Slow Paced Beginning / Video Games

Slow-Paced Beginnings in Video Games.

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• AeternoBlade feels like a very generic Metroidvania until all pieces of the titular blade are recovered about halfway through the game and the time warp mechanics open up the world and make the game far more unique and fun.
• The Alliance Alive starts off as a very linear RPG for the first 10 hours. The game gets much better after chapter 20, where you can recruit guild members to unlock more benefits, seek out construction sites for new Guild Towers, and pursue a number of goals in any order.
• In Alpha Protocol, a combination of low-level skills and weaponry makes combat a chore early on, and the missions in Saudi Arabia can come across as pretty boring for the most part. The game opens up immensely by the time you're given free rein to choose your missions.
• It's fairly standard behavior for fans of Animal Crossing to wax annoyed at various qualities of the Justified Tutorial. Either it's too long, it's too repetitive, or it really ought to be skippable.
• Arc Rise Fantasia: Six hours in, the game will still be telling you about its final basic mechanics (combining magic), and from there, it's a few more hours until the characters finally get to what will be the bulk of the plot: the war between the Empire, the Republic, and Olquina and Alf being the second Child of Eesa, Adele being the Diva of Real, and them becoming the main antagonists of the game, leaving your party.
• Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura. Coming off the crashed blimp, you have barely any money to buy your starting equipment, and your skills are lacking. It's hard to say at what point the game manages to pick-up, but you'll just suddenly realize that it did.
• Assassin's Creed:
  • Assassin's Creed takes a good hour and a half to get to your first real mission. That's if you're quick.
  • Assassin's Creed III spends the first three sequences setting up the plot with a completely different character and doesn't really open up until the 6th sequence about seven to ten hours in.
• Baldur's Gate:
  • The first game is extremely unforgiving to begin with, as you are at level one (see the D&D entry above) and have barely any HP, combat ability (whether you are a fighter, mage or other class) or special abilities (where applicable). You can only really start to actually do anything interesting without being slaughtered after gaining a couple of levels, half-decent equipment, and a party.
  • Baldur's Gate II has a much more forgiving opening area. For a start, there's the fact that being a direct successor means you actually have some skills and are tougher than a wounded puppy this time around (and you can actually import your character from the first game). However, the opening dungeon becomes extremely obnoxious and boring for many after the first trip or two through it, let alone if you like making new character builds. Mods have been made that allow you to skip it entirely while still taking everything of note, including experience.
  • Icewind Dale has a similar start. Thankfully, there are some moderately challenging sidequests in the first town to get experience. Going on to fight the first goblins will probably get you killed, especially your squishy wizard, with his 4 hitpoints and one spell (two if you have maxed Intelligence).
• Banjo-Tooie has an opening act that takes at minimum a half hour to complete before you can enter the first level, Mayahem Temple, due to the prolonged length of the cutscenes if you don't skip them. Compare this to the original game, where you could get into Mumbo's Mountain less than five minutes after starting a new game.
• Invoked in the 2004 PlayStation 2 and Xbox release of The Bard's Tale, where an extremely talkative Viking explains at length how he got into the situation he's in. The Bard himself can choose to shut him up before he finishes, but doing this denies the Bard a useful trinket a little later on.
• Baten Kaitos:
  • Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean gets off to a rocky start. The card-based battle system is something that you really have to experiment with to master; even if you read the manual cover to cover, you'll still spend the first few battles just pushing buttons. Just to add to that, you spend most of Sadal Suud with nobody but Kalas in your party, which slows battles against even the weakest enemies to a crawl. Finally, to top the whole thing off, there's little to no strategy involved; most of your weapons are simple nonelemental swords with only one spirit number, reducing battles to little more than hitting the enemies over and over. It's probably intended to ease players into the system, but it makes the whole thing feel clunky and tedious.
  • Origins, meanwhile, suffers from an underwhelming first half. The gameplay is enjoyable, but, story-wise, all the major villains can't die yet, so you lose a lot of boss battles. A lot. Sagi becomes a borderline Failure Hero just because he's so ineffective at getting things done. It's not until the Heart-to-Heart scene that Sagi becomes anything more than a thorn in the Big Bad's side.
• The story mode of BlazBlue: Central Fiction brings the player up to speed on the series' notorious Kudzu Plot via a summary of Ragna's story thus far, which the player is warned point-blank will take half an hour. In a fighting game where rounds of actual gameplay typically last less than two minutes. Fortunately, it's completely optional, and the dialogue for skipping it even has one character comment nobody's there to listen to that much talking.
• The first BloodRayne game began with several levels in an ugly brown swampy area, fighting zombies and spiders. It's only after you slog through this that you get to the real business of slaughtering Nazis. Thankfully in subsequent playthroughs, you can skip the swamps entirely.
• Bravely Default starts you with only two characters, both of the Freelancer class, meaning that all combat consists of attacking enemies. This admittedly does a good job of introducing the player to the Brave and Default mechanics (you can "Brave" to take multiple actions in one turn at the cost of skipping some turns afterwards, or "Default" to reduce damage taken and the aforementioned turn penalty), but it's mindlessly boring if you already understand it. Then you beat your first bosses and get the first job Asterisks: Monk (good at attacking, the same thing you were doing before), and White Mage (can heal, also something the Freelancer could do). Contrast this to the endgame, where you have several unique jobs with varied and interesting skills.
• While the story of Breath of Fire I certainly starts with a bang (you wake up to find your village on fire and the Dark Dragon tribe attacking, forcing your older sister to sacrifice herself to save everyone else) the next few hours of gameplay are extremely dull, as you only control Ryu, who starts out with no abilities whatsoever. This reduces all combat to "twat enemy with sword", occasionally using a Herb when your HP gets low. You can't even use offensive items to liven things up a bit, because there are only two to be found anywhere before the second boss (who you'll probably need to save them for). Things don't liven up until after this, when the perspective jumps to a different and less-limited character.
• Castlevania 64 begins in a forest with nasty Camera Screw platforms, moves on to the Villa with the hedge maze, then puts you smack dab in the nitro level. Once you get past that the game actually gets pretty fun, but most people unfortunately don't stay that long and its rather bad reputation stuck. It certainly doesn't help that the game, without any warning, pulls that stunt where it only lets you play so far on Easy mode before forcing you to start the whole game over from the beginning on Normal, and it does it right after the nitro level— of all the people willing to trudge through all that once, very few were willing to do it twice.
• Cave Story can make a bad first impression, thrusting you into the plot In Medias Res with underwhelming weapons, Jump Physics that even the game's fans admit are very floaty, and tiresome fetch quests. Things pick up when you reach the Sand Zone, where "fetch quest" means "explore this big open level with varied, interesting enemies at your own pace". By the time you reach the Labyrinth, you're done with the fetch quests, you have some excellent weapons, and you're finally starting to get a bearing on the plot.
• The Civilization games (including member in spirit Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri) start off quite slow: you have only one city, it takes ages to do anything, and there's miles and miles of empty space between you and the next civilization/faction over (usually). However, the game gets increasingly engrossing (and time-consuming) as world civilization gets more and more complex, and your rivals develop a unique character.
• Dark Cloud opens with a roughly six-minute cutscene about the release of the Dark Genie; unfortunately, about four of those minutes are spent on long, slow shots of characters dancing. Once the Genie is released, it looks like things will pick up... but then we cut to Toan's village, and there's another six-minute cutscene detailing the festival he's supposed to attend (with more long, slow shots of characters dancing). Things don't even pick up after the Dark Genie's attack, as this leads to another cutscene, followed by further exposition from the Mayor as he gives you the key to the first dungeon. All told, it takes about thirty minutes before you actually start fighting monsters and restoring your village.
• Dark Chronicle opens with an extended sequence of main character Max... going to a circus. The player mostly watches cutscenes—including a lengthy sequence of circus acts that has no bearing on the plot—and only gets to control Max for a few minutes as he chases around a small boy who stole his circus tickets. What makes this particularly frustrating is that there's a sequence that could have been a lot of fun to play—when Evil Clown Flotsam and his goons chase Max through the city—but this, too, is an FMV.
