It's Short, So It Sucks - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Its Short So It Sucks

"Seven levels? Please, I did that almost in my sleep. It is difficult, but still beatable in a very short amount of time. And once you are done, there isn't a whole lot of incentive to play it again. Yes, you can change ships and weapons load outs, but the levels play exactly the same. So there's little to no replay value once you've beaten it."

—This review of Gradius V. Gradius V is a 90-minute shmup.

Games in the 1970s and early 1980s usually had no fixed ending; if you survived, you kept going. Then came the 8-bit generation. Games started to have a definite length. If a player was highly skilled with the game, then most could be beaten in anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours. The general lack of saving and soul-crushing difficulty of these games meant that one had to play them for much longer in order to become good enough to get to the end. Gamers were more or less satisfied.

Then the 1990s and 2000s came. Hours-long adventures and RPGs started to increase in popularity, and the average length of a game increased. Many games these days last 20 to 40 hours. No longer could an hourlong game be regarded as standard length; it was now passed off as a short, budget game to be avoided at all costs. The game's length must be directly proportional to its price. In other words, It's Short, So It Sucks.

It doesn't matter what genre the game being targeted is: First Person Shooters, Shoot Em Ups, RPGs, Action Adventure, you name it. If you can beat the game in a day or two, or worse, in one sitting, expect review sites to, at best, cut off a whole point or letter grade. To some, complaining about an arcade-style game's length is to Completely Miss the Point.

Truth is, there is nothing (inherently) wrong with a short game. As the original generations of gamers have grown up, many of them have never left the hobby. But they find that many complications such as college, jobs and family life leave them with less time (and money) to play. Many of them prefer a shorter game that can be beaten in a few days, or even hours, so they can get on with their lives, or at least move on to the next game (or the New Game Plus, or whatever post-game content is available in the present one).

A single, hours-long game tends to satiate the player after one playthrough, leading to the mentality of "oh, I'll put this game away or sell it." In comparison, shorter, arcade-like games, due to their inherent Replay Value, are less likely to do this; multiple playthroughs of such a game can total up to the time needed to beat a modern video game.

This goes double for handheld consoles. One of the handheld's primary strengths is that it can be played while you're out in your normal day; on the bus, or during your lunch break. Portable games arguably need to be short, or at least have a decent amount of checkpoints, so the player can whip it out during a trip, play for a while, and put it away when he reaches his destination.

Another viewpoint argues that it's exceedingly rare to find a long game that achieves its length without resorting to padding, repetitive gameplay, and other forms of Fake Longevity. Therefore, shorter games of consistent, satisfyingly concentrated quality are often thought to be preferable to games that were artificially stretched out in response to this trope, but would otherwise be short.

Still, as the general price of games remains high, gamers may blanch at paying full price for such a game, making this perhaps a legitimate complaint for a review, though a more apt label would be "It's Short, So It's Too Expensive." As always, Your Mileage May Vary.

Its Easy So It Sucks is a Sister Trope.

This is NOT a page on which to complain about games that are too short. That's not the point of this page. This is when fandoms (or hatedoms) and reviewers make the complaint.

Examples:

Pick a Shoot Em Up. Any Shoot Em Up, preferably one made after the 16-bit era. A few infamous examples:
- Star Soldier R. With five minutes of gameplay in total for eight USD, the Wii Shop Channel even warns you about the length of the game when you go to buy it.
  - Strangely enough, this complaint isn't as common as Pac Man Championship Edition, which has a similar concept (score as many points as possible within a short time limit) and costs $2 more.
  - Probably because, you know, it's Pac Man and people know what they're buying.
- Ironically, shmup fans have bashed Space Megaforce (Japan's Super Aleste) for being too long.
  - However, it does have a "Short Game" mode which consists of four stages (as opposed to the standard mode's 12), ideal for shorter stretches of free time.
- For a more specific example, GameSpot gave Raiden Fighters Aces a 6.5., and bashed it for being "only an hour of gameplay." Even though it's $20. And it's three games.
- Sigma Star Saga, being a shooter/RPG hybrid, is something of a strange case in that it is considered short both by RPG standards AND by shooter standards.
- On the plus side, there are players who believe Gradius ReBirth's five stages are worth $10, possibly due to ReBirth being pretty cheap for a new Gradius game, when the past several iterations have been around $30.
For that matter, any arcade port. Because 30 minutes of Nintendo Hardness isn't enough; give us 50 more hours of pain. And way more pain for the developers.
The more recent Castlevania titles get this too, for lasting around 9-12 hours.
- Unless you plan to get every item, master every spell, and go through the extra game modes.
One massive criticism of Luigi's Mansion was having exactly four areas in the game and being over in about a days worth of gameplay.
Same with the original Pikmin game.
Same with Wario World and Wario Land Shake, both of which missed out of getting better than good reviews according to various media because they ended too quickly.
- Wario Ware, too.
- More so for Wario Ware with Snapped, and likely Made in Ore/Myself, because those games have only four characters, and in the former, only around 20 microgames.
  - For those not familiar with Wario Ware, keep in mind that a microgame rarely goes over 5 seconds on medium speed, much less ten seconds. Boss microgames are full-blown minigames, but still generally only last between thirty seconds and two minutes. 200 microgames or so is much more typical of Wario Ware, with about one in every 20-40 being a boss minigame.
Various Wii Ware games get criticised for this, and going from my latest issue of ONM UK, I can count both Lostwinds and a game about the Wild West as examples of a lack in content getting lowered scores.
- Wii Music has been gouged in reviews for not having a clear goal, and is thus "only" a two-hour jam session.
ICO. 6 hours or so on a first playthrough — maybe 8 or 10 if you just sit around watching the scenery — and it's finishable in 2½ hours on a replay. It's still regarded as a very fine example of the genre.
Braid has been subject to this, despite the fact that finding all the puzzle pieces in order to earn the game's ending can take ages if you're not using a guide.
The Neverhood
Jade Empire
Gears Of War
Okami, for some people.
The story mode of Soul Calibur IV, which only requires your character to fight five battles, compared to eight to ten in previous games.
Tomb Raider: Legend; Even the developers themselves later said that the game was too short and subsequent games would be longer.
- Anniversary was indeed much longer (though still half the length of the game it was remaking). However, Underworld wasn't much longer than Legend and got the same complaints.
Games that comprise many shorter games often fall prey to this - for instance, Kirby Super Star.
Aversion: God Of War, despite its short length, has garnered mostly positive reviews. As X Play put it: "Sure, it's a little short, but we dare you to only play it once!"
- PSP prequel Chains of Olympus did get this, though, since it was roughly 1/3 to 1/2 the size of the other games.
Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure got a lot of criticism on its release for being an RPG that lasts all of ten hours if you really, really dawdle. It was also brainlessly easy even on its highest difficulty setting. Still, it has its supporters simply because it's downright weird and practically unique (outside of Japan, anyway).
Portal has mostly avoided this despite taking only around four hours or so to complete on an average first-time playthrough. This may be due to a few factors. It is generally considered exceptionally good, it was relatively underhyped for a Valve game, and it is cheap. It originally came with two other mods/expansion packs and the individual unit retails at Target for 10 bucks. Hard to complain a game you paid 10 dollars for is too short.
- It's quite ironic as Portal, being a non-randomised puzzle game, is perhaps the least replayable game on this list!
  - The fact that it includes the advanced challenges, and some very hard "limited" modes, helped. Plus, Source games are relatively easy to mod, so we get tons of maps.
  - The reflexive internet-lynching of anyone levelling a criticism at Portal may account for the silence on that front; see also Bioshock and Fallout 3; rather than developing an immunity, the internet gaming commentariat actually appear to become more susceptible to hype the more they're exposed to it.
