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Bounce down? Nope. Fly up? Ceiling. Backtrack? Barrier. Official strategy guide? Silent. Time? Seven minutes and counting. You will die in this room.
"The whole game is based around secrets, but there's a difference between 'secret' and just fucking impossible!"
"You know, they make it so you can't defeat Zurg unless you buy this book."
Cousin to the Soup Cans, a Guide Dang It is any part of a video game in which that correct action or set of actions is so difficult to figure out from the game's own clues that, effectively, the only way to know what to do (aside from spending countless hours of trying every remote possibility until something happens) 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 Moon Logic Puzzle, where the game does provide the information you need, but most players will still require a walkthrough to put it all together.
Examples:
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- With the growing trend of games adding achievements for some replayability and to reward players for screwing around and finding things, many Achievements can be fit into this category if one does not have a proper list.
- 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. 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.
- There are ROM cartridges to be collected in the ruins, none of which are hinted at in the in-game hints. A few of these are hidden inside random sections of blank wall. However, this game teaches you very early on that smacking random sections of wall is bad and will get you killed: the manual says so, an early hint says that "every place that looks like it has something good has a trap" (and there's a demonstration in that same room), and the early levels are full of walls and other background objects that will hurt you badly if you smack them. The conclusion is: to find every ROM, you... smack every section of wall you find and eat the damage. And that's just the ROMs hidden in walls. This game hates you.
- The "wall that looks like you need to hit it to proceed but really just smites you when you hit it" thing is very prominent in the early areas... and then in the later areas, sometimes you actually will have to do it to proceed. To be fair, there are a lot of things that are logically and obviously dangerous to hit (statue of a goddess... big door with symbols all over it...), but sometimes you'll just be whipping away at walls or rocks and you'll get struck by lightning.
- 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.
- 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-game 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 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.
- To be fair, one of the flying missions does pass over those buildings. And it's quite likely a mission you'll have to repeat a few times. Damn plane...
- 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
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- There are (garbled but still) useful clues to these mysteries in the red books found throughout the game which nobody making the above complaint about the cliff or the lakes ever, ever, ever brings up or maybe even knows about.
- 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.
- Harmony of Dissonance is damn hard. Even completing it by the easiest way makes people mad because of constant looking to walkthrough. And, also, it perfectly mixes disadvantages of linear and non-linear games.
- One portion of Portrait of Ruin becomes a perfect Guide Dang It. To avoid the Nonstandard Game Over and progress further if you win the second battle against Stella and Loretta like a normal person, you must return to an already-cleared area and find the Sanctuary spell from an easily-missed corridor.
- Aria of Sorrow has that as well. Here, you have to get three specific Souls and equip them when you're fighting Graham. The only hints you get are three books littered around the castle, but they don't tell you that you need them to fight the Boss and not get the Bad Ending! Konami seemed to realise how stupid that was and made the conditions for being able to get the Good Ending in Dawn of Sorrow way easier to understand.
- 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.)
- The secret to getting to the true final level of the freeware game Cave Story is 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.
- And before all of that, after having a conversation with a certain NPC right after doing a certain action, you have to sleep in a bed before exiting the building, which was what you were prompted to do by the NPC. And there's no indication that you're able to sleep in beds in the first place. Doesn't make the game Unwinnable, but you've lost your chance at the best ending.
- 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 third level a series of item trades ends you up with an item with the description "Allows you face the abyss", next thing your wandering around the dungeon clueless. What you have to do is go to the place with an invisible bridge that you can now stand on, the camera angle doesn't help to show it at all.
- 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) one of these: 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) in order to obtain the titular Flame. A lot of people never figure this out and skip the level using cheats. Contrary to popular belief, the sword in the ruins isn't one of these: true, touching it appears to kill you, but it also immediately fades to a cutscene explaining more backstory.
- 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.
- This one has an extremely subtle hint in that you are never allowed to un-equip the revive pill, even though you can remove the fake death pill. This is probably supposed to tell very Genre Savvy players that the pills will have a mandatory use some time in the game, though how many people understood the hint may not be much. Though it may not even be a hint at all considering where the pills are on Snake's body. He can't remove them even if he wanted to.
- 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.
- The best part of this one? If you're playing the game on a Sega Nomad portable, you're pretty much screwed. The Nomad does not have a reset button, making the game Unwinnable.
- 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.
- 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.
- Not so much of a problem if you bought the game on Steam. At least there you can bring up the Steam overlay and use that to visit external web sites.
- As the illustration atop the page shows, Sonic The Hedgehog 3, the barrel in Carnival Night Zone (solution: stand on it and use the D-pad). 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. At first, this wasn't even in the guides.
- The "Find the Lost Chao" in Sonic Adventure 2 Battle are crafted from a vein of the purest Guide Dang It 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...
- Sonic Advance 3 is similar in this respect, as you have to collect all of the Chao hidden throughout the three acts of the zone (and there are about ten of them), and then find a key that will let you in to the Special Stage.
- And in Zone 3, they got one of the locations wrong. This tropes spent hours searching the map for Chao 10 before I found a walkthrough that told me it was actually in Act 1.
- Notably, to get to the final bonus level, after getting all the chaos emeralds, you need to press some set of buttons on the main menu.
- 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.
- 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)?
- Sonic Rush Adventure: As opposed to nearly every other hidden island that is hinted at where there is shallow water, there are two that you may have to scour the entire sea map for, as there is no sign that they're at the very top of the map, far away from any other island. Also, That One Boss Ghost Titan has one of the most absurd strategies behind it ever.
- Koei's flagship Warrior's (Samurai Warriors, et al) series, when it comes to unlocking characters, special mounts and final weapons. The requirements can be so very stringent that even when you have all the details on how to obtain the sought after character or weapon, multiple attempts are almost unavoidable. Particularly when you are saddled with multiple tasks such as: defeat Enemy X in the first 1:30 of the stage, then save remarkably weak Ally Y on the OTHER SIDE of the battlefield 3 minutes after defeating Enemy X, THEN allow Ally Z to die, but only AFTER they kill Enemy A just before cutscene F, and all this without riding a horse or using a Musou Attack. Once you've completed that litany of nonsense, chase down the spy captain before he can escape... did I mention he's only a brisk 20 second run away from the exit? And did I forget to mention that this must all be done on Hard or Chaos mode? And to top it all off, this must also be done on 1 player mode half of the time! The sad part is, this is not a hyperbole. Check the guides on Gamefaqs if you doubt me... Why do I play these games, again? Though conversely, some are tremendous aversions, such as in the case of Lu Bu, who unlocks his final weapon by killing 1000 enemies (which is pretty easy), in one iteration of the series.
- Slight correction: most of the characters/mounts/weapons can be unlocked in co-op mode, however, Player 1 has to be the one to actually fulfill the requirements (killing enemy X, getting 1000 K Os, collect all the treasures, etc). It still helps to have a Player 2 around to defend your base and do the mundane stuff. Also, unlocking special mounts and weapons is technically optional, and you can play through all the stages just fine without them; they're basically bonus challenges.
- 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. 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.
- To be fair, this statue (if I recall correctly) was the only thing at the end of a dangerous, hard to cross room. Considering that it was the only apparent object of interest, and that it held nothing in its hands while all the previous statues were seen to hold round objects...
- 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 infamous "Noob Bridge".
- Show me a person who claimed to find the Missile Expansion hidden in the lava in the second superheated room of Norfair, without going crazy and dropping Super Bombs everywhere, or scanning each and every single inch of every single room with the X-ray Scope, and I will show you a damned liar.
- Pretty much all of the original Metroid. There are places where to continue the game, you have to bomb blocks which look absolutely no different to any other blocks in the surrounding area. Add the fact that the games corridors look pretty much identical to each other, and there's no map, it's a recipe for tearing your hair out.
- To be fair, there's a pattern to destroyable walls that is pretty easy to figure out as the game pretty much reuses the same square rooms, so if you noticed, you'll find almsot every time they apparently re-use the room, where the secret holes would be.
- 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.
- 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. 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 an 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.
- 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 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!'.
- 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,perform an amazingly complex Rocket Jumping maneuver to get up the shaft to a teleporter, and find your way through a completely-unhinted-at teleporter maze to find a secret terminal message.
- 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.
- 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!?
- 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 wanders around all day", vaguely telling that his son is 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.
- 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.
- The Second Quest also throws fake walls at you. You'd be stuck in a dungeon, having bombed every wall and been unable to find a way out, until you realized that some walls let you just pass through if you walked up to them.
- 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.
- Not to mention that once you get inside Level 7, you're stopped halfway by an enemy who won't attack you and won't let you through his room. All he says is "Grumble grumble..." What do you do? You can't kill him, and he's blocking the only path through the dungeon. Turns out this is the only real use for "Meat." You're supposed to feed him and he'll let you pass.
- 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.
- 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.
- In the second dungeon, Bottle Grotto, one of the keys could only be obtained by defeated the enemies of one specific room in a specific order. There is an in-game hint for this portion, but unless you know the names of the enemies from some outside source (because neither the game nor the US game manual tells you their names), then the admonition to "First defeat the imprisoned Pons Voice; last, Stalfos," just sounds like so much gibberish.
- Twilight Princess: That one puzzle where you have to move blocks around on ice in three separate rooms in a cave north of North Hyrule Field... for a piece of heart. The Official Nintendo Player's guide tells you how to do a similar puzzle, step-by-step, in the Snowpeak Ruins dungeon (Yeto and Yeta's house), but offers no help for this piece of heart puzzle.
- Anyone who tells you that they passed the Statue Puzzle and got the Master Sword without looking up the solution is either a god at puzzles or lying.
- It's really not that difficult, just time-consuming... and requires A LOT of backtracking.
- I'm a god at puzzles.
- A bigger Guide Dang It moment was when you come back as an adult to find the place deserted and have to bomb the one rolling Goron to unlock the rest of the city and the next dungeon. Not only is this only very vaguely hinted at from an optional source that also gives you useless information, it is difficult to do.
- Spirit Tracks. You will use a guide. New puzzles involve using your entire collection of songs or gadgets until/if you manage to stumble on the one that works. Every single person in Hyrule exists in a vacuum, unaware of the world around them and the people in it. This is a huge problem when you rely on them for critical information. Gameplay functions go unexplained even by the people that need you to use them. Actions that should logically yield a given outcome do nothing. Actions that logically should do nothing are required to progress.
- Beedle's Air Shop is a store run out of a hot-air balloon, and is the only place to carry the Bomb Bag, which as in previous Zelda games is the only way to carry bombs. Of course, you'll need to get him to land first. He tells you how by mailing you a letter, which you will not receive for some time. Until then, have fun chasing him around like an idiot!
- Getting all the stamps is a pain. The sand sanctuary one was undoubtedly the worst though. It never would have occurred to me that you would have to go back later just so the resident lokomo would tell that he needs cuccos which, of course, you need to use to reach the tiny island where the stamp station is.
- Banjo-Tooie has several unduly 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.
- 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 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).
- 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.
- This is made even worse by a string of subtle clues that have been scattered throughout the hospital. The mysterious telephone voice you encounter in the locker room tells you that the psycho who's been leaving you love letters through the whole level so far is dead, and that his new name is number 7. Lo and behold, 7 is the number of the gurney he's lying on, and the accompanying poem very clearly refers to him. And yet, as noted above, the corresponding clue has nothing to do with any of this, instead giving the aforementioned vague bird clue. Apparently you have to be a member of the Audobon Society to survive in Silent Hill.
- Pretty much what happens in the games
- 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. There are several ways to do it though.
- 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.
- There's a mini-Guide Dang It in regards to the boss weakness in Mega Man 3; who knew that instead of one continuous loop, there were two, with Gemini Man, Snake Man, and Needle Man not being weak to any of the other Robot Master weapons?