• Unfortunately, the first few hours of Deadly Premonition are probably its weakest. After the opening cutscene, the player is thrown headfirst into a Resident Evil-inspired Survival Horror combat section, which features clunky controls, spotty enemy behavior, and very simple, yet tedious puzzles. Immediately after are a few exposition-heavy cutscenes, broken up by some short gameplay sections where the player just has to walk from one place to the next. It's not until the first few objectives are done that the Wide-Open Sandbox-esque town of Greenvale opens up, marking the point where the game really gets interesting.
• The first level of Deus Ex essentially throws you to the wolves, and is extremely difficult if you don't get how the overall gameplay and systems work yet. It does grow on many people in subsequent playthroughs for exactly this reason, though (as it doesn't really compromise too much on what works so well in the game). It's also thematically appropriate, as several characters note that the mission is a test of JC's capabilities, and if you complete it at all most people will be deeply impressed and say things like, "Who's awesome? You're awesome."
• The Devil in Me moves at a ludicrously slow pace. Not counting the Cold Open or the premonitions that tease potential events, it'll be a good three hours or so before you even encounter the Big Bad, and another hour — a solid four hours in all — before he even kills anyone.
• After a few steps, the first Devil May Cry game starts by forcing you to jump around the lifeless opening foyer of a castle and find 45 Red Orbs to unlock a door before meeting and fighting the first mook. And if you die enough times on the first mission to try the game's Mercy Mode, you have to replay the first few segments, including the aforementioned sequence. Thankfully, most of the games that follow do not do this and opt for an Action Prologue instead, recognizing what the majority of players were buying the game for.
• Disgaea games often start off slow-paced and tedious, as the game has to provide story exposition and take you through a series of tutorial stages to explain numerous game mechanics. Once you unlock the Item World, you've probably got a basic handle on how the game works and you finally have a good place to grind your characters and items to ungodly levels in entertaining fashion. In other words, the game goes from "I don't get the appeal of this..." to Just One More Grinding Run.
• Divine Divinity starts with a long, linear dungeon crawl that takes at least several hours to get through before you get to the heavily nonlinear and somewhat less combat-intensive main part of the game, which has heaps of interesting quests and whatnot. Technically it's possible to skip the dungeon, but it makes things a bit harder because every other enemy around is way too tough at level 1.
• The Doom Game Mod The Final Gathering consists of five levels, the first three of which are pretty amateurish and usually considered terrible. The latter two, however, are surprisingly good, to the point of earning the mod a place in Doomworld's "top 100 WADs of all time" list back in 2004.
• One especially controversial part of Doom³ is the incredibly drawn-out opening where your marine arrives at the Mars base, signs in, meets a few people, observes some stuff, gets a mission from his sergeant to find a missing scientist, gets a standard-issue pistol from the quartermaster, goes looking for the scientist, and it's only when you finally find him that the hellgate blows open and demonic forces rip through the base, turning 90% of the staff (including the scientist you were looking for) into zombies, unleashing the legions of hell on the rest, and finally giving you something to shoot. Considering this is supposed to be Doom, aka "the quintessential non-stop demon murderpalooza series", some people felt a bit betrayed that the series had apparently decided to take cues from Half-Life instead.
• Dragon Age:
  • Dragon Age II, from a strictly storytelling standpoint. Act 1 is relatively slow: the first fifteen hours or so do nothing but expand on the first game's world-building, introduce plot elements, and set up future events (mostly having to do with the Qunari and Templar/Mage conflict). The entire thing is more or less one big Innocuously Important Episode. Act 2 is where the game begins taking many of the plot points and items introduced in Act 1 and starts weaving them into the overall narrative.
  • Dragon Age: Inquisition has an exciting prologue setting up the initial mystery, interesting recruitment missions as you gather your party... and then most of Act 1 is spent grinding the most generic quests in the game through the least interesting areas in the game for hours until you can unlock one of two alliance missions. Then the actual plot kicks in, and after a few linear story missions, the map opens up and the actual meat of the game starts.
• Dragon Quest VII may have the longest Start-to-Slime time in video game history.
  • The game sets up the time-travel/world-hopping main storyline nicely at the beginning, but it takes two freakin' hours before the party encounters its first monster.
  • The reaction your hero's friends have to this first battle may be a bit of Lampshade Hanging; Kiefer's so excited he breaks into insane laughter, while Maribel is... less than pleased.
  • The game really starts to get fun when you reach Dhama Temple and the Job System kicks in, which is about 30 hours later. Before that, the fights are still pretty vanilla.
• For people used to modern Role-Playing Games, early Dragon Quest games (and their various Updated Re-releases and remakes). The only way to know how far your character is from the next level is to head to the local Save Point, combat is brutal on lower levels, and depending on the game, there may be few ways to regenerate magic outside of towns. Even newer games like IX can take a while to get going due to the Grandfather Clause.
• The first Dragon Quest Monsters on the Game Boy Color features a lot of dull text at the start, as you're forced to wander around a Noob Cave with monsters that don't have much in the way of usable skills, then do another mediocre dungeon, before you can finally start using the customization that makes the game so fun. The DS game is somewhat similar, but the period is much shorter.
• Dwarf Fortress, in an odd way. It would be more accurate to say the player gets better. Simply, Dwarf Fortress is so complex that anyone new to the game will simply not enjoy it. But once you figure out how to dig and build, you'll start enjoying the game. Then you can start scaling that difficulty cliff, which provides you with an ever-increasing view of awesomeness so that when you reach the top, you feel you deserve every bit of fun you now get... until you realize you just climbed up the side of a volcano, and so on.
• Mother:
  • EarthBound (1994) starts you out with one party member, rendering any strategy beyond 'hit and get hit' nonexistent. The game also gives you little room for error; this isn't too much of a problem in Onett, but Peaceful Rest Valley can be a nightmare even with the help of the rolling HP meter. After Paula joins and levels up enough to show her tremendous speed and magical powers, the game gets much better. And before that... well, let's just let Yahtzee explain it:
    The first thing you have to do is walk to the top of a hill, look around, then walk all the way down and go back to bed. The second thing you do is exactly the same thing, only now fighting the shittiest monsters the union had to offer. That’s not a slow boil; that’s chucking a signal flare into a swimming pool.
  • EarthBound Beginnings is rather tedious at times, especially since this is the only game in the series with Random Encounters. But when you first enter Magicant, the game gets a little better.
  • Mother 3: The first three chapters cover three very important days. While they're excellent as far as the story goes, the gameplay suffers somewhat, especially during Chapter 3. After the Time Skip, however, you get control of Lucas and Boney, and the gameplay becomes much more enjoyable, especially after getting your Psychic Powers.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • The intros to both Arena and Daggerfall include relatively boring tutorial dungeons the player must escape from before they're free to explore the sandbox. Daggerfall also has a lengthy sequence to generate your character and choose/create your class. Much of the latter can be skipped, in which case the game randomizes the options. This is, however, not recommended, as the randomized options can range from inconvenient to outright crippling.
  • Morrowind has a Forced Tutorial sequence in the intro, but it's thankfully short compared to the other games in the series. It consists of leaving the prison ship (learning the controls), talking to a guard captain (choose your race and gender), filling out your paperwork (choose your class and birth sign), and picking up a few items (learning the menus). It can be done in about 5 minutes, but that hasn't stopped the creation of Game Mods that allow it to be skipped. Some fans have complained that it is too short, however, and doesn't give the player enough information to easily survive in the game world. That Morrowind is an Early Game Hell environment to begin with lends some veracity to these arguments.
  • Oblivion's tutorial level consists of a dull sewer and duller cave that you must play through before you can start the game proper. Considering one of the game's biggest selling points is the beautiful outdoor landscapes, it is seen as particularly stupid to set the tutorial entirely inside a stuffy dungeon. As with Morrowind, there are plentiful Game Mods available that change the tutorial and character generation process. Naturally, they're some of the more popular mods available.