  - Lynch me. Although you can partially blame the Flash version for ruining all the physics logic spoilers.
Mirror's Edge's story is approximately six hours long, but it can take much longer to master each level in Speedrun mode.
- Ironically, once you get good at Mirror's Edge, it is over that much faster. The game is about running after all. Speedruns on You Tube can clock in at under half an hour, skipping cutscenes and loading times.
Final Fantasy Mystic Quest, in addition to also being "easy, so it sucks".
One of the criticisms leveled at Tales of the Tempest, also called "Tales of Ten Hours", though not the only one.
Suprisingly averted by Chrono Trigger. It's maybe half the length of modern Final Fantasy games (though its length was comparable to its contemporary FFs) similar RP Gs. A combination of fun gameplay and excellent characters and story keep the game more then satisfying. The remakes pad the game out with Bonus Dungeons. Inventing New Game Plus certainly helps, too.
- Also twelve (now thirteen) alternate endings is an excellent motivator to keep playing.
- The fact that extra memory space usually used to half-assedly pad other games out was used instead for a masterpiece of mechanical scripting unheard of to the generation is a reason to not mind the length in the first place. Even the mook encounters are carefully and individually scripted!
Averted by Max Payne and its sequel. Most reviewers noted that the games were very short. They also noted that the games and their story were so good, that the brevity didn't matter.
- Max Payne 2 actually spawned an article by a reviewer wondering about this very trope. His point was that, essentially, the only significant downfall that he could find with the game was its brevity. He couldn't decide if that was a detriment by itself.
Also averted by Freedom Fighters, widely acclaimed for its La Resistance setting despite its short duration.
Inverted with the original Deus Ex which was explicitly designed as a return to longer in-depth gameplay. leading critics to complain that they never found time to finish it or use half the features.
- Straight with the sequel.
Less than two days after the World Of Warcraft expansion pack Wrath of the Lich King was released, complaints were heard from people who had played it straight through and finished it within that time. However, some of those complaints were arguably a case of Unpleasable Fanbase, since many noted that the complainers had played the game straight through from beginning to end in marathon sessions - if they'd played the game like human beings, they would have gotten longer out of it.
Sonic The Hedgehog 2 was criticised for this by UK television show GamesMaster, because the reviewer finished it inside two hours, which by the standards of a game with no save feature will require a bathroom break or two. Everyone else in the world shrugged their shoulders and carried on playing.
- Ironically reversed for pretty much every Sonic game made after 1998. The "fans", among other things, complain about everything takes too long. Just no pleasing some people.
Mass Effect was accused of this as well; its story quest can be completed in less than ten hours. When you add in that most of its sidequests were fairly repetitive, the criticism may be fair, especially given the depth of content usually expected from an RPG.
Laconic Wiki sucks, all the articles are way too short.
Ninjatown caught some flack for this, although it was intended as a budget game (10 quid (~15 dollars) at game. W00t).
Anyone who says this about a Lego Crossover Game has obviously never tried to get One Hundred Percent Completion.
- No joke. Especially the timed levels where you have to get so many studs and get through level in certain time while dying a lot.
The House Of The Dead: Overkill gets complaints that it's only about four hours long, even though it's a rail shooter whose predecessors are in the 30-minute range.
- The game manual kinda sorta lampshades this though, noting that you're not allowed to go on internet forums to complain about the game until you beat it, and then beat it again on the harder difficulty mode you just unlocked.
Beyond Good And Evil also seemed to mostly avert this, getting very good reviews despite its length.
Star Wars: Republic Commando really, really suffered from this.
- Yet another Star Wars example; a common criticism of The Force Unleashed was how short it was. The game can easily be finished in less than 10 hours.
Mad World receives criticism for this, as single playthroughs of the game's storyline tend to average at around four hours.
Surprisingly enough, The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess got this because the average play-through time was somewhere between 25 and 50 hours, and some people expected a 100-hour game. This is jarring when you consider that previous Zelda games were only around 15 to 20 hours long; Twilight Princess is the longest and deepest yet.
- Averted in the shortest entry of the series, Link's Awakening, where nobody really minded the short length of 5-8 hours. Too Long So It Sucks-itis?
  - Considering both the year it debuted and the format it was released on, Link's Awakening is still a pretty impressive game in terms of length.
- Majora's Mask also got this, because the main quest didn't take long; however, the side quests made for a much longer game.