- Mega Man 8 also had the second set of Robot Masters have no weaknesses to the first set's weapons. Aqua Man and Sword Man could still be easily beaten with the Mega Buster, though.
- Getting access to many of the secret areas from Painkiller is a Guide Dang It moment. 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.
- 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.
- Biggest problem is that the locked door is marked with a symbol that seemingly indicates what order to press the mushrooms in. After taking forever trying different variations of the order, giving up, consulting a guide, and pressing the hidden mushroom, what does the symbol mean? Nothing at all. Purely stylistic.
- 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.
- 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 enemies, open an unmarked locker in a completely unrelated area which has a number written inside, refrain from capturing certain enemies 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.
- The NES version of the first Metal Gear added two maze sections that were not in the MSX2 version. The correct path in both mazes is "west, west, north, west", but none of your radio contacts or any of the prisoners you save will ever tell you this. At the time the game came out, there was no internet, so anyone who wanted to look up the solution would have to search for it in a video game magazine (such as Nintendo Power) and find out which issue featured the correct path.
- 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...
- In Eversion, you'll have to everse from certain points between different dimensions to succeed. However, eversion points aren't visible, except background slightly changes and other music can be heard. That caused many players to get stuck on world 2 for a while.
- It gets worse in world 8 where many players usually try to take the hardest route.
- The Commodore 64 tie-in Batman (of the film which featured Jack Nicholson as the Joker) has one of these right at the end of the game. The final boss, the Joker of course, climbs a ladder leading to an escape craft as soon as you arrive on the roof. If you've seen the film, you'll know what to do - fire the Batrope. If you haven't, consider the fact that no other enemy in the game is hurt by the Batrope and the game gives you literally two seconds to figure out what to do before he escapes.
- Luigis Mansion has a pretty notorious example of this, in the Blue Ghosts and Gold Mice. They drop a large amount of treasure when captured, so you need them for higher ranks at the end. But after being Lost Forever, they can be refound during the Blackout near the end of the game. Problem: The game only tells you to capture the ghost Uncle Grimmly and turn on the switch in the Breaker Room, so there's no indication they appear. Problem 2: About half ONLY appear during the blackout. When it's over, those are Lost Forever. Problem 3: Luigi is being chased by an infinite hoarde of blood thirsty ghosts during the blackout, hence exploring the far off rooms many of these ghosts are found in is near suicidal.
- Another thing. The coin values required for an A rank were raised significantly from about 100 000 000 to about 150 000 000 Gold in the PAL version. Hence to get an A rank there, you have to beat the Hidden Mansion, which itself is more difficult in said region. Possible other problem is this not being in many guides, due to the versions used for those having a far less difficult Hidden Mansion mode.
- This Troper played the game an upwards of 5 times trying to find the last couple major ghosts in the game, only to find out that the only way to reach them is to fall down the chimney to the boarded up room. How the fuck was I supposed to ever think of that?
- Ecco The Dolphin, multiple times. Especially notable are battling the Asterite in the past (there's a specific way to beat him, but the game never tells you this)
- Also in the second game, when you come back from the good future you've got to rescue some orcas. You're supposed to follow one of the babies to the exit, but it's glitchy and disappears if you lose sight of it. The presence of a hilarious glitch nearby (baby orcas rain from the sky if you echolocate at the upper left part of the stage) just complicated things.
- Some of the armour, gems, and locations of the elite enemies in The Legend Of Spyro: Dawn Of The Dragon. GRAHHH.
- Doom II has map 19, "The Citadel". In order to find a necessary key, you have to open a specific discolored wall in a generic corridor. Yep, you need to find a well-hidden secret area to finish the level.
Adventure
- Deus Ex: Invisible War. The special weapons. Most are in out of the way areas you wouldn't otherwise think about, including a sewer, the bedroom of an apartment dweller, under some junk in an antique store, and a utility hallway. The worst though, is the Hellfire Boltcaster, which is hidden in a small room only accessable by jumping over to a small ledge in an area you don't have much inclination to be in anyway (it frigging off one faction to the point of sending assassins if you complete the objective there.)
- 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:
- Pregzt, the final boss. What in the game hints at burning him with the lamp?
- Nothing in the game, but the instruction manual has specific directions for what to do, only written backwards, i.e. eert eht fo retnec eht ta ti worht dna pmal eht thgiL. Guide Dang It, indeed, because most people ignore PC game instruction manuals outright, if they got one with the game at all.
- 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.
- When I'm in a KoL mood and can't actually play the game, I've found that hitting the 'Random Article' link on the game's fan-wiki is an enlightening thing to do. The articles fall into three categories: obsolete content I can't get to, rare content that I'd have to spend a lot of cash to attain, and content that has been under my nose the whole time and didn't realize it. Guess which category has the most?
- Of course, there's a strict rule that any time anyone gives out a spoiler to a secret word for the Strange Leaflet Quest, that word becomes invalid. The only hint (on the wiki, not in the actual game) is that the words you're looking for are Shout Outs to old text adventure games.
- Let's not forget the Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot familiar, the recipe for which was supposed to be a fun spading project, but which was reportedly discovered by having a test account buy eight of every item in the game and seeing what got consumed upon making it.
- 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).
- The hint book was also a moment of Fridge Brilliance. The book gives you a full walkthrough for Space Quest 4. But due to time travel, you are in the time of Space Quest 12 and 10 for the majority of the game. You leave Space Quest 4 in the intro cutscene and don't return until the end credits. Genius.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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. 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, then think o the fairy tale. 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.
- Kings Quest II. There's a poisonous snake blocking your path. Get too close, and it will bite you and kill you. So how do you get past? You put a bridle on the snake, and it turns into a flying horse. Naturally.
- No, by far the worst Guide Dang It is in "Simon the Sorcerer 3D". The game is full of moments like that, but the final puzzle is just unforgettable. You're in front of a huge computer, and you must put a CD there. The problem is that the computer has no button to open the CD space. So, what to do? Oh, easy: just stand in front of the computer with the CD on your hand, and then open the CD space of your REAL-LIFE COMPUTER, so that the in-game computer opens. No previous hints at any point.
- Climbing. What the fuck. There's a point that requires you to climb a rock. It could have been much easier if you were told at some point that you're able to climb in that game. During the tutorial you're explained everything (and I mean everything) you can do there but the only thing you really should have been explained.
- Actually the manual tells it, but there's no in-game explaination. Besides, considering that's the only time on the whole game where you can actually climb (except from another rock in the very first room, but it's pointless to climb there, so most people will finish the game without knowing they could climb there) they could even believe it was a dropped-out game resource.
- Obscure Sierra adventure game Gold Rush. Let's start with the fact that the opening is a Timed Mission and certain areas make the game Unwinnable if you spent too much time in the game. Then combine it with Trial And Error Gameplay (on the "Land" route, at least). and then throw in a puzzle that requires you to not only have switched a mule you just bought for another one you have no reason to search for in the first place but also have picked up a family picture (that you have no indication you can take) in your house at the start of the game before selling it and you have headaches WAITING to happen.
- In The Labyrinth of Time, most of the game is standard point and click adventure, but at one point in the game in order to progress you need to move through a "Surreal Maze," which was a repeating room that could only be escaped by going through the exact right path. Very much like the Wind Fish's Egg in Link's Awakening. The only problem? Unlike Link's Awakening, there is NO point in the game in which you told this path. Even worse is the fact that there's no pattern to the solution either that you could conceivably guess; it's a COMPLETELY random sequence of paths, and there is NO WAY to finish the game without doing this maze.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Many puzzles in the Tomb Raider series, particularly the Puzzle Boss fights.
- One of the most egregious examples was in the very first game. Most of the "secrets" were stashed in hard to spot but easy to reach areas, or were sitting obviously on ledges the route to which were difficult to see. Towards the end of the game, however, was one that was nigh on impossible to see because it was floating in the air on an invisible platform (the one and only single solitary invisible platform in the entire game), and required a massive leap of faith in exactly the right direction to reach.
- 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. Who knew you had to pick up a metal bar, and then sharpen it on the spinning, rubberless wheel of a suspended car? 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.
- 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.
- Better yet, the screens line up differently on the DS lite, so the puzzle doesn't even work.
- 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.)
- 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.
- 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.
- On the same level, you need to find a certain point (possibly the same one, I can't remember) and spray water at the moon. Both of these are hinted at by villagers, but still.
- The puzzles in Limbo Of The Lost were the final nail on the coffin for the game, 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.
- 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).
- 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.
- And really, this is one of many, many situations in KGB where the puzzles range from extreme difficulty to borderline impossible without third-party intervention. Two examples of this are the coded messages that player receives at the beginning of Chapter 1, and the end of Chapter 2. By the time you get to the end of the game, progress is dependent entirely upon trial-and-error. Aside from Dagger Of Amon Ra, I consider this to be one of, if not the hardest adventure game of all time.
- 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!!
- Infocom's 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...
- 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!
- 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.
- 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 an 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?
- You're leaving out that you can find more than one bottle of said potion; it's marked "Bottle2" and it's the one described as being "impossibly light."
- And once you get across said bridge you see a statue of a snake, so what's the logical thing to do? Why point a random wand you found at it. Obviously.
- 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?
- Actually this only cuts off one path, you can still go around another way, it is just inconvenient. Still stupid though.
- 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.
- 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?
- This review mentions these things a lot.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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).
- Getting the Last Lousy Point for 102% completion in Donkey Kong Country 2. Made much worse when you actually play with a list of every bonus game and DK coin's location, because the last percent comes from visiting the colleges in each world that has one. Most people tear their hair out trying to speedrun 102% completion because their level-by-level guides turn out to only get them 101%.
- 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.
- A strategy guide for Super Mario Bros. 3 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.
- The Chick Coins, and some of the rarer eggs in Billy Hatcher And The Giant Egg. For example: The 'Super Recky' egg requires you to hatch either a particular item (the Booster), or a particular mount (Datch) in a particular level in Blizzard Castle, and then fly to a location which would not be thought of as acsessable (the second outer level of the Ice-Machine Castle). Another example would be where you have to jump around a gate, in order to get to a coin. This is never hinted at anywhere, and isn't that likely to be thought about, seeing as (a) gates are generally impassable until opened, and (b) it's in the second stage of the first level, whilst the game is still in 'Easing Into the Adventure' mode.
- 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.
- Some of the Lost and Found items in Flower Sun And Rain are pretty straightforward. 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 restaurant, 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 the alcoholic concentration of the drink, that for someone without enough chemistry knowledge would be indistinguishable from temperature. Try guessing that without looking it up.
- In Indiana Jones and the Fate Of Atlantis, one of the first puzzles you face is trying to get past an obnoxious bouncer to interrupt your colleague's speech. You can either talk your way past him, knock him out, or stack some boxes and climb through the window. What is not apparent is that your choice here completely changes the storyline of the game (which tailors itself to the solution you chose), and since most Adventure gamers are conditioned to assume that the first solution that works is the only solution that will, many players missed out on 2/3rds of the game.
- That's not quite true. The actual branching point comes later, once you've found the Lost Dialogue. The path Sophia suggests depends on how you got past the bouncer, but you can still pick any of the three paths at that point. However, it's not apparent that that conversation is so vital.
- Douglas Adams's Bureacracy, in some very bizarre manner, makes some amount of sense with most if its puzzles to start with (a parrot missing its left wing will become very excited upon seeing a painting of Ronald Reagan— think about it). However, when you get to the airport, the game requires you to climb one of the structure poles and crawl into the air ducts, and what happens when you leave the air ducts is bizarre, to say the very least. There is no indication at any point that you can do this, no sane person ever would, and this only marks the beginning of the puzzles making no lick of sense.
