Troperville
Help us survive. All donations are anonymous on the wiki and unacknowledged, as we don't wish to create a hierarchy among Tropers.
Editing
Tools
Toys
|
Current Time: 9 minutes and 30 seconds. Time remaining: 29 seconds. Status: still stuck.
""There's a difference between 'secret' and just fucking impossible!""
Cousin to the Soup Cans, a Guide Dang It is any part of a video game in which it is extremely unlikely one would be able to intuitively figure out or discover by oneself. In fact, the only way to know what to do is via a Strategy Guide or an online Walkthrough. Particularly necessary when dealing with random maze sections, determining Relationship Values, or trying to achieve Hundred Percent Completion.
Combine this with a Lost Forever, and you have something that gamers gnash their teeth over, as it is viewed as extremely cheap on the part of the game designers. It is Fake Difficulty created either through carelessness or it is a more diabolical move to make calling a tip line (conveniently promoted in your game's packaging) or purchasing a Strategy Guide necessary. The fact that most strategy guides are not made by the game companies makes this last one less likely, though. It might be possible that due to the recent proliferation of walkthrough-based websites such as GameFAQs, game designers are actually expecting gamers to be using guides.
Though it should be noted that more and more often, "Officially Licensed" guides are showing up on shelves, up to and including guide-producing companies that obviously have exclusivity deals with game companies. (Ex.: Brady Games and Square Enix.) Meanwhile, "Unofficial" guidebooks have almost disappeared, either litigated out of existence or simply replaced by free fan-made guides online. Considering that at least some guidebook companies are now paying for official licensing, it no longer seems all that far-fetched to believe the game programmers are asked to slip in a few "incentives" to get people to buy the guide.
Of course, one might notice that obviously, it has to be possible to solve it on your own, otherwise the walkthrough couldn't tell you how to get it. This is true in several cases, but other times the solutions might have been found through hacking, or a message board (or a wiki!) of hundreds of people trying different things reporting their findings, or through info gotten straight from the game company, or through someone actually buying the Strategy Guide and posting the tricky bits online.
Especially frustrating if you get stuck because of an Unwinnable scenario; nothing incites rage quite like being told you can't win because of a mistake you made three hours ago.
In any case, this can cause hardcore gamers who swear to never use a guide to pull their hair out.
Sometimes Copy Protection could result in this - notably with many of Sierra's games.
Compare See The Sailboat, where the game does provide the information you need, but most players will still require a walkthrough to put it all together.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Action
- Possibly the oldest and worst example: Jet Set Willy on the ZX Spectrum. Made worse by the fact that completing the game was a proper competition with a prize and everything. Players quickly discovered that the game had been released with a bug in it which made it literally impossible to complete, and the two winners of the competition (Ross Holman and Cameron Else) had debugged the machine code.
- So it was a programming competition, not a gaming one?
- The two Puzzle Boss fights in Syphon Filter 2. In the first, you have to sneak up on Gregorov(who is really an imposter) and tase him, which players will find impossible unless you know the lights can be destroyed. The second, with the Immune To Bullets traitor Chance, involves a gun that pushes him backwards, which seems insignificant at first. Who would figure it could be used to push him into the spinning tail rotor blades? Even worse, since his armor is shrapnel/explosion proof as well, players might think he would also be impervious to the tail rotor.
- La Mulana tops the list in this trope: switches that only affect a distant room at the far end of the map, treasures that only appear when a particular enemy is defeated, secret walls that only open when hit with just the right weapon... several times...
- Depressingly, the worst instance is the climactic puzzle, which requires you to read several tablets scattered all over the game, and use the mantras that are written on them. Not too bad, given that you can find a reasonable hint towards their location if you're paying attention. However, what the game doesn't tell you is that said tablets don't appear until you're near the end of the game, AND each tablet only appears after using the previous mantra, AND you have to use the mantras in specific rooms, with next to no clues about where those rooms might be and nothing descript to recognize them when you get there.
- And then there are quite a few cases where there are no monuments to give out hints. For instance, an elevator platform takes you to a button in plain sight, but said platform also goes into the above screen for a split second, long enough for you to spot a treasure chest. What you may not spot in that same room is the button necessary to open it, with it being camouflaged by the background and all. The button itself can be hard to trigger without the proper weapon. To top it off, you have to perform a tricky set of jumps to even collect the item. What does it do? Let you damage a previously Nigh Invulnerable monster outside of the ruins. In fairness, this did lead to the double-jump ability, but this troper only managed to spot the button through sheer luck. Also: Key Fairies and ROM combos.
- And how about the steps to unlocking the Hell Temple? One particular step requires you to go to an area in the Inferno Cavern and drop down 20 screens of a bottomless pool of lava, then go back up to the surface, then go down 19 screens and hit the breakable wall on your right. The in-game hint that you are given for this step is completely irrelevant.
- Inconceivably, there appears to be no definite walkthrough whatsoever available for the game.
- This being an open-ended game where you have much freedom of what order you wish to fulfill your objectives, it's hard to make a guide that doesn't force you down one particular path.
- There is a wiki
 , however, which is fairly complete. Also, there are two video walkthroughs (Deceasedcrab's LP, and Starman Junior's video walkthrough). Finally, until recently, GameFAQs declined a La Mulana entry, which was discouraging to those of us writing FAQs for the game. Since that has changed, it's possible that one of us might finally finish a walkthrough.
- The 1984 Namco arcade game Tower Of Druaga (adapted to an anime in 2008) is one of the worst examples of this trope, unusual in an arcade game. The hero adventures through a 60 floor tower; each randomly generated level contains a hidden treasure whose properties cannot be discerned until obtained (the item for each level remains the same on multiple playthroughs). Some treasures are essential to beating the game, and failing to obtain them on, say, level 4 makes the game Unwinnable, though this fact may not be discovered until level 38. By contrast, some treasures are traps, and obtaining them makes the game Unwinnable, though again this may not be discovered until many levels later. In the pre-Internet era, and without official guidebooks, the only way to beat the game was with many playthroughs (and quarters), making your own guide. To make things even more "hilarious", simply progressing through the game is already Nintendo Hard anyway; like most arcade games of the time, getting to a level in double digits means you're really, really, good at the game, and merely reaching level 20 requires an intense level of dedication. Oh, and heaven help you if you don't know how to continue (attack+start within 30 seconds of the title screen reappearing, select your floor from among those you've reached). For some reason this was a HUGE hit in Japan, but it flopped elsewhere. I wonder why?
- Another Guide Dang It arcade game(and an RPG arcade game to boot): Wonderboy in Monster Land. To get either of the special items near the end of the game, you have to complete a series of fetch quests, which often involve hidden rooms which there are no in-gmae hints alluding to, for example, the first stop is the hidden shop in Baraboro, which is accessed by pushing Up in front of a mundane window. To rack up a large amount of gold, essential for getting the higher-level equipment, you need to use the undocumented technique of waggling the joystick in midair at gold coin locations. And the Legendary Sword is hidden in an invisible room which there are absolutely no hints about(not even a ? in the door location). The Very Definitely Final Dungeon is a repeating hallway maze combined with a Boss Rush. The only way to find the right path other than painstaking Trial And Error Gameplay and quarter-munching is to have the Bell obtained from the Guide Dang It fetch quest, or look up a Game FAQ (which didn't exist back in the day except maybe on some BBSes); there were no printed guides as far as I know. And if you die here, "There are no continues, my friend". The SMS version, while less difficult enemy-wise, still had the Guide Dang Its, and no continues whatsoever.
- Some of the various collectibles spread throughout the Grand Theft Auto games are so tucked away and well-hidden that locating them all by oneself seems like a near-impossible task. One particularly egregious example appears in San Andreas, which has a sidequest in which you must take pictures of photograph icons spread throughout the game. While several of these are damned well-hidden, the most ridiculous one is located on the roof of a random, innocuous building. You can only see the photograph icon by flying an airplane on the roof itself, and not from on the ground or from any nearby buildings, although a player in the know can take the picture itself from the ground.
- While many of the numerous secret doors in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night can be found just by 'rapping on the walls' with your weapon or puzzling out visible switches, one in particular must be opened by passing through a tunnel in one animal form, and then switching to another animal form to backtrack. There is no practical reason to do this, no hint included in the course of play, and the opening door isn't even visible from the tunnel's end.
- Similarly, Castlevania II: Simon's Quest is filled with obstacles that are nigh-impossible to figure out just by playing the game itself. While this may be chalked up to the game's Nintendo Hard status, subscribers of Nintendo Power at the time were given the distinct advantage of actually knowing how to progress through the game. The Angry Video Game Nerd laments this in his debut video.
- Most of the secrets in Castlevania 64 require the player to locate insanely-placed invisible platforms that are usually exactly halfway between the nearest savepoints and / or right before the end of the level. There is never any indication of the platform's position, and one even has a gap deliberately placed right before the nearest visible platform to kill you on the way back.
- All the spells in Circle of the Moon do make the game easier, but first you have to find the right cards. And they're randomly dropped by certain enemies, most of which you have to complete parts of the game to even have access to.
- The means to reach the true ending in most of the Metroidvania games are rather oscure:
- Symphony of the Night: Find the gold and silver rings and wear them in the grand gallery clock room to get the holy glasses. Wear the holy glasses when fighting Richter and attack the green orb instead.
- Partially subverted, as the ring descriptions have text regarding the clock.
- Harmony of Dissonance: Fight Maxim in castle B wearing the MK and JB bracelets.
- Aria of Sorrow: Equip the Succubus, Giant Bat and Flame Demon souls when fighting Graham.
- Partially subverted as there are 3 hints located in the game (as items Ancient Book 1-3) that steer you towards the correct souls to equip... they just aren't always clear. Also, the Flame Demon attack animation is a HUGE hint.
- Dawn of Sorrow: Use the Paranoia soul on the mirror during the second Dario fight, then wear Mina's talisman when answering Celia's challenge.
- 100% Averted: When you get the bad ending, the epilogue tells you what you need to do. If you already have the Paranoia soul, then the correct strategy for the Dario fight is obvious. If you don't have Paranoia, then you haven't tried to get 100% map completion, and since this is Castlevania, YOU WERE DOING IT WRONG!
- Portrait of Ruin: Find the Purification spell and use it during the sisters fight. Eric outright asks you to do this, but neglects to tell you where to find the needed spell.
- Order of Ecclesia: Rescue all villagers before defeating Albus.
- It's actually partially averted in Order of Ecclesia - after you beat Albus without having saved all the villagers, and so get the bad ending you see an image of all the villagers you've yet to save. This doesn't show you exactly where they are, but by breaking every wall you come across you're sure to find them. Alternatively, you could use the Gorgon Head summon (preferably maxed) and just walk up to any wall with it activated, and the heads will destroy it if it can be.
- It has been long debated as to whether Net Hack is possible to beat in its current form without recourse to spoilers or sourcediving. Arguments end up focusing on what exactly constitutes a spoiler and whether price-based identification of items is actually cheating or not, but the general suspicion is: yes, it is theoretically possible, but it's seriously hard work — and proving such an achievement is even harder.
- Seems to be endemic in Roguelikes, where dying a lot, learning from mistakes and restarting is somehow part of the attraction. ADOM has a quest as part of the main plot where you encounter Khelavaster, the sage that is mentioned in the introduction. It isn't mentioned anywhere except in oblique hints that he is the key to obtaining the artefact that unlocks an Ultra ending. Yet he blocks the down staircase, preventing progress until you talk to him. When you do, he automatically dies, which lets you go on but also removes the possibility of him summoning the Trident at the end of the game. What you actually have to do is find an Amulet of Life Saving, which are incredibly rare (some people have spent several real-time days trying), and give him one before you speak to him. (Just don't accidentally talk to him when you have one in your hands, like this editor did.)
- Similarly, in Alpha Man, even if you seriously try to complete the missions (it's tempting to explore every lair and house you come across), you still only have a 7 day limit before the nerve gas is released. Added to that, the castles are significant distances away from each other, most transportation has limited range, each boss needs a special technique to destroy, and you have to make sure you have enough to eat.
- Yes, it is possible. A few years back, someone posted in rec.games.roguelike.nethack that they'd beaten the game for the first time, without the use of spoilers — after twelve years of trying.
- This editor certainly found the secret to getting to the true final level of the freeware game Cave Story to be extremely contrived; it required you to ignore one of your friends falling into a pit and make an almost impossible jump over the chasm, as well as finding an item inside a boss room before consulting your partner who has found something of interest (what any natural person would do first, surely). One slip-up and no true ending for you... If you can even finish the extremely difficult final secret level.
- And to add to this, you've not only got to rescue her, drain her of water, recover her memory, drag her through a quite literal Hell, AND beat (ideally) the penultimate bossES without any healing, but also ideally get every powerup in the game. Several players have beaten Hell without the lattermost step. This troper is NOT one of them, though not for lack of trying...
- Finally, if you can make it through the game without collecting any missiles whatsoever, the chest in Hell that would normally contain a larger-than-normal amount of them contains well in excess of 100 of them, far more than you could get normally even if you collected every single missile upgrade.
- But they're normal missiles, not Super Missiles. And given that the chest is just before the first of two bosses, you can't even safely level them up to Level 3 in time.
- Although rather minor compared to the others, most techniques for high-level play in Devil May Cry 3 are not stated in official help files and videos involving them invariably receive questions from newbies.
- In the first part of Eternal Darkness, you are required to choose the Big Bad which you will fight against for the remainder of the game by choosing a representative gem. The game makes it obvious that this choice is important, but what the game doesn't tell you is that this also affects the difficulty of the game too. Oh, you picked the red one on your first play? Sure sucks to be you, then, because not only will you have to wait a long while to use the Restore Health spell, but Chattur'gha's monsters are the toughest in the game, and you'll have to face them a lot.
- Don't forget that the strongest magicks can only be obtained in one specific chapter by activating a few certain (albeit very visible) switches, and then going through a hole in a wall by using a spell which is only needed to be used twice in the game. And which you don't get until some time after you've given up on figuring out what to do with that damn hole, so you have to think of going back and using the spell once you have it.
- Also, to get the Infinity Plus One Sword, you need to pick up three statuettes which can each be found in different chapters — no going back once the chapter is over — and are hard to find. In at least one case you can end the chapter by accident before visiting the statuette room, and never know you missed anything until hours later when you find that you can't locate the third statuette and resort to checking gamefaqs.
- Prince Of Persia 2 (the original DOS game, not Warrior Within) had several of these and they weren't optional. At one point, to continue, the player must touch a sword that kills him, then stare at his corpse and not hit any key to reload for a minute, while the game pretends to be over. Later on, the game does this again, but this time the player must die in a mundane way, killed by an easy-to-defeat Mook at a specific spot, while there are several, much more extravagant ways to die around (such as falling into this level's Bottomless Pits, which are unusual in Prince Of Persia games). A lot of people never figure this out and skip the level using cheats. Also, beating the final boss requires the use of an esoteric move, that isn't available, needed, or particularly useful for most of the game. This might be an attempt to make players buy an original copy, because without a manual, it's unlikely that anyone would figure out how to even perform the move.
- Metal Gear Solid 3 pulled the fake death prank during the "battle" with the Sorrow. Having waded up a river filled with the souls of guards you've killed, reaching the corpse at the end kills you, bringing up the familiar game over screen. The solution requires you to bring up the inventory and use the "revive" pill inside Snake's tooth that is actually supposed to be used after swallowing a fake death pill. Admittedly not one of the most annoying gameplay walls, but this troper certainly selected "continue" at least twice before finding the solution.
- Although Major Zero will tell you if you Radio him after about seven deaths. (This Troper had about a forty-five minute ford through the river and was playing late at night, and had to repeat it seven or eight times...).
- Near the end of Pathways Into Darkness, there's a teleporter maze, where all the rooms look exactly the same, square with a teleporter on each wall. There is nothing in the frickin' game that remotely hints at the path. Many other Guide Dang Its were also present, including the bomb code if you don't have the manual, the suffocation room; hint:use an item that speeds up time, the Violet Crystal(which is at the center of the randomly-generated Labyrinth), and opening the exit door, for which you needed to take the health-draining Artifact Of Doom out of its box.
- X-Men for the Sega Genesis had a level in the Danger Room where a countdown starts and Professor X tells you to "reset the computer". At no point do they tell you how to go about doing this. The solution most people discovered? HIT THE RESET BUTTON ON YOUR SEGA GENESIS, which causes the last level to load.
- What makes this more of a Guide-Dangit moment is the fact that the normal solution involves WAITING AT THE END OF THE LEVEL until Professor X gives you the cue to ATTACK THE COMPUTER. (Counter-intuitive logic, anyone?) This troper seriously believes the reset-button-method was there as a backup method in case people couldn't figure that solution.
- However, THIS Troper believes the reset button on the genesis bit is the intended solution, and the attack the computer bit is the backup.
- Even the official Halo 3 strategy guide won't tell you how to get the Skulls (at the behest of Bungie). While most of the Skulls are just inconvenient to track down, the "IWHBYD Skull" requires jumping through glowing rings in an order that plays the Halo theme, which is hinted at nowhere in the game, and then going back to the body of Truth.
- The IWHBYD skull in Halo 2 is a guide-dang-it to get as well.
- Several of the weapons in Drakengard require extremely specific circumstances to unlock. One in particular involves looking at certain paintings in a certain stage in a certain order, and this is a game in which you never have to look at anything that you don't intend to kill or maim in some way.
- Getting a character's second ending in Bushido Blade requires that you run to the well, during the battle with the first opponent, and leap into it... and then do a No Damage Run. It's not immediately obvious that you can even leave the starting screen, and the only map the game ever gives you of the castle all the fights take place around has no sign of any such well.
- Because of Sturgeon's Law, Game Mods can sometimes suffer from this. One example is Eternal Doom Level 20: Silures, a puzzle level, which has a spectacular Guide Dang It moment near the end: To open the path leading to the exit, you must activate a specific tree like a switch, with no indication that this is even possible.
- Rule of thumb: Any time a game modder is acting smug, it's a safe assumption that he's just turned an ordinary object into a hidden switch.
- In the obscure NES game Mystery Quest, there was a point in the first where you had to jump onto a springboard to get to the top level. This troper tried many times in vain, hitting his head on the ceiling and coming up short every time. Not until the age of Game FA Qs was it discovered that the protagonist had the ability to run by tapping the b-button(as opposed to holding it), which was required to get enough distance off the springboard. Maybe it was described in the manual, but none of the copies this troper rented had one.
- In Doom 3, there are two special storage cabinets sent from a company called "Martian Buddy" that contain free stuff for personnel, and the codes to them are nowhere in the game. To find the code, you actually have to go to the website www.martianbuddy.com. One of these allows you to obtain the chaingun early, big help for clearing out the Demonic Spiders at the end of Alpha Labs Sector 2 on higher difficulty levels.
- Of course, it doesn't help that id's games are notoriously resistant to Alt-Tabbing, meaning it becomes necessary to actually shut the game down in order to get the code.
- As the illustration atop the page shows, Sonic The Hedgehog 3, the barrel in Carnival Night Zone (solution: treat not as a platform but as an elevator). Made worse by the fact that all but one of the barrels on the level will bounce high enough to get past if you jump up and down on them with careful timing, and the one that won't is only a very few pixels short. This troper first got to GameFAQs searching how to solve it.
- This troper vaguely remembers looking for the solution on GameFAQs and not finding it. It definitely wasn't explained in the official strategy guide! I had to give up on beating the game for years.
- This troper still has a copy of that same official strategy guide from 1994 (from Brady Games) and I can verify that it does not explain this at all (and was equally useless for the Sonic CD guide that was integrated with it). The USENET group alt.fan.sonic-hedgehog (which this troper was a part of) was my saving grace back in the day. That and Debug Mode.
- Believe it or not, this troper actually lucked out and stumbled onto the solution...on about the fifteenth playthrough, with the realization "Huh. I seem to go down farther if I press down..."
- This troper discovered it was just possible to force the barrel down far enough with the bubble shield's ability. If he got there without the shield? Wait until the timer ran out.
- This troper was fortunate to have the issue of UK Sonic the Comic in which the Q Zone (cheats section) answered a reader question on that exact problem. Even after reading it twice, this troper and still didn't believe it was the answer until trying it in the game.
- This troper eventually managed to get past by jumping off the barrel as it approached its highest point and rolling underneath as it came back down.
- This troper didn't know whether to laugh or cry when he saw that image. He ended up using the same method as the above troper. It wasn't till many years later he discovered the real method.
- This troper didn't know this until reading it in this goddamn page, after years of beating the game, several times, and going through that part with either the bubble shield or rolling under the barrel after having a friend controling Tails synchronically jumping on the barrel to make reach its highest.
- This troper didn't know this to this day, he instead resorted to exploring every level to the point of insanity, and gaining Super Sonic form before that barrel, his increased speed let you bounce it up and down from jumping a lot more then normal, then sneaking under it on it's way up. Super Sonic for the rest of the game certainly made it very easy.
- This troper figured it out within the first 5 minutes by fluke of approach, which is less than the time he took to get frustrated with it and resorted to the two classic impatience tactics of "if pressing it hard doesn't work, hold it down till it chokes" and "pressing more buttons that could mean the same thing makes it go faster". The last minute was spent taking it to the gratuitous extreme and trying to mash Sonic into the ceiling with the out-of-control barrel.
- In his Lets Play of the game, Cybershell mocked this infamous blockade and gave it a Cunt-o-meter rating of one.
- This troper read the solution in the UK's Official Sega Magazine soon after the game came out, and so learned the solution long before actually playing it. When reading Internet horror stories about the level, he often wonders how he'd have fared without any clues... judging by how stuck he got on the maze-like Act 2 of the Scrap Brain Zone in the Master System version of Sonic 1, probably not very well.
- This troper figured it out without any trouble whatsoever at the age of seven. Just goes to show that tropes are subjective.
- The "Find the Lost Chao" in Sonic Adventure 2 Battle are crafted from a vein of the purest Guide Dang It this troper has ever seen. Not only do you have to find a gimmicky, often hard to find powerup for each character to even think about beating them, you also have to find the shrine in each level, 99% of which are hidden in bizarre places that the player doesn't even think of going.
- Like most Sonic games, Sonic Advance 2's true ending can only be seen if you collect all 7 Chaos Emeralds. However, to get to the Special Stage to even attempt to get a Chaos Emerald, you had to collect all 7 of the Special Rings hidden through a level. Unfortunately, since Sonic games aren't really known for their exploration, most players would end up running right past them. It doesn't help that backtracking is pretty much impossible and players would either have to memorize an entire level to get them or get the game guide with the detailed maps. Guide Dang It indeed...
- Recently released Sonic and the Black Knight certainly seems to be walking this way. The game doesn't explain controls and gimmicks at all, except the very basic functions.
- This Troper has no doubt that he's not the only one who felt this way about the golem miniboss in Sonic & Knuckles Sandopolis Zone; in a game where almost all the bosses are dispatched either by hitting them directly or having them hit themselves, who saw a boss that couldn't be damaged by either tactic coming (for those uninformed, the miniboss can be hit in its head to knock it back, but it'll just revive itself; the only way to kill it is to lure it to the quicksand to the far left side of the arena and have it jump in)?
- The glass tube in Super Metroid has prematurely ended nearly as many games as Sonic's barrel. Drop a super bomb inside it. The solution for this problem was actually in the commercial for the game, as Nintendo has a long history of hiding secrets in their advertisements.
- In addition, if you leave the game alone in the title screen, the solutions to many Guide Dang It puzzles are shown, including secret moves like horizontal and diagonal Shinesparks, bomb jumping, special attacks with the beam upgrades, the X-Ray visor and even the emergency health regeneration. Of course, performing said maneuvers is easier said than done.
- Even worse was the puzzle to obtain the Gravity Suit. At no point previously in any Metroid game did you have to roll up in a ball and sit in a bird statue's hands, pretending to be an item. There was no hint that this would ever be done. Of course, now this is a series mainstay.
- Several later Metroid games have made a reference to this by having a similar tunnel that must be broken to get an item expansion.
- On the plus side, however, there was an official release made with a guidebook in the place of a manual, which either stated or properly hinted how to deal with this and other puzzles.
- The reason this particular tube caused such a problem could well be because it was the only explodable thing in the game that wasn't instantly affected by the powerbomb. The player had time to watch the blast go off then leave the area; if they didn't sit around and wait it wouldn't shatter.
- Metroid Prime tends to have fewer Guide Dang It's since you have the Scan Visor, and anyone who's familiar with the game knows instinctively that the solution to just about any problem not solvable by scanning is to try hitting it with every weapon you have.
- There's also a pattern to what the Scan Visor says and what you're supposed to do. Beryllium alloy? Break out the power bombs. Oddly enough, though, it's different for each game. Metroid Prime Hunters takes it a step further and basically tells you what you need to use. "Superheated Magma?" Gee, wonder what that could be.
- The infamous "Noob Bridge".
- Maximo had a boss, a giant pirate ghost, who could only be harmed by attacking while crouching. Nowhere else in the game is there any use for crouching, and most players had probably forgotten that there even is a crouch button by the time they reach him. The only reason this editor figured it out was because it was the only thing left he hadn't tried.
- There's also the fact that, in order to activate the checkpoints in the game (rather a necessity), you have to double jump and attack. This is only explained in the manual, and when this troper first played it, it was a rental without one.