Yoshi's Story got a lot of flack for this. Though there are multiple paths, a single playthrough only takes the player through 6 individual levels at most.
The Legend of Spyro games fall under this category, considering the first three games were chock full of side quests (some of them really annoying too). Of course, some people would be stuck on a level for days and get frustrated with the game.
Left 4 Dead is accused of being too short for only having 20 maps (5 maps per campaign) and a minimal storyline. Each campaign takes about 20 minutes to a little over an hour, depending on difficulty and the AI director's mood. Then again, the meat of the game is in its online multiplayer and the randomization of item and monster spawn locations.
- With Valve announcing the new campaign, Crash Course, only being 2 maps long in order to make VS mode faster and more decisive so that people wouldn't quit when losing, fans naturally complained that the new campaign was too short and that Valve were appealing to scrubs for trying to make VS mode more fair.
  - With Crash Course now out, people are still complaining about it being too short, despite the fact that they knew about it. Both maps can take around 15 minutes each to complete and are a bit longer than a standard map that takes 10 minutes each. Not to mention that the finale is tougher than the other finales, which will cause restarts.
Heavenly Sword only takes roughly 5 to 7 hours to complete. Considering that it was heavily marketed as Sony's new, big hit title which would be taking full advantage of the PS 3's capabilities, gamers were less than pleased.
Hideo Kojima specifically stated that the original Metal Gear Solid game was designed to be completed at a leisurely pace in about ten hours, so that the people it was marketed towards (adults) would be able to work it into their busy schedules. Unfortunately, he seems to have forgotten that, since MGS2's standard playthrough is about 15 hours, MGS3 is about twenty, and MGS4 is about thirty.
The Conduit has accused of not being worth $50 due to only having a few hours worth of single player (the single player length was stated by the developers), ignoring the fact that the game has online multiplayer.
Message boards all around blare with the cries of fans of the Punch Out series being angry with the new Wii installment only having thirteen opponents. And apparently, "Title Defense" mode does not count because they're just Recurring Bosses.
- To clarify, the opponents in title defense aren't just the originals with more speed and HP. In general, whatever number of attacks the opponent had in the first fight, you can expect at least double in the second fight. They get new cutscenes and outfits too. Not to mention exhibition challenges.
- Don't forget you can fight Donkey Kong.
One of the main reasons that most Fire Emblem fans consider Sacred Stones to be one of the worst games in the series. Well, that and the existence of a world map with optional monster battles...The story was considered to be less deep, as well.
- Didn't help that it was one of the easiest in the series.
The Silent Scope series. Doesn't help that the home versions don't have a gun peripheral (except for the crappy one that came with Silent Scope Complete).
Variant: Some complain that arcade games don't give you enough content for your money's worth. Racing games, for instance, allow you to race only one track for what is usually 1 USD.
Averted with the Touhou series, which has a significant cult status despite being a series of shmups only 7 stages each.
- Probably because of the INSANE level of difficulty, and punishing for easy mode. You have to master it to see a good ending. And then there's the extra stage mode...
Some people complained that Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword could be completed in 6-8 hours. However this didn't really affect its actual reception.
For some perspective, Super Mario Bros. 3 was considered to be pretty huge at the time, and indeed, the first time through, it can take quite a while to beat, but the game can be sanely played through in 4-5 hours, and a skilled player can beat every single level in two (and, of course, you can beat it with warp whistles in about fifteen minutes), but then came save files, and suddenly you didn't have to start over from the beginning every time.
Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare has been criticized for this, as the single-player only lasts for about six hours. Infinity Ward has actually responded to this criticism, saying that the story largely came first and they designed the game around it without for the effect this would have on the length, because they specifically wanted to avoid artificially padding it out. Modern Warfare 2 has a similar length for the same reasons, but a new co-op gametype is being introduced, with scenarios based off of ideas suggested for the single player campaign that were ultimately left out because there wasn't any good place or good reasons to put them in.
Metroid games subvert this by using their short playtime to encourage multiple playthroughs, with much of the bonus content requiring speed runs of less than 2 hours.
- Cave Story is a similar case, though it's not so much speedrunning rewards (save for the ones gotten from the Bonus Level Of Hell) so much as every weapon being impossible to obtain in one playthrough; you could play one playthrough using the Machine Gun, another using the Spur, and so on.