- Quake II has many secrets hidden behind nondescript walls that must be shot, with no hints whatsoever. A bane to those looking for the Last Lousy Point.
- Either a Guide Dang It or a fond memory, the loot in Thief The Dark Project and its sequel could be fiendishly hard to find. For example, in the first mission of the second game, there are three coins hidden on a trompe l'oeil ledge in a stairway. You can't see the ledge moving up the stairway, and unless you have ninja eyes, you won't glimpse it coming down either, since the staircase is dark. The only way to get them is to move halfway up, stop midway, and turn around.
- Dark Cloud 2 has a special shop that lets you trade in medals you earn from challenges and buy specialty clothing and Name Change Tickets with them - the latter of which simply lets you rename a weapon you have. Oh, what's that? Renaming a weapon the same, case-sensitive name as another weapon changes it into that weapon? How was I supposed to know these tickets weren't useless?
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.
- Or you saw the Character Tiers. Funky Kong, Rosalina, Baby Daisy, Daisy, Luigi, Toadette, Dry Bowser...
- There are keys that unlock the bonus mini-games in each of the first four worlds of Diddy Kong Racing. The first one's out in the open, but the other three are in such ridiculous places that you pretty much have to look in a guide to find them (one word: drawbridge). To make matters worse, you have to beat all four mini-games in order to face the final boss! Gah!
- 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.
- Some of the Wanderer opponents in the Shutokou Battle series (known as Tokyo Xtreme Racer and Import Tuner Challenge outside of Japan) have requirements that are hinted at in their profiles, and finding the rest is absolute guesswork.
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.
- Note that there is actually a way to get the coordinates in-game: if you try to get Fwiffo to tell you the coordinates of the Spathi homeworld by threatening him, he will lie and send you to the planet where the creature can be found. However, the player has absolutely no reason to do so, since Fwiffo has already told you how to find his homeworld, so it's still a considerable Guide Dang It.
- 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.
- One of the best examples is thus: It's possible to unlock five items, three of which are among the best equippable parts in the game, one of which is a highly versatile melee weapon, and one of which is one of the most powerful melee weapons in the entire game. The opportunity to do comes on Mission 15, which is about a third/quarter way through the game, making this secret very much a Disc One Nuke. All you have to do is take out three enemies instead of running away like the mission objective says you should. Sound easy? The three enemies are end-game-level bosses, they do not have reduced stats, and you have a total of four units for the entire mission. It's possible, even fairly simple once you figure out the trick, but most players won't realize that when faced with three enemies capable of one-shotting anyone they choose and told to head for the hills.
- Company Of Heroes and the Dawn Of War series leave mentioning many things out of the game, to varying degrees of obviousness. For Company Of Heroes, there's the 'Elite Armour' for certain infantry and for certain infantry to gain - it makes them be harder to hit and take less damage from most bullets, but always be hit by sniper fire and take more damage from flames. One would have a hard time realizing what infantry have this and what it does without looking into the Meta Game. Retreating in Dawn Of War 2 is similar - doing so makes units run away back to their base, gradually getting fast and taking less damage from ranged attacks, but taken extra from melee. There is no indication anywhere why your units run through tons of ranged fire and survive, but get torn a new arse from melee attacks while retreating. And many units not made for melee get torn apart from melee units almost as fast anyway, so you'd also have a hard time to figure it out without going to the Meta Game also.
- 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.
- Another good example is Ilyana. A lonely little thunder mage in the top left corner of the map, with no indicator, prior battle conversation, base conversation, or anything to hint at her arrival. You have to talk to her with Ike. However, Path of Radiance will show you what character can talk to enemies without attacking them on the party status screen.
- So except for her and the below, you know who to bring into your party for those conversations, and whenever that's a character you never use, the new recruit will often be a good replacement. (see Haar from Path of Radiance)
- 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.
- Speaking of that, a Motive Rant for the Big Bad of Path of Radiance 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.
- Seisen no Keifu 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?!
- Fuuin no Tsurugi 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?
- Well, the Paladin was known to be an Etrurian general, not a Bernian (Bernan? Bernese?), and the bard is the supposedly dead prince of Etruria, who had merely faked his death. However, the bard you speak of is only recruited on one of the two routes, which is generally considered to be the less desirable one. The dancer that you receive instead on the other path is not royalty, which makes it less intuitive that she would also be able to recruit said paladin (she can).
- Fuuin no Tsurugi also had the path to Ilia vs. the path to Sacae, which is based on the levels of certain non-essential characters, as well as the slightly non-intuitive methods used to enter the Gaiden Chapters in which the legendary weapons are found. These range from the easy (Chapter 8x has no turn requirement, only that Lilina survives the chapter) to the arcane (Chapter 20x, the last chapter of the Ilia/Sacae split requires you to complete chapter 20 in 25 turns while recruiting the unit that can be obtained there and all earlier characters related to that character must also still be alive and recruited) to the absolutely infuriating (Chapter 16x requires an enemy unit that can't be recruited during the chapter to survive Chapter 16; said enemy will automatically join you at the start of 16x and must be used in said Gaiden Chapter.) And you must get all eight legendary weapons (and the Holy Maiden staff) and not have used up any of them (the staff, in particular, has only three uses), plus keep a certain unit alive, in order for the game to continue past Chapter 22.
- 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.
- And since we're on the subject, in Dual Strike, there's also the Oozium, with the exact same weakness to machine guns, which wouldn't fall under this due to actually making more sense (it's slime), if not for that when you first encounter it, you have a Megatank to use to attack it, and when you have it attack the Oozium, it does only 45%—with cannons despite its 125% to the Medium Tank. (Although afterwards, there's a level full of it. So you're at least supposed to learn how to kill it. As if there's any point for competitive play.)
- 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.
- 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.
- FFT's PSP remake had the "Agria's Birthday" sidequest. you have to have Agrias and Mustadio in your party, which most people will...but you also have to have kept the two generic knights that joined with Agrias, and THEN go to a certain city during a certain month...WHILE you have at least a half a million gil in your inventory. Screw this up and you miss out on a redonkulously powerful accesory.
- 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.
- Speaking of Disgaea, to find Etna's Journal in the PS 2 version, you had to flip two switches there were no indication existed, then examine a random corner with no indication that there was anything special about it — although all you miss out on by not finding it is a different perspective on the story and a rare item towards the end of the game. The remakes each make it a bit easier to discover, along with making it unlock an alternate storyline once you complete the game — in the PSP version, a Prinny is added near the corner you have to examine, commenting that there's a draft. The DS version also has the Prinny, and further adds notification balloons when you're near something you can interact with, making it easier to stumble across the switches by chance.
- The Variable Sword in Mega Man Battle Network looks like a regular Sword with 160 power. However, by inputting button combinations that the game 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, 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 combination 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.
- 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...
- Shining Force has 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.
- Shining Force III saw you play over three chapters, each a different game, with interchangeable characters. Items are traded between them allowing access to characters, bosses and enemies are recruitable depending on what you did to them in battle and then there is the whole finding hidden characters throughout the game; one of which is found by buying a random egg and hatching it much later in the game with a chicken that appears at some arbitrary moment in your HQ. Oh and some hidden characters you find will disappear only to re-appear in other chapters.
- Oh and those damn stones just before the tower of illusion. They stopped me from completeing the game for over 5 years.
- Shining Force II actually has a part where you are supposed to manually "use" an item to insert a slab into a tree. While this sounds easy, and the game makes it clear that this is your objective, it's actually somewhat confusing due to controls. While the player mostly uses the Genesis "C" button for most of the game to open the inventory screen, pressing "C" against this tree only opens a dialogue box. You must use the other button with a similar function, the "A" button against the tree, ensuring that you open your inventory and not "talk" to the tree. At no other point in the game are you forced to differentiate between the two buttons.
- Later versions of Dwarf Fortress are just about unplayable without recourse to the game's extensive wiki.
- Dwarf Fortress can only be included here for definitions of Guide Dang It that presume it should be possible to beat a game without even reading the manual (a purpose that the wiki fulfills). Dwarf Fortress does, in fact, have an in-game help file, which can be accessed by pressing the question mark key. Hilariously, there are only two ways to figure this out: by reading the wiki, or by accidentally hitting "?" when you were trying to type ">".
- 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.
- Turns out to involve a Luck Based Mission. But there is a more brutal Guide Dang It, which even badly hits a non-completionist player, in the first Battalion Wars: the Y button's use in commanded units' AI. Units in Follow mode will be far from active in attacking as opposed to in Wait mode where they will actively attack enemy units. However, using the Y button to specify a location for (a) unit(s) to move to will have the unit(s) attack anything that they get near enough actively. The game never suggesting about this may be part of why X-Day is regarded as a Scrappy Level (directing the units to inside the Artillery's range would stop the units from being hammered and have them attack the infantry support), and this causes a massive difficulty gap for Road to Xylvania as well, due to the AA Vets otherwise refusing to actively attack the respawning four Gunships.
- Front Mission 3 has two completely different story arcs. How do you choose between one or the other? You choose to either go or not go with a character to a location. This happens right after the games first mission. The kick? One arc leads to the bad ending, the other to the good, and I believe one is MUCH more difficult than the other.
- Game Boy Wars 3 has a few medals as this. Granted, the game gives you no hints as to how to obtain any of them, but these are the ones that definitely fall into the trope:
- The Honorable Wounded Prize - lose a battle in Campaign. This is clearly a case of Do Well But Not Perfect.
- The Excellence Prize - clear all 45 Campaign maps in 54 battles. For starters, this automatically qualifies it as a Lost Forever. This is actually intended to keep players from Level Grinding on early maps and having a bunch of promoted units to work with—not that it will help much on the harder levels. However, it's particularly bad because in order to unlock certain maps without repeating others, you must clear certain maps slowly. Which maps you'd have to clear quickly or slowly is its own Guide Dang It too.
- The 2 Engineer Medals - you must build certain terrain a certain number of times. This terrain must count as man-made and strengthening properties does not count toward this.
- The All Unit Medal - you know how bad a Guide Dang It this is when even the maintainer of Game Boy Wars Network hasn't obtained it and must only even know of its existence due to hacking on somebody's part. It is possibly done by building all 51 units due to cheat search results, but can't be sure with a Japan-only Revenue Enhancing Device being required for the mercenary units.
- Possibly the Reaper Medal (deny White Moon from surrendering 10 times).
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?
- 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.
- Though for those who don't know, this is the entire point of the game.
- 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.
- 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 nearly 2 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. And these two are actually the easiest stars to get.
- Of course, performing all tedious, time-consuming steps to acquire the hidden stars unlocks the bad ending. Since 'Braid' is an artsy game about the nature of obsession, this is strangely appropriate.
- freeware indie games are in no way exempt from this. Braid may be one example, but at least the Guide Dang Its 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)
- In the Point and Click game of Blazing Dragons had you stuck until a dodo delivered a message. Problem was that the dodo was being shot at by a hunter (who thankfully went to a certain academy). The solution was to backtrack all the way back to the second room you probably visited and to stamp a dodo on the endangered species list. Afterwards the hunter is arrested.
- The Da Vinci Code game has a ridiculously frustrating puzzle in the third level where you have to light up a pentagram using fire. Sounds easy, right? Not when you realize that there aren't any clues telling you what order to light the points of the star.
Simulation Games
- The Harvest Moon series is riddled with this sort of thing. While it generally only smacks those going for secrets or 100% completion, there are several instances where normal players are frustrated.