- Using a guide in Siren is extremely helpful, to the point of nearly being a necessity. It has a branching storyline... but certain branches require you to do something on another level first to perform them — and this isn't always obvious until it's too late... or ever — this troper only discovered after the fact that the reason it took her so many tries to complete one alternate path was because she hadn't set it up so it should be possible, rather than just because it was a really hard path, resulting in her performing an unintentional Sequence Break — and it doesn't give an indication of which stage unlocks the branch. If you're on a stage that unlocks the alternate path for another stage you have unlocked, it will give you a hint about what you have to do, but these are extremely vague, especially considering the sometimes downright bizarre requirements. For a particularly egregious example, "Search the Yoshimura house and well" means... find a radio in the house, then put it in the bucket in the well, to lure a wandering shibito over to the well, so that when you kill it, it will fall into the well.
- And there's one point where a guide is essentially necessary; when lighting the lanterns with Reiko Takato to get the good ending. The in-game hint tells you to watch the praying shibito... but it starts the level praying at the last lantern in the sequence, so listening to the game will probably lead to you failing.
- The actual logic behind the branching storylines make no canon sense as well. Events in one mission could effect events in a mission that happened in the past. Which could only happen since you had already gone through that mission.
- Some of the life upgrades in Prince Of Persia: Warrior Within were nearly impossible to find. One is found early in the game through a hole in the ceiling. The box which can be used to access it is behind a breakable gate - except that you don't have the gate-breaking sword yet, and if you haven't played the previous game, you wouldn't know this gate might be breakable. Instead, you would have to backtrack to that part of the game when you get the sword. Another life upgrade can only be accessed by descending down a very deep chasm, which seems bottomless from above.
- By the way, you need every life upgrade for the Good Ending.
- There's also a Block Puzzle when you first enter the library which requires dragging one of the mirrors away from the wall to reveal a crack through which your companion can sneak to activate a lever later in the puzzle. The problem? The puzzle can be passed up to the point where the lever needs moving WITHOUT dragging the mirror out. Meaning that you get most of the way through and then can't figure out where on earth you went wrong, nor why your stupid companion is just standing there instead of pulling the damn lever. Guide Dang It. Heck, even some of the guides don't make it properly clear...
- Jet Force Gemini has instances of this, particularly the need to search for the many ship parts, only one of which you are told how to acquire. The rest are hidden in such ways and behind such puzzles that it seems completely unfeasable that you could find them without a guide. Among the most jarring are the need to find a certain minigame hidden in a series of out of the way air ducts, then get a perfect score at the game in order to receive a set of ear muffs, then find a frigging polar bear on a planet that also requires you to find an out of the way ship pad to reach it, in order to give the muffs to the bear in exchange for a ship part. You are given no hints whatsoever that this is what you need to do.
- The first game in the Jak And Daxter series required the player to do a roll-jump attack to gain the necessary distance to leap across a pool of a substance which will kill you on contact. It is in the manual, but most people never used it. It never comes in handy again.
- The Marathon series had some obscure secrets, but in the original, if you wanted to get the Flamethrower at an early level, you had to walk into a random corner of a maze to activate an invisible, soundless trigger to lower an elevator, sprint back to the starting point, fall down the shaft, grab the flamethrower and sprint back to the elevator before it reset. Failure to do so will trap you in the hole, with a terminal that says nothing more than 'And here you are, stuck in a hole. We could have done a lot together!'.
- And one of the most ridiculously difficult secrets of all time was the Gherrit White Chamber, where you had to open an unmarked secret door, jump down a shaft and find your way through a completely-unhinted-at teleporter maze to find a secret terminal message. To exit, you had to perform an amazingly complex Rocket Jumping maneuver to get up the shaft and back into the main level.
- Every Legend Of Zelda game is almost contractually obliged to have a Guide Dang It in it somewhere. The most massive of these is possibly the Kafei and Anju sidequest in Majora's Mask, which requires a long string of specific actions performed at specific times, and which must be completed no less than twice in order to get every possible item from it. The trading sequence required to get the Infinity Plus One Sword (well, one of them, anyway) is pretty bad too. In fact, much of Majora's Mask in general is brimming with Guide Dang It moments.
- Mitigated significantly by the fact that the game gives you a schedule of when you have to do the things (though it doesn't specify what must be done). The hardest part of the quest for this troper was finding Kafei in the first place so you could see his schedule.
- Mention must also be made of the infamous Water Temple from Ocarina of Time. Scrappy Level at its finest, the Water Temple incorporates a baffling, groan-inducing water raising and lowering puzzle that has caused the early demise of many controllers.
- The water raising and lowering? How about the hidden block of time behind the longshot!? This troper literally spent hours trying to find away into that one room on the map that he hadn't gone to until he just gave up and looked for his strategy guide. He also had to tell one person doing a live Let's Play where to go, which led to that Let's Player to call that puzzle complete bullcrap.
- The Poacher's Saw in the Biggoron Sword sidequest. The only hints you get about who to give it to are that the carpenter boss says "my own son sits around all day", vaguely telling that his son the gray-skinned guy who actually only appears at night in Child Link's time, and that said man left his saw behind after he turned into a Stalfos. Yet another guide-dang-it is the blue chicken, which gives hardly any indication that you are supposed to use it on the carpenter's son, who is in a location you wouldn't think to go back to as adult Link.
- And how about the second quest of the original? Items get moved around, and every level's entrance is now hidden, with the exception of Levels 1 and 5.
- Level 5 in the first quest, where you have to go through a looping screen (the Lost Hills) several times. Level 8 is accessed by burning a conspicuous tree with the candle. And Level 7, how would they know the whistle does more than just warp you around? There's also a tombstone in the second quest graveyard that is opened with the whistle.
- You're told to "GO UP, UP THE MOUNTAIN AHEAD" to get to level 5 and "SECRET IS WHERE THE FAIRY DOESN'T LIVE" — the screen in question looks like a fairy spring, but there's no fairy — for level 7. There's no indication that you're supposed to use the Whistle, though, and an old issue of Nintendo Power had a two-page short story about how contrived the search for level 7 is.
- In The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past, there is a Great Fairy Fountain in the Pyramid of Power, where the Golden Sword and Silver Arrow upgrades(required for Ganon) are obtained, which can only be accessed with the Superbomb. The Bomb Shop doesn't carry the Superbomb until you rescue the fifth and sixth (of seven) maidens, and there's nothing in the game that hints at this, so the average player wouldn't think of any reason to go back after seeing only regular bombs there. Biggest Guide Dang It in the series other than Zelda 1.
- And Nintendo Power subscribers were given the gift of knowing these.
- The gameboy Zeldas were worse. This troper recalls a heart container in Oracle of Seasons that he still couldn't figure out how to get, even after obtaining all the items in the game!
- Two of the 12 heart pieces in each Oracle game can only be obtained randomly, with fairly low probabilities.
- One of the heart pieces in Link's Awakening could only be found by going far out of your way to dive underwater in a corner of the Kanalet Castle moat. I ONLY found this out via game counselor.
- Link's Awakening was mentioned...without the trick called the "Shot in the eye" in Turtle Rock?! This troper knows people who were stuck for months trying to figure that out! He only knew it because he had looked up ahead on a Legend of Zelda Fansite!
- Banjo-Tooie has several unduely annoying Jiggies. The worst and most infamous of these is Canary Mary's race in the final level, Cloud Cuckooland. It's a button-mashing race. The Guide Dang It part? You're not actually supposed to mash the buttons. Canary Mary has Rubber Band AI, and if you speed up, she speeds up proportionally—meaning that if you get too fast, she becomes impossible to beat. Making this even more fun is that you raced her before in an earlier level, where you could mash your way to victory somewhat easily.
- That's not even the end of it. The Nintendo Power guide doesn't tell you about the Rubber Band AI, it simply tells you that this new race "requires faster fingers" than the previous one, which is a lie, plain and simple. Only the internet tells you the true way.
- This Troper finally got past this part with the help of a friend with insane button mashing skills. So it's possible to beat her that way.
- It's also possible to beat Canary Mary's Rubber Band AI using a literal rubber band. Use the rubber band to attach a popsicle stick or other such contrivance over the button, and use two fingers in rapid alternation. This makes it easy to sustain a high tapping rate.
- The Xbox Live Arcade port added a new Guide Dang It: Stop 'n' Swop II. The first four objectives are simple enough: hatch all of the original Stop 'n' Swop eggs and collect the Bronze, Silver, and Gold eggs. However, for the remaining three objectives, you need to beat every boss under a total of 15 minutes, become each and every one of Humba Wumba's transformations, and finally, kill yourself 40 times during boss battles.
- A well-known Guide Dang It from Beyond Good And Evil is the location of the Ignis ingifera, "The Animal Everyone Misses." It's tucked away in a secret room whose location is not immediately obvious (it lies in the complete opposite of the direction you normally need to go). While it makes sense once you know where you're going, it can be a head-scratcher. The location of the "shy amoebas" in the Black Isle is similarly puzzling (until you realize that a bridge you lowered in fact had something hidden behind it.)
- What's hard is taking a picture of Domz Sarcophagii, which you only see twice between getting the camera and the endboss fight, and both times you are in instant combat with them. Stopping in the middle of a fight for a Kodak Moment is both non-intuitive and, if you haven't distributed your PAL-1s correctly, suicidal. And without taking the snap as early as possible on Hillys, you won't be able to Catch Them All and get the Photo Album m-disc.
- To acquire the most powerful armor in Megaman X5, you are required to drop X down what appears to be a bottomless pit in one of the final stages; if you're on the correct side of the shaft, you'll fall through a false wall into the room with the armor in it. The kicker is that the armor won't be there at all if you played through the stage with any of X's other armors, and there's nothing in-game to suggest this is the case. To be fair, the game will allow you to collect the armor with Zero regardless (although if you complete the stage with either character and neglect to pick up the armor, it's Lost Forever).
- The hidden ultimate upgrades in X1-X3 (The Hadoken, Shoryuken, and Gold Armor) are all likewise obtuse. And except for the Hadoken, they are also Lost Forever once you complete that level.
- Many of the Secret Bonus Points in Dynamite Headdy require you to perform extremely counterintuitive or un-obvious actions, and there are no hints anywhere.
- Goldeneye007 falls under this in the Egyptian level. One of your objectives is to retrieve the Golden Gun. However, if you try approaching it directly, bullet proof glass seals it and indestructible gun turrets appear and tear you to shreds. The solution? You're supposed to walk across the floor in a certain path in order to get the gun without setting off the trap. The kicker? There is nothing in the game that even remotely hints at the solution! Even if you were to do the All Guns cheat and complete the other objective, you still need to go and collect the Golden Gun.
- Silent Hill 3. Let's put it this way: when the game gives you the option to set puzzles to "Hard", it is not joking around. You're either spending five minutes with a guide or five hours with the Complete Works of William Shakespeare.
- IMO, the most frustrating puzzle on hard: the keypad puzzle in the hospital, where the solution is cryptically explained in a poem about mutilating someone's face.
- Same goes with Silent Hill 2 on the higher riddle difficulties.
- And the clogged garbage chute in SH 2, which you have to drop a case of soda down to dislodge a critical puzzle item (see Soup Cans).
- Some of the criteria for getting certain endings are vague at best. A condition for one bad ending, for example, is that you keep James' energy always on the edge - quite the opposite of what any normal player would do.
- A Guide Dang It on all difficulties: the scene where Heather holds Claudia at gunpoint. If you shoot her, the God will possess Heather, resulting in a Non Standard Game Over. The solution is to ingest the Held Back Phlebotinum pill inside the pendant she's been carrying since the beginning of the game. You only know of its existence by examining the pendant, and like in SH1, the in-game hints only vaguely reference its use.
- Silent Hill 1: To get the Good+ ending, you must collect the red liquid (later revealed to be Aglaophotis, a form of Applied Phlebotinum) from the broken vial in a plastic bottle, then, during the fight with the Puppet Cybil, throw it on her to exorcise the demonic parasite from her. The few in-game hints only remotely reference this substance's power, and not until it's too late to save Cybil. Since it's unlikely a player would get the Good+ ending on their first playthough without a guide, and Cybil is absent from later games, the regular Good ending, where she is killed, is considered by many to be canon.
- Also, the astrological sign puzzle in the Nowhere dimension was, in the beta, solved by putting the signs in numerical order, which the strategy guide showed, but in the final version, they changed it to counting the number of appendages of the animals. Guide dang it!.
- And that's not forget the Crematorium puzzle, also on Silent Hill 3's hard mode. Which requires you to know the real life habits of a particular, obscure bird most people don't know of, let alone know the real life habits of. Oh, and that's not to mention the part of the poem applied to this bird seems to identify an entirely different bird based on the poems provided in game.
- Many Mega Man bosses are weak to a particular weapon. The catch? You're not told the weakness, and new weapons are only acquired through beating bosses, so you have to beat the bosses in a particular order unless you want a (unnecessary) Self Imposed Challenge. And then in Mega Man 9, the first area of Dr. Wily's fortress has a room with three horizontal tubes that shoot instant-kill lava from one side of the screen to the other, and you need to get from bottom to top. You'll need to figure out how to get up there, and without having really fast reflexes, how would you guess that using Concrete Shot on a lava beam freezes it temporarily, making it safe to step on?
- There is an alternate way past said trap in Mega Man 9, but the timing is rather precise, and most players find the method outlined above first.
- How would I know that? I watched the trailer.
- Or you could use the Rush Coil... It's actually pretty easy to get past them that way.
- Mega Man make it so that every boss was weak to one of the weapons, in a recursive loop, and then balances so that all are theoretically beatable with the Mega Buster. In Mega Man X, however, the question of "how do I know which weapon to get first?" is replaced with "How am I supposed to know that I'm supposed to beat Chill Penguin first?" (so you can get the leg attachment). The ability to dash was far more important than any weapon, even in some boss fights (particularly the Octopus). Mega Man X2 learned from this mistake and gave the player the ability to dash from the start of the game.
- Even without the dash problem, Chill Penguin was the easiest boss in the game anyway, making him the first choice to fight in any case.
- There's a mini-Gide Dang It in regards to the boss weakness in Mega Man 3; who knew that instead of one continuous loup, there were two, with Gemini Man, Snake Man, and Needle Man not being weak to any of the other Robot Master weapons?
- Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. Final level. NUFF said . . .
- Jumping into the hole is a weird idea too.
- Getting access to many of the secret areas from Painkiller are Guide Dang It moments. Requiring taking a Leap Of Faith or exploiting the jump physics to reach otherwise unreachable areas, with the game not giving you any hints about where and when to do either to reach a secret area. Most times its better to leave well enough alone except to unlock the final difficulty requires earning collectable card powerups for meeting specific requirements when completing a level. Some levels require either finding all secret areas, or looting the contents of said secret areas to meet the card requirements. The people on Game Faqs have gone to great lenghs to find every secret in the game, however for the rest of us, as Yahtzee put it in his review of Painkiller "If more than a minute goes by without a dude and a murder you're not playing it right."
- Wario Master Of Disguise. In the final level you come across a room with a blue door, some green mushrooms, and a blue mushroom. To open the blue door you have to turn it green, by stepping on all of the green mushrooms. The blue mushroom is not required and only serves to hinder you, by un-pressing all of the green mushrooms. But there's nothing to suggest this is the case. (And since you don't have to press the green mushrooms in order, you just have to have them all pressed, there's no real reason for that blue mushroom to even be that.) Even worse is when you realize that one of the green mushrooms is invisible and you need Genius Wario to step on it. Again, there's nothing to suggest this would be the case. But hey, at least they only make you do that puzzle in the one room. Oh, wait, no. It's in every room.
- Astro Boy: Omega Factor makes getting to the end of the game much harder than it has to be. To begin, if you skip the credits after playing through the first go-round of the game, you miss one of the entries in the Omega Factor and screw yourself out of a power-up. One key event requires you to jet straight up four times (impossible without having maxed out your Jets or a full EX stock) to reach a hidden character, with no hint that there's anything up there. Another one requires you to destroy a specific door on a background object that gives no indication it's anything other than scenery (in an area filled with rolling statues that kill in a single hit), and another one necessitates you going left at the very start of the stage and destroying a trash can - in a stage that scrolls right, thus giving you no apparent reason to go left. Having maxed-out Sensors only partially helps, because Astro Boy will declare he senses a hidden character but doesn't tell you anything about how to find them.
- Fantastic game, but the order you have to go through the levels is also very unintuitive. You have to backtrack to several levels, upon which certain plot elements will resolve themselves. Those who skip the cutscenes (with their minor clues) are screwed.
- Another too-cleverly hidden character (needed to continue the plot) is hidden behind a wall in an elevator scene. So once you miss him, you have to start the stage over again. And again, there's no hint to his location, you just have to know it. Although it's not that hard to access him accidentally.
- And one This Troper forgot on first listing this entry: once you complete the first playthrough, in order to open up Dr. Tenma's house, you have to play through the tutorial again, so that Astro can confront Dr. O'Shay. The problem here is that the game discourages you from doing this, because Dr. O'Shay mocks you by wondering if you've forgotten the basic controls.
- Unlocking Liu Kang in Mortal Kombat Deception is next to impossible to do accidentally. In order to unlock him, you must be in a specific realm, during a specific hour on a specific day of the month, behind a tent that you seemingly never have any other reason to go to after you beat Jade. Even worse, the game gives you no indication that it's even possible to go around the tent. His alternate outfit is unlocked in very similar fashion, but fortunately in its case it is there for longer than an hour, lies in a more obvious location, and appears once a week instead of once a month.
- The Metal Gear Solid series is usually very good at averting these - even the more obscure puzzles can be answered by your support team in-game if you can't figure them out. However, have fun trying to assemble a full team of special characters on Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops. They range from One Game For The Price Of Two bonuses (beat the game with Metal Gear AC!D, AC!D or Metal Gear Solid Digital Graphic Novel on your memory card to automatically pick up Zero and have a chance at picking up Teliko and Venus) to Self Imposed Challenge rewards (beat the game very quickly, get high medical stat and max out technical stat/beat the Boss Rush minigame to pick up Cunningham, Ursula/Elisa and Gene) to obscenely obscure rescue tasks which require going to totally unrelated areas at times you are usually not given an indication for. Raikov is the easiest, but he does necessitate dumping a spy unit in an area which has no plot importance at a time when you have other things to concentrate on. Para-Medic requires you to return to the radio mast after completing the malaria sidequest, and then to complete all your spy jobs (even ones begging for you to collect useless items!) until she appears in the hospital. Sigint is a little easier, but requires you to have picked up Para-Medic. Sokolov requires an insane fetch-quest. Absolute queen of the pile, though, is EVA. To pick her up, you need to interrogate random NP Cs, open an unmarked locker in a completely unrelated area which has a number written inside, refrain from capturing certain NP Cs which it is beneficial to capture, contact her, clear out the airport, wait an in-game week, go to the bottom of the Ravine, and then she'll join you. You need her to recruit Ocelot, and, to add insult to injury, she's not an especially good character in terms of stats.
- Finding the Easter Eggs usually requires a guide, too. This troper has been a massive fan of Metal Gear Solid 2 for four years and she's still finding new Easter Eggs ranging from funny lines to bonus cutscenes requiring her to do incredibly obtuse things.
- This troper is finding MGS 2 hard in that they tell you to go somewhere yet don't tell you where that is. Thanks for telling me to go to the core Colonel but WHERE THE HELL IS IT? The game just doesn't tell you much in general. Even the tutorial goes so quickly this troper managed to screw everything up within 5 minutes because of not having an instruction booklet.
- Although 'core' typically means 'middle,' and the Big Shell is set up in the shape of a rough circle (hexagon). It's also marked clearly on your map (press start)...
- The original Bionic Commando had one of these so ridiculous that the game is still commonly-thought to be unbeatable. The last stage ends with a heroic leap off a cliff to face off against Hitler. You land on the ground to find Hitler in a giant armored helicopter and he shoots you dead. The "correct" solution is to blindly fire into the surprise helicopter's cockpit while falling, an action improbable with merely human reflexes and the character's sad rate of fire. Only this troper's tendency to randomly shoot at nothing yielded the winning ending.
- This Troper disagrees. The guy right before it who gives you the bazooka tells you that you need to hit the cockpit of the chopper. It took a couple attempts, but he did it.
- In the second level of Flashback, there's a jump you need to make that requires a specific maneuver you won't use often. You need to start running, hold the run button, and let go of the directional pad.
- Karateka does this with the ending. Once you defeat the final boss, you can leave the room and find the Distressed Damsel you came to rescue. To properly finish the game, you have to drop out of your fighting stance and run into her arms. If you approach her in your fighting stance, which most first-time players do after such a long struggle, she will kick you in the face, killing you instantly. Makes you wonder why she couldn't just kick her way to freedom...
- This Troper, who has a pretty bad sense of direction, was furious when, after Assassins Creed's third mission, the game removed the markers necessary for finding the investigations needed to track down your target, instead giving you vague hints on where to go and never mentioning them again. It got so bad he almost gave up on the game because of it.
Adventure
- The Maze on Mars in The Journeyman Project. You have a limited oxygen supply, making the Left-Hand Rule out of the question, and there's nothing in-game that hints at the path(unlike The Seventh Guest). So the only way to solve it is to painstakingly map the maze, or consult the hint sheet included with the game(god help you if it got lost).
- Or you could just use the Mapping Biochip you've been carrying around since the beginning of the game.
- Too many to count in the original Alone In The Dark trilogy, as well as The New Nightmare, but some examples from the first game:
- You find a fake book in Jeremy's study, which seems useless at first. Turns out you have to put it in an almost unnoticeable niche in one of the bookshelves in the library, to access a secret room that contains a crucial item. God knows who would figure this out on their own.
- After you grab the arrows from the planter, the way back into the ballroom is blocked by a horde of literal Demonic Spiders. The other way in is guarded by a zombie pirate, which at first seemed invincible to this troper.
- Also Pregzt, the final boss, what in the game hints at burning him with the lamp?
- The book found in the attic talks about using shields as mirrors to reflect Medusa's gaze of death. This just barely hints at the solution for the demons blocking the stairway. And to obtain the mirrors, you have to unlock the dresser using a key hidden inside a vase, which you have to throw and break to obtain said key.
- Many examples in the Resident Evil series, especially the first game and its remake.
- Many of the Stray Beads in the PS2/Wii game, Okami are like this.
- Some of the animal feeding locations are like this too.
- The creators of Kingdom Of Loathing have stated that they would be surprised if anyone has beaten the game without resorting to spoiler information.
- Considering how many of the puzzles are random pop culture references, some of them not even clued ...
- That and a mandatory logic puzzle at the final stretch of the game whose specifics are randomly generated...and it's ridiculously difficult.
- In a parody of the Guide Dang It puzzles that infested the genre at the time (and, well, the series itself also), one of the puzzles in Space Quest 4 required the player to find (in game) the "Space Quest 4 Hint Book" and look up the solution - that single solution being the only actually useful hint in the book. The rest either referenced outlandish events that weren't in the game, gave some smartass one liners or parodied hint books themselves. You can find a transcript of the book's contents here (the genuine hint is the one about the timepod).
- There is actually another useful hint - the "Super Computer" code hint is potentially useful at the end of the game. But, in order to take advantage of it, you have to have found the laptop (near the start of the game...), taken the battery from the energizer bunny (also near the start) and bought the correct plug adapter, thus making it pretty much a Guide Dang It moment itself.
- A particularly cruel one in the first game, where in order to enter the enemy mothership in space, you need a jet-pack to fly to it. If you didn't get the jet-pack earlier, the game is Unwinnable. When you enter Ulence Flats, an alien greeting you will offer to buy your hovercraft. You're supposed to refuse the offer at first, until he returns and throws in a jet-pack as a bonus. Unfortunately, at no point does the game ever hint (until it's too late) that you even need a jet-pack, let alone the fact that this alien has it, and will only give it to you on his second offer.
- In Space Quest II, you need to get a whistle by putting an order form(which you don't even know you have from the beginning unless you check your inventory) in a mailbox that looks more like a Star Wars robot. To cross the swamp you need to pick berries from an ordinary-looking bush (you see an alien doing something there but you don't know what), then rub them on yourself(also vaguely shown by the alien). Then in the deep area you need to HOLD BREATH before DIVE(ing) to get to the cavern with the gem. when you go down the chute to the bottom of the canyon(which requires the aforementioned gem), the aliens tell you to "say the word" when you want them to open a passage for you. Turns out you just type THE WORD. When you enter the dark maze, you find that "you can't maneuver with the gem in your hand", and you need a leap of intuition to know to PUT GEM IN MOUTH. After the maze, in a room that seems to be just another dead end, you need to blow the whistle to call the Labion Terror Beast, who then opens up a passage for you. This troper got past him by going to another screen and thus making him disappear, but nowhere in-game was it hinted you could also distract him by throwing him the seemingly useless puzzle. God help you if you descended into the canyon without the whistle or the gem, because by then they're Lost Forever.
- Space Quest III avoided the Unwinnable situations, but had even worse Guide Dang Its, most notoriously at the beginning of the game. The shuttle's computer shows a picture of a Warp Motivator which is right at the starting room, but you can't pick it up yourself. You need to use the claw on the grabber trolley(another guide dang it) to pick it up and drop it in the hole in the shuttle. In fact, to get into the shuttle itself, you need to grab the seemingly immovable ladder that is the exit from the rat's den! (which is accessed by entering the eye of the robot head, another guide dang it) BTW, the generator for the shuttle is hidden out of sight in said room. All you see is a wire connecting several lamps, no hints that it leads to the generator behind a pillar. Then you need to grab a set of insignificant looking wires from the wall of a hallway. After that, a rat will come and steal both wires and generator, and it appears they are Lost Forever. They're both back down in the same location in the rat's nest(the guide this troper referenced forgot to tell the wires were there too). If you go back down there without the ladder, though, it's Game Over (though still better than Unwinnable). Guide dang it, guide dang it, guide dang it!