- Noitu Love 2 is the same: the game actually takes only an hour to play through, but it helps that there's a soreboard, secret bosses, and unlockable characters that play completely differently.
The Australian gaming show Good Game gave Halo 3: ODST an average review due to the reviewers claiming to have beaten the game in co-op on legendary in 4 1/2 hours.
- It wasn't solely because of that fact, the main reason they gave it an average review was because it seemed more like an expansion or mod of Halo 3, without offering anything much new.
  - The reviewers knew they'd cop flak for the score too. Hence why after giving out the score, they put up their fanboy flame shields. Complete with an actual shield popping up in front of them.
A non-video game example, and possibly the ultimate subversion of this trope: Where The Wild Things Are. The thing is ten sentences long and considered one of the greatest pieces of children's literature ever written.
- Largely, this may be more because of the illustrations by Maurice Sendak telling the story in more ways than the actual words can.
Painkiller: Resurrection caught lots of flak for being only six levels long (each of which taking 30 minutes to beat tops), whereas its predecessor came packed with up to 34 levels (counting the Expansion Pack), and even Overdose had 16 levels - and both games combined can be bought for half the price of Resurrection, which was also initially advertised as having three new chapters instead of just one.
Some people will say this about You Have To Burn The Rope. Of course, these people are Completely Missing The Point of the game.
A common criticism of Brutal Legend, with some going so far as to say the story missions can be finished in four hours. This is partially due to the drastic change in pacing after the first half, and the lack of proportionate attention given to the third (and most threatening) final enemy army.
Silent Hill Shattered Memories is the first installment of the series on the Wii, and has gotten very good reviews thus far except for criticism of it's short length, 4-6 hours.
The Tony Hawk video-game franchise has been going downhill for a long time (no pun intended), many considering the beginning of the end to have been Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3, whose single player could be beaten in about 2 hours the first time through, and replays of single player (which you must do to unlock everything) could be completed by experienced players with 100% completion in under 30 minutes. The following game, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4, took an up-turn for the series, with 190 single player goals, competitions, mini-games, and collectables; finishing with 100% completion could take over 10 hours. After that brief return to (lengthy) glory, each game has been annoyingly short.
In a mixture of Seinfeld Is Unfunny and this trope, the first Star Ocean can be seen as this. The game has about ≤12 hours worth of unskippable material - for a JRPG? That's actually a rather short game for genres where games are often 20-50 hours, with some games like Tales Of Graces advertising 60-80 hours, and reports of people even putting as much as 300 hours into games like Pokemon Ruby or Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. No wonder it had this criticism - even when the game was new and was a huge experiment.
- of course, the keyword is "Skippable" - one can nearly double the amount of time it takes to beat the game if they wished to invest a lot of time in the skills, witness every Private Action available with their set of characters, etc.
- Wait... Star Ocean? The Super Nintendo game?
Outside the video-game realm, there have been a number of examples in anime. Because many major series run for hundreds of episodes (Dragon Ball Z, One Piece, Naruto, Inu Yasha, etc.), many fans have low tolerance for shorter series and films, and apply the Its Short So It Sucks mantra.
- Blood The Last Vampire, as a film, is only 45 minutes long, including the opening and closing credits. Despite being a very well made film, many anime fans seem to regard it as bad solely for it's short length.
- The same is true of Dead Leaves, another anime film clocking in at about 45 minutes.
- Fooly Cooly, at only 6 episodes, has gotten the criticism.
- Puni Puni Poemy at only 4 episodes.
- For a long time, 26 episodes was the standard length of an anime season, but more and more studios are outputting higher quality 13 episode seasons, many of which receive the Its Short So It Sucks response.
- Ironically the trope is running full circle...nowadays everyone is saying that any anime that runs for more than 50 episodes gets all sorts of criticisms thrown at it for simply how long they are. Of course, a lot of these people don't understand the main reasons for anime series based off of manga trying to intentionally prolong the show's run - You'd think the whole divisions into "arcs" as opposed to "Seasons" for most animes would be able to alert most people to this, but apparently, this doesn't seem to do so.
Inverted by this Cracked article — one of their complaints is about developers (particularly of open-world titles) artificially padding their games with filler in order to avert this trope. They specifically cite Portal as proof that games don't have to be over fifteen hours to be fun.