  • Skyrim:
    • Skyrim manages to briefly show off the main attractions—impressive landscapes and dragons—during the introduction. The Dragonborn gets hauled across the landscape, then sent to the executioner's block, then rescued by a dragon... and then the tutorial starts. Which is mostly an underground Dungeon Crawl, yet again. In short, it takes a while to get to the sandbox. It gets tedious to go through again when one wants to start a new game with a different character.
    • While the player gets free rein to explore after the tutorial dungeon, you still have some tedium ahead of you if you want to use Shouts. You need to go from Riverwood, to Whiterun, to a dungeon near Riverwood (although you can clear the dungeon before heading to Whiterun since you can get a sidequest from the merchant in Riverwood that'll take you through it), back to Whiterun, then go kill your first dragon, then report back to the Jarl and get told to go see the Greybeards. You're looking at a good 2-3 hours to access Shouts, and that's if you don't get distracted by something more interesting along the way.
• The Evil Within has a tense and frightening first chapter that immediately goes into a lull with the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th chapters. Chapter 5 ramps up the creepiness and terror, and Chapter 6 plunges you headfirst into the emotionally tense and nerve-wracking atmosphere of the rest of the game. The chapters also grow far longer, with Chapter 3 taking about 30 minutes to complete, and Chapter 6 taking anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half.
• Eversion seems like a generically cheerful Mario-clone platformer at first, but after a few levels, you need to figure out how to "evert" to solve the puzzles. Then the game's major narrative elements kick in.
• Factorio starts you off with few resources to automate anything. The first couple hours of most playthroughs are a series of mining and crafting materials by hand as you try to set up basic automation, running around keeping machines topped up on coal, chopping down trees to get more room to build, and trying to make enough assembling machines to make basic materials for you automatically. A number of popular mods exist to give the player more materials at the start, to skip ahead to the more interesting part.
• Fairy Fencer F starts out dreadfully dull, with a half-hour-long cutscene featuring a deliberately unlikable protagonist and his new partner (who sounds whiny by sheer dint of having to deal with The Slacker), broken up by only two heavily-scripted battle tutorials. It picks up quickly once the interminable cutscenes end and the first dungeon gives the player both some freedom and a taste of the game's humor. Advent Dark Force does what it can to fix this, spreading a similar cutscene across a brand-new introductory dungeon, but it still has to cover the same points, and the dungeon itself is a slog thanks to the dull prison design and only having one enemy type. (Both games also feature a deluge of often-redundant tutorial slides, but these are delivered in-character by Eryn, who annoys the other characters doing the same thing in speech.)
• Fallout 2 starts you with little money and poor equipment, typically fighting repetitive melee battles against radscorpions. The more interesting battles against gun-wielding soldiers and powerful mutants of the wastelands start in The Den and get more interesting as the game continues. Due to Executive Meddling, the very first thing you do in the game is travel through the Temple of Trials, a tutorial that makes absolutely no sense and even contradicts the main story in having this incredibly elaborate temple only used for worthiness-testing next to your dirt-poor village. Then the trial features a scrap against another member of your tribe to prove your worthiness - using your fists. Difficult if you've specced for guns during setup, or worse, certain diplomacy traits (unless you use an oddball way around it).
• Fallout 3 takes at least half an hour to get going, as you're forced through an extended character creation/exposition bit. For all its attempted immersion, even one of the characters admits it's a joke right before offering to change your stats for you.
• Fallout: New Vegas has an extremely quick tutorial. However, the first hours of the game are defined by Railroading, mostly by throwing Beef Gates everywhere, funneling players who don't know how to get around them more or less down the same route. Once you actually get to New Vegas and its environs, the game massively opens up, the main quest picks up, and the entire thing generally gets a lot more enjoyable.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy Tactics: During the first battle, only Ramza is controllable, and there are 10 other AI-controlled units, so you have to wait and watch until your turn comes. The first chapter of the game is also pretty slow (but it's so hard that you probably won't even notice.)
  • Final Fantasy Tactics Advance opens with a very long intro, then a tutorial battle comprising schoolyard children having a snowball fight, then more exposition before finally getting to the game.
  • While Final Fantasy VII gives you the meat of the core gameplay right off the bat, it'll take you anywhere between 6 to 8 hours on your first try. Then Sephiroth shows up and becomes the true Big Bad by killing President Shinra, then AVALANCHE escaping from Shinra HQ and Midgar, and then you gain access to the overworld. To put it in perspective just how long this game is, the entire prologue takes up less than one third of the time it takes to complete the first disc (of three)!
  • Final Fantasy X: While there's a lot happening, and you are thrown into battles almost immediately, the player does not reach an area with real random encounters and exploration until Kilika Woods, several hours into the game. And once you finish the woods, it's another few hours of cutscenes and linear story events until you reach the next area with random battles, the Mi'ihen Highroad.
  • Final Fantasy XI: The first 20 levels of your first character are painful, as the game drops you in your hometown with absolutely no instructions on how to do anything. They're by far the hardest, most frustrating, most unintuitive, grindtastic levels you will ever play in the entire game.
  • Final Fantasy XII. It's 2-3 hours before you get any real combat options.
  • Final Fantasy XIII's has one of the slowest beginnings in the series, to the extent it was one of the biggest criticism towards the game. It dumps you straight into a plot-in-progress with no real clue of to what's going on, who these characters are, or what they're trying to do. Speaking of characters, most of them don't make a good first impression, so you'll likely spend a while hating at least one or two of them. Gameplay-wise, the crystarium and paradigm systems are completely absent, leaving you with nothing to do but use the Auto-Battle command every turn, and maybe an item here or there to mix it up a bit. It's not until the Anima fight that the gameplay gets interesting. On the bright side, it's all uphill from there.
    Yahtzee Croshaw: Some people have told me that FFXIII gets good about 20 hours in. You know that's not really a point in its favor, right? Put your hand on a stove for 20 hours and yeah, you'll probably stop feeling the pain, but you'll have done serious damage to yourself.
  • Final Fantasy XIV: Many consider the entirety of the A Realm Reborn to be extremely slow-paced. Most quests are either a series of one Fetch Quest too many, a Chain of Deals, or 20 Bear Asses. The story itself drags, and you have to do a lot of quests before things get interesting. On top of that, gaining EXP becomes more of a chore the higher your level, and it can get to the point where you can't progress in the story until you grind your level high enough to continue. The post-patch content for A Realm Reborn is a little better, but the game doesn't truly improve until the last handful of quests where things start going to hell, leading into the Heavensward story.. The developers did eventually address the issue and make the base game more bearable for new players by removing several quests and making EXP grinding much easier, so the player can keep going with the flow of the story.
  • Final Fantasy XV opens with a glimpse of the final battle before cutting back to the group bidding Noctis' dad and town goodbye before... pushing your car forward for a bit. Afterward, it plods through a very uneventful first few hours where you have to fix the car, save some random guy and then make it to a seaside harbor. Aside from meeting the villain, nothing really happens and the sections are just a bunch of fetch quests. Chapter 2 picks up slightly by actually introducing the main threat of the game, but otherwise it isn't until chapter 9 that the game finally begins to pick up steam and never stops. Various sequences during the first few chapters even take control away from you, forcing you to go through the main plot, every so often. Exciting events like the Titan battle are few and far between, and most of the time we barely get any appearances by villains other than Ardyn; more often you're forced to sit through long sequences like the boat ride to Altissia.
• FlyFF: Most early advertisements, and the game's name (Fly For Fun), advertise its flying system and how you can do it at will. The catch? You have to wait until level 20 to do so. You also can't change classes until level 15, and before you can make the change, you also have to complete a quest (the same applies to the second job change at level 60).
• The first level in Siren 1 was called "easily the worst level in the entire game" by one website.
• Freedom Wars starts out terribly, even if you excuse being penalized for basic actions as effective worldbuilding. Even compared to the heavily-scripted tutorial that is Chapter 1, Chapter 2 is just a slog, running in circles to complete arbitrary objectives that don't help you in any gameplay sense, with only a single battle in the middle and not even any side-missions. It's unbelievably dull, with only one plot point of moderate interest. To add salt to the wound, one of the chapter rewards is the right to fast-travel, which would have cut the busywork down by at least two thirds. Luckily, it focuses more on action from Chapter 3 on and never really stops.