- In the original Colossal Cave Adventure, the final point could be obtained only by dropping a magazine on the floor in a particular room. In these days before guides, it was eventually discovered using a decompiler— unless you thought to examine the magazine several times, and learn the address.
- Try playing any Sierra game of the text-parser era without a hintbook, much less get a perfect score. Or something this side of Conquest of the Longbow without a hintbook. Of course Sierra had its own 900 number for hints, so if you wanted you could get mysterious charges on your parents' phone bill and tell them it was all in the interest of completing more games. Though there were a couple fake hints such as activating the Pizza shrine in Quest for Glory IV. This editor spent more than the price of the game on that silly 900-hint line.
- To add insult to injury, some Sierra games included the option to order the game's hint book right in the very same game over screen, which may have seemed outright condescending to many players considering how ridiculously obtuse some puzzle solutions were.
- This Irregular Webcomic strip cites a moment (among many) from Kings Quest V - a cat chases a rat across the screen early in the game. You are supposed to throw a boot at the cat (a boot that can only be found in an arbitrary part of the desert far to the west) so the rat can escape. What's that? You didn't? Well, the game is Unwinnable from that point on. As seen in the page for Unwinnable, Sierra is famous for that.
- By far the worst Guide Dang It in Kings Quest V. No spoiler here, because this Troper believes EVERYONE had to look this one up. In the final area of the game, any time you stay too long in one room of the castle, the big bad wizard appears and kills you. So who would possibly guess that to progress you actually have to stand in the room with the Big Ominous Living Eye above the doorway for long enough for the wizard to go to sleep in his bed, when trying that anywhere else in the castle will kill you? Guide Dang It! Most of the nastier puzzles have earlier, simpler preperatory puzzles tht have similar solutions to warn you. But not that one.
- Kings Quest I. Ifnkovhgroghprm. Ifnkovhgroghprm.
- For those who aren't familiar with Ifnkovhgroghprm, it's the solution to a puzzle in which a gnome asks Graham to guess his name (it is, thankfully not required to win the game, but you do need to solve it to get a perfect score). The whole scene is reminiscent of the fairytale Rumplestiltskin, and if you're not familiar with it the puzzle is even more of a Guide Dang It, but that's not his name, though he says it's "close" if you make that guess. The only hint is in an otherwise unrelated area, which contains a note that says "Sometimes it is wise to think backwards". Even if you do make the connection between the note and the puzzle, Nikstlitselpmur is not his name either. What you're supposed to do is turn the alphabet backwards, mapping a onto z, b onto y, and so on up to m onto n. This will give you the gnome's name, Ifnkovhgroghprm. This one was so bad that when Sierra released an updated version a few years later, Nikstlitselpmur was an acceptable solution.
- The two Laura Bow games are pretty bad at this considering you have to know where the secret passages are and when the events happen in order to get One Hundred Percent Completion. Laura Bow 2 is even worse considering that missing some events and clues make the game Unwinnable. They're actually both kind of justified in this, you're an amateur detective and you're supposed to pick everything for clues. This means examining EVERYthing. Of course this still doesn't exactly excuse missing certain events to see all the subplots and background information in the first game....
- Who forgot Myst? One example of this: Getting out of the Mechanical Age requires you to rotate the main area of the age to get to two small islands that have part of the password leading out. The problem? There was a bug in the game when it was first released that prevented the area from rotating towards one of the islands. A patch was later released to fix this, but until then players had to use the guide to find out what the solution was.
- Another one was the sound puzzle in the Selenitic Age. The water fountain and its microphone, as well as the blue page, are hidden in an area accessible only by a nearly invisible pathway off the main path. No wonder you can't find the water sound on the radio periscope device that tells you which order to play the sounds in, so you end up resorting to a guide or trial and error to find the solution.
- Also The Maze from the Selenitic Age. Woe to those who try to get through it who are deaf, hard of hearing, or who just don't realize the importance of the sounds.
- And what about the ONE puzzle in the game which requires specific timing? (Exiting the elevator BEFORE the door closes so that it goes up by itself allowing you to walk under.) What a stupid puzzle!
- The sequel, Riven contains a more egregious one in the form of the "Animals Puzzle", which precious few gamers can honestly claim to have solved without a walkthrough. It was inconsistent about the way it doled out information. But the real problem wasn't coming up with the solution; that was difficult but not entirely impossible. The real problem was that, once you knew the right animals in the right order, the "keypad" you had to enter them into was not well-labeled, and it took forever to try to enter one particular permutation. Imagine a 10-digit keypad that actually has 20 keys, but some of the digits 0-9 are repeated. Except that, even though it looks like there are three 9's, only one of them is the real 9, and the others are fake even though they look very much like a 9. And the only way to tell which is real is to enter all of the permutations of the correct code. And it takes 30 seconds to enter a 5-digit number.
- This troper found the marble grid puzzle harder. Try finding the dome of Book Assembly Island.
- In addition, you don't know what symbol the fifth island is(you have to solve the puzzle to reach it; catch 22 again), and the dome viewer on Survey Island is broken, so you can't clearly see the color symbol. And one of the marbles isn't used for any of the islands. So it becomes a game of trial and error.
- No, it wasn't. By using the map room and by process of elimination (I know because I did this), you can deduce that the color for the fifth island is one of the two remaining colors. I forget exactly how I found the Survey Island's color, but there is a way, because I distinctly remember walking into the Fire Marble chamber having whittled down the possible configurations to two. And my first guess was right ;)
- The ending to the fan game D'ni Legacy. The player cannot know that the whole world of Amerak has fallen apart, leaving only airless asteroids, or that you need to take that key to Elanif if you don't want to be trapped.
- On top of being one of the shining examples of Nintendo Hard, Solomon's Key was extremely fond of this trope. Not only does each group of levels have a secret level, each of those levels had a secret item that could only be found by making a brick and then destroying it in a certain spot of said room. There is never any indication as to which spot this might be. Beyond that, there are three extra rooms that are only accessible if you managed to find all twelve previous secret rooms and all twelve of Solomon's Seals. Not only is this never mentioned, but nobody even published a guide for the game. Nothing, and I swear nothing, is as bad as a Guide Dang It game that never gets a guide. Most gamers didn't even know of half of these hidden items until the advent of GameFAQs.
- It wasn't just the lack of a guide. This troper called the Nintendo Power Counselors on Solomon's Key. Not only didn't they know, they made up a reasonable-sounding but completely false answer on the spot to get me off the phone.
- Many puzzles in the Tomb Raider series, particularly the Puzzle Boss fights.
- The final puzzle in the game System's Twilight is near-impossible, even with the hints that the author has scattered throughout the game, unless one makes a very big leap of intuition. To add insult to injury, all of the guides that have been released will only obliquely reference the solution (because the puzzle is so good).
- Ghost in the Sheet, while funny (how many games start off by running you over with a bus?), features many Guide Dang It moments because what you can and can't muck around with isn't immediately apparent-this troper came to a complete standstill at one point because he had no idea that he could pick up a metal bar, and was further hampered by the fact that there was no obvious reason to sharpen it on the spinning, rubberless wheel of a suspended car; or rather, there was an obvious reason to do so, but no indication that doing so would accomplish this end. Funny game, but needs a little glowy aura around things you can pick up, and maybe some more NPCs hanging around to drop the occasional hint.
- Even worse was an overly-convoluted puzzle that involved opening locker doors in a specific way, and a "No Smoking" sign that was actually a button you had to press! At least the titular Ghost didn't say this puzzle's solution was "obvious", like he did after inputting one of many numeric passcodes, this one which isn't stated out in the open and can only be figured out by determining a pattern out of previous codes found in a diary! And furthermore, how the hell are you supposed to figure out that you should electrify a bone in order to get a makeshift flute?! Granted, this was an amateur-made Adventure Game created by two people using the freeware Wintermute Engine, but you'd think they'd give more hints for these extremely-tough-even-for-an-adventure-game puzzles...
- Example not directly related to the actual gameplay: Leisure Suit Larry 7: Love For Sail! included some graphics and dialogue that could be replaced at the player's whim, intended to allow players to place themselves physically in the game world. Sadly, the developers forgot to mention this feature in any of the game's documentation, and released the instructions through a patch later on.
- Douglas Adams Starship Titanic. Unless you are mind lnked to the programmers.
- Somewhat a minor example: At one spot in Simon the Sorcerer (2?), you had to try wearing the dog to proceed. This troper cannot think a way of figuring this out except by trying each command with each item in the inventory.
- The solution to a puzzle in The Legend Of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass is TO CLOSE THE DS. Not only non-intuitive but counter-intuitive, since normally you only do that to turn the dang thing off.
- Except that the markings on the top looked just like the markings on the map, flipped vertically as if they were pressed on by bringing the screens together. The game even draws attention to this fact with Celia remarking that the markings look familiar, but different.
- Another game, Hotel Dusk: Room 214, features a similar puzzle; it hints that you need to bring two characters (each displayed on a screen) together. The solution is simple, of course.
- I remember how I sat in front of that puzzle pressing the stylus continously against the screen to a point where I almost broke it. Well luckily I had to stop playing for a few minutes so I closed the thing... When I came back the first thing I did was to insult nintendo for inventing that.
- I was playing this section while waiting in an airport for my plane to arrive, and because I was going to be without any access to a guide for some time I was really frustrated on what to do. Since the hints make a reference to transferring a seal I was actually trying to drag the seal from the touch screen onto the non-touch screen for a while, yeah...
- This troper thought that that was a really interesting puzzle...but still a guide dang it. At least it was a creative one.
- And that was not even the worst one. On the ghost ship, there is a sign that tells you the order to pull a set of levers, but the sign can be interpreted two ways (does a "2" in the first spot mean to pull the second switch first, or the first switch second?), and only one of these interpretations actually works. A puzzle that had this troper stumped for hours before giving up and looking to a guide... Dang it..
- An enemy in the same game had you shout at the DS before you could attack it with only the hint: 'this monster has a weakness to sound.' so much time was spent making lost of sound banging walls with bombs before this troper got angry shouted and at the DS much to his surprise when this worked
- Wait, you had problems with that? When I figured out which quadrant it was showing, I figured it out right away. The thing that had ME was Bellum possessing Linebeck. God damnit, that took FOREVER to figure out x.x The ONLY clue that the game really gives you about constantly attacking instead of waiting for an opening (in order to get Ceila released long enough to create a Phantom Sphere) were those battles with that female pirate. And even then. Also, don't get me STARTED on that damned maze! >.<
- Trace Memory also features quite a lot of these. In order to get the perfect ending, you have to complete all possible tasks, and examine many objects around Blood Edward Island. However, you aren't given any hints to what these are, and I wasn't even aware some optional puzzles (such as clearing the rust off a plaque, or getting candies from the ship captain, and then exchanging them for a chocolate bar later in the game) until I read the guide. One particularly infuriating puzzle involves partially closing the DS so the screens reflect off each other, revealing the solution.
- And of course, a lot of these take place outside in the first level, which you can't go back to after you've passed...One time I missed the perfect ending simply for failing to read the first sign you reach in the first level.
- Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh is pretty bad with this too. Along with having to show everything to everyone, the puzzles are somewhere betweeun unintuitive (getting your wallet by putting your rat under the couch, then luring him back with a granola bar) and ridiculous (opening a toolbox with hammer and screwdriver, using a 'combo' process not explained even in the manual.)
- The first Discworld game was an egregious example of this. Most of the puzzles quasi-required you to have read the books to figure them out... Some even made little sense even when considered through an already Discworld-skewed logic. For example : to gain access to a secret society meeting, Rincewind needs a black robe. There is an NPC monk with a black robe. You'd think somehow interacting with him, perhaps Using Axe On Monk would do the trick. You sod. What you have to do is obviously go back in time through L-Space, put a frog in yesterday's yourself to mute the snoring so that you can catch a butterfly which, when used on a lamp (also yesterday) will cause a localized storm on the monk in the present. The monk will then vanish, but you'll find his robe on a clothesline in an alley. And no, there's not one bit of dialogue or hint towards this.
- Terry Pratchett himself has mocked the somewhat unintuitive logic of the games: "Okay. To get the walkthrough, you have to take the sponge from Nanny Ogg's pantry and stick it in the ear of the troll with the tutu, then take the lumps and put them in the pouch with the zombie's razor."
- Super Mario Sunshine uses this trope in the form of blue coins, which 10 of them equals 1 shine in exchange with an NPC. While they are not needed to beat the game, it will drive 100% completionists batty as they will search every nook and cranny, squirt water at anything that moves or doesn't move, and do all this for EVERY LEVELS' EPISODE.
- What really makes the blue coins a pain is the fact that there are ten of them on every level...but there's no indicator for how many of them you've found on each level. How hard would it have been to have a bit on the stage select that said "BLUE COINS: 6/10?"
- Also, to get one of the shines, you have to stand at a certain point in one of the levels, look straight up, and spray water at the sun. After you spray it, a shine will pop out. As far as I know, there is no in-game hint telling the player to do this.
- There is no in-game hint, but there is actually a hint on the game box cover. Look carefully at the words on the stylized logo on the cover - some of them read "Sprinkle Water In The Sunshine." Oblique, yes, but there.
- This troper recalls figuring that one out on his first try, by reading too much into an NPC's comment about how the sun looks especially nice from the top of the tallest tree.
- There is, however, one telling you to shoot at the moon in one of the nighttime levels (which I believe gets you one of the blue coins). You just have to go by analogy.
- Also, there is a shine picture on the ground.
- The falling floor tile puzzle in the chapel in The Seventh Guest stands out among all the puzzles in this game. You were supposed to find a path across the tiles by adding up groups of numbers. Unfortunately, these numbers were nowhere to be seen. In this troper's case, attempts to link the tile colours to different values bore no fruit, and eventually trial and error got there first. (The attic door lock puzzle and the dolls house windows puzzle in the attic also exhibited this trope, in this troper's opinion, but in these cases, trial and error got there fast.)
- For this troper, it was the underground maze. All the corridors looked exactly the same, and the creepy voice asking "Feeling...lonely?" every time she reached a dead end was serious Nightmare Fuel.
- The trick for that one is that it's a so-called "true" maze, composed entirely of contiguous walls, without any "free-floating" sections. If you hug one wall the whole time, you'll eventually get to the exit. If you specifically choose the left wall, which is often the one recommended in things discussing this property of mazes, you get there almost immediately, in fact.
- Alternatively, you can find a map of the maze on the carpet of the room that is approximately above the kitchen. Then you only have to guess at which of the two entrances you start.
- Hmm, if this troper remembers correctly, the falling floor tiles puzzle (in the chapel, right?) is "as easy as one, two, three" - you just had to cross in a number of steps evenly divisible by three. The doll house puzzle didn't exhibit a recognizable pattern even after being solved by trial and error, though.
- Doll's house puzzle was simple when you knew it: If you go left from a window with a certain shape, you'll go left whenever you find another window with the same shape. Same for other directions.
- The puzzles in Limbo of the Lost were the final nail on the coffin for this troper, as half the time they don't even begin to make sense. For example, early on in the game players are expected to put a worm into a flask of water to create tequila. Having never heard of such a recipe for intoxication, this troper went nearly mad with frustration after he read the walkthrough.
- Even more egregiously is the soul vial puzzle, where the player needs to fill an empty (green-tinted) vial with liquid to replace it with a vial containing a warrior's soul, which shines green in the vial. To do this, players are expected to fill the vial with water (which shines through as a blue colour, as opposed to clear as real-life water should) and mix some saffron into it to turn the water green (not that many players even know what saffron is or what it does in the first place, and those who do probably already know that saffron makes water yellow, not green). Or so this troper heard, since he's yet to even get past that level...
- Point-and-click game KGB has the main character discover a clue leading him to a fishing boat about to leave town near the end of chapter two, but the game simply does not allow him to go to the docks unless he meets with an accomplice in the park and compares some rather unrelated information first - and said accomplice won't be in the park unless you talked to him earlier in the game and agreed on this meeting, even though there was no indication towards this being nessecary, and you even being told specifically NOT to contact him at that point by an ally you had no reason to distrust. The game has a few more such moments (including one where you need to be at a certain place at a certain time in order to see one of the villains drive off, letting you trail him to your next destination. The game never even remotely hints at what you're supposed to do at this point), but this one is the most game-breaking in that you know what you are supposed to do, but the game just won't let you actually do it before you've done something else you never knew you were supposed to have activated in the first place. The fact that you learn nothing important from this guy, and he never does anything particularly helpful after this point does not help the case.
- Shadow Of Memories (Shadow of Destiny in the US) has a bunch of them in the course of normal play, especially if you want to get the best endings: two or three conversation choices at different points in the game send you down different branches, which not only affects which ending you get, but also the backgrounds of the various characters! The game makes reference to the specific conversation choices being "important", but beyond that makes no mention as to WHY they're important. Then, of course, there's the problem of actually proceeding through the game, which, in later chapters, requires travelling to multiple time periods... Between that and trying to reconcile the various endings, a guide is definitely needed!!
- The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy adventure game. Ye gods. Not only are most of the clues found in the literal in-game "guide," but there's no index on the thing, so you have to keep guessing searches. How else are you going to figure out that the Brownian motion is used to power the improbability drive? But even this won't help you if, say, you forgot to feed a cheese sandwich to a small dog at the very beginning of the game or didn't pick up the screwdriver on your bedroom table. This game has been known to make grown men cry at the mere mention of the phrase "Babel Fish." And
God Guide help you if you haven't read the book or are otherwise unfamiliar with the Hitchhiker's Guide story...
- If you're a klepto gamer, the babel fish thing is easy with some trial and error. Took me forever to get the goddamn control panel WHILE USING a strategy guide!
- At some points, being overly familiar with the book will make things worse. If by some miracle you managed to guess that the dog was the one in the book, and so would later eat the microscopic space fleet, you might think it best not to give it the cheese sandwich as this would protect the Earth from invasion by making sure it was still hungry. Wrong!
- To be fair, this game was made a Guide Dang It (before guides existed) on purpose. It said right on the box that it was difficult. You cant' say you weren't warned.
- Runaway: A Road Adventure. The game had it's puzzles mostly grounded in realism up until a moment about halfway through: you need to use a WW 2 machine gun, but it's out of ammo. Solution? Load it with tubes of lipstick mixed with gunpowder. That's just the developers being mean.
- The Hamtaro Game Boy and GBA games fall into this trope rather well. Especially with the one character saying he'll only give you This if you give him That. You LITERALLY have to find an item named "That" for him. That confused the hell out of this troper.
- Professor Layton And The Curious Village has a few of these, but which ones they are tend to depend on the player. This troper was completely stumped by the one involving a chocolate bar stamped with "GECY NW"; he figured out the gist of the puzzle without even looking at the in-game hints, but was unable to even guess at what the first word decoded to. Turns out that the bites in the candy bar, mentioned nowhere in the hints and so seemingly insignificant that this troper didn't even notice them, were actually involved in the solution. (And judging from a Google search, said troper wasn't the only one stumped.)
- Oh, and to make matters worse, this one's entirely the localization team's fault. Not only are the bite marks larger and clearer in the illustration in the Japanese version, but they're mentioned in the very first hint in that version. ::facepalm::
- The interactive fiction game Jigsaw gives you plenty of opportunities to completely screw yourself out of victory without even knowing it. Most of them are about failing to collect all the jigsaw pieces in a time period before doing something that renders them Lost Forever (an in-game device does tell you if there are pieces you haven't discovered in that time yet, but it won't warn you when you're about to inadvertently make it impossible to get them), but the biggest one by a mile has to be the drawing competition at the very end of the game. To win it, you need to have collected a sketchbook and pencil hidden in a stool at the beginning of the game and sketched at least four animals over the course of the game. There's little indication in the game that this will become vital later on, and if you don't do it, you fail to get the competition prize and can't complete the game without it, even after you've spent hours slogging through all these Lost Forever-riddled historical Timed Missions beforehand. Guide dang it!
- What makes this especially, ah, interesting is that the author of Jigsaw, Graham Nelson, is also the author of "The Craft of Adventure", an essay on interactive fiction design whose "Player's Bill of Rights" basically warns designers not to do this sort of thing. As Graham admitted, "like any good dictator, I prefer drafting constitutions to abiding by them."
- All the Clock Tower games have this to some extent, but by far the worst is Clock Tower II: The Struggle Within. Not only are various endings based entirely on whether or not you happen to be playing as Alyssa or Bates at the time, but other random problems crop up - for instance, doors locked to Alyssa are open for Bates, even if you just changed personas. Possibly the worst example is a statue that, if examined, comes to life and chases you (providing a second antagonist for that scenario.) While you think you'd want to avoid this, if one ignores the statue, they're shoehorned into the "G" ending in the last level for no apparent reason.
- Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, during the level That Old Devil Moon you are faced with a door locked with a 5 digit security code. Your only hint is that the owners were a "superstitious" people. Even going through Player Guides now, none but one mention how you were supposed to figure out the code, they just tell you what the code is. Apparently you were supposed to look up the planet's information in the computer before beaming down, then look up information on the races who live there and making note of their special numbers. The code is the result of rendering one of the numbers in the Base of another of those numbers.
- But the worst part is that there is no way to return to the ship after you land on the planet. So If you saved over your only save game after landing on the planet, without getting the answer from the ship's computer, without a guide it becomes Unwinnable
- Star Trek: Judgement Rites fixed this by allowing you to access the ships computer during missions by using the communicator, at least in one mission.
- NES adventure game Willow suffers from this at times. While the game is, overall, rather linear, there is often no in-game indication whatsoever that performing action A leads to location B opening up. Probably the most egregious example is early on when you talk to one of the Nail Clan and he tells you that they make their home in the forest. Later, you have to talk to one of them to get an item that allows you to progress (Which actually is mentioned in-game), and you find him in an area that's much closer to a mountain that it is a forest. Further, brute-force exploration is the only way to figure out the precise square the Clansman and item is on, at least at first.
- While Point-And-Click adventures are almost guaranteed to have a few Guide Dang It moments for players who fail to catch a ride on the designer's particular train of thought, Shadowgate for the NES is a particularly egregious example. Many of the puzzles were instant death if you failed to solve them on the first try or within a few seconds of seeing them and more than a few things were capable of being Lost Forever. To name a few...
- How many people honestly guessed that the only way to get past the collapsing bridge was to drink a random potion you found in a random room in a game where most potions kill you or at best do nothing? Or that the potion is good for one round trip only and if you don't have the item you need to complete the puzzle on the other side the only thing to do is restart?
- This is why one 'Look's at their items. The levitation potion/Bottle2 is described as being 'impossibly light.' And there are actually about three of said bottles throughout the castle. Figured that out years ago without a guide.
- How many people guessed that the only way to beat the wyvern was to put the star talisman on a pedestal in front of it in the half a second before it kills you?
- Uh, no, you're remembering the solution wrong. It was to throw the Star you get from the observatory room in the right-hand tower at it. One also more than a half a second to do this. In fact you could leave the room if you didn't have the Star, to go get it.
- How many people guessed that if you opened an unmarked coffin in the mausoleum, flesh-dissolving green slime poured out and filled the hallway, making it impossible to proceed with the game?
- It's not impossible. You just approach the Mirror room from below, using the Epor spell and the then-magically-levitating rope. Shadowgate was made merely somewhat illogical, not Unwinnable.
- Who would've thought that if you tell the game to USE any of the weapon type items on SELF you die instantly with no confirmation screen, no slight wound...no, you just die.
- [[Critical Failure Okay, this one maybe not so much.]]
- Uh, I'd have thought using a Sword on myself wasn't a particularly bright move in any genre or reality, anyway...
- Who ever thought that a random unmarked door, which you must pass through to proceed, would open into a blistering inferno that is instant "back where you came from" if you open the door without wearing the cloak? Or for that matter, that even if you wear the cloak you get killed by a fire demon when you try to proceed after entering unless you throw the orb into the fire to extinguish it. What's that? You threw the orb into the lake to freeze it so you could get the key, and then didn't realize you had to use a torch to thaw the lake just enough to get the orb to pop back up? Oops.
- Who guessed that the dragon's lair would be lethal? You enter to get a handful of items. Try to go to the end of the hall or get any other treasure? The dragon blows fire at you and you block it with your shield. But oh yeah, if you do this more than a specific number of times your shield melts and you die...but there's no text to tell you that's even a possibility.
- That's why you only Look at things first, before you get all grabby. The melted mass of gold coins was supposed to be a clue about the eyes at the end of the hallway. As for the shield, well, I don't know. Do you want to get an exciting career, finding out the melting point of a shield when held up to a Dragon's Flame? Yeesh, man.
- For the absolute kicker who would have guessed that to beat the final boss you had to use the Staff of Ages to blast the Behemoth, tricking it into thinking the wizard shot it so it would kill the wizard and then go back into the abyss?
- What could possibly make this game worse? How about the fact that it was made before the days when strategy guides actually told you what the hell to do. There actually was a strategy guide for this game, but it was an old school "hint book" style of guide and even the "easy" hints were remarkably obtuse.
- The game Trapped hosted at the Godlimations website generally avoids this trope, except for a point where you need to burn a human finger with a match in order to get a lockpick. It's only vaguely alluded to in game.
- Disappointingly, the sequel Pursuit engages in this egregiously . During the opening of the game, the police detective protagonist refuses to leave her house before gathering such objects as a banana, her favorite teddy bear, and the lightbulbs from her kitchen light fixture. One has to wonder if it's standard police procedure in Australia for the officer to ransack her own home before taking on a case.