- In the series as a whole, triggering certain cut scenes (needed to marry characters or unlock new features) are a matter of being in the right place at the right time - and sometimes under the right conditions and with the right item equipped. (Ex: Elli's Yellow Heart event in Friends Of Mineral Town can only be triggered on a sunny Wednesday on Mineral Beach between 9 AM and 10:30 AM)
- An egregious one is unlocking the first Hot Springs in HM DS. You need to view Flora's Yellow Heart scene to get it. If you haven't seen it before you marry someone else or she marries Carter, it's Lost Forever.
- 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.
- Also in Io H, getting the fishing pole from Taro can be an exercise in frustration. First of all, there's no hint that you get the pole from him. Secondly, if you try to give him gifts right away to raise his friendship levels, he won't take them. It turns out you have to raise his levels at first by talking to him every for three to five days straight. And if you try to give him a gift before he's ready to accept... the "counter" resets and you have to start with the talking all over again. Getting the dog from Mirabelle and the horse from Chen are similarly frustrating.
- Then there's littering in HM DS. In the other games of the series, littering (throwing objects away outside of your property, and not into a trash can) causes a dip in friendship levels for the entire cast (How can they tell?). In DS, not only does littering on your own property count, but the penalties are insanely high. Littering twice in one day can literally knock your love interest's Heart Level down one entire color.
- There's also Cursed Tools in HM DS and (More) Friends: Not only how to get them (Randomly on certain mine floors, and only after you've upgraded your standard tools to their maximum) but how to remove the curses permanently (once you equip a curse tool, you can't unequip it until you have Pastor Carter release the curse). In DS, it's a matter of money. In (More) Friends there are three different ways to break the curse: leave equipped for 30 days, Bless 10 times, use 255 times without unequipping. The game doesn't tell you this, nor which method corresponds to which of the six tools.
- In the Animal Crossing series, finding every bug and fish is almost impossible without a guide, since all bugs and fish are catchable at specific dates and times, and you never know if you got all of them for a specific month (since some are very rare, and some fish shadows look a lot like other fish's shadows)
- 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 apparently well aware that there players would almost certainly immediately search on the internet for any cheat codes should any either exist or become necessary, 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 losing points, vary from giving a particular character better stats (increasing their physical, charm or intellect, or giving them personality traits such as "amorous", "chaste", "drinker", etc) to things like giving everyone giant heads or instantly giving all the women giant breast implants.
- The Princess Maker games, and their Western sister series, Cute Knight, generally have a number of normal endings that are fairly easy to get by playing the game normally, a handful of straightforward special endings ... then a few special endings that you're unlikely to figure out exist without looking them up in a guide, let alone figure out how to get them.
- In Westward IV from Sandlot (yes, it's a series), to unlock the fourth crop type, you need to irrigate and farm in a space that also includes a visible mine site, even though there is plenty of area that does not require irrigation. A farmer will eventually tell you that there are traces of peas, so you can then add variety to your radishes (the basic!), tomatoes, and corn. Talk about improbable actions!
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 all five games, 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.
- 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.
- Tsukihime: just try to get the second Shakes and Shivers Animal Land Bad End without someone telling you how. Typographic symbol
It requires being in Ciel's route when Nvnqusr attacks without getting the ring, which basically means Arcueid's route yet with more relationship points with Ciel at that point. To do so you need to meet Ciel all three times on the first day and not on the second to get three relationship points before killing Arcueid (max possible without getting the ring automatically), choosing "it's a dream" so the cap is of 4 points instead of 2, refuse to help Arcueid but not run and escape but turning back (not turning back gets a bad end, running earlier makes impossible to avoid it) so we have only two relationship points with her (we get three automatically at the begining of Near Side routes, agreeing to help increases relationship and getting out of the hotel at that point is the only way to decrease it until then), and then going outside the room to avoid the first S&SAL. Bonus points because the staff needed a Flow Chart to get it, as said in Kagetsu Tohya.
Game Guides
- 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 to.
- For an older Final Fantasy example take Final Fantasy IX, the guide for which required you to go to the website and enter a keyword for certain information. This was made even worse when the online portion of the guide was later TAKEN OFFLINE.
- 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.
- Don't forget the 'Spray tag the gang signs', which are completely messed up. (Don't go by the eye-straining photographs they give, sometimes a beige tag will be on a beige wall and thus blend in).
- 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.
- Not only that, but the guide even shows the Trading Card picture of the final boss, and makes the claim that it is "A benevolent creature living in the clouds high above Shiver Star." Which is, of course, an outright lie.
- The game does contain one Guide Dang It moment when it breaks its own hint convention. Most of the puzzles in the game can be solved by combining powers in accordance with the color of the wall you want to break. For example, if you see a wall that is yellow and red, you know you need to combine Spark and Fire (whose symbols are yellow and red respectively). Somewhere in Neo Star there is a brownish rock on the floor that you need to break. The Rock power symbol is brown, but no rock combinations will break it. The solution? Combine ice with bomb (blue/black symbol). Because the rock is in a fiery area. Okay.
- 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).
- Brady's guide for Final Fantasy VII PC, even though the rest of it is blatantly copy-pasted from the PSX guide (except screenshots are now from the PC version and the maps are now incoveniently in the back), it omits the strategy for Safer-Sephiroth, telling the player to "use what you've learned so far" (if I bought the guide, I didn't do it for basic gameplay explanations, I bought it so I get directions to do stuff!) and directing them to the website if they have trouble. It's just lazy when you consider that they copy-pasted everything else.
- The guide released for the Anthologies version of Final Fantasy V was odd in that it gave instructions on how to beat bosses that were technically viable but still absolutely useless. Instead of giving general tips for a variety of party types to beat a given boss (which you'd expect, since the whole point of the gameplay system is to customize your characters), the guide gave you "tips" like, "Okay, first have everyone master the Ninja job, then switch to Dragoon and have everyone dual wield the best spears in the game." Essentially, the guide was written either for or by munchkins.
- 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.
- Prima's Pokemon Diamond and Pearl guide was terrible. Being a Pokemon strategy guide, you'd expect them to have a list of all the Pokemon in the back of the guide, right? Well, they did: all 150 Pokemon in the Sinnoh Dex only. That's only the tip of the iceberg.
- You think that's bad? The official one from NINTENDO (which, may I remind you, MADE the games) lists the name, number, Abilities, and locations of Sinnoh's 150 Pokemon. And nothing else. No list of levelup moves, Egg moves, or compatible H Ms.
- And to address all this, they have a second book, the "Pokédex" which has the entire amount of Pokemon, with everything that's not in the original guide. They even have a route-by-route breakdown of where everything can be found, and a post-game guide detailing the Battle tower area. But that's more like One Guide For The Price Of Two.
- Prima's guide for Mario And Luigi Superstar Saga details how you need to get the GameBoy Horror SP before fighting the Pirahna Bean boss to get a rare piece of equipment. They give you general locations of a few Invisible Blocks containing Hoo Beans needed to get the item beforehand. However, they don't give you the exact details for finding them because, and I quote, "it takes the fun out of finding them all for yourself," which is probably why you BOUGHT the damn guide in the first place. Oh, and the guide doesn't have any maps, instead going for a "higher-quality" version of the in-game maps.
- Furthermore, the guide leaves out several locations of Hoo Beans, to the point of not showing enough to get the Piranha Suit. Luckily, this forum post details the locations of all of the hidden Hoo Bean blocks, including the ones the guide left out.
- The Official Nintendo Guide for Animal Crossing:Wild World blantantly omits the entire Nintendo Set, which includes the Master Sword, Triforce, Arwing, and Metroid. In fact, that guide is chock-full of errors.
- In an infamous example, the official guide packaged with Earthbound stated that the Gutsy Bat, Ness's ultimate weapon, was dropped by Kraken. This weapon, like several other pieces of ultimate equipment, were dropped by specific creatures at a 1/128 rate. Unfortunately, the game features both Krakens and Bionic Krakens. The Bionic Krakens actually drop the Gutsy Bat, while the regular Krakens do not. Adding insult to injury, regular Krakens are only encountered at the very end of Magicant, so if you attempted to obtain this on console with the official guide's advice, you could spend 30-45 minutes to kill 3 of them...and they never respawn unless you reset and redo the entire dungeon.
- The Earthbound guide further stated that the "Broken Parabolic" item could be repaired into Jeff's ultimate weapon, but did not specify where to obtain it. The end guide item tables vaguely suggested that it was found in a treasure box (it was not). Not only did the actual item drop from a fairly difficult enemy (another 1/128 chance, and the enemy caused explosion damage on defeat, every time), but it was actually called the Broken Antenna. The official guide for this game had quite a few other minor errors both in text and photos, due largely to the fact that writing began while the game was in beta.
- Prima's guide for Dragon Age: Origins has several glaring flaws. Among these are absolutely no information on the companion sidequests aside from small snippets in each character bio, at least one falsehood. (It claims that Sten will abandon you if you defeat him in a duel at Haven, when in fact it actually raises your approval with him), and leaves some key details about certain quests out. (For example, nowhere does it say that its possible to make Wynne immediately hostile if you bring Morrigan along for the Circle Tower quest.) On the plus side, the guide's data tables for talents and items are decent enough.
- Prima's guide for Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation repeatedly tells you to use the revolver and laser sight to take out skeletons in the Coastal Ruins and Catacombs, while forgetting that you don't actually get the revolver until the first Cairo level, City of the Dead. Apparently Prima used the All Guns cheat to write their guide.
Other
- The finished but still-current Neopets 'plot' quest called Altador is absolutely impossible without using a guide: Some of the requirements make you click A SINGLE PIXEL in an image which it was never specified to do so, and go to locations in a certain order which seemingly had absolutely nothing to do with the plot. Some of the 'puzzle' varieties in the games consisted of pressing switches in the right combination— for the second-last combination puzzle, there were over 1,000 possible combinations and you had to try every single one. All this for some measly items per day while the plot is still relevant, which don't even amount to much cash right now (but will in, say, 10 years) so it's useless to most players of the game.
- Not to mention when you had to take care of the sick petpet you found, which requires pressing a certain action for according facial expressions of the pet at the exact time the clock changes on a correct clock— ten times. If you made a mistake and didn't know, you would never know you made one and could've possibly been trying for hours. The fact that you must only press an action at the exact time the clock is :00 minutes was never specified, let alone which actions correspond to which facial expressions. A true example of this trope indeed.
- Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games falls very mildly to this trope, but it's susceptible all the same. One of Peach's missions requires her to perform a shout in the hammer throw three consecutive times, which nothing in the game or the guide tells you how to do even once. On the plus side, learning how to do it tends to give you extra distance.
- 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.One such 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).
- For another 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.
- 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. 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.
- There is 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, it is loot after all), 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.
- 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.
- Pretty standard for most fighting games. Particularly when it comes to seeing divergent endings, unlocking secret characters or battling the True Final Boss. And then there all those unpublished move lists, with Mortal Kombat's whatever-alities being the king of this trope. The DBZ: Budokai series and it's successors are fond of this.
- Unintentional example in the Bleach DS fighting game series. Money can be unlocked using three passwords that are written on the touch screen, which in the second game are either an open jar, a pawprint, or a poorly drawn rabbit. For people outside of Japan, there's no way of knowing what the password is, as it was in a Japanese magazine exclusive. Furthermore, the game reads the markings on the screen with an incredible lack of accuracy. However, making random scribbles will actually count as having the password before even drawing it.
- Soul Calibur 3 has forking paths in the story mode in the form of a choose your own adventure style story. There is exactly one path each character can take to see the true ending, the paths are not all the same between characters, and there is no way to know what path it is unless someone's already done it. Furthermore, each fight gets progressively harder as The Computer Is A Cheating Bastard, which makes the following two stipulations, also entirely unstated, near impossible: You cannot lose, at all. You can have a maximum of one ring-out for the entire story. Make even one mistake on the path and you have to start all over.