• Gabriel Knight, for those not interested in backstory, historical minutiae, and/or drawn-out interview processes, especially when controlling Grace. Each of the three games takes about half the game for the action to pick up, which is good when it does, but until then it's jarring.
• Golden Sun: The Lost Age feels like a rehash of the first game until about a quarter of the way through when you get the ship. Even if you know exactly where to go and what to do, many players will feel like they're trudging through nothing but mundane fetch quests and crossing one side of a continent to another for the plot while wading through Random Encounters up the ass. It isn't until you discover the true nature of the Lighthouses in Lumeria and then go to the far west to tackle the Jupiter Lighthouse that the game starts to pick up.
• Half-Life threw many people off-guard in 1998 when everyone expected shooters to be like Doom. Instead, players have to sit through a few minutes of Gordon Freeman riding the tram, then navigating his maze-like workplace, grabbing his suit, starting the Resonance Cascade, and going through a few more hallways before Gordon even picks up a gun.
• While the prologue of Half-Life 2 is well-liked, the first "real" gameplay sequence in the canals/Airboat before getting a weapon on the airboat, and then the gravity gun after that, is considered a drudge by many. The real gameplay starts in chapter 3; the first two chapters before that, besides one chase sequence in which you have no weapons, consist entirely of unskippable dialogue and world-building. When selecting "New Game", you can choose to begin on any chapter you've already played to, letting you skip to Ravenholm, which is just after the gravity gun tutorial and the point at which the game starts to get really good.
• Hamtaro: Ham-Ham Heartbreak starts with Hamtaro, who has to find Bijou (who will join him permanently) and save Oxnard and Pepper's relationship. It's somewhat uninteresting until Bijou joins you and the relationship between Oxnard and Pepper is fixed, and then you meet Spat, but it's when you meet Harmony that the game will hit its stride.
• Head over Heels is mostly just tricky platforming for the first sixth of the game, learning how each character works (Head's climbing and gliding abilities, Heels needing to outrun stuff and carry things around) and hunting down their gear, and not really impressing. But once they pair up in Blacktooth Market, the game explodes with possibilities, and only more so when the non-linear section kicks in on the Moonbase.
• Heavy Rain: The intent of the opening sequence playing Ethan Mars and his Idyllic Home Life is to familiarize yourself with the Quick Time Events and make you care about Ethan... but lots of people find it incredibly boring.
• Infinite Undiscovery was criticized for its obnoxious opening hour. It starts with the player running up a long series of cut-and-pasted stairs, being chased by an invincible boss, and proceeding into a ridiculously long and mostly pitch-black forest full of enemies, all with only two characters and about as many health items. After the forest, the player gets a proper party... controlled by the AI, with the only player-controlled character unable to attack because they have to carry another character to a nearby town. Fortunately, it picks up immediately afterwards.
• Izuna. While the games are a Nintendo Hard dungeon crawler, the first game has a long text introduction followed by a boring dungeon where you get few items and die in a couple of hits. The second game is better, but still has a lot of text at the start.
• The first few levels of Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast are painful to get through, due to a combination of limited health and ammo, a restricted weapon selection where it takes an hour to find a weapon that even tries to combine any semblance of accuracy and actual power behind it, and the stormtroopers having taken about sixteen levels in badass. However, upon obtaining a lightsaber and gaining Force powers (and escaping the alley full of snipers who can still shoot you through the lightsaber) the game becomes a primary example of how friggin' cool it is to be a Jedi. In almost a heartbeat, you go from weeping bitter tears as you can't get through one room with four guys in it, to standing in front of an entire army, not touching a single button, and still winning.
• killer7 has an extremely slow start, with the introductory level throwing you straight into the action without a word of explanation, and only offering bits and pieces of exposition during the incredibly long second level... but as soon as you reach the Cloudman chapter and meet Andrei Ulmeyda, the game picks up instantly.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • In Kingdom Hearts, the plot doesn't truly start until you reach Traverse Town, which happens after roughly an hour—maybe two—of play. It's much better paced than its sequel, though, especially since most of the gameplay on Destiny Islands before the plot kicks into high gear is optional.
  • Kingdom Hearts II. You go through a three-hour prologue/tutorial playing as somebody who isn't even the main character and whose story only gets cursory mention throughout the rest of the game until the very end. Even within these three hours, you get five to ten minutes of really cool stuff set between a half-hour of slow, boring stuff.
  • Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix sort of fixes the problems with the base game by adding some things to make Roxas's story more relevant, most notably a battle against him towards the end of the game. Also, knowing what happened in the later-released Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days, which features Roxas as the main protagonist and is intended to be played (or watched, in the case of the I.5 ReMix collection) before II according to Word of God, makes it much easier to get invested in the events of the prologue.
  • Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep and Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance] improve on their predecessors with short and skippable tutorial sequences. In the former, you need to have seen the tutorial at least once in to skip it, but you can skip Dream Drop Distance's tutorials right away. 3D even puts some of its heavier background exposition in a menu log, allowing you to view them at your leisure instead of breaking up game flow with repeated flashbacks.
• Knights of the Old Republic, both the first game and its sequel, have less than stellar opening levels that take a long time to complete and have a severely limited Jedi experience. It's only when planet selection is available that the games really pick up. The sequel in particular has an incredibly linear Prolonged Prologue that takes over three hours to complete, before dumping you into another prolonged prologue, albeit one with more openness and actual dialogue (but you still don't get a lightsaber until much later). It's quite telling that both games have popular mods that solely exist to skip the opening levels.
• La-Mulana starts with a horribly weak character armed with a single clumsy weapon in a jungle full of irritating enemies and unclear puzzles, all while fighting tricky Jump Physics and trying to figure out where to go. However, this has less to do with pacing problems and more with the developers' stated desire to weed out anyone who doesn't have the patience to deal with the steep learning curve. It picks up after you get the grail (which makes dying very unlikely outside of boss battles) and the glyph reader (which gives you a chance to work on most of the puzzles). By that point, you've probably got some bearing on the general logic the game runs on and have gotten the hang of the controls.
• The Last Remnant has an extremely complex battle system that takes a lot of patience to understand, much less master. There's also the really long, unskippable cutscenes... but, once you understand the fights enough to not just mash buttons, it gets good. The PC version makes the cutscenes skippable and somewhat streamlines the battle system, though it is still quite bewildering starting out.
• Laura Bow: The Dagger of Amon Ra doesn't really get interesting until after you get to the museum. Before that, it's a bunch of gathering information, gathering items because you've conveniently lost all your stuff and somehow don't have a press pass, money, or a dress to wear to this party you've been hired to write a story on, and you have to take the taxi from place to place, watching the same unnecessarily long, unskippable transition clip every single time.
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky FC is a slow burn. If you're expecting world-shattering events, traveling across continents in an airship (as the title implies) or saving the world, you'll have to look elsewhere. The game's events are very grounded, and while there's great drama and battles ahead, it takes time to build up. As in, the prologue, which spends its events in the starting town of Rolent, takes about seven hours if you do all the sidequests, and you will if you want half-decent Quartz. The first chapter can drag in places, but once you meet Olivier, the storytelling picks up. Chapter 2 has a lot of memorable scenes, and the Chapter 3is where the plot really gets going. After finishing the game, it becomes apparent that all the Worldbuilding, Character Development, and exposition over the last 40 hours was to get you invested in the cast and their world, and that it's one extended prologue to the real story in SC.
• Many 3D installments of The Legend of Zelda:
  • In Majora's Mask, you have to do several successive tasks to regain your original form, from Deku Scrub to Hylian. And you must do it within the time limit or you'll have to do it all over, because you can't save your progress until you're done. In Majora's Mask 3D, owl statues merely need to be examined instead of slashed, so you can save whenever you want, but everything else is still true.
  • The beginning of The Wind Waker is quite different from the rest of the game: you start on a tiny island with no weapons, hang out with some pirates, are hauled around on their ship, lose your equipment, spend about an hour doing a Stealth-Based Mission (the only one in the entire game), and then have to do a number of fetch quests for various townspeople. It's only about three hours into the game when you finally have your equipment and your boat that the game catches its stride.