- Worse, worse, much worse from the same game is a late puzzle that requires you to combine a banana, a large rope and a knife with some super glue to create a fishing rod. Not only does this make no sense whatsoever, it isn't even vaguely alluded to or hinted at anywhere in the game. To make matters worse, this occurs late in the game when your inventory is very full of objects, and any number of objects can be combined, and the order in which items are combined matters, meaning the "try everything" option results in literally hundreds of possible combinations.
- The game is also a bit sexist, and that can lead to some really frustrating puzzles. At one point, the female protagonist needs to grease up a bolt. However, she refuses to do so because she would mess up her fingernails. Keep in mind that she's hot on the pursuit of an infamous murderer, and lives are on the line. The solution? Use the (childishly nicknamed) teddy bear you were required to take with you on this police mission as a rag.
- Time Hollow is pretty good about avoiding this for the main path... but there's a few optional tasks you can perform that fall squarely into this. All but one of them, you have no reason to suspect are even possible without checking a guide, in fact.
- Milon's Secret Castle gets a lot of criticism on this front, though most of it is exaggerated. Left+Start continuing the game seems like a Guide Dang It, but it is mentioned in the manual. Most of the secrets are not marked, but many of them are optional, or redundant, or placed in such a way that running through the most obvious path in the level with the shoot button held down will find them by accident. The reason this game belongs on the page? Milon can move blocks to reveal doors. This is not mentioned in the manual. This is not even slightly hinted at in the game; there is a shopkeeper who gives hints, but he found it more important to tell you to "FIND A SAW" (the saw is in an item shop, for free, in a game with infinite inventory space and no negative-effect items). Even if Milon is standing near a block he can move, and pressing up against it, the game's animation does not indicate that Milon is pushing it and you must push it for several seconds to move the block. Worst of all, the player cannot make any significant progress without figuring this one out; you can enter three rooms, only two of which will have anything in them.
- Every game in the Zork series has one of these. For example, getting past the cyclops in the first game requires either saying "Odysseus" or feeding him lunch. Attacking him with the sword, knife, or your bare hands; trying to sneak past him; or giving him anything else or saying anything else results in a game over.
- This troper knew his Greek Mythology, and figured that out easily.
- The original mainframe Zork had some really bad forms of this. Notably To make the rainbow solid to get the treasure there, you had to wave an otherwise uninteresting stick. This one was so bad, they changed the stick in to something resembling a rainbow in the Infocom port of the game
- Dreamhold has the player finding several masks. When worn, each one triggers a different memory. There's a mirror, and when the player looks at it while sitting in the chair in front of it, he sees his face-as a blur-with other blurs the color of the masks. The solution to the climactic puzzle is to hold the masks up to the mirror to cover the face-blur in the exact chronological order of the memories each mask triggered. For extra irony, this troper was playing the game because it was recommended as good for beginners.
- Lampshaded in Donkey Kong Country 3. One NPC will periodically give you hints as to the location of the game's Lost World. If you solve the riddle before he gives you any hints, however, he accuses you of using the player's guide (which is where he got his information in the first place).
- Necronomicon had a puzzle where the player was presented with about 20 unmarked bottles, and had to mix two specfic ones in a beaker. Every such attempt involved moving the bottles one at a time from their shelf to the beaker, there was absolutely no hint as to which bottles had to be mixed, and only very vaguely alluded to that you had to mix some of them in the first place. This puzzle leads directly into having to locate an unknown piece of information from a talking, hard-to-understand and annoying-to-operate interactive encyclopedia, then using the name it gave you to locate a specific urn of ashes in a massive room of urns by looking at near-impossible-to-read labels with initials of the guys whose ashes these are. This is the point where most everyone either look up a guide or throw the game in the trash.
- Most Atari 2600 adventure games had a certain amount of RTFM, which is one reason modern gamers on emulators often get frustrated. The king of RTFM (and also this trope), was Raiders of the Lost Ark. Unfortunately, the manual left out a couple of steps (and didn't describe one vital object) for solving the game. Leaving a bunch of kids to puzzle out, with no internet (even the magazines were tight-lipped). A LOT of kids gave up, some eventually made the necessary leaps of logic. A modern gamer with no manual, forget it.
- This troper recalls having a strategy guide for Super Mario Bros. 3 back in the day, which mentioned that one could get a whistle by dropping through a floating white block in stage 1-3 and then running behind the ending curtain. Only one problem: The guide didn't specify how to drop down... and holding down the 'down' button for several seconds isn't something that's immediately obvious.
- English adventure game The Guild Of Thieves used this in the worst way: at one point, the player is asked to cross a path of coloured squares in a pattern. While the the player gets the correct path, the game will not tell you how the squares are laid out. The solution: consult a paper map that was included with the game.
- It would seem that most of the mystery in the 1990 puzzle/adventure game Theme Park Mystery is figuring out what the object of the game is. The puzzles range from the frustratingly obscure (the Zoltan fortune-telling machine, which does tell you what the game objective is. Eventually.) to the downright surreal (the chess board in Dreamland). What makes the game particularly Guide Dang It is that it comes with a booklet that turns out not to be a manual, but a guide to theme parks and amusement parks throughout history.
- Those flipping pictures frames in Ty the Tasmanian Tiger, which are not only in invisible crates and need a particular 'rang to find (forcing you to search through every nook and cranny of every. Single. Level.), but are required if you want to access the Secret Level. Oh, and the best part? Once you've accessed the Secret Level, 123 more pictures frames become avaliable to find. Krome sure can be a bitch.
- The Goonies II has most of the key items and goals like this.
Racing
- Each character in Mario Kart DS affects the karts' weight rating differently. Similarly, in Mario Kart Wii, each character will provide small boosts to 2-4 of the seven stats, not just weight. The manual doesn't say anything about it, and you wouldn't notice it in-game unless you took a really close look at the stats.
- Unlocking Drumstick in the original Diddy Kong Racing required beating all of the main tracks in Adventure Mode (except those in the fifth world), then finding and running over a small frog in The Hub. In the remake, you are required to use the touch screen to actually pick up and fling said frog into a high-up pond.
- Well, it is a frog with a rooster's comb, which is sort of a give away. As for knowing you need to run it over, well, when all you have is a hammer...
- Games which have a checklist of objectives, like Kirby Air Ride, often do not tell you what the objectives are before you complete them. This leads to a few of the objectives becoming Guide Dang Its. In KAR's case, how would anyone guess to win a race on a certain track without touching the walls even once? Well, the game does reveal a few of the uncleared objectives when you start to clear them, but for most of them, they'll be completed without you knowing what they are or that you've completed them.
- In one of the Scooby-Doo CD-ROM games, you have to click a random torch on a wall to trigger an encounter necessary to the plot. Why click that specific spot?
- In Detective Barbie, you have to specifically walk INTO the wall with the funny footprints at the base to open the secret passage. This troper took two years to realize that. Seriously, two years.
- Oh, dear lord, the Lost and Found items in Flower Sun And Rain. Some of them are pretty straightforward, but some of them... not so much. For instance, the third one in Scenario 4 has the hint that the guest in room 407 drank all the cocktails from the resturaunt, and they're worried because that's a lot of alcohol. No, you're not supposed to add together all the alcoholic ingredients listed for the cocktails. No, you're not supposed to add together all the ingredients, alcoholic or otherwise, either. You're supposed to add together the temperatures the drinks are served at. Try guessing that without looking it up.
Strategy
- Star Control 2 has a mild version of this in general, due to the universe going on without the player - indeed, there's a time limit to winning the game - combined with the time-and-fuel-consuming need to gather resources in order to complete the game at all and the fact that many star systems are not worth mining. At least it's mild enough that one can play some "probe" games before trying to take a serious stab at actually winning...
- The free remake/port, The Ur-Quan Masters, suffers from a specialised form of this trope because clues given in the original PC version are missing. For example, because UQM uses the dialogue from the 3DO version, it's missing two key lines of dialogue from the PC version (one about the time limit, the other about where to find a particular race's homeworld).
- Also, one optional but important quest asks you to track down a unique life form on an unknown planet orbiting an unknown star in a game universe of hundreds of stars, with only an obscure clue about the constellation to help you find it. The solution was much more obvious if you owned the original PC release because the game came with a printed map. It has to do with the shape of the constellation.
- The requirements to get the various secret items and mechs in the Super Robot Wars games are insane. For example, take a look at this page detailing how to get the secrets in Original Generation 2and ponder how one's supposed to meet these without either clairvoyance, hacking the game, or enough luck that if you had used this luck on something more important than a video game you'd likely have won the lottery... twice.
- Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber is full of this. First off, the end of the game is based on your reputation, which is based on a complicated system that the game never tells you about. Second, in order to get many of the special characters and items you have to talk to people or go to certain shops at incredibly specific times, such as midnight on the last day of the month. Also the player's guide simply doesn't tell you how to get a handful of the characters in the game, despite the fact that they are, in a few cases, prominent figures in it, thus making it a Guide Dang It for a guide.
- And then there's the original SNES Ogre Battle... Where does one begin? You often only get once chance to recruit the important NPCs, and the criteria for doing so are hopelessly vague and rarely alluded to in the game itself. This is made worse by the fact that the criteria often involve you having recruited another NPC, creating a knock-on effect whereby it's possible to miss out on almost every important character should you visit the towns in the wrong order on LEVEL THREE, without any indication of what the right order actually is. Getting the best ending also involves collecting all the Zodiac Stones, which are all randomly hidden and require you to have already gotten two obscure, difficult to obtain items - which can be lost, permanently, should you mess up getting them - before you can even begin the search. You also need to maintain high Charisma, Reputation and Alignment stats, which are - as in Ogre Battle 64 - related a system that the game doesn't explain to you. Have fun!
- The SNES Ogre Battle also had a rather unusual version of this, to get the worst ending in the game. It required having very high reputation to get a specific item, then almost immediately lowering your reputation to nothing so that a certain character would offer to join you if you gave him the item.
- Many of the games in the Fire Emblem series feature strange and rather arcane ways to recruit various people to your army. This contributor bets few players of Path of Radiance realized that to convince a certain character to rejoin your crew late in the game, you have to have one inconsequential character talk to him, then have the main hero of the story defeat him, especially because the series is noted for the fact that character death is permanent the vast, vast majority of the time.
- This editor remembers the only way to get one of the best units in Path of Radiance is to send one of two very powerful characters to a specific space in the corner of a field way out of the way. How many people discovered that one without a guide?
- The desert chapters present in every game from 6 onward (that are already annoying due to the fact that you are fighting on sand, lowering your units' movements) have hidden items that can only be obtained by having units wait on a selected square. The 10th game has these hidden items in EVERY chapter; naturally, finding any of them requires a guide.
- Don't forget how you can get one boss character to join you in Radiant Dawn by putting a character that cannot attack and has insanely low defense directly in front of said boss. Granted, however, one might find this out if they were curious to see if Oliver would attack Rafiel given his unnatural obsession with the herons.
- Speaking of that, a Motive Rant for FE 9's Big Bad is hidden in a similar way. Said rant is obtained by letting him attack Reyson, a unit who can not harm him, (only 6 characters can harm him, only 3 of whom you can have at once) and will die quickly and permanently (as he can't take hits from normal foes...), best part? If you know about this, you will have already have seen the dialog, meaning there is no reason for you to do it.
- Unlocking the super-secret, spoileriffic ending sequences for the tenth game involves a convoluted series of events throughout the course of the story (And a New Game Plus) that nobody would ever do without actually knowing what would come from it. This even includes bringing in a maxed out Support Bond, transferred from the previous game.
- Fire Emblem 4 has the Hero Axe. You get it by sending Lex, equipped with an Iron Axe (When the much better Steel Axe is also available) to a certain off-path square. How the hell does anyone guess any of this?!
- Fire Emblem 6 has something along the lines of this for the recruitment of a certain Paladin, who is considered to be one of the best pre-promoted characters. Who'd have thought dropping a defenseless bard character next into a swarming mob of enemies (literally 6 or 8 cavaliers around the Paladin character himself) would net you their general?
- A meta-game based example: in Advance Wars: Days of Ruin, the Anti-Tank is susceptible to infantry machine guns. You probably wouldn't suspect this because the Recon, which has far less defense, takes only 12% from Infantry; and the Anti-Tank already has weaknesses in that it is slow, lacking any decent range, and slightly expensive. At least in Game Boy Wars 3, it's possible to tell that the bulldozer—another slow, somewhat expensive vehicle, and one not even designed for combat at that—can be damaged decently by machine guns, since it shares the same armor class as infantry there.
- In Command And Conquer Generals, the last scenario of the Chinese campaign gives the enemy a superweapon that will screw you over every five minutes. Turns out, it won't fire if you have less than $5000. But of course this fact isn't mentioned in your briefing or anything.
- When a mission is completed in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, you often get a item that doesn't go into your regular inventory, but can be taken along on a mission, and boosts your entire party's stats in some way. Some missions force you to bring along these items before you can even begin (for example, you'll need to bring along the black thread and magic cloth if your mission is to make a hat for a black mage). Unfortunately, you quickly get more of these items than you can hold, and, while some of them are never used to complete a mission, quite a few of them are used hundreds of missions after you've gotten them. If you delete one of the latter items, they're Lost Forever. This troper has a saved game that is only one mission short of unlocking the Bonus Dungeon Missions, requiring one spool of black thread... which she threw out of her crowded inventory. Guess who can't complete the game?
- This troper also had that problem, though with Adaman Alloy instead of Black Thread. The solution? Let's just say this troper is glad they made a Game Shark for the GBA.
- This troper had problems with the exact same damn Black Thread (it doesn't help that you use one for a different Dispatch Mission much, much earlier, so you assume you're done with it, and then... oops). He started up a new game on the second save slot, got the first Black Thread, found a friend with a copy of the game, and prepared to link it over... only to discover that Amazon bodged up and sent me a North American release of the game (the friend has the European release, since we're Brits), and they won't link up. That's why this troper has sworn he will never ever import games for handhelds, however easy it may turn out to be.
- The sequel makes things a bit better by having such items part of the loot system which is also used for Item Crafting and never Lost Forever. However, there are other instances of Guide Dang It: For instance, a series of quests where you need to provide the right person for a non-combat job, with very vague hints provided which race/class can do it. The worst case is "Wanted:Caretaker" which can only be done by a Viera White Mage - all the others require a specific class/set of classes OR a specific race, but that one requires both.
- Then again, the random nature of the loot can really screw you over. A Thief and an Enemy Scan will make things much easier for you. Except the game's not going to tell you what you're missing for a specific piece of loot, so knowing exactly what you can steal is pointless unless you get a guide to consult on what is used to make what.
- This troper never ran into the above mentioned problem with the the quest items and never had a problem with having to many of them. Infact he didn't even knew you can delete them, until it was mentioned here.
- The original Final Fantasy Tactics is even worse. This troper, knowing that getting the bonus character Cloud Strife and finding the Deep Dungeon are nigh impossible without help, shelled out for a strategy guide. It failed to mention until it was too late that both these side quests are rendered Lost Forever if you allow an NPC you acquired near the beginning of the game to die between that point and the final chapter. Guess who will be level grinding instead of playing the most interesting side quests of the game?
- The game Vanguard Bandits has Multiple Endings based on pivotal decisive moments. One branch of endings was only possible to reach if Bastion was level 8 by the end of the third mission (in other words... the only one to fight in all the battles up to that point, pretty much). Less obscure was a path that showed up after finishing the game at least once, but it was still fairly easy to choose the wrong decision at this point and just continue on the normal branch. The game showed no real sign that these branches exist.
- Even worse, if your team's morale is low, it's impossible to even beat the game without getting the bad ending where the hero ends up possessed by the Big Bad. The worst part about this Nonstandard Game Over (apart from being forced to kill your comrades) is that your only option once this happens is to restart the game from the beginning.
- The first Command And Conquer game gave you a garbled mission briefing, telling you to take the Commando to the Nod base, blow up <static>, and then get out. The mission ends when you blow up a building in the base that isn't a SAM site. Usually, the officer rebukes you for not taking out the base and assigns you to destroy the rest of it as your next mission. But if you take out the Airstrip, you get a different mission instead. This hinges entirely on the player realising that the Commando can probably take out the whole base by himself without guidance, as long as there aren't any vehicles in the area.
- While Disgaea lets you know that there are Multiple Endings, nowhere in the included material will they tell you what factors affect these endings. This could lead to a great deal of frustration when you finally check GameFAQs and realize that the one accidental ally kill you made (easier to do than it sounds) disqualifies you from getting the canon ending.
- Well, it would only make sense that a character death that's your fault wouldn't be canon...
- Except that "ally kill" doesn't actually involve any negative repercussions - except for not being able to see the best ending. The ally that was killed is easily revived with a little money after the end of the battle, story character or created, and the player is not informed that the game keeps track, unless you check a guide.
- Makai Kingdom is a little more merciful. If you get a different ending, it does have the decency to tell you what you did to get it, so at least you can avoid that one.
- The Variable Sword in Mega Man Battle Network looks like a regular Sword with 160 power. However, by inputting button combinations that the game
never tells you gives only a few of the less useful ones over the ingame BBS, Variable Sword can change its shape. It still has only 160 power, so it's still not that great but can hit 4 times against anything (and only in the 3rd game). Even Neo Variable Sword (added in 4), with 220 power (with one combonation hitting twice), isn't great either, and even worse, Neo Variable Sword's button combinations (which again, are never told by the game to the player) are different from the regular Variable Sword.
- The gutspunch family of chips can apparently be fired as a rocket rather than a punch with their own button combination—and by their own I mean "each one has its own". Considering that without this they were effectively a sword that knocked people backwards, only some of the combonations are given on the ingame BBS. More importantly, in all of the games finding boss rematches (and thus the mega-class chips) for non-allied bosses, because after beating them a "ghost" appears in a specific unmarked unhinted-at dead end in if you're lucky the general region you explored just before beating him, which does not appear on the map and is virtually always in a dead end meaning the only way to find them without a map is to systematically walk into every single dead end of every internet area blindly. And after that further rematches against further-powered-up bosses for for further-powered-up chips become random encounters (ugh) on a different map. Forget the "secret areas", mystery data and hidden jack-in points; it'd take a masochist just to find all the rematches without a guide. Some jobs also require you to go to rather nonsensical areas to complete them, like the memorable occasion of finding an escaped penguin hiding in your bathroom in the sixth game.
- This troper only played the two first games, but found the locations of the Navi Ghosts relatively easy to find, and they usually were in areas you hadn't explored yet, with the dead ends very much standing out.
- Mega Man Star Force has invisible ghost bosses as well, but in the second game they're visible until you beat them and they become random enemy encounters. But enough about that - the biggest Guide Dang It EVAR occurs to a translation error: At one point a character says, "You can have a Recover150", but you don't get a Recover150. He actually WANTS a Recover150. Thanks, Crapcom.
- Secret Chips. Most of the Mega Man Battle Network games had them (the first one didn't). In the sixth game, it's possible to get "Secret Complete" by having a friend trade you all the chips that are exclusive to the other version. That's the easiest game to get secret chips in. The fifth game has this as well, but also has two chips that can only be obtained by linking up with a completely unrelated game (Boktai 2), trading the points obtained by doing so at the Boktai Trader (you get points in Boktai as well that can be traded for armor), and hoping you get the chips you want (which you need to trade 50 points at once to even have a CHANCE of getting). The Crossover itself is mentioned in the instructions for both games, though, so it's still fairly easy to figure out. Game 4 requires you to defeat a bunch of opponents in the Free Space, which can only be filled with the necessary type of opponents by linking up with another game. Even then, you only get the chip of the LAST opponent you face, which is determined pretty much at random, and each Navi has three levels of chip they can drop, depending on how strong or weak the game considers them to be (not that the criteria for "strength" or "weakness" is well-known). Even this can be discovered without too much difficulty, though. What you'll have the most difficulty finding are the Secret Chips in games 3 and 2 (though they weren't yet referred to as such). This required getting a certain number of completion stars, then battling with a friend on multiplayer, with a random chance of the victor drawing a Secret Chip from nowhere instead of getting a chip from their opponent. You could actually tilt the odds in your favor if you knew how to, and if you're looking up how to get the Secret Chips in the first place, you might as well look this up too.
- There's one more "Super Secret Chip" in Mega Man Battle Network 2. To obtain it, you must first get 100% completion, including obtaining all 10 Secret Chips, then save and return to the title screen. With your 5 shiny, multi-colored completion stars, you then have to hover the cursor over New Game and input a button combination that turns the letters orange. If you start an orange New Game, you'll be playing in Hard Mode, where the enemies deal 1.5x the damage to you, and have 1.5x the health. To make sure you don't just trade for chips from the later part of the game, the multiplayer modes are disabled (which also prevents you from getting the Secret Chips if you somehow clear enough of the game). If you manage to get through this ridiculously hard game (less ridiculously so the farther through the game you get), you're awarded with a "Congratulations" screen and the Super Secret Chip known as Sanctuary...which appears in your NORMAL file...which you've already 100% completed...
- Then there's the chips that CANNOT be obtained legitimately without going to a special event held way back when, God knows where. These included the four elemental Gospel chips, which could be used to form the Game Breaker Program Advance known as Dark Messiah (P.A. number 31/30 in the P.A. Library). This only-usable-by-cheating P.A. is then referenced in game 6 with its perfectly legal Dark Messiah NEO...
- Mega Man Battle Network 3 is rather unkind to those without a guide. If you manage to clear the game, then obtain all the Standard-class chips (including the ridiculously hard-to-find Viruschips) and Mega-class chips (including those only obtainable by trading with the other version), you can then unlock battles with the Omega Navis (which drop V5 chips, which are Giga-class)...by inputting a certain button sequence on the title screen. You then have to actually find the Omega Navis, and actually fighting them requires beating up a few waves of Omega-level viruses first, all in a row, which will likely leave you weakened for the upcoming boss battle. Did I mention that one of the Program Advances (needed for the P.A. Complete star) requires using one of three of these V5 chips, alongside two other chips that are quite pathetic on their own?
- Not to mention how several of the chips in that game could only be obtained by 1. defeating a virus, 2. with a Busting Rank of S, 3. in under 5 seconds, 4. while in a Custom Style (no using, say, HeatGuts Style), 5. without using the Mega Buster or any chips that freeze time. This is referred to as a "Special Custom Drop," and while most viruses just drop their usual chips in rare, hard-to-find codes, some viruses dropped completely different chips (BodyBurn becomes Burner, LavaCannon becomes Volcano). Worse yet, replace "under 5 seconds" with "under 20 seconds," and you've got the requirements to obtain any Navi's V4 chip. Couple this with how difficult Navi ghosts can be to find, especially in that game (which has special conditions for several of the ghosts, like having a specific program equipped, or being low on health), and you'll definitely be shouting "GUIDE DANG IT!" before long. Oh, and if your friend with the other version can't do well enough against the Navi exclusive to that version, you can kiss your 100% completion goodbye.
- In the plotline for Mega Man Battle Network 3, one of the clues to find a magical Mc Guffin to complete the game is "one of many birds". Easy, in a game with a zoo area, and many birdlike enemies to battle. Unfortunately, the many birds refer to the paper cranes around a sick patient's hospital room. All references to which have been stripped out of the English version.
- Mega Man Battle Network 6 has "rare" viruses that show up randomly in specific areas. For instance, RareBombCorn shows up in JudgeTree3. If a rare virus is defeated, you can then use that virus in a fun little virus battle mini-game. Just try and collect all the viruses without a guide.
- Oh, and the rare viruses also drop rare chips (or rare chip codes) at their highest busting rank (ReflecMet * chips, for example). Since it's pretty difficult to beat most of them in the absurdly short time required (without specifically preparing for it) and there's no explicit information saying the drops are any different...
- In Shining Force is one of the most egregious examples of this: A unique item required to promote one of the character types is simply on the ground in a random spot in a castle. The only way one would legitimately find the thing would be to manually search (through a menu!) every tile in the game.
- Later versions of Dwarf Fortress are just about unplayable without recourse to the game's extensive wiki.
- Battalion Wars 2 - in the mission Enemies Undone, if you didn't bother with the Xylvanians (most likely because they can't doing anything to you once you jump to the HQ) but wiped out all of the other enemies, you still won't get 100% in Power because you missed 8 infantry. Tip: they're all Xylvanians. However, a search reveals only 7 Grunts—still one short of the 100% in Power. It seems you get the 8th one by blowing up the 3 digging machines by shooting the explosive canisters near them, something suggested in-game by Vlad responding to that by warning Frontier's commander that this helps invite Xylvania to retaliate one day with their full wrath. What makes this more fun is that in other missions, some enemies won't necessarily count for Power at all, but you have to destroy all of the enemies that do count for Power if you want 100% in it.
Puzzle Games
- Level 27 in Chromatron was a massive Guide Dang It moment, as any level further that used the same trick. Not exactly unfair, but a way too obtuse puzzle: there is the object called quantum tangler, and if you change the color of the beam on one side, the other side also changes color — the opposite way. But no matter what you do, you cannot solve level 27 and a few others until you realise that reflecting a quantum-entangled beam BACK ONTO ITSELF causes very insane color changes. There's no indication in the game that you can do this, and the only similar thing was on level 17, where with a splitter it's pretty apparent.
- Supaplex, a perfectly logical Boulder Dash clone... until you get to levels 59 and 60, and later on 100 and 108, and even on 91, but you can work around on that one. A corridor three tiles in height, which has three vertical rows of rocks one after the other and only the last rock can be pushed. No matter what you do, there doesn't seem a way to get past, because only one of the top rocks will fall. The solution? Eat all the tiles near the first row of rocks, but eat the middle one last, then step away TO THE SIDE — two rocks will fall as opposed to the usual one, which in turn will free the second top rock to roll off. The last rock can now be pushed. The only hint you were given is an in-game demo which does something similar on a completely different level and stuffs it up 30 seconds later. At this point, most people already know that the demo feature is pretty useless, so they miss it. Guide Dang It.