- Actually, that's partly false - there's exactly two fights you are not allowed to perform a ring-out victory on: the one that leads you into the dungeon that leads to Olcadan, and Night Terror (who cannot be defeated by ring-out anyways). you can ring every other person out and still get it. You can also lose when fighting Night Terror, but not before.
- in the MSX version of Salamander, if you want the good ending you have to have a number of secret items PLUS a copy of Nemesis II (another game in the series) in the second cartridge slot...God help you if the MSX you're playing on doesn't HAVE a second cartridge slot. also, you have to go through a secret level that's...well, Temperamental on anything but a MSX 1.
- 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 ''Final Fantasy VIII' 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!
- 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.
- Soul Calibur IV Tower of Lost Souls mode. I know, you would think that you could complete all of the hidden requirements without needing a guide, right? However the clues are so vague, and can apply to so much, that if you want all of the hidden items, you're better off 1) buying the guide, or 2) buying the items as DLC. Examples of such vague clues are "Use your ultimate attack without hesitation." If I didn't read from the guide that this means to critical finish everyone on the stage, confusing because a CF isn't really an attack in and of itself, I would probably never ever figure this out. What is my ultimate attack anyway: unblockables, just frames, the attack that does the most damage, the critical finish? Then there are the clues that, even if you know what they mean, not much help is given in understanding how to accomplish them. Two clues on the same stage are "Become a shield to repel the blade," and "The best offense is a good defense." These mean that you should block 3 and 10 consecutive attacks respectively. There is no way that anyone would know how long to perform the required actions unless they were looking at the guide, as opposed to some other random amount. Furthermore, on the last clue, the end boss has a habit of doing everything he can to prevent you from fulfilling this goal, which is all the more frustrating because it's dependent on something the opponent does instead of you. Only in the last 10 seconds (out of 250) of the match do you really have any chance of fulfilling the requirements, due to the computer going berzerk.
- Rumble Roses XX. There's a lot of Guide Dang It in this game, ranging from merely annoying to complete progress stopping, and most reviewers have already caught it all, so I'll just go over the big ones. Title Matches: you would think that in order to get a title match, all you'd have to do is to fight so many people and win so many times until you get a shot at the belt. Unfortunately in this game it doesn't quite work like that: there are a few basic rules to getting title matches, but most title matches require that you're fight certain characters with other characters, with certain people either on or off your tag team. Unlocking Characters: see Title Matches. In order to get certain characters, you're generally going to need to get title matches against them. For some characters, this is as easy as just beating up on people until you get your shot, however for most characters it involves having title matches as certain characters against certain characters. If one wanted character Y as a playable character, it isn't enough to play a title match against them, you have to be playing a title match against them as character Z. Not to mention there's the characters where you have to win X matches against them or LOSE X matches against them to get said character. And in the whole game, there's nothing like a hint system, a meter, or even in game dialog to let you know how close you're getting to your goal. Even the old arcade game Wrestlemania told you how many more matches you had until your title shots. Here you could conceivably fight and beat a hundred people and never get a title shot because you aren't fighting with the right tag partner in the right outfit and you didn't beat the right person the right amount of times. The character strength and flexiblity system may as well not exist. Basically, when you add muscle, you get less flexible and submissions do more damage. You get more flexible by escaping from submissions, which lessens the damage you take from those holds, however the damage system is so iffy in this game: rather than start out at 100 for optimum health and go down to zero for no health, damage gauges start out at around 50, and go up to 120+. Characters don't have visible stats or anything: beyond going up to each character in 2 player mode, and doing moves to random body parts until the numbers won't go up anymore, you have no way of knowing where or what a character's damage limit is. Nor is there a gauge or any set system for determining how flexible you are. You might be at 10% of your maximum flexibility, 80%, 100%, and you would never know, because there is nothing that indicates otherwise.
- And then there's Solaris. It was a fun little shooter for the Atari 2600, had amazing graphics for it's day, a couple of you might remember it: you flew a little triangle in levels that looked to be psuedo 3d, in a 3rd person view. Considering that virtually all other home shooters at the time were top down or side on, this was amazing. Anyway, this game actually had an ending. Yes, someone actually BEAT this game, and it IS beatable. They had to hack the ROM to do it, and then write down all of the grids they went to and the time they did, but they did beat the game. Guide is here.
- Looking to score high in the Raiden Fighters series? Then you'll need to know where all the hidden Micluses are, as they release medals that can make or break your score. Uncovering some are as simple (to put it very nicely) as hovering in a particular spot, and uncovering others requires destroying enemies in a particular order or way. There's no in-game hints pointing towards where to find any of them.
- Revolution X, an arcade rail shooter game from 1994 is guilty of this. There's special items you can get called "Wings", which you get when you find a member of Aerosmith. You want to get these because not only do you get a score multiplier at the end of every stage after you find Wings, but you also need to collect all five to get the game's best ending. And typically, the way you find them is you need to destroy parts of the stage to trigger a sequence to get them. Herein though lies the problem: due to the fact that nearly ANYTHING can be destroyed and also the fact that other actions NOT connected to destroying parts of the stage must be undertaken to find a member of Aerosmith (noting which way the screen scrolled so you can go the right direction, destroying something AND collecting the power-up), almost no one would get lucky and figure it out. The order of destroying certain parts of the stage also has to be done in a specific manner, or else you won't get to retrieve those Wings. It's especially frustrating because the FIRST STAGE has TWO Wings in it, and a first-time player would have no clue of their existence until they completed it.
- The NES version of Section Z, an early Capcom shoot em up originally released for the arcade, consists of three stages with 20 "sections" each. The game requires you to memorize the layout of each stage and know which teleporter will take you to which section in order to find the two power generators in each stage and destroy them in order to reach the stage boss. This isn't a hard task to do, since you have to manually map the game if you have trouble remembering the correct path. However, the paths to the final two generators are hidden in warp gates which you can only find by shooting at the exact spot where they're located. If you don't know where the warp gates are located, you will spent an eternity flying through various sections in circle finding nothing.
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 1 achieves Guide Dang It in the traditional ways by having some extremely obscure quest solutions, but also by virtue of how rudimentary the game's quest log is. It summarizes each active quest in as little detail as possible, often without indicating where you're supposed to travel. So if you don't pay close enough attention to a certain line of dialogue from the quest giver, or if you just plain forget what he said, you may be left with no choice but to either wander aimlessly around the map or look it up in a guide.
- Specific example: the Brotherhood initiation quest. The NPC initially gives you a hint of where to look, but once you're done talking to him there's no way to get a reminder of where to go.
- 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. 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, goddamnit 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.
- Plus, with the glasses, there is a large chance they have fallen onto the platform below where there are normally, making them glitched, and nearly impossible to get. if you want them, the method of getting them is complicated and involve going int third person mode, and then looking away from them, and hoping the "pick up glasses" prompt shows up... Or you get pile about 20 mines right next to it and blow them up.
- And the Bobbleheads- two of them are Lost Forever. One is in the tutorial area, but you come back there eventually for a bit, so you have two, and only two chances to get it. The other is in a way off place that you are in once, and in the area everone around you is hostile to you. Good luck.
- 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.
- Though this is pretty soundly averted by Zevran (if you're a male) in Dragon Age. Thorough testing seems to reveal that if you talk to him for influence it's near impossible for him not to hit on you. Leliana seems more "hidden," granted she's equally tough for males to get as well.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 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
- The worst is the "Compulsive" achievement, which requires to you collect every single item in the game. Wouldn't be so bad, since you can buy most and craft nearly all of them. A few, however, can only be crafted with certain ingredients that are only offered once. Even better? They only show up at the very beginning of the game and, because several are dropped in battle, the player might miss them in the confusion, assuming they appear at all.
- 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.
- 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 Vvardenfell.
- Even worse: "Multiple peices of Sanguine equipment" means twenty-seven (!) seperate magical items. A few are found during that mission or others factions quests, but this almost makes it worse. If you don't find out about it, you may have grabbed the gear and sold it (Sanguine items are not useful, despite having a rare effect) or simply passed the items by and left them on the dead bodies. They'll stay around - if you can ever find them again. Regardless, you'll have to ravage the land massacring every dungeon and NPC in order to find them all the "normal" way.
- 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.
- For another instance of this trope in Morrowind, one of the very early episodes of the main quest requires finding a "Dwemer puzzle box" in a ruin. While this is not a hard task per se, it is additionally obfuscated by having the box hidden in a part of the ruin sharing its name with a different and better-accessible part of the same ruin - so most players would only find the latter part and not even notice (on the map) that the former also exists. What doesn't make things easier is the fact that this is one of the very few riddles in an otherwise straightforward and not quite adventure-like RPG.
- 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.
- Mass Effect 2 has the game's final mission. Your actions throughout the game can result in several party members' deaths during this mission, up to and including Shepard him/herself. Obviously, the best result, the one everyone wants, is the one where everyone gets out alive. Thought doing all the party members' loyalty missions was enough? How about obtaining all the upgrades? How about choosing the "correct" people for their special roles during the mission? Admittedly, as of this writing, the game has been out for less than a week, but even so: no one has figured it out yet. There seems to be a widely-agreed-upon "best set" of choices, but even having picked those choices, people have reported seemingly completely random deaths. Oddly enough, no one seems to have figured out how to let Shepard die either.
- To let Shepard die, you have to get EVERY one of your other party members killed. That in itself is a Guide Dang It because in order to accomplish that, you have to intentionally skip upgrading your ship at all and skip all the loyalty missions. A speedrunner naturally accomplished that feat.
- In addition, in order to save your crew from the Collector base, you must begin the suicide mission immediately as it is available, otherwise they all get melted into a silvery goop. The fact that this is the one instance in the entire series that subverts Take Your Time will frustrate completionists who did not know about that contingency already.
- When Star Wars Galaxies was first released, Jedi characters had to be unlocked through specific in-game actions. The fans were displeased. Then the NGE changed that... and the fans were STILL displeased.
- Consider that the original version rewarded either balls-out grinding (to master EVERY skill set) or canny deduction and numerology (to figure out which ONE skill set to master). Making it stupid would certainly anger just about everybody.
- Might And Magic II requires you to go into a dungeon to retrieve King Kalohn's Element Orb. However, as long as the Orb is in your inventory, a magical barrier prevents you from leaving the area which, by the way, is also an anti-magic area preventing the use of teleportation spells. What you are supposed to do is to give the Orb to a hireling and dismiss him from the party. The hireling will then somehow find his way back to the last visited inn with the Orb still in his inventory. That's right; abusing game mechanics is the intended solution to this puzzle.
- It's been ages since I played the game, so I'm not sure if I even remember the name correctly, but Centauri Alliance (I played on an Apple I Ie) had a final puzzle that fit this trope. I found (and reassembled) the Mc Guffin, handed it to the character most likely to be able to use it, found what I thought was the proper location...nothing. I found out a decade or so later that, not only had I given the Mc Guffin to the wrong character (the race that only has one skill set ISN'T the one that can learn a new skill set?!?), but the "proper location" was actually two steps south of the descriptive text. Argh!
- Baldur's Gate 2: Shadows of Amn: During a paladin stronghold quest, you are required to guard a young lady (actually a rude, spoiled brat) from assassins until a relative comes to pick her up. When the relative finally shows up, the only way to ascertain he's not an impostor and thus finish the quest succesfully is to cast 'detect evil' in his presence. There is no hint given that you must do this, and the spell is never used anywhere else in the game, such that some players might have even forgotten they had it at this point...
- Well, it is useful for checking what enemies the area has.
- 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.
- To be fair, this was probably not intentional when the first game came out. By the second, there was still likely only a vague idea that they would use "sometime" in the future, somehow, someway.
