a mashup of Phone-in Game Shows and Interactive Fiction games), a jester with noisy bells on her hat and shoes who Rhymes on a Dime and promises to constantly tell jokes throughout the whole quest. The caller finds her so annoying that he immediately tries to kill her, even though that would render the rest of the game unwinnable, which he thinks is Worth It.

Pinballs

• In the Star Trek: The Next Generation pinball game, you actually get a bonus for cutting off Data when he talks at times.
  Data: Had you projected the ball at the proper velocity, you would have been rewa— [hit flipper buttons]
  Picard: THANK YOU, Mr. Data.
• Monster Bash features the Phantom Flip, which automatically activates one of the two flippers after passing through the corresponding inlane (similarly to Thing Flips). However, unlike the latter, Phantom Flip doesn't adjust its accuracy after each shot, and since its accuracy is pretty underwhelming to begin with, it more often than not sends the ball flying out of control towards a very likely drain.

Web Original

• Dorkly Originals: In a Zelda video parodying The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, Link grows irritated with Fi's constant obvious explanations and stating useless facts. He immediately has enough of it and sells her for Deku Seeds.
• MLB.com has a scout feature to its gameday feature that spurts out random facts that fans traditionally don't care about. You used to be able to turn it off, but that no longer does anything.
• YouTube has a tendency to respond to slowly-loading videos by reducing the quality automatically. This can be a problem for those who prefer higher quality video, or specifically need it; software tutorials get hit particularly hard, with the menu options shown often being indecipherable at lower qualities. People who object to YouTube doing this will respond by putting the quality back up again, taking up more time than it would have if YouTube had simply left the video alone. Even worse is that sometimes YouTube will lock off the higher quality option when it does this, forcing the user to refresh the page, and taking up even more time. Particularly nasty is how YouTube gives an option to never play high-quality video to improve load times... but no option to never play low-quality video.
• Pokémon Showdown, a website used to simulate competitive Pokémon battling, has a few tools to help beginners be as competitive as reasonably possible. It lists Pokémon by tier, moves by how viable they are on the Pokémon in question, and optimal EV spreads based on the Pokémon's stats and moves. While this is all well and good in theory, it's mostly automatically generated and a few Pokémon can really screw up how it's built. For an example, Magmortar is very notorious among the RU crowd for this reason; it needs high Speed to function with any real degree of success, but the automated EV generator will almost invariably give it high HP at the expense of Speed. It's also based on the assumption that players will be using maximum-level Pokémon, meaning that players of Little Cup (a spinoff metagame where all legal Pokemon are at level 5) can sometimes encounter hilarious results like this◊. ^note 255 is the maximum number of EVs legal in any one stat, and negative EVs are never possible.
• Google will sometimes detect what it thinks are misspelled search terms.
  • Sometimes, it will suggest what it believes to be a corrected query, but otherwise let you browse results with what you typed in ("Did you mean..."), but other times, it will automatically show results for the altered terms either alongside your exact terms ("Including results for...") or instead of them ("Showing results for..."), with a link to search only for your exact words. And other times, you won't even be given the option to un-correct your query and have to surround your words with quotation marks to signal "no, Google, don't correct these damn terms" - and sometimes after going through this, Google will completely ignore you anyway ("No results found for (insert intended search). Results for...") This can be a problem with proper nouns (which most spelling correction software will not recognize unless they're common names) and very technical terms that are unlikely to be included in most general-purpose dictionaries.
  • Google Chrome gets in on it as well. There is an option, defaulting to on, to get search strings suggested in the URL bar whenever you type something into it that isn't a URL - and unless you're using the mobile version on a smartphone, there is zero middle ground between turning the option off entirely and having the search suggestions completely crowd out actual URLs for websites you've previously visited and are trying to go to again.
  • For Chrome (as well as every other Chromium-based browser), the URL bar has autocomplete, and it cannot be disabled. Search for Super Mario Odyssey, for example, and you will now have to press Backspace whenever you just want to search for "Super Mario", because it will fill in "Odyssey" automatically for you every single time. Very annoying. Plenty of users have requested an option to turn the damn thing off, but Google has responded that they will never add such an option.
• A lot of Medical, Health, and Fitness websites have a thing now where if you trying look up information from a search engine on a certain helpful subject and try to read the article on a website talking about that subject, a popup will occur, trying to get you to sign up for their website as a member. Most websites, however, have an option that lets you surpass the popup, such as: "Remind Me Later", "Not At This Time", etc. However, the most annoying websites won't let you view their articles useless you sign up to their website first.
• Some websites sell words, which means that more or less random words in the article will be highlighted as links to paid content. This isn't so bad if you actually have to click on the link. Horrible if just accidentally moving the mouse pointer across one results in a popup. Guess which type is more common?

Softwares

• Microsoft Agents, which you may otherwise know as Microsoft Office Assistants. Particularly Clippit. His tendency to suddenly pop up options and tips have gotten on the nerves of many users of Microsoft Office who're trying to concentrate on their work and had their concentration broken because of said interruption, and many people who figured out how to turn them off, did so. Is there any wonder he's often on the receiving end of satire and vitriol? And oh, his ancestor, Rover the dog, was the assistant of the ill-received Microsoft Bob.

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