  • Twilight Princess forces you to go through a ton of tutorial-style content before you get to the actual game. From the start of the game, it takes about roughly two hours for players to enter the first dungeon, another hour to gain access to Hyrule Field, and far longer still to explore it in its entirety. The tutorials include how to fish, which is usually completely optional. Then when catch something, you need to find out how to drop it so the cat takes off with it.
  • Parodied in both Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks. The games start out with a big chunk of backstory told with text and still pictures, just like the beginning of The Wind Waker. Once it ends, it's shown that Link got bored and fell asleep while Niko was telling the story. As for actual gameplay, both games do their best to speed through tutorials where you can, in theory, die.
  • Skyward Sword has a typical small-town intro filled with various tutorials and cutscenes. While this is mitigated somewhat by some side activities that you can do or skip at your discretion, it takes about an hour and a half for Link to finally journey to the Surface and properly start the adventure. And even then, it takes another hour and a half for Link to go through several more tutorials and cutscenes, a Fetch Quest where you must locate members of the local tribe, and then finally enter the first proper dungeon.
  • Defied in Breath of the Wild, in keeping with its goal of cutting back on story and tutorials in favor of letting the player discover everything by themselves. Instead of a long sequence of story and tutorial events, you're given a vertical slice of the game's Wide-Open Sandbox right off the bat. And while you have to complete the first four shrines to unlock the rest of the game, nothing's stopping you from exploring the still-massive Great Plateau.
  • Slightly brought back in Tears of the Kingdom since some of the things you had from the start in BOTW like the Paraglider and Shrine Radar now have to be earned instead.
• The Longest Journey are rather exposition-heavy in the first two chapters, which are your only real chance to learn about the city and its characters. However, the main story of the game is a complete mystery to both the player and April, the main character in the beginning. You also have to complete the infamous inflatable rubber duck puzzle very early. It may put off some players to be stuck with lots of exposition and a difficult puzzle early on when they haven't really learned the basic plot of the game yet.
• Mario & Luigi: Dream Team: The game starts with a long cutscene, then a bunch of tutorial battles and small minigames. Even the first "dungeon" is constantly interrupted with forced tutorials. Once you get to Mushrise Park and learn how to use your hammers, the game stops bombarding you with tutorials (as much) and you can explore more freely.
• Mass Effect: The first game opens with a short exposition onboard the Normandy starship, followed by the "dungeon" mission on Eden Prime which serves as a combat tutorial, then more exposition, followed by your arrival to the game's major town, the maze-like Citadel, which is full of even more exposition and fetch quests with a few action scenes before finally opening up when they give you the Normandy to explore the galaxy. The sequel, in contrast, opens with an action-packed dungeon nowhere near as long as Eden Prime, followed by a short exposition, then another action-packed dungeon, and then an even shorter exposition before opening up.
• Metal Gear Solid can start off slow, stiff, and exposition-heavy for some... until the scope of the plot and narrative slowly build, hitting their peak at the Psycho Mantis battle and culminating in an explosive, emotional climax that few games can match.
• Metroid Prime Trilogy:
  • Metroid Prime starts with the derelict Frigate Orpheon, which is well-regarded by players... but then you lose everything, including the Charge Beam, leaving spamming the Power Beam (read: constant Button Mashing) your main attack until you get it back, which is a borderline Guide Dang It! if you're new to the series and not used to the exploration-based gameplay.
  • In Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, the start of the game is slowed down by the extreme caution necessary during the first forays into Dark Aether. Without the Dark Suit, gameplay is reduced to darting from beacon to beacon while defeating persistent enemies, and exploration of the nonlinear worlds (the core of Metroid's gameplay) is effectively punished. Dark Aether isn't meant to be safe by any definition, but it's only later, with the obtainment of the Dark Suit ,that taking risks becomes a genuine option - but by then, the game is already a third of the way through.
  • In Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, the Olympus and Norion are very generic Federation areas (though the Ridley fight is good), and Bryyo is very linear with some annoying level design and tasks. Once you beat Mogenar, you're off to Elysia, a stunning steampunk world with tramlines to grapple across and more exciting upgrades, where the game starts to open up (though like Prime 2, you're a third of the way to the end by this point).
• Middle-earth: Shadow of War billed itself as a game based around mind-controlling Uruks to build your own army, and you spend the entirety of Act 1 doing none of that. It's actually worked into the plot, as the heroes would like to start building their army, but Shelob has stolen their Ring.
• Monster Hunter games start out slow, but once you get used to the controls and the craft/shop system, anyone can really get into fighting monsters that are challenging, colorful, and entertaining, with the resulting weapons following suit. In particular, Freedom Unite has a set of tutorial missions that can take a day or more to finish. After you start getting actual rewards for your efforts, however, it picks up nicely, even though there's no plot beyond the premise. It goes a lot faster with friends. As part of its sweeping modernization of the series, Monster Hunter: World mostly avoid this; after a two-part Action Prologue, there's a lull as you tour your new base of operations, then just one non-optional busywork quest before you're off to hunt the big things.
• This is one of the reasons Act I of Neverwinter Nights 2 tends to get flak from some players, particularly those mainly interested in the story. You travel through two quest hubs, several scripted encounters, and lots of ultimately irrelevant sidequests before you finally get to Neverwinter—where you get even more irrelevant sidequests before finally getting a chance to continue with the main plot.
• Octopath Traveler stars eight travelers, each with their own story and reason for embarking on a journey across the continent of Orsterra. Each of their first chapters (out of four) involves sitting through several expository scenes and a tutorial on their Path Action before setting out to a relatively easy introductory dungeon. The fact that you have to do this eight times means the early game drags a bit.
• Oh No! More Lemmings begins with the Tame levels — 20 levels of various terrain formations, with all skills available and no hazards, so there is no difficulty whatsoever, and not much fun either.
• Ōkami has a long, unskippable, though beautifully drawn introduction detailing the historical battle between Nagi, Shiranui, and Orochi. If the player starts the game after letting the "attract loop" play, which illustrates the exact same story slightly differently, it will seemto go on for a very very long time. It is possible to skip the cutscene once you've already finished the game, and the Wii port lets you skip them on your first run. The first several hours of the game itself are very linear, restricting you to a few small locations, while Issun feels an insatiable need to interrupt your gameplay every few minutes. It vastly improves once you unlock your basic brush powers and get full access to the larger areas, although the hand-holding never really goes away.
• Parasite Eve has a very slow beginning, not helped by Aya's rather sluggish movement speed. You start off with Aya going to an opera show, which quickly goes south when the Eve shows up, but the pacing is rather slow since you only get to fight some rats at first before having another fight with Eve and then ending the chapter with a fight against a mutated Sewer Gator with no explanation on what's going on. Day 2 starts with a rather lengthy section of watching everyone talk about what happened the day before and what to do about it before you get start the next dungeon section, Central Park... which is also a slog, since it's very big, peppered with random encounters, and almost no story development until you reach Eve and fight her. The story and action start to pick up on day 3, where more of the story elements are explained and the high stakes against Eve start to manifest when she has her monsters attack the police precinct where Aya works at.
• Paper Mario:
  • Paper Mario 64 is the only Mario RPG that explicitly prevents you from guarding and using timed hits until the tutorial explains it at the end of the lengthy prologue. Until then, battle is purely "hit and get hit", and the player is forced to use healing blocks and items to avoid dying. Averted in Paper Mario: Master Quest, where you start with Action Commands.
  • Super Paper Mario. The first chapter consists of only Mario being playable, only one Pixl (which you get halfway through), and not many interesting puzzles. It picks up when you get to use Peach in chapter 2, along with more puzzle-oriented level design and slowly acquiring more Pixls. You also get Bowser in Chapter 3, which shows off the gameplay variety and gives you more fun combinations of characters and Pixls to use.