- Karoshi 2.0. Mostly of the awesome fourth-wall-raping style, the kicker of which is level 48, on which to get an in-game CD player working, you had to insert a music CD in your computer's CD drive. Who would've thought of that?
- Well, there is a CD player there that says 'NO CD'. However, when this This Troper figured that out, he was playing the game on a laptop without a CD drive...
- The Widget Series Chulip has such obscure clues (and one requiring familiarity with Japanese/Chinese counting systems, no less) that it comes with its own guide, and even then one clue is not entirely accurrate.
- The Impossible Quiz. 'Nuff said.
- In Tetris: The Grand Master 3, Shirase mode normally ends at level 1,300, assuming you've previously passed two checkpoints that terminate your game early if you don't meet their respective time quotas. According to Ichiro Mihara, the vice president of Arika (which developed the TGM series) and one of the designers of TGM, there exists levels beyond 1,300. But even the fastest players have yet to find a way to exceed level 1,300, leading some to believe that Mihara's words were a mistake.
- Portal. That puzzle where you have to break a cube tube with a rocket sentry. Since it's purely a decorative feature BEFORE, I just bypassed the puzzle by using a chair. It's also plagued by a ridiculous bug which makes the tube breakable ONLY from the bottom, so even if you guessed the correct solution, you may still fail. Have fun.
- At one point late in the game, you go down a staircase and see a hand-drawn symbol of a running silhouette with an "up" arrow above it. This troper assumed it meant "go back up the stairs", because hey, that's what a running silhouette would mean, right? So he returned and searched the upper area, and searched, and searched... Guess what, the clue actually meant "look towards the ceiling".
- Bubble Bobble Double Shot for the DS seems easy enough, until you get to Level 81. Then things get tough, and by 83 suddenly turn to a GUIDE DANG IT, if you're playing by yourself. That level is really designed for multiple player, who all need their own copy of the game to play.
- The hidden stars in [[Braid]], one of which specifically has to be obtained by making a star out of two of the puzzle pieces from World 3 and part of a star visible in the window above the puzzle frame in the house. And you assemble the puzzle before finding this out, you're boned and have to start the game over. And don't get me started on the one in World 2-2, where you have to go to a particular spot and just wait a few hours for a particularly slow-moving platform to get to a spot where you can climb up on it so you can get to the star. No, really.
- freeware indie games are in no way exempt from this. [[Braid]] may be one example, but at least the GDIs weren't crucial to finishing the game. Opera Omnia gives you a handful of them, one of which is understanding the mechanics (the butterfly effect in reverse), another is Chapter 18 (you have to use what is technically a bug to win)
Simulation Games
- Harvest Moon: Island of Happiness tweaked the farming system used in previous games. The new crop growing system uses set time intervals as minimum time required in each stage, and adds water and sunlight requirements that don't always correspond, and the weather gaining its own modifiers. Too little, and your crops will never grow. Too much, and they'll wither away. Those ranges are wide enough to avoid complete ruin unless the randgen hates you, but if you want that ultimate turnip for the festival? You need to hit the absolute minimum to grow - too much sun and water will only reduce the quality. The precise requirements for each crop, or exactly how the weather affects them? All in the guide.
- Finding out how to attract some of the species in the Viva Pinata games is an extreme hassle. They often involve things such as having an arbitrary number of a certain, easily-devoured pinata in your garden, having a certain number of plants, or keeping a few random items around. Although once you attract them, the in-game encyclopedia will tell you what their other requirements are, some of them evolve after that... and good luck finding those requirements on your own!
- Not to mention getting the Twingersnaps or Fourheads, which requires you to breed two Syrupents (or Twingersnaps for the latter of the two), and then hit the egg with your shovel at a precise moment. Did I mention that hitting an egg with the shovel normally destroys it, so quite a few people wouldn't realise that you had to do such a thing? And let's not even get into romancing or attracting Chewnicorns and Swananas....
- Averted in "Playboy; The Mansion". The makers of the game were aparantly well aware that there players would almost certainly immediately search on the internet for any cheat codes should any either exist or become necesary, so there's no cheat codes at all. instead, as you build up points, you have the option to spend those points on either archive photos or on Cheats. These cheats, which you simply select at the expense of loseing points, vary from giving a paticular character better stats (increaseing their physical, charm or intelect, or giving them personality traits such as "amourous", "chaste", "drinker", etc) to things like giving everyone giant heads or instantly giving all the women giant breast implants.
Visual Novels
- Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations, has a cross-examination in which there are 10 statements, 9 of which will have Godot object and cause an automatic Game Over. Press the correct statement, and Godot will still object, and even say the same thing until Phoenix says something different. Some people saw the losing sequence once, and proceeded to reset after every time Godot objected and began to speak. Only looking at a guide would show that this is supposed to happen, and made Those people feel like fools who attempted to fool the game but ended up being foolishly fooled by that very game.
- The same thing happens with the last piece of evidence you're supposed to show Godot. Even though it should be fairly obvious what to present, trying to guess by presenting the evidence and seeing Godot's reaction will get nowhere, just as above. You have to go a few lines of dialog beyond to see the difference: You're supposed to be showing evidence of how Godot can hide the injury. No matter what you present, Godot shouts "You aren't half the lawyer she (Mia) was!". Bad ending, Phoenix stutters, case ends. Good ending (obtained by presenting Godot's profile, which has a picture of his face, including HIS MASK), Godot is momentarily surprised by a vision of young Mia standing next to Phoenix. "Wha... living on, though him?" Then, Phoenix and Mia's image both, at the exact same time, outstretch their first fingers and shout, "IT'S UNDER YOUR MASK!"
- The instance in the first game where you must press a certain statement without pressing anything else. If you press any other statement first, the press dialogue for that statement changes, and the game becomes wedged; the only recourse is to reset the game and start the segment over (it is mercifully the first testimony of the chapter). The game has, up until then, encouraged and sometimes required the player to press aggressively; this is the first time in the game, and indeed the only time in the series of four, that pressing is punished thus. Yes, later games do make you lose for pressing the wrong statement, but always with a quick guilty verdict, and always with ample forewarning.
- The second game had you cross examining the killer, De Killer in it's final case. The case being far from straight forward seeing as your client's guilty so getting a Not Guilty verdict is more difficult to obtain. So while you combat your way trough this already difficult chapter your Health Bar will dwindle unless you play perfectly. So at one point the Judge warns you if you press any wrong statements from the killer, or if you waste the court's time that you will be penalized. Doesn't help that when the Judge asks you after you've pressed a statement whether or not it was relevant, you're inclined to say "Yes" to hope and not get a penalty. Logic? You have to say no on that specific one, and then De Killer makes a passing remark about Adrian being a man and THEN you have to say it's relevant to the case... Fuck me.
- Just TRY beating Hotel Dusk: Room 215 without resorting to Game FAQS. No, scratch that. Try finishing one chapter. I triple dog dare you.
- Well, the first guy to write a FAQ of the game must have managed somehow.
- Eh, I found the whole game rather easy. The only times I failed were when I accidentaly revealed that I'd been in the office and during a dialogue sequence. Another code was harder, how was I to know that I should breathe into my microphone to fog up a window which someone had written the code on?
- This is made worse due to the fact that unlike similar games, which allow you to pick up all plot-relevant items the first time you encounter them, you can't pick up or manipulate a lot of items until later in the game, without any hint that their status has changed or that they're needed.
- Dating Sims are notorious for this. Older games often required you to be at a certain location at a certain time to even get potential love interests to appear (For example, to unlock Anze in True Love 95, you need to do the "SHOPPING" activity at night between Aug. 1 and Aug. 5) and once the time period passed, that person is Lost Forever. Newer games (like Heart De Roommate) use "dialog trees" to establish your path and connections. The problem is that the dialog often is often so absolutely generic, it offers no clue as to which love interest which answer will effect. (Often the effect is toward someone who isn't even in the scene). Often made worse when a good portion of the game's initial story doesn't branch at all, and everything seen up to a certain point leads to a false idea as to who is available to pursue. Ex: In Roommate, the first half of the entire game involves establishing your character's place at school and building up Tomoe's confidence. Without a walkthrough, one would easily come to the conclusion Tomoe is the "default" love interest and you're on her path. You're probably not (Azumi is the default).
- Roommate isn't the best example, largely because the only choice that really matters in the first half of the game is the one where you get bluntly asked "Which girl do you love?" Although you may not work out that choosing "Not sure" doesn't only give you a Non Standard Game Over but also unlocks the 2 bonus scenarios.
- In Gakuensai no Oujisama, one of the Prince Of Tennis dating sims, some of the guys are horribly hard to hook up with. Genichirou Sanada is actually so hard to date that he's been nicknamed "Bastardchirou Sanada" by some players. And about some guys who are supposed to be easier catches, like Choutarou Ohtori and Takeshi Momoshiro... well, talk to another male at the wrong place and time, get caught by either of them, and watch your love meter completely go POOF out of jealousy. Oi.
Other
- Enjoy it while you still can, though. This troper is a strict devotee of the Nintendo systems, and was very dismayed to find that the company has contracted out all of their "official" guides to Prima. Most gamers probably have known for years that they're usually better off trying to do it on their own than following a Prima Players' Guide. Thank God for GameFAQs.
- Speaking of strategy guides, Brady Games seems to make their guides half done, requiring you to actually go online for a different source of help, thus a double Guide Dang It! Examples include:
- Final Fantasy XII. The guide frequently had things like "For more information, see page ???" No, Several maps were missing from the book and the font size in another section was very small as well. The only reason anyone would probably want the collector's edition of the guide was for the freebies that came with it.
- Even more ridiculous was the instructions on how to get the Infinity Plus One Sword. This, the most infamous Guide Dang It in the entire game, requires you not to open four arbitrary chests. They hadn't yet figured out which four and simply tell you what they've narrowed it down ot.
- Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. The locations of oysters, horseshoes, and photo ops were completely mixed up and one of the cars listed was never present in the game. Some say that the strategy guide was based on a beta version of the game.
- Parasite Eve 2. While this guide was better overall compared to the other guides, some things explained in the guide were suddenly cut off.
- I'll do you one better; the guide for the PS 2 game Shadow of Rome left out the entire last part of the game. No, it's not in a sealed secrets section, it's just not there. The writers seemed to assume that the game ended after the last gladitorial match. It doesn't...there's still around 2-3 hours of gameplay left, containing some very tough bosses.
- Prima's Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards guide similarly ends directly after the battle with Miracle Matter - of course, they threw in an "Or Is It?" line along with a picture of the possessed fairy queen, suggesting that there was something more to the story. They actually showed you how to get all the crystal shards in the game, so it's not like they skipped one and got the bad ending or anything.
- The Brady Games guide for Dragon Quest VIII features incredibly sparse tips on navigating dungeons and absolutely no boss strategies. You can't even tell where there are bosses to fight unless you look at the monster section in the back, and that doesn't even list them all. It'd be spectacularly useless guide, were it not saved by its alchemy section and detailed maps (complete with item locations).
- Prima's guide for Super Smash Bros Brawl is pretty awful. The author was apparently unaware that ROB's Arm Rotor can deflect projectiles... and, worse, that Fox's Firefox (a move which dates back to the original SSB) can be aimed.
- Their guide for the original game was worse. Pretty much the entire Jigglypuff section was dedicated to just whining about how crappy the character was, in particular her "completely useless" down+B move, which the guide repeatedly urged to never, ever use. Apparently the author was completely unaware that said move can potentially be ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL ATTACKS IN THE GAME if it's pulled off correctly.
- Similar to the San Andreas guide, the guide for Vice City screwed up at least one package location, which claimed that it was in one of the movie studios when it wasn't. This guide is also rumored to be based on the beta.
- The Prima Games guide for The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina of Time included almost no information about how to beat several puzzles in Ganon's castle. Likewise, they apparently never got the Ice Arrows, because there's no walkthrough for the optional Gerudo Training Grounds dungeon.
- The Prima Guide for Jade Cocoon features a "Monster Compendium" which would make you think they'd have all the minions in there. Despite there only being 171 there are several repeats (including wind and air?? minions), they missed the two secret minions (Sherrick and Tweengo) and somehow missing Arpatron who is the FIRST MINION YOU GET AND ARE REQUIRED TO CATCH.
- Prima's spore guide shows that they never made it to the center of the galaxy or fought the grox.
- The forest mazes The NES version of Metal Gear, which the game gives no clues on how to navigate.
- The Winter section of the Woods in Mickey Mousecapade. The hidden door to the final section is in the tree right at the start, but won't open until you go all the way through and loop back to the start, so many players would think there is no door there at all and eventually admit defeat and consult the helpline after shooting every other tree to no avail.
- Undercoverfilmer00v covered this in his review before taking it down, mocking the logic behind it:
UC F00v: *gasp* There's that start sign! I guess I better shoot that same tree again that I know didn't do anything the first time. Maybe something has changed for no reason whatsoever. (shoots the tree in question to open the door) *gasp* Oh my God! It's a glitch in the matrix!
- In The Guardian Legend for the NES, the gates to several of the Corridors(the space-shooter areas) are Guide Dang Its to open. For example one says "wait forever", but you only have to wait a minute or so. Another message says a corridor is sealed permanently, to open it, you have to visit a certain Blue Lander three times in a row(god knows who could figure this out).
- This troper remembers one cooridor. The message was to "ask the round creature for help." This was, as stated above, the blue lander. You had to enter and exit its room several times in a row (through the same door and without going through any other rooms) before it would unlock the cooridor. But prior to the last time (when you get a message saying the door is open) there is no message given to suggest that what you're doing is right. This troper remembers wasting hours wandering, and all his ammo shooting at the lander, to the point he went to his mother and shouted "Help me, round creature!" ...she found it funny.
- For one corridor, the hint is to shoot continuously at the door. It won't work if you happened to be using a controller with "turbo" turned on.
- Rune Factory 2 has a few, the biggest one being what to do after getting every last stone tablet fragment in the second generation. The only hint as to what you're supposed to do comes from Barrett, who first tells you not to get any ideas to seal the dragon and then proceeds to make a small, seemingly insignificant remark about how there's no way to get under the town. Freebie hint: your barn doesn't expand above ground.
- The Flash Game PSAI is the most extreme example of Guide Dang It that this troper has ever even played. Its so complicated the creator actually put a link in the game to the walkthrough!
- The C64 had some painfully Guide Dang It titles; among them the BC series, Quest for Tires and Grog's Revenge. To this day I still don't understand "Use keys A and B in the first cave you See", just that it means a lot of dying.
- There's no trick. You die, it's game over, that's how the game ends.
- Bemani managed to avoid this for 14 PS 2 iterations of Beatmania IIDX. Then DJ TROOPERS came along with their Unknown Targets secretly hidden in the extra stage system. There is no way you would figure out that in order to unlock all of the Unknown Target songs (which, unless you knew exactly what was going on, seemed to appear randomly inside the Military Splash extra stage system) you'd need to fulfill any 5 of 6 criteria:
- Clear a song with a MAX COMBO of 573 (which itself is a reference lost to anyone outside Japan)
- Clear a song with an exact multiple of 1/9 of the song's maximum possible "EX SCORE" (with fractions rounded up on songs with a note count that isn't a multiple of 9), but not 1/9. This means there were 8 possible scores on each song to fulfill this requirement, and you had to hit one of them on the nose, with most songs having a maximum possible EX Score of well over 1,000.
- Clear a song with a Border Bonus (i.e. finish with exactly 80% on your gauge, without HARD or HAZARD turned on)
- Clear 40 songs
- Full Combo 10 songs
- Hit a total of at least 1,000 notes with a GREAT judgment or better in the Scratch column.
- And then there's one song that requires you to know to spell FOREVER using the first letters of songs' titles to unlock, and doing so dumps you into the song without even highlighting it. What? You're missing a letter? Back to the Unknown Target songs for you!
- Another song can only be unlocked by playing the 2-kyu course in Dan'inintei mode
- Thankfully, Konami posted the requirements on their official web site, 5 weeks after the game was released.
- This troper has seen a rather baroque puzzle built into a scenario in the tabletop RPG Call Of Cthulhu Sourcebook Secrets of Japan. Basically, the P Cs need to find a secret door in a maze. The only real hint of the door's location the player characters can get requires them to 1) be able to understand Japanese writing (not a big obstacle, seeing as how at least one of the P Cs or NP Cs within the party are expected to Japanese), 2) pick up one of the cultists' prayer books earlier (not as big a snag), 3) explore enough of the maze to map out its layout without hitting any traps or monsters (thankfully, there's only one or two of each in the entire maze) and 4) compare the map and the first letter of each line in the prayer book for some random reason, thus learning the right directions for getting to the secret door from the entrance. Mercifully, despite the game's reputation, the scenario outline nevertheless offers alternate ways for the P Cs to find the secret door, such as pure luck, the guidance of NPCs or successful Idea and Spot Hidden rolls.
- Possibly the one Fighting Game example: Guilty Gear XX and its Story Mode paths. Some of the requirements are impossible to figure out on your own. Several paths require that you win a specific fight by time-up, with no sign you should. Jam's Story Mode hinges entirely on how you win the first fight (time-up, standard, or Instant Kill). One of the most horrible is Baiken - unless you defeat Anji with more than 30% health remaining, you're locked into her third ending. Several of the endings require you see a different character's ending before you can even try at them. Nothing in the game hints at anything remotely like this.
- In Runescape, there is a speical item called the Blurite Sword. However, it is a quest item. The only way to get one to ask a dwarve to forge it for you. If you have one in your inventory, he will refuse. And once you complete the quest, you can never make one again.
- Brady's guide for FFVIII has no strategy for the final boss (other than a "good luck!" message), despite the fact that it has three forms, uses skills that do not immediately make themselves clear on what they do on first application, can destroy your spells, perma-kill your characters, and the final form has a secret spell that can be junctioned. Stop basing your walkthroughs off betas, goddamnit!
- Super Paper Mario. In 3-1 you have to jump in between two pipes, but your only wint is a sign where everything is backwards.
- Any game by cactus that involves puzzles or multiple endings. the Mondo series (which is approaching a third game) are large offenders, Mondo Medicals being the most egregious of the two released games.
- Another notable offender is Stench Mechanics, which can lock you out of two endings if you get the suit before inhaling the purple stench. That combined with some counter-intuitive moments ( turning on EVERY LIGHT despite captain's orders, for instance) makes for some headaches.
CRPG
- On the first level of Undermountain in the Hordes of the Underdark expansion for Neverwinter Nights, there's a secret door that can only be discovered when a specific non-hostile rat is within ten feet of the door. There's no indication of this in the game, save that the door will sometimes refuse to appear regardless of your character's Search skill rank. This is hardly game breaking, and you can open the module in the game's level editor to figure out what's going on, but it still makes very little sense.
- The Fallout series uses Dialogue Trees. What they don't tell you is how testy most NP Cs are, and saying anything to get them angry results in them ending the conversation and never allowing you to apologize and get whatever quests they hold.
- Fallout 2 featured an Easter Egg with the strategy guide phenomenon. After finishing the game's main quests, you could return to New Reno and get a Fallout 2 Strategy Guide from the old drunken priest. Upon using it, your character gains 10,000 xp, all your skills are set to 300% (this being the maximum in the game), and your display window reads "Well, it would have been nice to have this at the BEGINNING of the damn game!" You can use the item multiple times for more XP, though your skills can't improve further. Incidentally, this troper has found out through editing that if you have the item in your inventory at any point before the game ends, and attempt to save, the game will crash.
- Speaking of Fallout 2, would you like to help out the NCR? Go ahead and do Tandi's mission then. What's that? You didn't tell them to Keep The Reward they agreed give you? Well then, fuck you, we'll just be keeping this entire mission branch without any indication as to why.
- Most of Fallout 3. Best glasses in the game? Head to a store in the middle of nowhere, look for the only item in the shop that doesn't count as theft, and there you go. Some of the Bobbleheads involve going to the middle of nowhere and killing raiders for no real reason. The only 'good' solution to the Tenpenny Towers/Ghouls quest? Unless you read a guide, the first time going through it will involve a slaughter.
- A better example from Fallout 3: The "Tranquility Lane" quest. Either you do a Face Heel Turn, or buy the guide and find out about the obscure "good" path in which you call in Chinese soldiers which promptly slaughter everyone in the VR rig except for you and Dad. The only in-game hint? Bethesda's tendency to hide secrets in abandoned houses.
- Or you can just listen to the lady who tells you to check out the abandonded house.
- What, no mention of the fact that the only way to actually find the console in the abandoned house is to tap a number of random objects so they play a particular song that is being whistled by one character in the simulation? If that's not guide dang it, this troper doesn't know what is.
- This Troper actually did stumble on to that good ending entirely by accident. Being a good and upstanding fellow and not wanting to do anything more harmful that make a young boy cry I listened to the Old woman and went to check out the abandoned house. Since the game gives a very obvious Wrong noise when you click the wrong objects I figured out the sequence fairly easily. I was incredibly surprised when the console showed up as I had no idea it was going to do that.
- Personally the real Guide Dang It moment there was that that was the good option.
- The Gay Option in most RPGs is usually so well-hidden from Moral Guardians even the gamer might not figure it out. Take Jade Empire, for example... the only way to get Sky to date you is by being Open Palm and shutting down the romances with Silk Fox and/or Dawn Star. Because 'nice' conversation options get you higher good points, it's pretty close to impossible to figure out how to let the girls down gently while still being 'good' enough to catch the fella's interest.
- The Amiga/Atari classic Captive was a particularly heavy offender in this category. The game manual neglected to inform you on such frivolous little details as:
- If you want your droids to be able to learn (gain XPs), you need to put the "droid chip" into the "brain" slot in each droid's inventory.
- Your objective (to blow up the base by placing explosives into the generators; this was related in an in-game note, though.)
- Oh, and did we forget to tell you that in order to locate your next objective, you need to enter the correct password into a giant computer to get a Planet Probe that will reveal the next base on the star map? The password is on a clipboard carried by a scientist in white lab coat. No planet probe? Good luck trying to find the next base.
- You'll really want to get everything else in the base out of the way before blowing up the generators, as after that things get all explode-y in a hurry. You did write down the four-button combination for the outer door, didn't you? Oh, and the optics device that leads you back to the exit can be quite handy, especially later in the game.
- At the Space Station, however, you do not want to blow up the generators as that's where you are being held. Succeed in blowing up the station and you've managed to commit a needlessly elaborate suicide. Congratulations.
- You need to recharge your droids by putting your "finger" (the mouse pointer) into an electric outlet (gray square at the bottom of a wall with three black dots) and then sticking the electric charge onto the droid's chest. Especially annoying since touching anything other than a droid chest or a battery with the electrified finger causes said item to explode. Accidentally clicked an arm instead of a chest? Hope you have a recent savegame handy.
- Trying to use melee weapons from the rear rank makes you hit the front rank guys in the back.
- Dice can be used to "decode" the four-button code locks, except the ones on the outer doors of the bases.
- Want one of the best (so much that some consider it a Game Breaker) NPC companions in Arcanum Of Steamworks And Magick Obscura? Then you need to know exactly what to do when entering a certain city, where one of the citizens is kicking a wounded dog on the ground. That dog is your future companion if you manage to tell the citizen to stop kicking the pooch. The only problem is that the already wounded dog is kicked constantly and can really easily die before you even know anything happened if you don't run straight away to the scene of action as soon as you enter the area.
- Infinite Undiscovery for the Xbox 360 has several Guide Dang It moments, but the worst in this troper's opinion is the Castle Prevant area where four of your allied soldiers are being held in jail cells. One is executed every 4 minutes unless you acquire the cell keys and let them out. One key is dropped by an enemy, one found in a treasure chest, one you have to talk to a freaking rat (in near absolute darkness no less) and the final one has to be crafted. What makes an already frustrating task worse is that the game gives you no hint that the task is even there. No dialogue. No timer. Nobody even says anything if you fail.
- More than a few achievements from the game fall into this category. You may never guess that you need to have every single one of your characters avoid being hit by the tsunami at the Cerulean Chain battle in order to unlock the Tide of Battle Achievement
- Much like the "Rumplestiltskin if the alphabet is backwards" example near the start of this page, browser-based MMORPG Travians includes a spell of protection where you have to say the first letter in each word of the spell. The only clue to this is the word "SHORTLY" as in "Enter the house, and say SHORTLY: Great Mother! Protect this house!" etc. etc. As the letters don't even form any manner of word themselves, nobody could get that without looking at the Quest Guide.
- This troper suspects that the whole game may consist of one huge Guide Dang It before you can even start; he was being farmed within 90 minutes of his Beginner protection wearing off. (Which means either you need a Guide Dang It just to get started, or that the Meta Game is chronically broken.)
- This troper suspects you were playing Travian, not Travians. Although the point of the game is to join soon after a server starts, thus putting yourself in a good position of power.
- In Drakensang it's straightforward at least. A woman asks you if you know the password (44SC2K). If you do, she'll give you a magical item.
- This was actually the key to a promotional item, the key was sent to people who preordered (IIRC). "Nice" idea, but badly executed.
- The item itself was a reference to the old DSA games of the nineties. And the Gold Edition included it without the need for a code.
- In Wizardry VII, some of the puzzles are nigh-incomprehensible without the guide. Map pieces in the game give you clues on occasion, but even with all of them you will do lots of aimless wandering.
