When a video game presents you with multiple paths or options, you should
always take the most difficult looking one. Don't know where to go? Look for the door with the most
Spikes Of Doom near it. Need a pokemon that can actually
hurt something? Start leveling your
Magikarp. Want the super powerful,
glowing Infinity Plus One Sword? It'll be at the bottom of a three thousand floor
Bonus Dungeon, guarded by the
Bonus Boss that takes
three hours to kill. In the video game world, doing it the hard way is the only way to get the best rewards.
See
Short Cuts Make Long Delays for when the game actively punishes you for doing it the easy way.
(If the game allows it, or if you
intrepidly convince it to, usually the best thing is to take BOTH paths via backtracking.)
Examples:
- Shows up on the "Detour" on The Amazing Race. Teams must choose between two tasks. Usually one is scary or physically challenging, but fast, while the other is safe, but tedious and time-consuming.
- Cave Story. You get the chance to get an upgrade of your single-shot, puny gun two times in the game. If you skip both times you get a super gun which can deal upwards of 100 damage in one shot. Also, if you skip getting the jetpack 0.8, you get the 2.0 version later on.
- It's not entirely obvious during the booster scene that there even is another way to do things. The only real clue is an obscure hint in one character's diary that is called out with mysterious music. Or a FAQ.
- In plenty of Zelda games, the door that's easy to get to will be locked. The hard thing to get to will be the Interchangeable Antimatter Key.
- The Awesome series video Resident Awesome- Leon is trying to go through a clear, safe path to an objective, but the game diverts him to a path filled with multiple zombies and the beast from Ski-Free
- In the first gym of Pokemon Red/Blue/Yellow, you can choose to either go through the easy way and avoid the trainer that guards Brock, or you can go through the hard way and fight the trainers and thus, be rewarded more so in the end by leveling up your 'Mons.
- In that case, a similar argument can be made for Blaine's gym, in which you can answer a multiple-choice question to open the door to the next room — getting it wrong will force you to fight the nearby trainer, but you could just fight the trainer in the first place for the EXP.
- Or you could solve the puzzle and then talk to the trainers to battle them anyway.
- Shinobi 3 has a level near the end in which taking the wrong door sends you back to the start of the level. As you can guess, all the safe looking ones just send you back, while the ones that actually take you closer to the end have all kinds of death traps, jumping puzzles, and ninjas in front of them.
- Dumnestor's Heroes had 'Blackeye' Susan taking the apparently-disused path
to avoid the grues.
- Taking the back-door of the National Archives in Fallout 3 nets you much more loot (things you can sell to the person who gave you the mission, weaponry, ammo, other stuff), but is heavily infested with special super mutants.
- I Wanna Be The Guy showcases this in the room with the Shy Guy and the Bullet Bill cannon. If you try to go down first without getting rid of the Shy Guy, the cannon tilts and turns into a Death Ray, killing you very noisily.
- La Mulana is made of this. The hard path will have pitfalls, deadly foes, and lasers. The easy path will have inescapable deadly spikes or just trap you forever.
- Discussed and subverted in the comic strip Fox Trot. Jason (the video game fan) is having an impossible time getting past a certain boss, and Paige (who has very little interest in video games) discovers that you can just walk right past him with nothing to stop you. Jason finds this quite hard to believe, and when he does believe it, he remarks that doing things the easy way is extremely counterintuitive.