  • Paper Mario: Sticker Star doesn't really pick up until World 3. The first two worlds are the standard grasslands and desert, both largely plotless and lacking in variation. World 3, despite its length, has a more interesting Lost Woods environment, includes levels that deviate from the standard formula (including Rustle Burrow's Bag of Spilling mechanic and Stump Glade's game show), and it's the only world with an overarching subplot (retrieving Wiggler's parts and figuring out how to clean up the forest). Worlds 4 and 5 have no subplots, but keep adding new ideas to their themes (respectively, having an elaborate haunted house portraying Boos as some sort of horror unleashed from a book and a minecart ride for a final dungeon; World 5 progresses from a fairly unique jungle setting with raft rides, to ruins, to a volcano).
  • Paper Mario: The Origami King starts with the Whispering Woods, which primarily consist of walking between the start of the forest and the Spring of Restoration, broken up by relatively simple tutorial battles. Afterward is a small interlude at Toad Town where you travel through the sewers and meet up with Luigi. The game picks up at Picnic Road, which introduces a bunch of hidden secrets to find.
• Persona 3 spends a few hours introducing the members of SEES (and Pharos) while the protagonist is evaluated for their potential. Once Akihiko contacts the group about the massive Shadow he's encountered, the game kicks up a notch and throws you straight into the fight.
• Persona 4 has an odd obsession with justifying the Anthropic Principle. You know as soon as you discover the TV world that you'll wind up going in there and fighting monsters, but the characters react realistically rather than simply rushing in, with the result that gameplay doesn't fully open up until about three hours in.
• Persona 5, like its predecessors, has a slow beginning. Although it has an Action Prologue to set up the Framing Device, the player then has to sit through nine in-game days of setup, during which there are very few meaningful choices to make. This can take about five hours of playtime, after which you unlock more ways to spend time.
• Pokémon:
  • Pokémon Sun and Moon: Melemele Island, the first of the Alola region's four main islands, holds your hand so aggressively that many players are discouraged from restarting for a challenge run simply to avoid going through it a second time. At this point in the game, it's almost as if the world doesn't want you to explore, as it seems you can't go more than a few feet without another cutscene that lasts anywhere from 2 to 5 minutes, or getting whisked away from wherever you were to somewhere else to watch another cutscene. It's only once you leave for Akala Island an hour or two after starting the game that it finally starts to back off with the copious story cutscenes and tutorials. Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon shares the same issue, with the added bonus of the story not significantly diverging from the originals until Aether Paradise (after the second island), which can be frustrating for veterans who just want to see the new content.
  • Pokémon Scarlet and Violet: The game becomes incredibly hands-off and lets the player explore the majority of the Paldea region however they please once they get past the tutorial. That being said, the tutorial consists of getting your starter, battling Nemona, learning to catch Pokémon, encountering the box legendary, having a Reverse Escort Mission with said legendary, battling Arven, battling Nemona again, battling two Team Star Grunts, attending your first day of school and getting introduced to all three quest lines, and finally unlocking your legendary as a mount before you're free to do whatever you wish. Even speedruns take around 50 minutes to get through the game's extended tutorial.
  • Hey You, Pikachu! gets off to a weak start, mainly because you can't look away from your Pika-pal until he comes to live with you. Once you get full camera control, the game opens up nicely.
  • Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness: It takes a few hours before you get into the meat of the game. What with finding your little sister, acquiring the Machine Part, and having to use the Purify Stone to individually convert your Shadow Pokémon until the Purify Chamber's complete. Once it is finished however, Cipher's plans start to come together, the map opens up, and you can start tackling their operations head on.
• Princess Waltz: For the first hour or so, there's no interactivity at all. The first time you do anything other than click through dialogue is the battle at the end of Chapter 2... which promptly introduces you to the simple yet intricate card-battle system, at which point your interest gets reignited.
• Once you get past the opening and initial Ward 13 section of Remnant: From the Ashes, the first few hours of the game see you stuck on post-apocalyptic Earth, fighting almost nothing but hordes of the Root with your starting gear. Since the gameworld is made of Randomly Generated Levels, it's a matter of luck whether or not you find any new equipment to make your character build more interesting rather than being stuck with your starter gear, as well as which bosses you have to get through to proceed with the story and which side quests you have access to (apart from the encounter with Root Mother in the church, which is fixed). Once you finally beat the world boss (either the Ent or Singed) and reach the entrance to the Labyrinth and eventually the desert planet of Rhom, the game gets more exciting with a bigger variety of enemies and new, more alien weapons and armour to supplment the mundane human-built equipment you'd been finding to this point.
• Resident Evil starts off pretty slow as you wander from room to room looking for keys to progress. You only fight some zombies and a few zombie dogs, but the battle with the giant snake is when things start to pick up a bit, and the backstory via files starts to reveal a lot more on what happened on the mansion grounds.
• Retro Game Challenge opens up with the earliest, simplest game in the collection: Cosmic Gate. If you're not a fan of Galaga, you're in for a bit of a bad time.
• Rune: After the perfectly serviceable tutorial, you and your allies are killed at sea. Your body then sinks so far underwater that you end up in a network of boring underwater caves and ruins under the underworld, which are filled with boring enemies like crabs, anemones and jellyfish (with occasional goblins, but they're very rare), before ol' Odin decides to revive you. On your way to the surface, you then have to pass through Helheim, which is full of almost nothing but boring zombies. Finally, you reach the "land of the living", and the game gets vastly better from there on. The intro is bad enough that it is likely partially responsible for the game's obscurity.
• Serious Sam 3: BFE starts out rather slowly with most of the enemies coming one by one. A pistol and a single shotgun are your only ranged weapons early on. Taking cover is also necessary despite the game's slogan, since many enemies have hitscan weapons. Near the end of the third level, the first big battles happen and the game's pace picks up drastically, reaching series standard in short order. The lack of ranged weapons can be averted by finding secrets. Find the right ones, and by the time you reach those first big battles, you already have both shotguns, an assault rifle, and the laser gun; this still leaves you with little ammo for them until the point you normally acquire them, though.
• Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne gets off to a slow start. You name your characters, get sent on a few tangential bits of exploration in the Shinjuku Medical Center, learn about the end of the world, and get thrown back into the hospital, now able to save after the first 45 minutes. It's only after you do some battling, acquire a humble Pixie, and get used to recruiting demons that you start to come to grips with the game. Even then, it's a few hours of linear dungeons and low-level demons before you get the Compendium and your Fusion options open up. Then you slog through the Underpass of Ginza and encounter Matador, the first boss that tests your knowledge of the game's mechanics and the fun challenge begins in earnest. From here, you get access to the AMala Labyrinth, fight your way through the trial in Ikebukuro, and can tackle the optional Fiend bosses and dungeons while you chart a path to the many Multiple Endings.
• A number of Shin Megami Tensei IV players tend to give up before they enter Tokyo, as that's where the game's Early Game Hell and lack of varied environments end and the player can start picking up attacks and weapons best-suited to eliminate entire enemy parties at once, which are especially vital given the game's lack of defense stat leading to the player's party either emerging victorious or getting destroyed in about one or two turns.
• Silent Hill: Following the very attention-grabbing Establishing Series Moment, the first 30 minutes or so involve a lengthy key hunt through the eponymous fog-shrouded town, looking for notes to guide you in the right direction and tracking down three keys hidden in the northeast section of the map to unlock the back door of an abandoned house. Once you make it through that door and daylight rapidly fades away into darkness, the game's signature style of visceral terror rarely lets up again until the credits roll.
• SimCity:
  • Starting off small can be boring for some, but this is also where you can make a lot of mistakes by expanding a city too quickly and going bankrupt, or getting into development habits. Particularly after the first, when you have to lay out a lot more to expand at all. Luckily, you can start with an existing metropolis in all of the games, though you might have to turn off disasters in some scenarios.
  • Sim City 4 takes this to the extreme in that it offers the regions of San Francisco, New York City, and a generic "Fairview" as completely empty, as in not one town to get you started. Of course, your own custom regions also start off blank. It can be frustrating to get the first few towns to grow, but after you get the regional population over 150,000, getting other cities to grow actually becomes incredibly easy and more strategically challenging than pure frustration.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Shadow the Hedgehog has Westopolis, a pretty average opening stage(mainly due to the bland color palette and forgettable level design) which you will get tired of having to play through multiple times(including the True Final Boss you need to play it at least ten times to get all the endings) in order to get all of the endings, fortunately things pick up once you get the option to branch out and choose which stages you want to play and subsequent stages are much better designed.