- One of the more versatile (and cool-looking) spells in Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos is only attainable in the abandoned city of Yvel about two-thirds of the way through the game. Most of the doors in this city are boarded up, but there is one boarded-up door that can be opened, and the scroll for the spell is waiting inside. By the way, all you have to do to open this door is click on it several times with the mouse cursor...but the door looks exactly like every single other boarded-up door in the city, and nowhere else in the game are you ever required to click on random background scenery for any reason.
- In fact, now that I think of it, the game is peppered with other instances of this trope. Example One: using the Green Skull is the best (and possibly only) way to kill the Lahrkon guarding the Urbish Mines, but you might not figure this out until you'd tried everything else. Example Two: the fact that the Emerald Blade is the best (and possibly only) weapon to use against Wraiths is only mentioned once, in an easily-missed book in the only library in the game, which is located on the very first map, which is inaccessible by the time you're fighting Wraiths, which are easily capable of wiping out your entire party in a single blow.
- Also, it's possible to miss both Green Skulls and both Emerald Blades.
- The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind has a side-quest wherein you are required to find multiple pieces of Sanguine equipment. The quest-giver only tells you about a few of them. The rest are on seemingly random NP Cs throughout Vvardenfel.
- The expansions make this quest utterly pointless by making the then-unique Fortify Skill reward spell into a common buyable spell from many NP Cs in the new areas.
- Mass Effect requires either a high enough intimidate or charm score in order to prevent one of your teammate's death. Alternatively, you had to do a side quest supplied by the same guy in order to build up trust between you and him. The decision itself comes upon you with no warning whatsoever, and unless you knew about the decision or the side quest in advance (neither of which receive much foreshadowing, if any at all), it is impossible to get him out of the situation alive.
- Considering how dialogue-focused the game is, it isn't all that surprising really. It is actually possible to talk him down even if you haven't done the quest, it just takes a little longer.
- No, it's not. There's no possible option that will allow for a pleasant outcome if you don't have high enough charm/intimidate or have done the quest. He draws his gun at you (even if you've done everything right and can settle it peacefully, he always does), and without the prerequisites your choices are shoot him first, or take no action (at which point another specific ally will shoot him instead). Either way, that teammate is gone for good.
JRPG
- This troper has been happily enjoying the recent DS release of Final Fantasy IV, which has, among other things, an "Augment" system wherein you can teach characters certain helpful abilities. These items are one-of-a-kind, and said character will know them permanently. It's only now, a good 5 hours into the game, that he's finding out that if you teach Augments to temporary party members, you are rewarded with more Augments. This little fact is nowhere to be found in the manual, or in-game. What fun.
- What makes this worse is how anyone who played the original game would naturally feel inclined to AVOID giving augments to any character who they knew was going to leave their party soon. Of course, doing this results in the player missing out on some of the most useful augments in the game.
- Final Fantasy IV The After Years provides the player with a way to avoid the Player Punch where Calca and Brina must be scrapped for parts, requiring them to get three items, left completely unmentioned by the game. One of the items is in an obvious treasure box the player is unlikely to miss. Fair enough. The other two, however? Random drops from a monster that only appears in one out-of-the-way room during one specific lunar cycle (which is the worst lunar cycle for a party with a black mage and no white mages, as the chapter in question is), and the drop rate is absolutely inexcusably low in this game. And you need two different items from this. Yet any player who knows about this will do it, because who could really allow Calca and Brina to die?
- In the recent Final Fantasy III remake for the Nintendo DS, the only way to unlock the Onion Knight class in the game is to use the game's letter sending system to send a certain number of letters to another player over wifi. Not only is this never mentioned in the game, Square seems not to have realized it might not even be possible for some people. Don't have easy access to a wifi hotspot? Don't have any friends who also have this game? TOO BAD.
- The Fairy Flute in the first Dragon Quest which is almost required to get past the Boss In Mook Clothing Golem guarding the town of Cantlin. A certain character says "4 steps south of the bath in Kol, you will find a magic item", god knows if anyone can figure out on your own that "bath" means the square of water in the middle of that town.
- Many a gamer had their journey come to an end shortly after getting the boat in Dragon Quest II. Finding almost a dozen plot-essential items scattered across a humongous world is almost impossible without some sort of help (on top of that, some of the most evil dungeon designs in video game history - namely, the Sea Cave, which requires you to walk through damaging lava in order to look for staircases that may or may not lead you to the item you're looking for, and the Road to Rhone, which has several pitfalls that send you to a lower level and repeating rooms that look exactly the same, some of which indistinguishably loop around). While the NP Cs generally do give useful advice, they don't point out everything. On top of that, the NPC that tells you where to find the Golden Key is locked inside a jail cell; to open his cell, you need the Jailer's Key, which you need the Golden Key to acquire!
- The skill "Chocobuckle" in Final Fantasy VII. To get Hundred Percent Completion of enemy skills, you needed to feed a wild Chocobo a particular green and then reduce it to 1 hit point. This was typically done using the Useless Useful Spell L4 Suicide. Needless to say there was no way to guess this in game, while the occasional player got it by pure chance and puzzled everyone else.
- To get the PuPu card in Final Fantasy VIII, the player has to fight random battles at several small, nondescript, arbitrary patches of the world map in order to see a UFO each time. They then have to go to another arbitrary, unexceptional, and inaccessible area of land in order to encounter PuPu. The player would have no reason whatsoever to visit or want to investigate this area on their own. Once they've done so they have to feed him five of a certain item. The only way to have five of this item is to have synthesized them ahead of time, by using another fairly obscure game mechanic. If the party misses the chance to feed PuPu five of the item, or they kill him, the card is Lost Forever.
- The locations of the UFO sightings are revealed in-game in (hidden) newsletters the player can find.
- And the PuPu card isn't even that good.
- Well...
- Receiving the most powerful weapon in Final Fantasy IX, the Excalibur 2, requires that one must complete the game within the very difficult time limit of 12 hours. Not only is this information not given to the player at any point in the game, but the location of the weapon is just as difficult to find. What's worse, once the time limit has been reached, the weapon is Lost Forever.
- If that wasn't frustrating enough, the guide doesn't tell you that performing said task under 12 hours is nigh impossible because the various cutscenes take too long. There is a technique that allows you to skip the cutscenes completely, but this is never discussed in the manual or the official strategy guide.
- Since the time things take is based on frame count, while the clock is based on real time, the NTSC version (US and Japan) runs 20% faster, and it's quite possible to reach the sword in time (the record for beating the game is eight and a half hours).
- Even though the PAL version is slower, it still is possible to get the Excalibur 2. This troper himself got it on his PAL Playstation (with ~34 minutes left to spare woot!)
- The biggest problem for PAL people? Americanitis. Pretty much all the guides and time checkpoints and instructional videos, including Atomos' famous Excalibur 2 Perfect Game Guide, are written by NTSC people for NTSC people. Their tiny section about PAL? "You can't do it, so don't. Or import an NTSC version. Or Gameshark the clock." No advice anywhere on what bits you can skip or chop out to save the two extra hours you need. This troper has yet to find anything resembling a sensible Excalibur 2 PAL Guide anywhere.
- The game, as a whole, had a double Guide Dang It, because the guide didn't give you all the info. No, you were supposed to shell out even more money to get a subscription to Play Online.
- The game also pulls a Guide Dang It on you in the inverted castle. All of your strongest weapons in that area do minimal damage while the weakest weapons do the most damage. There is a place in the castle that gives a hint, but it's rather confusing, going on about how "up is down, strong is weak, and heaven is earth." Fortunately, the weak weapons that can be found in chests are a useful hint.
- In Final Fantasy X, players can input one-word destination passwords in the Global Airship that lead to hidden locations each containing a treasure chest. While perhaps not technically a Guide Dang It, virtually all players learned of these passwords via a guide, as the method for discovering the passwords the normal way is so incredibly obscure that most players don't even know it exists (it involves deciphering deeply-hidden, nonsensical messages left throughout the game world).
- Finding the all 26 Al Bhed Primers without a guide is nigh impossible. About half of them is easy to find or get from NP Cs, but the other half is either lost forever in a location you can't go back to, blend into the scenery so well your only hope finding them is smashing the 'X' button while you walk or hidden in an optional location you can only find if you, again, keep hitting the 'X' on the airship map in hopes of finding something, without any in-game hint to it's existence.
- Fortunately, the Primers are compiled into a dictionary on the memory card separately from the game. This was done mainly so the player could load the previously deciphered parts into a new game and understand what the Al Bhed says, but also if you turn in all 26 books to a certain NPC, you get 99 of a rare customization item. So if you missed on of the Lost Forever Primers, you can get them in a new game, compile it to the rest, and it'll be available to you in your previous game when you load it back - no need to go through all the minigames and item hunting for the ultimate weapons and armors again.
- What? No mention of the ultimate weapons and the ridiculous hoops we had to jump through? The biggest example would probably be having to dodge 200 lightning bolts in a row. There is no in-game hint about how many you have to dodge, or even that there will be a reward; without a guide, many players would probably stop around 50-60 and assume the item they were given was the final prize. The Chocobo race also deserves a mention.
- This troper can't for the life of him understand how Square thought that the player would know to talk to a random dog on Besaid Island to get Valefor's second Overdrive.
- If this troper recalls right, the owner of said dog mentions that he's been finding weird stuff lately.
- You haven't mentioned Yunalesca yet? Back when the game was released, those of us who WEREN'T using Gamefaqs or strategy guides and were thus struggling to make heads or tails of the Sphere Grid kept dying on Yunalesca for numerous reasons. One, she uses an attack that casts The Zombie status on the party and then casts Regen, meaning that since Revive Kills Zombie, you will keep losing health with no way to recover. Now normally, you'd want to get rid of this, right? Well wrong. You have to keep at least one party member as a Zombie so that they won't be killed when her third form uses Megadeath on everyone. This troper doesn't know a single person who thought of this until they either heard it or realized on their fourth or so time through "Hey wait a second, Revive Kills Zombie, so I should keep someone alive!". This alone wouldn't be that much of a Guide Dang It moment if she didn't wait until her third bloody form before she started casting megadeath, or if, like I said, she only used Megadeath once. oh no, there's almost always the chance she'll use it periodically, meaning you can't recover HP for some of your party members or even all of them, and she will cast Curaga for 45000 HP to your party members. IT also does not help that Yunalesca is already That One Boss for a reason. She is quite hard enough without becoming Nintendo Hard by giving you the challenge of leaving your party members alive.
- The Sphere Grid. Just. The Sphere Grid.
- The Sphere Grid is relatively straightforward. Sure it's complex, but you don't need a guide to figure it out.
- To get Hundred Percent Completion in Final Fantasy X-2 one has to take a detour from chasing a villain in order to talk to someone hidden in a Moogle costume, early in the game. The game is riddled with one-time, easily missable scenes like this, and despite the fact you get fully healed from touching a save point, you have to use the bed in the airship at least once a chapter.
- That isn't even the worst part. The game allows you to skip cutscenes, but what it doesn't tell you is that skipped cutscenes doesn't count towards the Hundred Percent Completion.
- There's one bit even worse than that. At one point you can have a long sit down for a Maechen Period from the original Maechen himself. Periodically, you'll get a text box where you can either interrupt him to leave, or urge him to continue his story. But what you're supposed to do for this to count toward completion is NEITHER, and let him just keep rambling without you pressing a single button on your controller. If Maechen wasn't voiced by Dwight Schultz, this would be nearly as tedius and unbearable as the legendary hot-springs webcam sequence.
- And let's not forget that to get the best ending, you need to have Yuna run around the field of the Farplane, hitting the X button, until you randomly hit the right spot and hear a little happy "Ding!" Without any hint or idea that this would be required. But doesn't everyone run around every single bit of game setting, hitting 'X' like a madman in hopes of actually finding something? (Xenogears, below, certainly seems to think so.)
- Actually, if you're talking about the first time (since there are actually two times in the game that you need to do this in order to achieve the Perfect Ending) you don't have to run around. All you have to do is wait until Yuna says "I'm all alone..." then press X to hear a whistle. Then after that, you just keep pressing X until she runs out of the Farplane. The second part is much worse, as you need to press X at a specific point during what is essentially the last cutscene of the game, in order to get the Perfect Ending.
- Even more frustrating is the fact that, even with the guide, some one-time things are easily missed, due to the fact that some things must be done in every chapter, but the guide doesn't mention it until the last chapter (i.e. "If you've been talking to so-and-so in every chapter, now they'll give you this!").
- And how, when at that point of the game, the Youth League and New Yevon are portrayed as being both basically good except for their conflict with each other, If you choose to help New Yevon and not the Youth League (instead of vice versa), you can't get 100% completion on that playthrough.
- Collecting all the Crimson Spheres requires a few of these. The first two, in the Ravine, aren't that hard, but there's one in Chapter 3 where, upon receiving a distress call from one place, you must instead go to somewhere completely different - which you may have been unable to get into previously because of the choice in the above example. Of course, this doesn't get mentioned in the game.
- Final Fantasy XI is probably the king of this trope in MMORPGs, if only for the fact that noone knew how to make Goblin Drinks, which pop a Notorious Monster for a very useful Paladin and Dark Knight gorget, until the developers told them about it, and there's an endgame NM that no one knows how to beat even though Square Enix has started dropping hints about it. Add quests where you are not really told what exactly you are doing and can't find out from NP Cs, and the fact that the in-game reminder text for quests is vague and doesn't update with gathered information — even if you don't know the point of the quest until step three or so — and you can see it gets kinda stupid. Thank god for around 500,000 people playing, or we'd probably never figure a lot of stuff out.
- Let's not even get into the stuff that would be way too obtuse to find if the game files weren't so heavily picked apart for information...
- In Final Fantasy XII, obtaining a certain ultimate weapon requires not opening four specific unmarked chests which are not mentioned anywhere in the game. This would be a prime example.
- Granted, if you got greedy and opened the "unlucky" chests, there is another chest that can cough it up, roughly .1% of the time (that is to say, 1/1000 chance)... but the said existence of that chest is in and of itself an example of Guide Dang It.
- There is also the case of the Bazaar system, by which selling loot is the only way to unlock some of the high end items. The loot items needed for these are not only very difficult to acquire, but are also used to unlock other, more easily unlocked, items. And once an item of loot has unlocked one item for sale, it must be acquired all over again and sold once more.
- Don't forget that if you want to get all eighty rare game, you have to either be the luckiest gamer in the world or have a guide by your side. Many of these monsters just have a high-percentage random chance to show up, but many more have an inexplicable list of criteria that need to be filled before they might rear their ugly heads. Some appear for only a ten-minute window once an hour. Some require you to chain-kill a certain number of a certain kind of monster. Some have time limits on top of this criteria. Some require you not to kill any monsters at all. Some appear in tiny, tiny areas, again, randomly. Some have chances of appearance at just 5%. Some only appear if you sit around doing nothing for five minutes or more. Sure, the average gamer stumbles across at least a few of them by accident across the game, but all eighty? Forget it.
- The game also riddles players with the Limit Break of the Espers. While a good portion of the creatures will use their last attack when time is about to expire, low on HP, or the summoner has low HP. However, some of the other Espers will never use their final attack unless certain conditions are met, such as casting Immobilize on the Esper, having the summoner AND the Esper with low HP, or casting Petrify on the Esper! There is NOTHING in the game that hints at these conditions.
- Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles is no exception, either. If you chose blacksmith as your family's job background, you won't be able to get some of the best weapons or items in the game unless you actually create more players with different family jobs. While you don't have to switch players, you're clueless until you look online for help. Also, when it comes to the Final Boss in his final form, the spheres of your family members, which are memories, are actually ultimate magicite displayed as ????, allowing you to cast Blizzaga, Thundaga, Firaga, Curaga, and Invincibility (they are randomized) without any charge time. However, to change the spheres into those spells before Raem eats them, you have to cast Cure on them and there's nothing in the game that hints you this. While it can be possible to beat him without those items, it can be harder and having most of your memories eaten results in a Game Over.
- In Legend of Mana, obtaining the best weapon that can be obtained without crafting (which ITSELF is a Guide Dang It) requires you to have a save file of Sa Ga Frontier 2 (another Square game), go to a save point, highlight the save file in the list, and then go to a particular location (whose purpose at this point is solely to get some fairly crappy pets) and fight a fairly difficult boss fight. The "highlight a save file from another game" mechanic? Never referenced anywhere, despite the fact that it is also used to obtain a particular pet early in the game, using a Final Fantasy VIII save file.
- An infamous example occurs in Star Ocean 2, where one can affect the Relationship Values of characters via battling or items in order to get a number of variations on the generic ending — the box art famously advertises multiple endings. However, these values are never shown or alluded to in the game and are not known to the player until the end of the long game.
- Though there is an in-game way to guess at Relationship Values using the Art skill, characters will tend to paint pictures of the character they have the highest Romance or Friendship Value with. Of course no-one tells you that....
- Star Ocean 3 was full of this. The best example was perhaps the list of 300 "Battle Trophies" that the player must acquire by completing certain tasks in battle. If some of them are instinctive and/or will be earned sooner or later anyway (doing a certain number of battles, for example), others will require you to beat the final boss with a party of level 1 characters, or to stay in battle for 2 whole hours.
- Another one worth mentioning: the best available weapons in the game (without using the nonsensical crafting system, in itself another Guide Dang It, or going to the bonus dungeon that only unlocks after beating the game once)is to go into a house you never need to enter otherwise, and give two people directions to the previous town. This happens very early on in the game, and once missed is Lost Forever. Then, you have to do it twice more, and if you give them the wrong directions, guess what? No weapons for you.
- While we're on the topic of Star Ocean, some of the character recruitment methods are obscure to this point. The original and its PSP remake were the worst about this — for two particularly egregious examples, to get Pericci/Perisie, after getting a decent way into the game, you have to return to the first town in the past, for no obvious reason, while getting Erys requires you to recruit a very specific set of characters... including one that has no visible connection to her.
- In fact, acquiring certain characters to be added to your party itself really affects the outcome of character recruitment throughout the game. Keeping Ashlay means a few certain characters will not join because some events won't occur and keeping Ioshua guarantees the recruitment of Mavelle. So obviously, you don't know that getting some characters bars recruitment to the others. Guide, Dang it!
- Another character called T'Nique was and is still a secret character in Star Ocean, but compared to unlocking most "secret characters" in some games, this is actually rather easy...if you have a guide that is. You have to manipulate which events will happen so that you will have six characters or less by the time you are on a quest for the emblems. Then you have to return to the town with the arena for no obvious reason and then fight in there until you are challenged by T'Nique.
- And if you wanted the remake-exclusive character, Welch, then you had to be quite a ways into the game and have seven or less characters, so you really had to practically be trying FROM THE START with a guide (dang it!) if you wanted to recruit Welch in the remake.
- To acquire one advanced attack in Chrono Trigger the player has to obtain one character's ultimate weapon (which is, fortunately, not really Guide Dang It material in and of itself), re-enter a dungeon from far earlier in the game, put that character in the lead position of the party, go to a particular room within the dungeon, then let an enemy hit the party (i.e., the first member) with a thrown rock. That character will then examine the rock and declare it is actually a magical stone. Nothing hints toward this in-game, and no other items are gained in a similar manner.
- The "Slide Show"/"Memory Lane" ending (original/DS names) has a very specific time in which you can see it. You must defeat Lavos after seeing Schala open the door to the queen's chambers in Zeal, but before walking through that door yourself. If you wait too long, you get the normal ending after defeating Lavos. This is especially offputting since the ending usually only changes after the game's milestone events. To put it in perspective, the ending last changed after the destruction of Tyranno Lair and changes again only after Crono dies.
- A room in Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete required you to enter 4 doors in the correct order. The game itself gave no indication of progress until the final door is entered, making it hard to know what the puzzle actually is. There was a nearby sign meant to explain the puzzle; unfortunately, that sign was replaced with one that provided no insight to the puzzle at all.
- The puzzle was so obtuse, Working Designs ended up just posting the solution to it on the top page of their website for several months.
- The good ending of Valkyrie Profile requires one to view a certain order of cutscenes at time specific periods in the storyline, in addition to making certain decisions and actually getting rid of a plot-important character before a certain chapter of the game. This involves actually acting counter to your ostensible objective. There's almost no indication in the game itself that this is possible.
- This still is in effect somewhat in Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume. While the ending is based solely off of how many times you used the plume, not everyone would think to not use it period if they wanted to get the "A" ending...and it's really not advisable to try to get the "A" ending on your first playthrough. You could wind up with an Unwinnable boss battle.
- Also, the game branches into three paths very early on. One is relatively easy, the other is average and one leads to a difficult Escort Mission where you have to save a character with low defense. Unless you looked up Gamefaqs, you will not know that picking the village will lead you to the hard version of chapter 2, and that you will miss the Creepy Twins by not going to the keep. On the plus side, how will you know when it's a good time to get maximum sin?
- In the Suikoden series of video games, the only way to get the best ending is to collect all members of the hero's army (108 fighters and support characters.) Some characters are only recruitable during or after certain plot events, and others can only be recruited when the hero performs certain tasks in a certain order. Some characters will outright reject the hero if you happen to say the wrong thing to them, (or, in at least one case, if you press the "advance text" button while they're talking to you.) If that wasn't bad enough, some characters can be killed during major battles, if you're not careful with them. You can't revive any characters who have fallen in major battles, so once they're gone, they're gone forever. As such, getting the best ending the first time out is all but impossible with these games unless you have a walkthrough handy.
- Unlocking the ???? skill for a level 3 Fusion Soul in Shadow Hearts is a particularly egregious Guide Dang It, as although there is a clue in-game, it's at best so vague as to be useless, and at worst misleading. Compounding matters, what is actually required to unlock it - letting Yuri berserk - is something you want to try your hardest to avoid in all other circumstances, making it unlikely that the player would discover it on their own.
- However, there's an even worse one earlier, combined with a Lost Forever. At one point, there's a series of conversation choices. To unlock a sidequest and bonus dungeon, you need to pick the first option three times in a row—however, there's no indication that which one you pick actually matters at the time... or, indeed, at any other point in the game.
- Worse still is getting the good ending, which requires you to defeat four optional boss enemies before you reach a certain point in the story. The problem here being that if you want them to start appearing you have to let your Malice Gauge hit red, something you're generally trying to avoid. To make matters worse, the only indication the game gives you that you actually need to do this is an incredibly vague hint in one of item descriptions about what order the enemies should be beaten in. As if that wasn't enough, these bosses produce status effects that make them much more difficult to defeat except in one specific order and appear as random encounters, forcing you to do a lot of running away should the one of them arrive out of order. To add insult to injury, the game gives no indication whatsoever that this all must be done before a certain event is reached nor that defeating the enemies beforehand will affect the event.
- on the subject of the conversation, in its sequels Covenant and From the New world, you are placed in a conversational scene (Be it torture or interrogation) where your character is either shocked or stabbed with knives. Now obviously, do you want to pick all the "wrong" options that result in getting your character stabbed in From the New world or shocked in Covenant? You sick bastard. ...oh wait a sec you did it because it gives you a more powerful weapon for torturing the character afterward? Guide, Dang it!
- In the Pokémon video games, there exist hidden stats called Individual Values (the statistical variations between Pokémon of the same type; basically, the higher Individual Values the better), and Effort Values (a hidden mechanism that makes it so your stats are directly affected by which Pokémon you battle). The existence of these stats is only vaguely alluded to in-game, and fully understanding the process and its various formulas by oneself without hacking and digging deep into the game files is likely an impossible task. Knowing these stats and understanding them is essential for breeding Pokémon for competitive battling. In fact, this is specifically an Internet Guide Dang It, as even Nintendo's official guides include no information on IVs or EVs. Nintendo seems intent on disavowing their existence and making the games' level-up systems seem more like a standard RPG. It's worth noting that being aware of the EV and IV systems isn't required to beat the core game and even achieve Hundred Percent Completion, but considering that the game constantly alludes to and references the hidden stat systems, it would appear that Nintendo expected some players to know about them at some point.
- You may have heard of 'Shiny' Pokémon: an extremely low chance that you may encounter, for example, a perfectly ordinary Psyduck that just happens to be blue instead of yellow. Other than the colour change there is no difference save for bragging rights, and they exist solely because they wanted to show off the pallete of the Game Boy Color.
- But even WORSE than Shiny Pokémon is...the Pokérus. Short for 'Pokémon Virus', as the chances of ever seeing it are three times worse than seeing a Shiny, many think it is a myth; but no. It is a status condition caught off wild Pokémon and you will either see it if you look at your party of when you go to a Pokémon centre. Then you had better pray you caught it in the 48 hours it takes to wear off - for the Pokérus has the wonderful ability to up all the EV's of the affected Pokémon, and it has a contagious period where you can spread it to your party and to all other Pokémon you desire. People who manage to catch it spread it to as many as possible then give spares to their friends for better parties all round. However so little is said and so few guides written and obvious that you can so damn easily miss this great chance - especially if it is early in the game!! This troper found it on her Staraptor late on Boxing Day, and she had last played on Xmas Eve...Oh well, at least my Staraptor's going to be nigh-on invincible now.
- This troper remembers first catching Pokérus in her copy of Gold without knowing what it was, and worrying that the game may be glitching. As it was very late at night, she wasn't sure if she was just imagining it, and turned the game off for the night to be safe. A few days later, she finally looked up what it was, and discovered that she'd lost the chance to spread it to her other Pokémon.
- To make things all the worse, there are Pokémon that cannot be collected without a Gameboy Advance game, Pokémon which cannot be collected without actually wandering through a dungeon of sorts, and Pokémon which are specific to a given game, which lends the entire series a flavor of unfairness. Of course, that's been a long running idea in the series, so...
- Also, the majority of these gimmicks are at least introduced in the Pokémon anime, and end up being quite well known to those who actually watch the show. Might be more of a cross-advertising complaint than a true Guide Dang It.