- Diablo has the Spectral Elixir, a quest reward that boosts all max stats by 3? Awesome, right? Except that you have to drink it before saving the game, or else you can't use it due to a bug. However, you can drink it along with the newly acquired elixir if you start a new game and redo the quest for a second boost.
- World Of Warcraft: 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.
- 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 WoWWiki 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.
- 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.
- Blackrock Depths. This is just a pair of Guide Dang Its, but they're critical: the dungeon cannot be completed unless you get the Shadowforge Key and unlock the Shadowforge Lock with it. However, you can run half the dungeon without it, only to find yourself in a dead-end without explanation. There is never an indication you must have the key, nor where to get it, nor does anything tell you that you have to take a quest from a ghost outside the dungeon whom you can't even see unless you're dead and that you need to not kill a unique dwarf you're going to find before you have the quest, or a completely required item won't drop and the dungeon has to be reset. Later on you hit up a tavern with a locked back door, and indications you need a key to get through it, but there's no way to get it. How do you get through? Four ways: pickpocket the tavern owner and risk death when he finds out and everyone there attacks, kill someone to summon a guard patrol (which never happens anywhere else), do a quest for an NPC there that requires you leave the dungeon and fly around the world gathering bits, or give an otherwise normal looking dwarf several beers, at which point he'll smash the door down for no reason other than he wants to be drunker.
- The hacking game Uplink pretty much requires this guide to know exactly what tools that your character, a hacker, would need to avoid your character being 'retired''. Even with that knowledge, the game is Unwinnable unless you back up your save game files after every major hack. Sometimes, the server you just hacked can find you, even if you shut down all of the defenses and deleted all the logs that point to you being the hacker.
- The beginning tutorials of Gaia Online MMORPG zOMG! have been altered, edited, debugged, taken apart and reassembled, and generally changed so much that they no longer tell you much of how to play the game. Things like Ghi, suppressing your level to farm in lower-level areas, ring CL swap, and salvaging your spare rings for orbs all have to be explained in the forums.
JRPG
- Pretty much every Final Fantasy game is guilty of this.
- 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 Enix 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.
- In the DS release of Final Fantasy IV 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. The catch is, if you teach Augments to temporary party members, you are rewarded with more (better) 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?
- Final Fantasy V has an interesting variation on the premise. The main important information which the game doesn't tell you is what skills each class teaches, what they learn, and that the Freelancer and Mimic classes retain all passive skills learned from mastered classes. However, once a player has this information, it is to their detriment to figure out how to win fights from a strategy guide. Why? Because for any given encounter there's about a dozen different ways to win the battle, often more depending on how creative you get with skill combinations. All of a sudden a guide that says "learn Dual Wielding and master Dragoon" isn't so helpful when, alternatively, you can take advantage of the Bard's status-inflicting songs, use the "Mix" skill to give everyone in your party Giant potions, "Catch" a dangerous wild monster to deliver a mighty blow at the start of a boss fight...and it goes on from there.
- Final Fantasy VI has a "Cursed Shield" that inflicts nearly every status ailment in the game on the wearer. But if they survive 256 battles wearing the shield, it becomes uncursed and is now the best shield in the game
- You can also bet the shield at the Colosseum for a "Cursed Ring". Despite what logic tells you, the ring doesn't uncurse, and is plain useless.
- Speaking of the Colosseum, that's another Guide Dang It! The betting list is a total mystery, you have no idea what you can win by betting what. A lot of rare items can be won here, but they in turn require long chains of complex betting no one could figure out alone.
- 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.
- Getting the PuPu card in Final Fantasy VIII. Hints about some parts of the process are given in the game, but not all of it, and these hints are fairly obscure themselves. 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. 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.
- You can use the Card skill on him, but that would require knowing ahead of time that the point of the sidequest is to obtain his card.
- 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. The guide also doesn't tell you that there is a technique that allows you to skip the cutscenes completely, which certainly makes the time limit easier to cope with. (In fairness, the makers of the guide may not have realised this.)
- 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 small hint. Fortunately, by that time you'll also have various other means of dealing damage, as this only affects the Fight command, not Jump, Throw, Thievery or any other special attack.
- Hell, getting the first Excalibur is no picnic either. There's nothing at all that even hints at how you're supposed to find the MacGuffin a certain NPC wants (you have to buy four other MacGuffins and then sell them around town for it to even appear), and then you have to bid a king's ransom at the Auction House to buy it. Not fun.
- The most absolutely frustrating thing in Final Fantasy IX, though, is that you're never told at any time what items you need to synthesize the very best weapons and armor in Disks 3 and 4. On your first playthrough, be prepared to pull out some of your hair in frustration as you realize that, in order to forge the Grand Armor, you needed to keep those Mythril Swords and suits of Mythril Armor you got all the way back in Disk 2. Oh, and the Mythril Swords become Lost Forevers after you leave Treno for the first time. That's just one example, mind you...
- There's one scene in which you can perform a certain action, and it does nothing. You have to do it thirteen times in succession to reveal one of the secret items. Needless to say, there are no hints for this.
- 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 ITS existence.
- Also 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.
- The Chocobo race definitely deserves mentioning. You are required to finish with a time under 0:0:0. No sane gamer alive could reach such a conclusion without a guide.
- 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. And 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 have to 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.
- 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.
- Don't forget you have to watch all the spherecam clips until a certain point, even though it doesn't tell you this or for that matter tell how long you need to watch them for it to count...
- 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...
- For example, to obtain the useful unique armor for the Scholar class, you are told to find some random object. The name at best suggests a single zone to look in. Now, amongst the items you need to get, one only appears during certain weather, transporting between many spots in the zone each time it rains. Another only appears at certain times of the day. In addition, these objects (And the vast majority of quest items not dropped from monsters), do not actually appear on the map. Rather you must mash the tab button until a blank point on the ground gets highlighted (Labled as ???, just in case you might have thought to write down what you found and where you found it for later). Even with guides telling you where and when to look, it can still take hours.
- In Final Fantasy XII, obtaining the Zodiac Spear 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.
- It's a good thing (well, not for ''us'') that the Updated Rerelease made them controllable. Not sure why they weren't to begin with.
- 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.
- Lets not forget the very long side-quest that ends in you getting 1,000,000g for everyone currently in your party and to a lesser extent getting the ? chalice to even find the final boss, seeing as that actually has hints scattered about the random events.
- 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!
- 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.
- This file is a description of the tempering (Item Crafting) system in Legend of Mana. It's 160 kilobytes in size, and if your head doesn't explode before you grasp the basics, I salute you.
- LoM is a Guide Dang It in more ways than that. Its crafting system and pet raising are very deep. The game is a collection of 67 side quests. Some of these quests are dependent on the placement of artifacts on a carefully selected piece of the map, with a specific order, and the quests have to be done in the correct order. Some quests require that another quest is not completed or active. In other words, if you want to be able to do all 67 quests in one run, you're going to need a guide. It's next to impossible for a gamer to figure out a structure for the game without prior experience playing it and a lot of mathematics and brain wracking.
- Possibly the worst example of this is the quest "Rachel". It seems impossible to find a guide that knew for certain what the requirements for triggering this quest are.
- An infamous example occurs in Star Ocean: The Second Story, 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...
- There is in-fact a way to look at the Relationship Values in game using the Fortune Teller during the GoldenSaucer area of the game.
- One of the best examples of Guide Dang It- the extra content in Star Ocean 2. Unlocking the end-game dungeon requires the player to reach the very last save point of the game, return to the main world, and speak to an NPC who will send your character back to a game area that was destroyed. Who is this important NPC? A generic old man NPC sitting in a crowd of people in an arena's stands. And, once you get there, you have to know that it's on an island that was previously inaccessable without flight. It's kind of funny that the designers would spend so much effort on a very impressive end-game dungeon, equipment, and bosses, while leaving the means to reach it so vague and obscure.
- Star Ocean: Till the End of Time 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.
- Not to mention the whole business about your last 2 party members...
- Also this game probably gave the WORST directions possible when it told you where to go next; if it actually gave you directions. Best line ever "It's past the pointy rock!" EVERY ROCK IS POINTY DUE TO LOW POLYGON COUNTS! Thanks old lady...
- 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 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 Joshua 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.
- As for Chrono Cross, a big chunk of the characters rely on this, to say nothing of their level 7 techs...
- 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 Golden 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. Mind you, this is a game where almost all the playable characters do not matter to the main plot. In fact, if you know that there is a Golden Ending but nothing about how to reach it, getting rid of said character would be the exact opposite of what you would think should be done to reach that ending.
- 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?
- Duh. It's always a good time to max out your Sin meter, since it gets you the best items, and helps avoid having to deal with Hel's servants.
- 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.
- Suikoden II was even worse in this regard; you had to have all 108 characters before you launch the invasion of Rockaxe castle. If you did then during the cutscene when Gorudo orders his crossbowmen to open fire on your party and Jowy you're given an extra choice. You have to choose to shout "Nanami!" rather than "Look out!" causing you to step forward to protect Nanami from the arrows. Not only are you offered this conversation choice for less than a second in which time you have to read both options and choose the second, this does not actually affect the outcome of the scene and you get no clues that anything has changed. Then at the very end of the game after beating the final boss you have to choose to leave the new city state you founded and go to Tenzan Pass to meet Jowy, only unlike the normal version of this ending you have to persistantly refuse to fight him until Jowy collapses and Leknaat shows up and tells you what's going on. Trying to work that out without a FAQ is enough to break your mind.
- Not quite as bad as all that, but still pretty terrible: getting all 108 characters, for example, is usually the hardest part. You're not required to say "Nanami!" instead of "Look out!", you just have to choose one before the window disappears, and then, after the battle, there's is a one-line variation in one of the scenes that lets you know you succeeded. And then, at the end of the game, if you don't go to the specific place, you'll be reminded during the ending you get, and if you don't take the above-mentioned specific action, you weren't paying attention to what was said/have no soul.
- Even worse in Suikoden II was Clive's subquest. This was timed from the start of the game and ran on an absurdly fast timer, requiring you start by meeting Clive in Muse City less than 2 hours, 6 minutes and 28 seconds into the game, recruiting him less than 4 hours, 48 minutes and 38 seconds in and then catching another 6 cutscenes each triggered by going to a specific place within a specific time wth Clive in your party. The entire sequence has to be done within 15 hours, 42 minutes and 11 seconds of starting the game.
- Clive seems to have a knack for "Guide Dang it." Getting him in the first Suikoden game required you to be completely lucky enough to see him in a town's inn. If he is not in the inn, recruiting him requires the player to exit the town, re-enter, and try the inn again. Several times. The odds of seeing him are very low. There was no detective-like character in this game to give you any hints on where to recruit him, so without a guide, there's a very good chance you can search the entire game screen-by-screen and never see him once.
- Unlocking the ???? skill for a level 3 Fusion Soul in Shadow Hearts is an 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.
- Hell, getting the good ending to Covenant and From The New World counts as well. In Covenant, you have to give a certain answer to a certain question asked by Yuri's Spirit Advisor, when none of her previous questions had any impact on the plot. And in From The New World, you have to get Shania's Tirawa form and max out all the statues. Neither game gives any hints to either of these.
- 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.
- 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).
- 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.
- 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. How the developers expected anyone to work that out themselves is an excellent question.
- 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, which is probably why Collosseum hands both to you right off the bat). 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!
- To be fair, an NPC in Platinum tells you that certain Pokemon level up at Mt. Coronet, but they never hint as to which Pokemon or that Mt. Coronet is magnetic.
- 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.
- In the case of any baby introduced from Generation III onwards, this also requires the parent to be holding a certain type of incense.
- 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.