  • Sonic and the Secret Rings forces you to unlock many of the interesting abilities, to the point you actually have to unlock better controls.
  • Sonic and the Black Knight is... tolerable at first, and gets much better by the end. This has less to do with gaining abilities and more to do with the player learning what to do combined with not so great design for the first few stages. The game picks up significantly around Molten Mine.
• The early parts of Spec Ops: The Line (presumably intentionally) seem like a generic, somewhat unpolished modern military shooter. As it progresses, the story begins to play with and subvert the expected tropes, creating a more engaging experience. "Better" probably isn't the right word to describe the direction the plot takes, though.
• Splatoon's multiplayer: You start with one available weapon, one game mode, and one set of gear and must earn everything else by leveling up. The early battles are still fun, but it isn't until you've gained a few levels that other weapon types become available and the real variety of gameplay styles become apparent. Then you hit level 10 and gain access to ranked battles, and the game really opens up.
• Star Ocean: Till the End of Time: The first hour or so is almost entirely "run to this place, talk to this person, repeat." There are only two battles during the entire opening, and one is a tutorial.
• Star Ruler. At the start your industry is poor, your ships are short-legged, slow, weak, and don't carry much ammo, early-game rushes are nearly impossible. It's only after some tech buildup that you can start making war in earnest.
• Star Wars: The Old Republic has a lot of this, especially on the Republic Classes, and doubly so on the Jedi Consular.
  • The Consular's first act is hunting down Jedi Masters afflicted with a Dark Side plague and is a Fetch Quest. But then Alderaan is seen, where the last Jedi Master is negotiating with the squabbling noble houses (and under the Dark side plague, making the civil war worse). The Consular, either way, shows up and forces a peace among those haughty nobles, establishing them as a first-rate Ambadassador and setting into motion the events of Acts 2 and 3.
  • A class's first Act comprises going to a planet, doing the same thing as they do on the other three planets (destroying a terrorist cell as the Agent, disabling a superweapon as the Knight, finding an artifact as the Sith Inquisitor, etc.), and then leaving. In comparison, Acts 2 and 3 generally have much more epic, tightly woven stories, with a clear objective, more interesting characters, and more of a sense of impact on the world as a whole. The stories become more interesting, too: The Imperial Agent is brainwashed and uncovers an Ancient Conspiracy, the Jedi Knight goes after the Emperor himself, the Sith Inquisitor becomes a Sith Lord, builds a power base, hunts ghosts and fights for their life against a Dark Council member who wants them dead, etc.
  • This hits some characters harder than others. While classes like the Imperial Agent and Jedi Knight still have fairly interesting stories (albeit much less so than their Act 2 and 3 stories), others can be a nightmare to get through. The Jedi Consular, as mentioned, is downright painful to get through at first, and the Sith Inquisitor doesn't fare much better (although the amount of funny dialog and downright insane plans like "steal a cult" and "become part colicoid to swim in toxic waste" they get in this section have their own appeal). Luckily, they get much better by Act 2.
• Stardew Valley is slow to get going at first. You start off with a plot of farmland that's covered in vegetation and needs to be cleared out, all you get to start is some starting cash, and you use so much of your energy watering your crops one at a time that the only times you can really do anything else intensive (like going to the mines or chopping down trees en masse) are when it's raining. However, as you grow your profits, your options open up, and by the second year, you will likely have enough resources and tools (including upgraded versions of them) to do whatever you want.
• Story of Seasons games, a particularly notable example being Harvest Moon: A New Beginning where the Forced Tutorial takes a full in-game year, and you have to do a lot of tedious scavenging for resources to unlock the fun elements and characters. Before you show up, the place is a Ghost Town with only two residents. You have to unlock those people by scavenging for resources to build their homes. The first Story of Seasons (Tsunagaru Shin Tenchi) is much better about the building mechanic.
• The Suikoden series can take varying amounts of time to get to the best parts of the game, but Suikoden V is the real offender as far as this trope goes - it takes a good 10-15 hours (as in, probably the better part of a real-life day) to get past the initial go to various towns, talk to various people, see cutscenes, and okay, we'll let you fight a *few*battles here and there stage to where the game starts opening up, letting you get your base and actually starting to explore, recruit, and really get into the actual game. But once you do get past that, it's actually probably the best Suikoden game other than the revered Suikoden II. This is done intentionally, to get players really invested in caring about the nation of Falena and its people before the war gets started.
• Super Robot Wars Original Generation starts you off with one or two Gespensts (mass-produced units with only a handful of abilities) and maybe a fighter plane or two. It isn't until the cooler unique prototypes that it gets really interesting. Kyosuke's route isn't too bad though, as you get quickly several unique units and even some Super Robots. Ryusei's, on the other hand, has no such luck.
• System Shock 2. You start the game the moment you enroll with TriOptimum. You go through the basic training (three simple and very quick tutorials) and then through three years of training... which amount to picking one of three doors, three times. Most fans agree this is an aversion, since it is very quick, especially if you want it to be quick. It works well as part of the intro - establishing your character, while the FMV-intro establishes the setting of the game. Nonetheless, the game also has a severe case of Early Game Hell, and key plot developments are not revealed until you're almost done with a third of the main campaign.
• Tales Series:
  • The first ten hours of Tales of the Abyss can be a real drag since the main character Luke is an unlikable Jerkass, the characters constantly throw around terms like "Score", "the Seventh Fonon" and "Hyperresonance" which either aren't explained until later or require immediate heavy-handed exposition, and the plot is fairly typical. Even worse is how expensive weapon and armor is, so every time you get a new character you have to waste a lot of time running around fighting monsters because you will not have enough money. But eventually you get all your characters geared up, Luke has a Heel Realization moment, and the first traditional Tales plot twist happens, making the story actually interesting.
  • Tales of Symphonia: What seems like a classic "power up the Chosen One and save the world" story turns out to be a complete and utter LIE. In fact, you've only completed about five percent of the game! Now get ready to use daemonic weapons, Powered by a Forsaken Child augmentations, and unholy summoning spells against Cyber-Heaven for the remaining ninety-five percent.
  • Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World: You start off with a long unskippable cutscene, and the first chapter is essentially one long, long unskippable tutorial on how to play. Even on New Game Plus. It really doesn't help that this is the first of many chapters where the "Courage is the magic that turns dreams into reality" line is really overused.
  • Tales of Xillia zig-zags this. The player starts off by heading into the Factory With A Dark Secret and you get quickly thrown into battles, as well as being given Milla, who is amazingly overpowered for that part of the game. But then she loses those powers and the next few hours are spent travelling to Nia Khera, which forces the player to head from one identical harbor to small, very uninteresting towns connected by identically designed routes. The game does pick up again shortly after, but goes into another low point, before looking up again.
• The first stage of Tatsujin Ou / Truxton II mostly consists of copy and paste space and enemy patterns for several minutes until you reach actual scenery. Once you get to stage 2, the game picks up in variety, although it also gets more difficult.
• Toribash starts off rather awkward and clumsy. There's a tutorial in the game, but a lot of players starting tend to only learn the most basic of moves, or just blindly enter inputs... then, as understanding of the physics, timing, tolerances, and power available sets in, players can start pulling off more impressive maneuvers, and by then even the basic default settings will allow for some rather spectacular (or spectacularly gruesome) feats.
• Unreal:
  • In Unreal, the first level is about Prisoner 849 trying to escape from a prison ship. There are no fightable enemies and no hazards (at best, there's an explosion that removes a bit of your health, but that's it) until after 849 exits the ship... a minute after the beginning of the second level.
  • The expansion pack Return to Na Pali starts with Prisoner 849's escape ship being found by the UMS Bodega Bay, and a communication between the ship and Starlight Base introducing the player to what they can expect from the mode. Afterwards there's a flyby consisting of previous Unreal levels, followed by the first Intermission segment with a Suddenly Voiced 849 telling the log what's the situation.