- Something that is required for Hundred Percent Completion, however, is Shedinja (In Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald as well as the National Dex in every game past Ruby/Sapphire). Shedinja cannot be found in the wild and despite appearing in the Pokédex after Nincada and Ninjask and obviously being from the same evolution line, doesn't evolve from anything. To get it, the player must raise a Nincada to level 20 and let it evolve with at least one empty slot in their party and at least one Pokéball of any variety with them. Having the Pokéball is one thing, but most players go around with a full party for the entire game as soon as they are able to do so. Shedinja is also never mentioned in any of the games or used by anyone outside of the Battle Tower (where opponents are randomly-generated).
- In Diamond, Shedinja would only appear if this troper had a Pokéball. As in a "Pokéball half-red-half-white that by this time had long been ignored as crap". So she had to go and buy one specially for the little dead piece...
- Getting a Milotic is probably more frustrating. First, you need to get yourself a Feebas, catching it isn't so difficult, finding it though is another matter entirely. They are usually in a single area, such as a lake or river, but get this, the blasted fish are only found on a few tiles of that area: six in Ruby and Sapphire (on a route that has a huge river) and four in Diamond and Pearl (in a big underground lake that's difficult to get to). Did I mention that the tiles are randomly generated? In the advanced games, this is determined by "trendy sayings" in a far off town while in DP, it changes each day. Once you got your ugly fish, you need to evolve it, with Pokéblocks/Poffins, specifically blue ones that raise beauty. So you need to know how to make top quality Pokéblocks/Poffins and your Feebas needs to be the right nature (a stat modifier that's determined upon encounter) to get the maximum effects. However, getting a Milotic is all worth it since it's one of the best tanks in the metagame.
- Do you know 32 different people with the game or the patience to sit down with a friend and have him stand outside your secret base while you go in and out talking to him each time? No? Then no Spiritomb for you!!
- Do you know 1 person with the game patient enough your you to enter, talk to them and exit the area 32 times?
- And to be honest, Pokémon evolutions in general have become guide dang it during the more recent generations and especially in the fourth one, with what things like happiness (based on a stat you can only get a basic idea of using a certain Pokétch app), certain stat values, time of day, gender or even location affecting pokémon evolutions these days.
- And moves known. To get Mamoswine, you have to level up Piloswine while it knows Ancientpower, a move it will have already forgotten by the time you get it. The only way to evolve it is to raise a new one from an egg or go to the man who returns forgotten moves to your Pokémon. I don't know how the developers expected anyone to work that out themselves.
- The gender-based evolutions border on cruel when you look at Combee, a relatively rare Pokemon that is male almost nine-tenths of the time. It has terrible moves, poor stats, and cannot evolve... unless it's female. Did this troper mention that to try to find one, you need to activate an in-game event and then wait twelve real-world hours? Luckily, you can SaveScum, since while the specific Pokémon found on the Honey Tree will remain the same, the details (stats and gender) won't.
- Eevee has seven different evolutions. Three require an Elemental Stone, which is easy (using a stone on an incompatible Pokémon won't waste it, so the player can just try all the stones). Two require you to pamper Eevee and level it up either during the day or at night (made borderline cruel in the third generation, where Eevee was only obtainable in the games lacking a day/night system). The last two evolutions require Eevee to level up in a specific area, designated only by a stone.
- Magneton and Nosepass only evolve if leveled up in Mt. Coronet, which apparently exudes a magnetic field that affects the two magnet-based Pokémon. Tragically, nowhere in the game is it mentioned that Mt. Coronet is magnetic!
- (In the Japanese version, I understand it's called "Tengam Mountain" - i.e., Magnet backwards. There's no excuse for some of the others, though.)
- Sadly it's Tengen, or heaven/sky. Which means there's no logic even in the original!
- Baby Pokémon might count as this: you can only find some Pokémon by breeding their parents. This then requires a female evolution of the baby. Which Pokémon are only obtainable therein isn't really explained.
- Not to mention the eggs for some babies will only be generated if the mother is holding a certain incense. Which Pokémon must hold which incense is lightly alluded to in its description.
- Using a Ditto will also work for breeding when you only have a male, but if you're trying to get certain egg moves (another aspect that isn't exactly mentioned in the games) you need the father to know the moves you want inherited, while the mother is the Pokémon you want it to be born as. Then there's also Volt Tackle, which can only be learned as an egg move if bred with a female Pikachu or Raichu carrying a Light Ball.
- Certain Pokémon only evolve if traded while holding a certain item, or if leveled up holding a certain item. These items aren't labeled as influencing evolution, and many of them have a beneficial effect, so one might never realize they have a second use.
- Tyrogue will evolve into one of three Pokémon based on whether its Attack and Defense are higher than each other or equal. Strangely, all three evolutions have similar stats and are all offensively-based. Wurmple evolves into one of two Pokémon based on a stat that's never eluded to in the game called personality values. While its evolutions can be caught in the wild, they won't know any offensive moves and will never learn any until their final evolution.
- Mamoswine. See, evolving Swinub into Piloswine is a simple level-based evolution. To evolve Piloswine, it must be leveled up while knowing a certain move. Tragically, it never learns the move, and you can't teach it the move unless you go to the Move Relearner and decide to teach it this move, which neither Piloswine or Mamoswine can make much use of. There are other Pokémon that need to learn a certain move to evolve, but those moves are learned naturally and tend to be good enough that most Trainers would let the Pokémon learn them. Of course, if you don't let the Pokémon learn those moves, they'll never evolve.
- For this troper, playing the game at the age of eleven, the puzzles in RBY's Victory Road were ridiculously hard. They involved using a move called Strength to push rocks onto force plates so they would turn off force fields blocking your way. This involved pushing the rocks in very convulted paths. If you messed up, you had to exit the level and reset the puzzle. This troper finally broke down and bought the guide, which showed you the exact paths to push the rocks. Those puzzles are still remembered with horror, and they were removed or simplified a lot in all future versions.
- Getting to Lt.Surge in his gym is a bit of a pain if you don't know what you're doing. You need to turn off a force field by pressing two switches in waste baskets. It's randomly generated which basket has the first switch. Once you find it, you have to find the second one immediately, otherwise the first switch resets on you. This can leave some kids a bit stumped.
- World Of Warcraft has a fairly famous example of this: the player is handed the task of defeating a monster located in Zul'Farrak, one of the game's many instanced areas. Unfortunately, after slaughtering your way through numerous enemies to get there, you find... Nothing. The solution is, naturally, to travel to the other side of the world and partake in a mini-Fetch Quest for an item used to summon the monster. The quest giver tells you you need an item to summon the monster, and clues to the item's location are dropped by enemies in the instance, but these are easily overlooked. (Damn you, Ghaz'rilla!)
- Mankrik's Wife. That says it all. On the Alliance side, the quest "Fiora Longears" was easy: travel to Theramore, talk to the eponymous NPC... until she was arbitrarily moved to Auberdine and the developers forgot to update the quest description, leaving the players clueless for months until it was finally fixed.
- Quest descriptions at times leave the player at a loss. E.g., how you pick up this one quest in Ashenvale quite a ways west of center, and it says to go to this place with demons and satyrs "just a little northeast of here" (IIRC). By which it means, the whole other side of the map and slightly north; the only way this troper found it was that she had been wandering around the place at random the day before and happened to recall the specific name of the region she was being told to locate.
- The Horde's Call of Fire quest deserves a special mention in this case. Midway through the quest, you are required to fetch two items. One of these is a reagent pouch, which the quest-giver says you can find on Burning Blade cultists in a cave northeast of Razor Hill. Gee, that sounds like that cave you went to during that Skull Rock quest, right?...Er, not quite. Turns out that he was talking about a different cave — but you probably won't figure that out until you've spent two hours wondering why none of these damn cultists in Skull Rock are dropping that pouch you need.
- It could be argued that the very gameplay itself is an example of this trope, at least in endgame. Yes, you can solo your way to level 80 without checking out any external sites etc., but don't expect that to fly once you're doing instances or raiding. For example, tanks MUST have 540 defense in order to prevent critical strikes from raid bosses; at NO point does the game inform you of this, and only by checking out Wo W Wiki or various forums will you discover this sort of information. Unusually for this trope, the players embrace it and EXPECT you to have done the extra-curricular research; failing to consult the proper guides will get you ridiculed and called a noob.
- Further mechanics subtleties are the fact that when attacking from behind they can dodge, but not parry. And also that parrying attacks increases the speed of the next attack, which has led to a lot of dps attacking bosses from the front, thus causing the tank to take considerably more damage.
- All of Blizzard's releases this millennium can be extremely frustrating without a guide, hence the reason they've started giving them out with the Battle Chest releases of Warcraft III and Starcraft. This Troper personally considers the use of either a guide or a cheat code to get past the "Into the Darkness" Protoss mission in Starcraft entirely justified, because of the Infested Terrans appearing out of nowhere and killing half your troops as you walk along the corridors.
- Tales Of Symphonia was quite sneaky with this. Throughout the game, the player is given choices between two lines for the main character, Lloyd, to say in dialogue during cutscenes. Most assumed, as I did, that the choices were just for fun and to enjoy the amusing reactions. But what the game does not even hint at, EVEN ONCE, is that every choice you make in dialogue raises or lowers your Relationship Values with the other eight party members, affecting the ending of the game. Without knowing this, nearly everyone would get Lloyd's ending with his default love interest, Colette. When really, if you made the right choices, you could have Lloyd end up any of the characters. (Even the guys. Yaoi fans are people too.)
- WHAT?! You can end up with someone OTHER than Colette?! Goddammit!
- Not to mention that if you like a specific character, say, Zelos, but you don't like him enough in the game... he'll die. Yup. You just killed Zelos of neglect. I always found it a lose-lose situation anyways. If you wanted Kratos to join your party later, Zelos would have to die, and many times, you'd have to manipulate it to be so. Buuuut, if you wanted Zelos, there would be no Kratos.
- The game does have a certain place where one can determine the current relationship values of all the characters. With some experimentation, it is probably possible to figure out for yourself how the changes happen- and since New Game Plus is required for Hundred Percent Completion of the game, after several playthroughs you will probably be able to figure out how to get the character you want to like you.
- Basically, make them happy, and pick them whatever chance you get. Certain areas in the game will also let you know who is in the lead. For example, one stage where Lloyd has to go through a hole in a dungeon will separate that sequence with a short scene with whoever likes him most whenever you do it.
- To make it easier, you can choose between the top 4 party members with the highest affection at the Point Of No Return, after which you'll be locked into their ending path. I'm betting most people found out about the game's Relationship Values only after they declined Colette's invitation.
- Also in the game is the Wind Temple's goddamn pinwheel puzzle. The only way to know how to do it without a guide is to blindly activate the pinwheels in complete random order until you found one that worked, OR you could go around the dungeons figuring out how a bunch of tablets about the history of the temple vaguely revealed the solution to the puzzle, while making sure that the temple was properly well-lit so that you could read one specific tablet at a time.
- The Hi-Ougis. These super-attacks have no hint that you are even able to use them, let alone how to.
- That entire GAME is a living Guide Dang It. Have fun getting stuck when the solution to your puzzle is at the other end of the world and not the slightest bit intuitive.
- The sequel is even worse, if for no other reason than the official guide sucks.
- Furthermore, both the first game and the sequel are packed with sidequests that are Lost Forever past certain events.
- Terranigma's final boss hits you with an unavoidable beam that cuts your life in half twice every second for about 8 seconds. If you block, however, it will only cause ten damage or so every few seconds. Problem: You haven't had to use Block the entire game. In fact, you haven't used block since the first level... of the game that came before it!
- Skies Of Arcadia sometimes gave you options of what dialogue to use during conversations. Choosing the right option would be heralded by a cheerful sound and would advance your "pirate title" a little bit. Unfortunately, it is often very difficult to divine which response is the correct one and which the incorrect, and most conversations are one-shot only.
- The correct options are usually courageous, loyal, and all around hero-like, and you get a little tune when you get it right, so you know to reload if you don't.
- More ambiguous is the fact that running from battles lowers your 'pirate title'. This is only alluded too in that it's one of the stats that a hermit tells you. This hermit can only be reached after you've made it about 2/3rds of the way into the game. Did we mention that you have to have the highest rating possible to get to the game's best weapons and secret boss?
- Many of the Discoveries peppered throughout the game also qualify, as many are hidden in out of the way portions of the map. Some even move around, or require you to have completed certain sidequests.
- Xenogears had a few of these, with hidden items in odd places that you'd essentially have to be climbing over every bit of game scenery hitting the "examine" button repeatedly to find, with little to no clue that you should actually be looking for these things.
- Trader's Card. This item greatly increases the chance of rare items being dropped. The only way to get it is to beat a certain boss before he can self-destruct, and the only way to do THAT is to know the fight is coming and get all your characters' up to maximum Limit Break level. Even then, defeating the boss is a feat in and of itself.
- Learning the Deathblows for the characters might count for a bit of this. It's not clued at much at all early int he game, so you'll likely only learn one or two randomly. Once you figure out the pattern, you might think just doing the combos will learn them...but it's more complex than that. The game actually counts the animations for each move of the combos you perform, and each deathblow requires each animation to be used a certain number of times. And the animations could be in different orders depending on how you input your combos, and some moves didn't require the same animations that led up to them...suffice to say: Guide Dang It!
- Xenosaga Episode I also did, with the e-mails. These were random e-mails - sometimes plot-relevant, sometimes just fluff, and sometimes shameless plugs for other Namco games - that could be collected, usually by being at exactly the right spot at exactly the right time. Often, there was no reason the player would ever suspect they should be in that spot, like, say, running between two aisles of chairs in the dock clinic after hearing the Commander Cherenkov was being attacked in an alley but before actually running the fifty feet to go to his aid. Of course, to add to it, many of the e-mails were chained, and if you missed one, you could never get the later ones. Miss the wrong ones, and you miss several items and a ton of money.
- At the beginning of Kingdom Hearts, the character is asked a few questions by some of his friends during a dream sequence. The game doesn't tell you that your answers to these questions affect the rate at which you level up during the game. Pick the bottom answers to each question? Congratulations, you now level up slowly. Fortunately, it actually makes the game easier in the long run, because after around level 40 you start levelling up faster.
- After finding all of the 99 Dalmatian puppies and then visiting their house in Traverse Town, you will receive a complete gummi set, which is great if you've opened all the treasure chests in the game. However, if you haven't, you're screwed because Cid will only buy the common gummis and not the rarer ones like Holy-G and Ultima-G. And once you're gifted with the Dalmatians' gummis, you can never run out of them. Ever. For 100% completionists, this can totally wreck your game.
- What about a certain Trinity mark in Halloween Town that is Lost Forever unless you read up on it before hand?
- Zero Gear in 358/2 Days. Put it on and Roxas' Kingdom Chain becomes Kingdom Chain +. Fair enough, this is implied in the part description. What isn't is that piling Ability Units onto the weapon, rather than merely unlock new abilities like with every other weapon change tile, actually changes the weapon itself, first to Oathkeeper, then to Chance Two. This isn't a problem quite yet - Ability Units are generally the best use of Gear space, so you'll discover the new weapons quickly enough. No, the Guide Dang It is the third Ability Unit, which simply turns the weapon back into a perfectly normal Kingdom Chain +... unless you're Roxas in Mission Mode, and only in Mission Mode, when that Kingdom Chain + suddenly becomes Dual Wielding Oathkeeper and Oblivion.
- In Star Tropics on the NES, the game comes with an in-character letter addressed to the player. It contains a code (which doesn't appear anywhere in the game itself) that becomes visible when you submerge it in water. You will be required to enter this. Of course, the problem is that a majority of the people that played this game either lost the letter or didn't get it with the game. The Wii Virtual Console release of the game included the letter as part of the instruction screens, making the game always beatable at the expense of making it quite obvious that the letter is part of a puzzle.
- There was also an obtuse dungeon early on in a graveyard. You would enter a dungeon by examining one of the gravestones, then go through a couple screens to find an exit. This would lead you back into the graveyard, where nothing has changed. You were supposed to find a very well hidden secret passageway (ignoring several more false exits along the way) before those stairs to continue that dungeon.
- In Persona 3, fulfilling Elizabeth's requests for certain Personae with certain moves is nigh-on impossible for some of the later ones unless you either have a guide or are willing to spend hours experimenting.
- Also, most, if not all, personae have "inheritance types". Physical personae cannot learn magic, death/darkness personae cannot learn healing spells, Status Buff, or Light-based skills such as Hama, and so on. Igor only vaguely mentions this in the help menu, so you might blow hours and hours only to realize that your persona only likes bad status spells. Would it have been really hard to display the persona's inheritance type in its status menu? Guide Dang It. While some are easy to figure out (persona that start with mostly ice magic are usually ice inheritance type), some are just bizarre (there is at least one persona that starts with healing, ice, and wind skills, and you would think it's more aligned to magic, when in actuality its inheritance type is Pierce (which is physical).
- Persona 3: FES brings us "Orpheus Telos", a super-powered version of the protagonist's default persona. It's pretty much tailor-made for fighting the Bonus Boss, as it resists everything, has absurdly high stats and can be outfitted with any skill you want. The problem? You need to max every single Social Link in ONE playthrough. Every single one. Which pretty much screams "You DID print out that guide from GameFAQs, right?"
- Let's not forget the Shadow Shard and Shadow Crystal requests in the original P3. Not only is there only a ~10% of a treasure chest containing one appearing - and then only on certain floors - Elizabeth gives you false information on which floors they appear on. And of course she doesn't tell you any of this. So if you're planning on finding these items without a guide, all I can say is... Have fun.
- To get the good ending of Persona 4, you are given a Dialogue Tree when you confront Namatame in the hospital. Even if you already know who is the real culprit, you still must divine the game's logic and give the exact responses to calm Yosuke's anger, AND convince him that Namatame wasn't the real culprit, otherwise you'll end up with the bad ending. Even if you get it right, for the next couple days you're bombarded with more choices of who is the true killer (out of a lot of characters you've met) which will give you ANOTHER bad ending if you make the smallest mistake.
- Don't forget that all of that takes place after lengthy cutscenes. (Fortunately, though, your first response choice is pretty obvious, and you can save between the first and second events mentioned.) Oh, but you did know that you can press the Triangle button to immediately make all text in a text box appear, so you can skip through quicker, right? Even though the manual says nothing about it?
- And even if you make it to the end of the game, you probably won't figure out how to get the True ending unless you've maxed the majority of your Social Links. After you've talked to everyone on the last day, the game...strongly suggests that you to go home and watch the ending sequence. Instead, you're supposed to fight the game at every turn in its attempt to end itself and go back to the food court at Junes, which will trigger the scenes to unlock the Bonus Dungeon and the game's real final boss. Of course, if you do all this, you get the ability to fuse the Protagonist's Eleventh Hour Superpower next playthrough...
- ''The first Persona game, for the Play Station, had one(if not a couple) of these, too. In this game, you had a set party of 4 characters, and could take a different 5th member. You could only have one, however. There were three other characters to choose from (normally, but see later) , but the game didn't tell you to get the others you had to refuse the character before them; you couldn't take them, meet the other character, and then DITCH them to take the other one. This was only the start, however, and was actually minor and eventually understandable by a prudent gamer, unlike the next instance. There was yet another character who redefines 'hidden.' You see this character at a few points in the story, and there's even a point (if you have five characters by a certain point), where he helps you in a battle, and the game drops a SMALL hint that 'maybe this guy is playable.' However, the hints VERY MUCH stop there. To get this character, one had to first do several steps, involving some that were pretty out there in even GUESSING what they were(go here, do this, meet with character once, go back here, meet him again). One step involved meeting with the characters mother, answering a question, and then NOT TALKING TO HER AGAIN after this, because it would ruin your chances to get said character. Then, you have to refuse all three of the other characters (after even more steps), and THEN proceed with the game as normal, actually being a rather difficult dungeon with only 4 characters. THEN, after one particular plot point, said hidden character joins your party. However, this 12+ step program IS worth it in this troper's opinion; the character adds a lot to the storyline, is a bruiser of a physical attacker and can utilize Personas that no one else can, including the highest-level Persona of the game. It was very difficult to figure out, due to the mixture of A. steps that had to be done, B. the order of said steps, C. the fact that no one usually thinks to NOT take a full party with them into the rather difficult dungeon, D. the fact you can mess it up by accidentally speaking to said character's mother twice, and E. a whole crapload of other stuff. In fact, this troper and her friends, before the advent of TV tropes, used to call Guide Dang It 'Chris Syndrome.'
- Alchemy in Dragon Quest VIII. Once you acquire an "Alchemy Pot", you can mix two (later up to three) items together to get a new, usually better item. This is the only way to get certain items, including some of the best weapons, armor, and healing items in the game. You get hints in-game by checking bookshelves for journals and such, but they're all infuriatingly vague, along the lines of: "Dear Diary, today I made a great new armor for myself! All I had to do was combine a red garment with something shiny!" Even the most hardcore of gamers get themselves to GameFAQs to puzzle out the combinations if they have half a brain. Also, you had to find the items, which in many cases, was much easier said than done.
- In Breath Of Fire II, avoiding the Downer Ending requires picking out a certain NPC to live in your new village, saving the old man strapped to the Eye Machine boss, and finding the hidden control room under the village. Miss the first, you'll never see the third. Miss the second, you'll never get the third to work. You'll not get a single hint as to what it does until you've already got it working.
- Let's not forget finding the Elemental Dragon upgrade. Miss your first chance, and Wildcat, a boss who would be a total pushover with said upgrade, instead becomes That One Boss and you have no way of going back for the upgrade. Your second chance lasts pretty much the whole game after a certain point, but it's still quite well hidden. And you don't get the Gold Dragon upgrade, which surpasses it, until very late in the game. Up to that point pretty much every boss is That One Boss because they are all designed expecting you to be using the Elemental Dragons and therefore dealing far more damage than you're capable of with your pathetic Elemental Puppies.
- Thankfully much easier in FFVII. It was calculated by how many times you chose to speak to the other characters, and when forced to speak, what answers you gave. Avoiding as many conversations as possible with the female characters (including optional Yuffie) left you with Barret...for the one scene in the entire game that this affected. Completely pointless but for some dialog.
- Chrono Cross: in order to get the best ending you have to use your spells in a specific order against the Time Devourer, the Final Boss. Each spell has a color (purity is white, fire is red, water is blue, etc.), and each color of spell emits a different tone when cast. During the final battle with the Time Devourer, you have to play a SONG with these tones in order to rescue Schala from within the boss. Nowhere in the game or out of it is this stated or alluded to, and could only be found via either incredible luck or a strategy guide. It's not even made clear in the game that your spells make tones, let alone could be chained together to make a song.
- Even entering the right combination is difficult, as the Time Devourer will regularly cast spells and interrupt you. To get around that, what you have to do is have everyone cast the right order of spells at the Time Devourer from full stamina. This allows the character another spellcast(putting them into negative stamina as a result) before Time Devourer gets it's turn. The real Guide Dang It part is that when you cast the first six colors in the right order, the Time Devourer doesn't attack or do anything, leaving you free to effortlessly beat it to death or use the Chrono Cross. How is anyone supposed to figure that out?
- The tones aren't all different. Listen to the second and fifth ones. (And yet they still have to be played in the "right" order.)
- It's mentioned very vaguely by a couple of characters if (and only if) you have the titular Chrono Cross with you when you meet them, which is hardly guaranteed. The Chrono Cross itself is a fair example of this, as the location where it is acquired is mentioned once in reference to something else, not marked on the World Map, and you have to be in the right Alternate Continuity. And it's required for more of an ending than some lovely credits. And the Cross itself comes up as a subject of conversation once, by the same couple of characters, only if you don't have it the one time you meet them. So if you use that hint to go and get it, you'll never get any in-game indication of what it does. Yay.
- To be fair, the order is repeated multiple times. It's almost the order in which you fight the bosses in Terra Tower, it's the order of the colors the Sequential Boss uses at the end of Terra Tower, and indeed, This Troper had that boss use spells of all six colors in order in a row last time he fought the Terra Tower boss. If you have the Chrono Cross, the tones are heard in any battle, though it's arguable the Cross itself is a Guide Dang It. This Troper had help with the Cross, but figured out the trick to defeating the final boss on his own.
- The riddle of the Criosphinx does hint at it, except finding the Criosphinx is itself nearly impossible without a guide.
- And there is a room in the final dungeon where the song the Chrono Cross needs plays, with colored lights flashing in time with the tones. Now, realizing this is important is the hard part.
- All of the level 7 Summon elements fall into this, being that you have to set a trap specifically for that particular spell in order to steal it. Exactly one out of the six is held by an enemy that makes any sense having the spell, and for several you have to set the stage specifically for that summon. In fact, getting decent use out of any of your Traps tends to take a Walkthrough, since they mostly require foreknowledge of boss patterns.
- And let's not forget near the beginning of the game, in Viper's mansion. Two guards in front of a door you have to enter ask for a password, with three choices. The only way to get in? Choose nothing, as the answer is silence.
- Several optional characters are this, the one that might piss you off the most is the alternate version of Leena, the Unlucky Childhood Friend, who will only join your party if you refuse help from Kid. Its basically a subversion of But Thou Must.
- Ephemeral Fantasia. Half of the game. The game had a Groundhog Day Loop format where you had a limited amount of time per game "week" to figure out how to progress the story before everything gets reset to the "starting point". You had to prove to many people that the world is constantly repeating, thus "awakening" them. Some were relatively simple, but others were just so obtuse that there's just no way anybody found them on their own (most likely, all the "player made" walkthroughs borrowed heavily from an official guide of some sort). A particularly egregious solution was that a character would smash his quill pen during a cutscene, thus you have to prove that you know this by making a duplicate of it (an arcane multi-step process by itself). There is almost no indication that is what you have to do and even the actual process of making the pen itself doesn't suggest this until you're finished. This aspect is probably the biggest reason why most people hated the game.