- Others don't have any other effect, but are also extremely vague as to what they're used for. For example, the in-game description of the Protector reads, "A protective item of some sort. It is extremely stiff and heavy. It is loved by a certain Pokémon." This item cannot be found on a wild Pokémon, so there are no clues as to which Pokémon is being referred to. It's Rhydon, which will evolve into Rhyperior if traded while holding one. The Reaper Cloth has the same situation, although you might be able to get a minor hint *
After catching Giratina, if you return to Turnback Cave, an item will be waiting for you in Giratina's room on each return trip, which changes based on how quickly you get there. 16-30 rooms will give you a Stardust (an item that exists only to be sold), 4-15 rooms gets you a Rare Bone (the same, but more valuable), and the minimum 3 rooms will net you an extra Reaper Cloth, which further points toward it belonging to a Ghost type. , while the Magmarizer and Electirizer, albeit with similarly cryptic in-game descriptions, do not, as they are sometimes held by the wild Pokémon that would use them.
- 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 alluded 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.
- The entire move list in the first Generation of games was a Guide Dang It, because nowhere in the game did any of those moves get their effects described. So you really had no idea what that new move Charmander just learned actually does, you just know it's a Fire attack with 15 PP. Is it stronger or weaker than that other Fire attack it just forgot? Who knows?
- The ins and outs of breeding for movesets is a Guide Dang It all on its own. Breeding can result in babies that know moves from their parents, which results in expanded move pools for most Pokemon. However, which moves can be inherited aren't told anywhere in the game. Some of them can be inferred (it's easy to figure out that you can breed Thunderbolt onto anything that can learn it via TM), some of them aren't that surprising (Mud Shot can be learned by an awful lot - but throwing mud around isn't the most mindblowing technique), but some are positively mind-boggling (Aron, a Rock/Steel type that weighs over a hundred pounds and eventually evolves into something weighing nearly 800 pounds, can inherit a move called Aerial Ace). On top of that, there's the rule that many guides overlook, in that a baby will inherit a level-up move if both parents know it. Valuable for Pokemon with wildly divergent movelists upon level-up (like Seedot) or anyone looking to breed for Tournament Play (which sometimes imposes level restrictions, preventing you from acquiring moves via Level Grinding).
- Diglet, known for never being shown aboveground aside from it's head, can learn aerial ace as well, though that's more Fridge Logic...
- Anyone who got the three legendary golems in Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald without a guide is also a flat-out liar. Each beast occupies its own inconspicuous cave; these caves are scattered throughout Hoenn. However, to even get into the caves, they need to be unlocked. To unlock them, you need to use Dive in a tiny patch of deep water on a route at the end of some very fast currents; simply getting to the spot is a result of either trial and error or pure chance. Once you Dive and get into the cavern, you need to be able to read Braille. With your eyes. Though, mercifully, there is a Braille alphabet right outside. On the other hand, you'd need to know Braille to know it was the Braille alphabet. The Braille writing tells you to how to progress - these clues include using Dig on a wall instead of using it to try to leave the cave like you normally would, as well as putting a Wailord and a Relicanth (two relatively hard-to-get Pokémon that most trainers never have in their parties, especially not simultaneously) in specific spots in your party. Then you have to FIND the now-open caves. What's even more annoying, each cave as their own little Braille test before you can even get to the Pokémon; one requires you to stand in place, not touching your Game Boy, for several minutes. After all that, battling the monsters (who all have mammoth Defense & Special Defense stats) feels like a piece of cake.
- Also from Pokemon was Gold & Silver, where the HM waterfall is required to beat the game. HM Waterfall is found on the ground in one cave in the whole game. Now this wouldn't be too bad, except that there is no indication that it is found in that particular cave, you can get from one end of the cave to the other without even seeing the HM, and every other HM in the game has been given out by somebody in a town.
- Spiritomb, anyone? The part about putting the Odd Keystone into the ruined tower is intuitive enough, as examining the latter suggests that something could be put in there and hints at what it is, but the other requirement involves interacting with other people in the Underground at least 32 times. There is one trainer on a nearby route who gives you a hint when you talk to him after beating him, though.
- Finally, there's the Generation IV National Dex. It is unlocked by seeing (not catching) every Pokémon in the Sinnoh Dex (150 as of Diamond and Pearl—seeing Manaphy, the 151st in the Sinnoh Dex, wasn't necessary—and 210 in Platinum), and to help make this easier, they made it so that every non-legendary Pokémon in the Sinnoh Dex could be seen in a trainer battle at some point during the game. Furthermore, to increase the likelihood that you'd have to beat the game (or come up just short) to do so, the only trainer with a Garchomp, Spiritomb, or Milotic (and in Platinum, you can add Togekiss to this list) is the Pokémon League Champion. However, they didn't always make it entirely evident where to find some of these. Examples of Pokémon that could easily be missed:
- Wormadam—in the party of a trainer on a part of Route 214 that you might not even end up visiting at all (in between Veilstone City and Lake Valor, since the first time you visit Lake Valor for plot purposes, you'll be coming from Pastoria City), whose gaze can easily be avoided as she isn't facing the main path.
- Riolu—in the party of a trainer at Veilstone Gym, which means that if you beat the leader without beating this trainer first, good-bye. Platinum remedied this by giving one to another trainer on Route 217, but given the wide-open nature of that route, it's still no sure thing. Did we mention that the only way to get one for yourself is to go through a sidequest in an optional area while keeping a slot in your party open (which also means no catching Pokémon while you're there) and then hatching an egg?
- Actually, Riolu isn't in Veilstone gym in Pearl/Diamond, according to Bulbapedia, and I didn't get it there either, and I fought every trainer in every gym. However, it is in said egg, and also in the team of a man in a cave on route 204, but you need several H Ms to get to him. Doesn't make getting him any easier, though.
- Palkia (Diamond)/Dialga (Pearl)/Manaphy (Platinum): In the original two, the Pokédex data for the legendary not appearing in your game could be obtained by returning to Celestic Town after Spear Pillar and talking to Cynthia's grandmother. In Platinum, both Dialga and Palkia are seen (and uncatchable) on your initial trip to Spear Pillar, but the expansion of the Sinnoh Dex to 210 means that data for the hidden number 151, Manaphy, must be collected. You can find this data in a similar fashion, but a different place: a book in Mr. Backlot's mansion.
- Rotom. Without the guide letting you know you can only catch it in the Old Chateu at night, and that you need a certain key to unlock its various forms...you'd pretty much have no idea it even exists.
- Dialga and Palkia in Platinum. Gaah. First, you must find the Adamant and Lustrous Orbs, located in an out-of-the-way cavern in Mt. Coronet that is unlikely to be discovered by most players. Then, you must travel to the Spear Pillar. Players of Diamond and Pearl know that there is no post-story reason to return to the Spear Pillar except to play the Azure Flute. Said item is currently unobtainable without cheating. Sure, people might want to go to the Spear Pillar just to see if the portal to the Distortion World is still there, but it's not likely that they'd find the orbs first. Did I mention that there are absolutely no hints about any of this?
More JRPG * too many lines, and the folders stop working, so this had to be broken in two
- 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 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.)
- 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.
- 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.
- 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. 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.
- The Hi-Ougis. These super-attacks have no hint that you are even able to use them, let alone how to.
- Especially Lloyd's (at least in the GCN version). Colette's especially and to some extent Genis' are relatively easy to stumble on accidentally. Lloyd's is such a Guide Dang It there's no way you'll be seeing it unless you know exactly which hoops to jump through to get it.
- 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. Furthermore, both the first game and the sequel are packed with sidequests that are Lost Forever past certain events.
- Plus, in the first game, most of the side quests only unlocked when the player unlocks the final door to the final boss, but does not take that path. There is also no indication at all that random minigames on the other side of the world have been unlocked.
- To put the final boss unlock in perspective, Symphonia's Bonus Level Of Hell can only be unlocked by getting a stone that you can only get in the dungeon that leads to the final boss. The last boss is in the next room, and you're supposed to leave the whole place to go find a book in a library halfway across the world. Well, one of them.
- Sheena gets a title in the first game from opening every single chest in one game (including the ones before she even joins your party). Some of the chests end up Lost Forever. And you cannot miss a single one if you want that title. There are NP Cs around the world that are supposed to know if you've gotten all the chests in specific areas, but they're really bad at math and often wrong. So if you get to the end and find out you've got 98% of the chests or something like that, you might as well just give up on getting the title until your next game, because you'll have no idea where in the two worlds those missed chests might be and if you can even access them at that point.
- Zelos's "Gigolo" title, obtained by speaking to every female NPC with him as your map character and his personal EX skill active, is just as bad. This is egregious in that there is at least one instance where you have to go behind the desk at an inn so that the "flirting" dialogue triggers instead of the normal innkeeper dialogue. Ditto the receptionist at the Arena.
- There is a second way to get this title, but it's no less contrived. After going through the moment when everyone learns the True Meaning Of Christmas, if you leave and go talk to Zelos's butler, he gives you the title in a short cutscene. Oh, and if you go onto the next part of the dungeon without doing this, it's Lost Forever. You have to leave immediately after getting the last key item. No sooner, no later. Forger "no less contrived." How about exponentially more contrived?
- Luin is a town that gets destroyed and you can give money to repair it. The catch is that you have to give the correct amount of money each time. Let's say it needs 5000 to get an upgrade. If you donate 3000 and then 2000 you just wasted 5000. If you give 6000 you wasted 6000 (and 11000 if you been giving the whole time). You must give exactly 5000 for the upgrade. Also there is no indication whatsoever of the amount to give, and you do not know the right amount untill you re-enter the town to see if it has been fixed up a bit. Finally when the town is completed you can still upgrade it further!
- 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. 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.
- The Prima guide for the Updated Rerelease Legends wasn't very helpful. Granted, it did have lists of where to find the bounty Bonus Boss fights, the Moonfish, and the Chams. In completely random places scattered throughout the main story walkthrough instead of, say, in the "optional stuff" appendix at the end. They didn't even provide strategies for any Bonus Boss fight that wasn't Piastol, and even then acted as though her stats were fixed, apparently not figuring out that the Bonus Boss fights made use of Dynamic Difficulty and scaled their stats based on your level, and never touched on the fact that you can fight her multiple times. Even the main story walkthrough wasn't all that great, frequently recommending strategies or items that were grossly inefficient (they never seemed to figure out that magic is heavily outclassed by special moves and items in this game) and got some facts straight-out wrong (such as spamming Gilder's Aura of Denial against Galcian to avoid instant-death attacks, claiming that Aika's 2 SP-cost Delta Shield was more expensive than Gilder's 3 SP-cost Aura of Denial [?!]). Finally, they called the final boss Ramirez Thing. Granted, they provided boss HP numbers and their Discovery map was okay.
- 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 in the 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...and while you could brute-force your way through most of the game if you didn't figure any of this out, it will be ridiculously difficult and practically every boss fight will end up being near-impossible...suffice to say: Guide Dang It!
- Near the end of the game you can obtain a great item (the Hercules Ring) by talking to Midori, but she won't give it to you unless you trade her her own ring, which you get by digging thru the bushes outside her house at the very beginning of the game.
- 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?
- 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.
- Fortunately, this one was yanked in FES. Its replacements? The Elizabeth Dates. Can be Lost Forever if you put one off too long, but otherwise, this is a positive change in all respects.
- The Fortune Social Link for the female protagonist in Persona 3 Portable is given a ridiculously rigid schedule — you can only meet the character in question on specific days, and if you even miss one, you aren't maxing shit. Good luck figuring out exactly when those days are without GameFAQs at your disposal!
- Persona 4: 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 then when you make it to the ending 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. on top of the whole contacting thing. Good luck doing all that without a guide, but at least you can probably experiment. However, the next example is just a very blatant example of Guide Dang It at its worst. 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.