  • In Unreal II: The Awakening, the first level is an Infodump whose main point is to introduce the characters to the player, get the player used to the controls, and find the way to the lift. The only hazard in the level is falling from the exterior catwalks to your death below. Afterwards, there's the optional Video Game Tutorial and the first Atlantis Intermission segment. Only several minutes after Dalton lands on Elara V: Sanctuary he finds a creature to shoot.
  • Unreal Championship 2: The Liandri Conflict begins the Ascension Rites with a series of cutscenes meant to introduce the characters as well as some training levels with your partner. The first proper combat happens in the fourth rung.
• Whenever you recruit a new character, Valkyrie Profile gives you an unskippable cutscene detailing his or her backstory. Some are good, some just have you mashing the X button in the irrational hope that it will do something. Notably, the intro to the entire game- which has to introduce the main character AND her first two companions- takes nearly fifty minutes. And there's also a prologue cutscene that plays if you leave the game on the title screen without pressing start for a while, sets up a plot twist later on, and is almost as long.
• The first stage of Wai Wai World 2 is a slow, boring autoscroller that seemingly takes forever to end. Thankfully, the game gets more exciting the minute the second stage starts.
• The first episode of The Walking Dead: Season Two isn't all that interesting, with Clementine mostly on her own, while one of Telltale's greatest strengths is creating memorable characters and giving the player meaningful interactions with them. The overall direction of the story is also very vague. Once Clementine finally begins to be trusted by the new group of survivors near the end of episode one and the focus of the story is introduced early on in episode two, the game becomes the Walking Dead experience players know and love, and stays that way.
• Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune starts you off with a stock vehicle that can top maybe 250 km/h at best. In order to be able to go toe-to-toe in Versus and Time Attack modes, you need to power up your vehicle through Story Mode, which depending on the game can take 60, 80, or even 100 stages, in a game that asks you to insert more credits after every stage. Once you hit full-tune, the "real" game opens up and you can start racing seriously with other players whether in real-time VS matches or in Ghost Battle mode and try your hand at Time Attack.
• The Witcher certainly has this issue. While the Prologue might not seem that bad to first-time players, Chapter I probably will. The slow learning curve, slower pace, fair amount of backtracking and seemingly side-tracked plot ended up putting off some gamers - most notably Yahtzee. However, things get better in the next chapter, which is when the player's abilities start to diversify and the main story starts to pick up.
  • The Witcher 2 had a similar problem due to its inverse difficulty curve and barely-present tutorial. Some players Rage Quit the game after failing to beat the first encounter with enemy mooks. However, once you get a hang of the way the combat works and get some levels to unlock more abilities, it turns into a very rewarding experience.
• The early levels of World of Warcraft can be boring if you're not playing for the first time. You have only one or two skills and no talent points yet.
  • Especially the low level Barrens for the Horde. The zone is as exciting as it sounds, and it's extremely big, with plenty of quests that have you scour large areas to find those elusive kodos that just don't drop quest items as often as they should. Even one of the quest NPCs is constantly moving. And ganked repeatedly by the Alliance.
  • Enormous areas of the game were made this when an expansion came out. Azeroth, the original two continents, were nearly totally abandoned when the Burning Crusade came out and everybody went to Outland. Only low levels and bank alts were left. Then the Wrath of the Lich King came out, and Outland was abandoned.
  • Blizzard actually acknowledges the issue and throughout the second expansion was constantly improving it. They have cut the amount of experience needed for levels 1-60 several times, added XP gain in battlegrounds, introduced the whole new system for random dungeons which made it far easier to gather a party for them, and gives more loot and finally added several moderately challenging dungeons which awarded loot on par with lower level of previous raid tier. While the last addition removed the need for new players to farm several tiers of raids to finally get into actual content, it got hit with It's Easy, So It Sucks!.
  • Cataclysm takes it a step further. Most of the classic zones have been redesigned (the Barrens for example were split into two more manageable zones), the talent trees are completely revamped (and now give you first Signature Move for a chosen specialisation at level 10 instead of around 30), dungeons are readjusted for new level ranges, etc. It is very awesome.
• The developmental league in WWE Day of Reckoning's story mode. There's no storyline or anything interesting going on, it's all "Beat this guy," "OK, beat this guy using your finisher," "OK, beat this guy using a top-rope move," "OK, make this guy tap out..." and on and on and on. And you're fighting crappy nobody wrestlers that are just an amalgamation of CAW parts instead of the actual WWE guys you bought the game for. Overly realistic for many gamers.
• Endemic to the X-Universe series. Depending on the game, it can literally take days to get enough cash together for your first factory, assuming you don't try to take advantage of the derelict ships floating around. Recently the devs have been trying to reduce the lead time and make the games more accessible to new players. The first game was by far the worst, starting you off without a time compressor, in a setting that is much more liberal with the scale of space than usual. Assuming you know exactly what to buy and where, your first trading run will take half an hour.
• Xenoblade Chronicles X: The first three chapters consist mainly of exposition about the game's setting and few tutorials that barely scratch the surface of the game's mechanics. After that point, more of the side missions that make up the bulk of the game's content becomes available. But even then, things don't really pick up until you've unlocked your Skell and the flight module, which both make exploration and combat much easier.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 2 suffers from this on both the story and gameplay front:
  • There's a small bit of explanation of the world in the opening cutscene, then straight into a mysterious mission for mysterious, untrustworthy people that doesn't explain anything. The inciting incident of Rex's death and resurrection followed by deciding to go to Elysium takes things in a good direction at the end of chapter 1. However, the story takes every opportunity to not go towards Elysium^{How much so?}After the party hits a proverbial wall at the end of chapter two, finding a solution and actually using it takes until chapter seven out of ten. Considering how much the story narrows down on its climax after this point, well over half the game is spent not pursuing your overarching objective., and it's a while until the other plotlines pick up enough momentum to make up for the lack of progression on the obvious main story.
  • While the game mechanics are satisfying once you figure them out, they're complicated and not introduced well. The Blade mechanic isn't introduced until the end of the first chapter, despite being the center of the game's combat system. More party members are added, following the usual Damager, Healer, Tank dynamic, but the story keeps removing party members in the early chapters, meaning you can lose your healer or tank just as you're starting to get used to how they play. There are also mechanics like chain attacks that are introduced early, but before you're likely to have the right blade setup to take full advantage of them. It's not until late chapter 4/early chapter 5 that the party fills out and you'll have access to enough decent blades and items that the game mechanics finally start to click. This is also around the time in the game that, for most players, the story starts to pick up as well.
• GameSpot has a review demerit Game Emblem called Terrible First Impression for games that suffer from this trope.
  "Games with this demerit pick up at least a little later on, but they definitely don't start strong."
• Yakuza 3: most of the first act (and several hours of gameplay) focus around Kiryu retiring from the yakuza and living in (relative) peace in a small corner of Okinawa, running an orphanage with Haruka. There's little fighting or intrigue beyond Kiryu's scuffles with a local yakuza branch that wants to buy his land, and most of the side missions surround Kiryu helping the orphans solve mundane problems in their lives. Then the second act opens with an assassination attempt on Daigo Dojima, and Kiryu heads back to Kamurocho to break up a Government Conspiracy.
• Yakuza 0: Most of Chapter 1 focuses on exposition through cutscenes to introduce you to the main conflict and the story threads, and you can only explore a small area of Kamurocho. However, there's plenty of moments that help balance it out, such as singing Karaoke with Nishiki, meeting Bacchus and learning your first few fighting moves, and the first series-staple massive fight through the Dojima Family HQ. Once Chapter 2 begins, you're given a lot more space to explore and advance the story as you wish.
• Yakuza: Like a Dragon: There's about three hours of cutscene-heavy backstory and exposition to get through before you can start doing all of the wacky stuff that you saw on YouTube. It isn't until mid Chapter 5 (of 15) that the game really opens up, as that's when you unlock the Job System, the Company Management quest, and have access to most of the minigames.

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