- Shining the Holy Ark had pixies hidden throughout the game, which could be used for extra attacks on enemies at the start of a battle. Finding a pixie is done by searching a space on a wall. Without a guide, there are no clues to where the pixies are, so you have to search every space on every wall in the whole game.
- The last Solomon Trial in Shadow Hearts: Covenant pits you against enemies that are easy to kill...and then comes the last enemy, a Metal Slime of an enemy encountered very early in the game. The problem? It's immune to everything except petrification, and normal petrify attacks don't work against it. You COULD try to petrify it via Lucia's Tarot Card ability, but do you really wanna use that? To top it all off, it can damage your characters with a 4-digit damage attack when your HP only caps at three. It's only defeated via one skill, found on only one character, and it's a skill you would probably almost NEVER use in normal gameplay. Naturally, the game provides no clues on this whatsoever. No, not even if you use Anastasia's camera.
- Wild ARMs. In order to get to the Bonus Dungeon, The Abyss, to fight the Bonus Boss Ragu Ragola and obtain the obscenely powerful Sheriff Star as well as other top level accessories, you must have progressed up to a certain level in the game in order to get a necessary tool for a character to trigger the event. Then go to an Elw pyramid, use the tool to hit the ground near the green teleport pad, and walk onto the pad. Instead of beaming up to the satellite and ricocheting off, there's a good chance of getting stuck inside the satellite (so be prepared to try this several times). This is actually hinted in dialogue with some town characters but never explained in detail.
- In any of the games with Puzzle Boxs, finding all of them is a Guide Dang It moment. This is taken to extremes in Wild ARMs 3 and Wild ARMs 5, where not only puzzle boxes but items are hidden all over the world map. Apparently, you're just supposed to seach every square inch of the planet.
- And in Wild ARMs XF during the final boss battle, you'll suddenly stop doing any damage whatsoever to the final boss. If she took a turn before this happened, the game will tell you she's entering "defensive mode," but if not you'll just be baffled. The only way to start dealing damage again is to hit her with 7 combination attacks. The only way to figure this out is trial and error. What's worse is that combination attacks aren't particularly useful and many players hadn't even used them before this battle and so wouldn't think of them.
- Many of the rare monsters in Monster Rancher have long, complicated methods of unlocking. Some of them can be stumbled into by accident, but some of them are Guide Dang It to the extreme:
- Unlocking the Serket (a special sub-species of Arrowhead) in Monster Rancher Advance 2 requires you to create a "purebred" Arrowhead with a fully Arrowhead family tree, in which each Arrowhead was A-level or higher, and combine it with a Joker at B-level or higher.
- Unlocking the Doodle species in the same game required you to raise a Garu-type monster to a specific level, with certain stats, and have it look in a very specific place in one of the ruins, after having unlocked all the other monster species.
- Getting both the Niton and the Undine species in Monster Rancher 2 required you to raise a monster of the Hopper species to Rank B, then have it on your farm during December—it had a random chance of digging up hot springs. Of course, just about the only way to figure this out is via pure chance. To make things even worse, while getting the hot springs automatically nets you an item that you can use to fuse and make an Undine, nowhere does it say that you've now unlocked Niton—the only way to find that out is by trying to regenerate a disk with a Niton on it.
- Perhaps the "best" example: Unlocking the Beaklon in Monster Rancher 2 requires you to raise a monster of the Worm species to be four years old. Over the course of its life, it must be raised in a perfectly "even" fashion (never "strict" or "pampered"), it must never get stressed, and it must consume 30 Cup Jelly items over the course of its life. On the fourth week in June, if all of the above conditions are met, it has a chance of metamorphosing into a Beaklon. If you screwed up somewhere—and it's hard to tell—it only turns into a Worm hybrid monster. Guide Dang It!
- Monster Rancher also has a mountain of hidden stats, much like Pokémon—such as monster lifespan, fatigue, and stress. While these are all numerical values, you can never see said numbers, and the game doesn't bother to tell you how they affect your monster—or how various items affect those stats. Because you almost have to micromanage your monster's stats, this can get extremely frustrating.
- Baten Kaitos. That's really all that needs to be said, but if you insist... Hundred Percent Completion in both games refers to collecting all 1000+ of the magnus, a task designed only for the
utterly insane truly dedicated player. Ideally, such a player carries a camera everywhere, in everyone's deck, and references the internet frequently, so as not to miss that one card dropped by that one enemy in the Trail of Souls, which you visit once. Add this to the fact that magnus actually change over time (one in particular taking fifty hours to do so), and you have a frustrating task. The prequel even adds in the lovely option of combining magnus, which makes the task all the more fun.
- Aside from those, there's a minor instance in the prequel of an easy-to-miss magnus, during a sidequest which requires you to go back in time and defeat Wiseman. To be fair, it is hinted by one source, but it's not as obvious as the hints to take care of the bosses in the present who previously whupped your ass. If you miss it, however, you also miss getting Aphelion Dustwake, Guillo's strongest attack and the last part of the most powerful multi-target combo in the game.
- A particularly annoying Pig Noise from The World Ends With You starts off asleep, and runs away as soon as you hit it. No matter how hard you hit it, it never dies. The only way to kill this Noise is to close over the DS and open it up again. It dies instantly. The only clue is that this action puts the DS into "Sleep Mode".
- This troper found two other infuriating Guide Dang It moments. First, is the Trend system. After a little while playing the game, you find out that wearing specific brands in specific areas gets you bonuses or penalties to your attack. Threads (armor and accessories) and Pins (attack items) both have brands. But here's the kicker: the Trend system is just for the Pins, not the Threads. Which means two things: you'll be wearing inferior armor into battle thinking it will give you a bonus, and that you'll be blowing huge amounts of money hoarding every possible brand so you can be prepared. Second is the pin leveling system. There are three ways to level up a pin; combat experience, the standby experience and 'mingling' (contacting other people using the wireless function of DS) and some pins will evolve into a more powerful form once their level is maxed. However, pins that evolve will evolve only if the majority of experience is one of types (the type needed isn't stated anywhere). Which means you can have your favorite pin almost evolved, then something comes up and you don't play the game for a few days, you can come back and your pin now has too much standby experience to evolve. If you want it to evolve, tough. You'll just have to sell it, buy a new one and start over. This is only revealed in the game by somewhat hard to find way; this troper just found out on a message board and is quite peeved.
- Concerning the evolving of pins: Shutdown and mingle experience are actually more 'potent' than battle experience i.e. getting one point of battle experience counts less towards the pin evolving than getting that point from shutdown or mingle. THIS isn't mentioned anywhere in the game.
- Factual error correcting: There are three ways of gaining pin points/evolving pins instead of two. Battling is the most common one, one is shutting down your DS and one is 'mingling', which means getting in contact with other people using DS's wireles options (Picto Chat works fine.) All pins that evolve need to have a majority of one type of experience to evolve. If it is even, they do not.
- As a kid, this troper was obsessed with an obscure Game Boy RPG called Li'l Monster. Many of the game's puzzles were extreme Guide Dang Its, as they generally involved either A) using items in almost completely arbitrary places, B) or giving equally arbitrary items to monsters in certain areas. One part, which she didn't discover until many years later, involved using the largely useless Paper Airplane item in a completely unremarkable area to find four pieces of fruit, one of which had about a 30% chance of being an item that would permanently increase your monster's HP. Given that no guide for this game seems to exist (due to the extreme obscurity of the title), she still hasn't figured everything in the game out... But vows to try and do so someday.
- In Phantasy Star Online, there was a very rare random drop called the Sealed J-Sword. The thing is, under a certain circumstance, the sword can become unsealed to become the Infinity Plus One Sword Tsumikiri J-Sword. The thing is, during this tropers entire time spent playing that game, NO-ONE knew how you unlocked it. In addition, because item-duping was very common, the Tsumikiri J-Sword was actually quite common, resulting in the occasion where all four randomly selected players in a game were all equiped with a sword that was so rare, no-one actually knew how to get it. This troper quit soon after.
- The Sega Ages remake of Phantasy Star II has a severe Guide Dang It in the form of an added 'Easter Egg': it is possible to permanently and in a non-glitch manner resurrect Nei after her Killed Off For Real Heroic Sacrifice versus her dark half NeiFirst. However, in order to do this, the player needs to have a save from the remake of PhantasyStar I on their memory card, start a new game of PS II with it, beat PS II, start a new game (NOT a NewGamePlus), see EVERY SINGLE LINE of dialog to include random NPCs and party members after anything happens until you reach the fight with NeiFirst (and one thing the remake did was add a good deal of additional dialog), and engage in a series of unspecified fetch quests. After all that, the reward was the Clone Lab attendant, rather than stating that Nei cannot be cloned as usual due to being part-biomonster/losing part of her soul, just charged the party the regular rate and sent you on your merry way. No happy reuniting cutscene (especially after the one associated with her death), no extra dialog, NOTHING. On the plus side, she did get added to the ending and she is a bit of a Game Breaker, but still ...
- Tales of Destiny has a Guide Dang It moment built in by the games translators. Late in the game, in Helraois, the game asks for a password. There's hints to the 4 letters in the password given in the dungeon, unfortunately, two of the letters, both consonants, are one off their actual value. Have fun figuring out which ones are incorrect and what 2 of the other 14 letters you need without resorting to a guide. Incidentally, the password is FATE.
- Tales of Vesperia manages to be even worse than its predecessors in that there are simply so many possible events at every single part of a game that can easily last over 100 hours if going for side quests. Worse yet, many of these completely optional, easily missable events give titles or items, and all titles and items are necessary for Hundred Percent Completion. By the time you get the Airship, there will be events in parts of the world that have absolutely nothing to do with the story. And many events can only be seen after seeing one event and then going and sleeping at an inn/completing a game event, and going back.
- The random missable events and such that make it so easy to miss Hundred Percent Completion are one thing, but really all they do is make you miss 100% completion—they don't have much of an effect on the actual game. On the other hand, the Fell Arms quest for the Infinity Plus One Swords is just...absurd. If you know exactly what to do, it is painfully easy; many of the Fell Arms take only a few minutes to find, and even the more difficult ones aren't that bad. If you don't, you'll probably need to go pretty much everywhere before you'll actually find them all, and you might not even find them all then. And of course, the game doesn't tell you that the last boss is powered up dramatically by you having all of them...
- Also there is the bonus endgame dungeon. If you don't see one event by going back to Phaeroh's Crag at a specific point in the game, you can't access it.
- This troper recalls completing some of the sidequests COMPLETELY BY ACCIDENT. The game doesn't tell you anything other than being like Zagi is poisoned without telling you that you have to cure it.
- While some of the Secret Missions can be beaten purely by accident, some are easy to beat (Oh I can target something else...maybe I should hit it!) while others are practically Guide Dang It. There is also That one boss named Yeager who, when you fight him, reveals something that suggests a secret mission. Now how will you do this? You have to make him stagger and then hit him with Raven's Rain or Rainsong. How would anyone discover this by accident? You not only have to have a specific party member in your fighting team at the time, but you also have to do something that is VERY hard to do thanks to Yeager not being knocked back easily and then at just the right moment, hit him with that party member's art.
- Also, let's not forget The secret mission with Estelle, where you have to activate an event where she gives you an item called "Mother's Memento", and then use it during a specific battle. Easily, it's Lost Forever if you don't get it within the right window.
- Baldurs Gate 2: The Throne of Bhaal for the best piece of armor (the Big Metal Unit) you must have play the first game of the series and steal the pants of a random nobleman, play the second part in which you save somebody from certain death, do some detective work to find the wrongdoers, but instead of rescueing their hostage you have to collect the ransom for her and finally in The Throne of Bhaal you must hire 3 of the weakest characters in the world to face an unknown threat. Only if you have done all that and kept the pairs of pants that have absolutely no use whatsoever, yet another guy (who needs to be found, too) can forge them into one.
- Golden Sun 1&2. Try to find all djinns without a guide.
- In 1st GS it's not that hard actually. All djinns are either located in "standard secret areas" which are pretty easy to find or in isolated places devoid of anything of interest. After you find few djinns in the wild it becomes obvious that they can be encountered in such places. Second Golden Sun however has thrice as much djinns and they appear everywhere around the world - not only on isolated isles or "obvious secrets". Also, the world is much bigger. The Guide Dang It part is also enhanced by the fact that you need all djinns from BOTH games for a special location with special boss guarding special summon.
- The first Golden Sun has a blatant translation induced Guide Dang It; in Kolima, a man speaks about a treasure but refuses to give the location. Read his mind and the Japanese version of the game says "It's hidden deep in the forest all the way west of the village, but I can't tell him that!", which fits into one text window in Japanese, but was too long for the English version, so it was replaced with "It's hidden deep in the forest, but I can't tell him that!". The forest west of the village is a patch of forest terrain with the man's treasure in it. Directly north of the village is a full-blown story-relevant forest dungeon. Confusion ensues.
- With the recent release of a new Episode 3 story mission in Phantasy Star Universe, it has become possible to obtain two particular NPC partner cards that a lot of people have been waiting for. Unfortunately, one of them requires you to go back and fulfill utterly ridiculous tasks in missions you've already cleared, just to see a few little changes to cutscenes, which will then somehow qualify you to obtain this card. Oh, and if you haven't played all twelve chapters of the Episode 2 story missions, forget it...
- "Party RPG" Dokapon Kingdom has the "Acrobat" class, which can only be obtained by bringing a special item to the king. While it isn't the only such class to be obtained this way, it is possibly the most difficult to find—to get it, you need to go to the Casino (a place you're never required to go at story point, and which it may be downright dangerous to go to if you're playing more competitively with your friends and everyone wants to move forward) and get both all cherries on a "great" or "excellent" bonus.
- Graffiti Kingdom. The bosses are a HUGE problem in this game, because after the first three, every single boss except Acryla [and, arguably, Deskel] becomes That One Boss; Telepin is virtually impossible no matter what you do, Palette absolutely requires you have wings and the very hidden Fly ability, Medium, the assumed final boss, has two forms, the latter of which is almost three times as hard as the first and Tablet, the REAL final boss, has FIVE, all harder than the last and with their own HP bars. You must learn this all through trial and error, or by doing things you normally wouldn't do, like hitting a certain tree in a certain stage so a certain enemy pops out that may or may not die before you get a chance to swipe it for the Fly ability.
- Figuring out how certain parts work can even be a Guide Dang It due to the vagueness of their descriptions in-game. Legs and Arms are pretty obvious, but Knees and Ankles always give This Troper issues, because she simply has no idea how you're supposed to use them. (This may or may not actually be in the instruction manual; This Troper got her copy from Blockbuster, who decided it was a good idea to stock the game without its instruction manual.)
- Unlocking all the characters in Dragon Ball Z: Legendary Super Warriors. The game oftentimes requires you to beat a chapter with a certain character—or in the case of team matches, characters. Sometimes, you have to lose the first match, before winning it on your second try. And two characters have to be unlocked by repeatedly pressing the Start button while the credits are rolling. At no point in the game is any of this so much hinted to you. And you're supposed to figure all this out without a strategy guide? FFFFFF
- The Sa Ga games are pretty much the epitome of this trope, unplayable without some sort of guide.
- Perhaps Magi Nation should be included. The only way to get some of the most powerful dream creatures in the game were extremely hidden and required Guides. Some examples to get these creatures included running through a mountain on the world map or swimming past a dude's house you meet early on and never have to return.
- Try to get through the Shadow Hold without Gamefaqs...I dare you.
- or to get the New game Plus.
- One example of the hidden creatures is the Orathan F. In order to find it, you have to wander around between two mountains on the world map in the final overworld map...Would you at all think that you could find a dream creature on a world map? I wouldn't think so.
- The Lightning Spell.
- Phantasy Star did this twice, and both were the sid-effects of really awful translations:
- In the Genesis version Phantasy Star II, an entire line of dialogue was left out: After Nei dies at the hands of her evil clone Neifirst, the entire team is brought back to Paseo for an attempt at a Meaningful Funeral. However, because the translators left out several lines of dialogue, the situation becomes a combination of Guide Dang It and It's All There In The Manual—the game shipped with a Strategy Guide and maps which explained the next steps, but if you lost them like This Troper did... The PS 2 remakes apparently fix the whole mess.
- And again demonstrating Sega having issues with their localization team: midway through Phantasy Star III: Generations Of Doom, one of the Sages tells you you need to take care of a certain task, but he refers to the wrong place, leading the player off to nowhere. The manual attempts to hide the mistake by pleading that he's senile and offers you the right direction. Again: lose the manual and things come to a grinding halt.
- The US localization of Dragon Warrior II does the same thing: while chasing down The Prince, the King of Middenhall may refer to the wrong city, sending you off in the entirely wrong direction. Did for This Troper anyways.
- Live A Live is basically one giant Guide Dang It. You've got doors that only open if you stand in a specific spot and press 'A' exactly one hundred times, Bonus Bosses and special items that only appear if you backtrack and/or walk in a very specific way, and a whole host of other counter-intuitive things that are never hinted that and are sometimes needed to either advance the plot or not get completely screwed over for the rest of the game.
- Ys Book I and II for the Turbografx-16 CD was full of these(of course nearly all RPGs had them back in the day). Some examples: You find a Roda Tree Seed in the Mine in Book 1, this troper figured out how to use it only by accident: it is used to talk to the big trees in the field to obtain the Silver Sword (in the ''Eternal'' remake you have to eat the seed first). Near the end of Book I, the door to Dark Fact is sealed, and even the Evil Ring(also a Guide Dang It to figure out how to use w/o it draining your health, or worse, in other versions, killing you instantly) won't open it. In the book of Gemma, a Blue Amulet is mentioned, vaguely hinting that you're supposed to go all the way back down to where Luta was to get it, and then you can go in the boss room.
- Halfway up Darm tower, you encounter a corridor where scary Source Music is played that drains your health. In the room halfway down, Raba/Rasta tells you that you need to break one of the pillars "on this floor" to stop the "Devil's Wind", as it is sometimes called(the name of the music piece on the soundtrack). It turns out that you're supposed to break one of the pillars on the outside of the floor where Luta Gemma resides. In the TGCD version, the hint is that the gallery on that floor is purple instead of blue, as well as having gargoyle faces on the pillars. No hints in other versions, though.
- In Book II, in the lava village, if you talk to the mayor, he tells you that the bridge is broken. If you talk to him while in beast form, he says he promised not to let Adol through. Then you have to change back and talk to him a third time , only then does he tell you where his kidnapped son is and give you the Whisper Earings (this troper figured it out by Trying Everything). Worse, the path to Tarf's cell is blocked by a Gas Chamber. To figure out how to get through, you have to use the Evil Bell at the entrance to the dungeon(one of the villagers tells you that Quays, the gremlin-like species the Transform magic turns you into, used to be seen there), then the Quays tell you to use a Roda Leaf, which is lying on the ground, barely visible just inside the entrance(In the PC remake, the leaf is hidden in the Quay's hideout, which you also have to use the Evil Bell to access)
- This troper didn't even know the Cape of Holy Spirit(Book II's equivalent of the Heal Ring) existed until he read about it in a Game FAQ. It's in a very-well concealed cave in the Ice Park of Noltia, hinted at only by a strip of blue along one of the side walls.
- In Rance Village, Jira tells you that he hears noises coming from his basement. When you go down there, there's apparently nothing there. A villager also says that he hears a bell when the goons are called to a meeting. This somewhat vaguely hints that you need use the Evil Bell(obtained in the Mine) in the basement to call the demons, which then break down the wall, allowing you to access the final priest's shrine.
- Later, after the wizard Dalles turns you into a green ghoul monster(a blue or black Quay in other versions), you come upon the refugee's hideout. They block your way in, but at least in the TG-CD version they give you the hint that a room with a different wall contains the sacred cup of Dabbie who also held the Magic of Light(in the Eternal remake they give you no hints whatsoever, guide dang it).
- Also a statue holding a sword is found in the canals. Hardly do you know that when you use the Dreaming Stone Idol to change the refugees back, he changes back too. And that sword he has is the Infinity Plus One Sword critical to the Final Boss fight!
- Ys IV: Mask Of The Sun for the Super Famicom: When you first return to Minea, Pim tells you he has lost his gold pedestal. Towards the end of the game, you are told to drive the Hero's Sword into the gold pedestal at the top of the mountain after obtaining it from the "Information Booth", which doesn't actually exist in the game. You have to go back to Pim, and it turns out he didn't lose it after all.
- In Ys VI: The Ark of Napishtim, the main quest had almost none, but many of the secret items, including the Emelas gear, were guide-dang-its to find, many of which involved going back and fighting respawned(and suped-up) mini-bosses. Biggest Guide Dang Its were the Black Tabulas and Eldian Orb in the Ruins of Amnesia, where, to see the invisible platforms, you need the Rainbow Fragment, which isn't obtained until after you complete the dungeon, and there are almost no in-game hints about its use.
- The Dark Spire. As a tribute to the original Wizardry, this game is full of them, including:
- The H3LLO KITTY door. Requires three apples. First of all, the apples already have another use in the game. Second, you have no way to know that you need three, making it pretty much impossible to solve just by trying everything. Third, you don't even know that you need apples unless you happen to know that Hello Kitty likes apple pie.
- Several quest items that are lying on the ground with no message whatsoever (short of searching every square in the game): the Sun Jewel (which a FAQ claims provides a message; this troper got none) and the Dragon Drops.
- Several quests which just claim that an unspecified NPC wants an unspecified item. In one case it's made to sound like a quest item, but the item is actually a random drop (a ring).
- The true ending requires a nearly maxed charisma, which means grinding unless you know in advance and saved up the experience to buy it, and having a character with Balanced alignment wield Tyrung. There are no clues about this. Not to mention that even getting the Tyrung means finding a mysterious woman in an otherwise meaningless location on all other levels, in order.
- The necromancy puzzle requires, among other things, a candle. There's another candle with a completely different use (and if you use it first, no way to know you didn't just lose the one you needed), and the correct one requires using an item, which aside from its obvious effect also puts the needed candle in your inventory without telling you.
- Some steps in solving quests only have a percentage chance of working, such as the getting the golden axe and some of the ????? level skill-based quests.
- The Mist Giant quest, which only appears if you enter a particular room without happening to trigger a random encounter at the door—which is pretty likely to happen.
- The level, stat, and skill requirements for obtaining advanced classes are not documented. One stat needed for one class is not even available for raising during most of the game.
- The game also rolls hit points using the original Wizardry method: reroll your entire hit points whenever you go up a level, so reloading to gain more hit points will be fruitless in the long run. How to figure this out? Umm, read guides for Wizardry and recognize that the hit point gain looks similar?
- You have to be pretty darn lucky to find Grate Guy's casino on your own in Super Mario RPG, because there are no hints about its location and you have to jump at a seemingly randomly chosen, unmarked spot to find the exit that leads to the casino. You'll also need to find the ID card to get into the casino, which can only be obtained by revisiting a place that you likely have no other particular reason to revisit, though this is considerably easier to discover than the casino itself.
- Free MMORPG Mabinogi has a few of these. Most of them are the result of bad translations, and there are usually people around who can give you the correct info. Some, however, are almost game-breaking. The worst are two specific skills. Since the game is skill-based and not class-based, the only restriction on how your character functions is based entirely on the skills you choose to learn. Skills are divided into Combat, Magic, and Life. Skill paths are not exclusive in any way, and it is technically possible to learn any and all available skills, given enough time and effort. However, the Guide Dang It part is that two of the most important skills can only be learned, or learned easily, if you work on them very early on.
- The most frustrating one is "Windmill"; probably the most powerful combat skill in the game. Training to advance this skill is highly dependent on the comparison between the character's and monsters' "Combat Power", the overall combat ability ranting. If your CP is too high, then you won't be able to train the skill effectively. The Guide Dang It moment comes in when you realize that the game does not display your CP, only a vague "comparison" to monsters, nor is it even remotely clear how CP works. Worse yet, if you increase the level of certain other skills too high, mainly Combat Mastery (your primary combat skill) training the higher levels of Windmill becomes nearly impossible. (There are client-side mods which give more useful CP information; but these are prohibited, and are removed every time the client undergoes a major update.)
- The second is the crafting skill Refine, which affects your Dexterity stat. This is arguable the most useful "Life" skill since Dex has a huge effect on the amount of damage you inflict in combat, especially ranged combat; and this skill has the largest effect on Dex. However, in order to train the skill, you need "failures" when attempting to use it as well as "successes". If your Dex stat and main Life skill — "Production Mastery" — are too high, it will be nearly impossible to fail; and you need at least as many failures as successes to effectively train the skills, if not more.
- There are ways to compensate, but they're limited. There are enchanted equips that will reduce your CP or Dex; but the effects are fairly small (although cumulative); and they are typically extremely expensive and hard to get. Rebirthing will help, but again, only to a limited degree. Finally, there are items available, known as "skill reset capsules" that will enable you to reduce any skill by one level; but they're only available to those using certain paid services, at a rate of one a week, and cannot be traded.
References in Other Media
- Referenced in Toy Story 2, in which Rex can't figure out how to beat Emperor Zurg in the Buzz Lightyear video game until he finds a Strategy Guide when the characters infiltrate Al's Toy Barn: "They make it so you can't defeat Zurg unless you buy this book. It's extortion, that's what it is!"
- Spoofed in this Adventurers! strip. And also see this one.
Close References in Other Media
|
|