- The Snow Queen quest also requires you to follow a fairly odd sequence of events at a time when you have no particular reason to follow them, but at least the chain of events is hinted at and generally makes logical sense.
- 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.
- 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. The tones aren't even 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.
- 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.
- 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 obtuse. An 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.
- 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.
- Or conversly you could just get the item that exposes everything on the map for you. More to the point is the Telepath Tower quest which has such strict timing it is very missable.
- 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.
- In Wild Arms 2 the last dungeon started off with a puzzle that outright confounded so many players entire sections of the game boards were dedicated to figuring it out, most people for some reason did not have the necessary semi-obscure knowledge of how the days of the week got their names.
- 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.
- 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".
- 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.
- Speaking of pin evolution, the three types of PP determine whether your pin evolves, and what it evolves into. Say a pin requires Shutdown PP to evolve. If it isn't the dominant PP type when it the pin maxes out its levels, the pin won't evolve, so you have to be extremely careful as to what types of PP you give which pin. The problem? The game never even gives you so much as a hint as to which PP a pin needs. And you really do need a guide to get the most out of your pins; evolution paths can get pretty complex.
- 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 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. No guide for this game seems to exist (due to the extreme obscurity of the title).
- 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. 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.
- Ironically, the sword couldn't be changed until eps. 1 & 2, which is when Sonic Team actually added a way to change it (you have to kill 23,000 enemies with it).
- 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 Phantasy Star I on their memory card, start a new game of PS II with it, beat PS II, start a new game (NOT a New Game Plus), see EVERY SINGLE LINE of dialog to include random NP Cs and party members after anything happens until you reach the fight with Nei First (and one thing the remake did was add a good deal of additional dialog), and engage in a series of unspecified fetch quests.(as described here) 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 (which is the main "traditional" side quest in the game) 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. (Granted, this isn't THAT bad, but a guide makes it so much easier that it's pretty ridiculous.) And of course, the game doesn't tell you that the last boss is powered up dramatically by you having all of them, and that the Fell Arms are worthless until they transfer over into a New Game Plus, thus giving you no help in beating the ultra powerful final boss.
- 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.
- 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. 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.
- Even worse in that during that specific window, there's another scene activated by the exact same requirements that comes first. So you have to do it twice to get the item, something there's a pretty good chance a person wouldn't do just for the heck of it.
- Alexei's secret mission is pretty unintuitive to continue the examples. During battle, he uses a powerful mystic arte called "Brilliant cataclysm", which can VERY easily decimate the party. Unlike most other bosses you have faced, he will use this mystic arte not once but up to six times. If you want the secret mission...you have to let him use it around three times and then hit him when he's exhausted (Which is similar to another boss you fought, but he only had to use it once). Why on earth would you think to let him use an attack that can kill the entire party unless you knew that you would get a secret mission that way?
- Tales Of Phantasia wasn't immune to this, either. A quick list of all the possible ways to screw up the Elwin and Nancy sidequest:
- Once you've completed the first portion of the quest in Euclid, Nancy will head off to Venezia to follow Elwin, stopping in Hamel on the way. If you don't see and talk to her at the Hamel inn before making the pact with Sylph, she'll die along with everyone else when Hamel gets destroyed, and the quest will fail.
- If you've completed the third part of the sidequest on your initial trip to Venezia, the next part will trigger once you defeat Demitel...and promptly be Lost Forever as soon as you set sail for Alvanista, your very next destination. During these events with the short window of opportunity, the couple will argue with Elwin's father, and Klarth will suggest that they elope.
- After going to Alvanista and finding that they have taken Klarth's advice and gone to Alvanista, on your next trip to Venezia, you must go back to Elwin's father and tell him where they've run off to, which seems completely counterintuitive to your goal of trying to help them be happy. (Don't worry; this can be done any time before you leave for the present.) From here, it's pretty straightforward.
- Tales Of Rebirth combines this with Scrappy Mechanic. At several points, you have to actually type what you are going to say rather than choosing it through choices. Doesn't sound like a problem at first, but since this game falls under No Export For You, if you can't read or understand Japanese, find a FAQ to solve this.
- Golden Sun 2. Try to find all djinns without a guide.
- Second Golden Sun djinns 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 and to the south is another forest dungeon. Confusion ensues. Luckily the Turtle Boots you find there, while the only footware for 3/4 the game, are pretty pathetic thanks to the percentage speed penalty they have outweighing the few extra points of defence. So if you miss them, you haven't really missed much.
- 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.
- 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?
- 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.
- 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.
- Also, don't forget the Shadow Hold. Good luck getting through that dungeon without a guide. And good luck trying to get through the 5th Shadow Geyser with a key leftover for the New Game Plus.
- The Ormagon. Reading a guide for it would make you think they're making it up as they go along!
- 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.
- 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, 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 without 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. 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)
- 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 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?
- In Super Mario RPG You have to be pretty darn lucky to find Grate Guy's casino on your own, 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.
- The game does give you a hint about jumping at the spot occupied by a golden chain chomp, but they don't tell you where to find the said enemy nor where to obtain the membership card needed to access the casino once you find it.
- Don't forget about the hidden treasure chest in the Mushroom Kingdom Castle, which can only be accessed by jumping on Toad's head while he's walking, and then jumping off his head to the top of the door frame he's passing through. Oh, and you can only do this the very first time you enter the castle, with no hints what so ever about it and, depending on if you went out of your way to speak to a certain NPC in someone's basement, before you even know hidden treasure chests existed! Fortunately, you don't receive any rewards from finding them all (besides the contents in the chest themselves) and the only reason to complete this quest is for bragging rights.
- 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.
- Knights in Nightmare pulls this, even worse considering that you need it to recruit characters. So, you destroyed all the objects in the stage, so you got all the key items, I assume? What? You didn't destroy the objects after you force it to respawn AGAIN, which is even annoying considered you have extremely limited movement and Warriors can only face 2 directions?
- Tactics Ogre does this. The Chaos Frame works in a very odd way that requires a guide to find out. But even more obscure is if you want all four elemental Shamans. You have to know to go through the chaos or neutral route to even get two of the sisters by chapter four (And did you pick the chapter where you have to save Seleye? God help you) and you are put against one of them named Shelley as a low-physical-defense enemy in chapter 4. While you are told in-game that you don't have to kill Shelley, it's still easy to do it by accident, especially if you are overleveled. But even if you do reduce her to about 20 health and she runs away...wait where is she? You got a tantalizing hint that she'll be playable! Well you have to go to Baramus, have Olivia, then enter training, then make it stormy somehow, then exit training, and then an event goes. Of course, this is never specified in the game, but how on earth would you discover this by accident?
- A minor, yet dumb example occurs in Killzone 2: you get a Trophy for destroying all special Helghast symbols in the game, which the game tells you in a prompt in the first level...however said prompt appears shortly before the second symbol of the level, meaning if you didn't check the manual or otherwise know of the symbols beforehand, you just missed it. Whoops!
- Manhunter New York and San Francisco are the worst. You have to get a game over a specific way, and then you are given a name to search for later in the game. Normally, a game over in these games are something you try and avoid. Especially since they would often either say "rest in peace" or a silly message. Meaning you probably would not think to take these as a hint - especially isnce a lot of those snarky death endings often say "That wasn't a good move!" or "Here's a hint: Don't do what you just did!"
- In Ace Combat games, the methods for unlocking the superfighters are never spelt out clearly. For example, in Shattered Skies the X-02 Wyvern is unlocked only after beating all missions with a S rank, but you wouldn't guess unless you've played games with similar unlock systems. In Unsung War getting the ADF-01F Falken requires finding and destroying hangars in out of the way areas. Various optional enemy aces also don't appear on radar unless you fly close enough to their turf. Fortunately, most of these you can get by deliberately exploring the mission areas or trying every possible obvious option.
- Not to mention the Wyvern in in Unsung War is only unlockable by buying one of every airplane except for the Falken (which, if you're going for 100% you'll only ever have money for one of anyway). Any casual player will probably pick out their favorite planes early and not really care about the rest.
- Skies of Deception takes ace-finding to a new level, as some of them don't appear unless you carry out counterintuitive actions, like speeding through an area littered with Instant Death Radius radar coverage circles or ignoring a bunch of Xbox hueg Frickin Laser Beams in order to shoot down enemy planes.
- The romhack of Earthbound known as Radiation's Halloween Hack has a bizarre subversion easily described as a Title Dang It. At one point in the game you are presented with a choice that appears to only have one option, and at that point you have to remember the actual title of the hack: Press The B Button.
- In the Hello Kitty Online preview game Island of Fun, an optional quest requires you to clean all the statues on the island. One of them is of "Jed", who isn't an established Sanrio character, and there isn't a statue that matches with him. Turns out the "statue" is a glowing pile of rocks. Even worse, the only part of it that's actually clickable is the captain's hat on top of the pile of rocks.
- Shin Megami Tensei Devil Survivor. The game has multiple endings, determined by scenes seen and conversation choices. At the end you can pick between the endings you qualified for. This is all well and good, except that one of the endings requires you to pick one of two almost identical responses in a scene halfway through the game. Another Requires you to let a plot important character die.
- Shining the Holy Ark had the only extra character hiding as a tree in the first town you come across. No way you could know he was there unless you checked every tree in the town, you might have done that at the start of the game to find treasure but Doyle will only appear after you’ve visited his village on the other-side of the map.
- Shining the Holy Ark also 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.
- Ever played Final Fantasy Legend 2? Good luck being able to figure the game's leveling-up system without having a strategy guide or a fansite handy. The DS remake may potentially improve some of these.
- Digimon World on PS One was absolutely chock full of this trope. There were no clues on how to get several Digivolutions. This could also fit in the Double Guide Dang It because the Official Guide didn't even have knowledge of how to get some of the monsters. Also an example of Trial And Error Gameplay as you have no clue what you will get when your partner Digimon will turn into near the start of the game. The player eventually manages to guess their way to more powerful Digimon, but every so often there is the occasional Centarumon, Numemon (and if you are particularly messy, Sukamon). Devimon was the worst case of this (Although much later in the game you discover Items which Digivolve rookies into certain Champions). First you had to get an Angemon... Which was extremely difficult in itself, then get his disipline below 50% and THEN you have to lose a battle. Almost ALL of the Ultimate level Digimon were discovered just by random chance.
Non-games
- 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!"
- When the group goes up against an action figure of Zurg, Rex manages to defeat it by accident. When he gets back home at the end of the film, he's uninterested in the game. "I don't have to beat it. I lived it!"
- Spoofed in this Adventurers! strip. And also see this one.
- Good luck getting through Knightmare without divining what you were supposed to do, the game was easily made unwinnable with the no backtracking rule.
- A rare game show example, During the 9th season of the American Big Brother, the contestants were asked true or false questions about the game. One of the twists was that there were two pre-existing relationships in the house (Ryan & Jen, Jacob & Sharon), but in the question that asked "True or false, there were more than two pre-existing relationships", everyone would have said "False" but guess what? True - The third was the pet guinea pigs that were put in the house. There was a very good reason that there was an outrage after the episode ended - nobody in the house would have gotten that.
- The works of James Joyce, notably Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.
- A trivia game in Survivor: Africa included asking which contestant had a tattoo, and where it was. Trouble being, unknown to the producers another contestant also had a less noticable tattoo that she had shown to another person, who got hosed when he guessed it.
- In this age of free information on the Internet, buying a game manual has become a bit of Schmuck Bait, in a way.
- Using an operating system that uses a command-line interface isn't as easy to do as with a graphical interface, especially without first knowing what the commands are and what they do, so a manual would come in handy. DOS is probably the most well known operating system like this, but Unix-like operating systems such as Linux and BSD can still be used this way today if a GUI either isn't installed or isn't the default interface, though they're far more stable than DOS.
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