Needs Help: Guide Dang It

EDIT: Wick-check is available here: Guide Dang It Wick Check
Post explaining the problems with Guide Dang It! can be read here.

One thing I've noticed a lot with Guide Dang It! is that it seems to be less "you need to literally Try Everything three times or look up a guide to figure this out" and more "I personally had to look up a guide to figure this out", even when something in game seems otherwise reasonable to solve. There might be some merit as games do have some secrets that are extremely difficult to pick up on without looking up the answer but it's somewhat annoying to me to see an entry for this on a game I played and thinking to myself how I didn't have much trouble figuring something out, either because the game did provide me with decent hints or I did a reasonable scan of a level.

The Final Fantasy X section of the Guide Dang It examples show to me how wildly all over the place Guide Dang It! can be. Examples like the game not telling you you can get Ultimate Weapon components for having a time under 0:0:0 in a difficult, RNG-reliant minigame or performing 200 perfect lightning dodges in another minigame are displayed next to more benign things in game, like getting an ability for one of Yuna's summons from an interactable dog in the first village in the game, or finding a handful of painfully visible messages in the world that have simple riddles written on them in substitution ciphers for a language that you pick up on as the game goes.

I was personally able to get the dog and cipher things on my own and looked up some of the Ultimate Weapon information. Another player might've been able to pick up on all four of these in a reasonable time frame without a guide and yet another player might have needed a guide for all of these.

With all this in mind, isn't this trope primarily YMMV?

Edited by YourIdeas on May 8th 2021 at 9:56:50 AM

Yeah, I’ve thought that too, especially with the relatively recent migration of other difficulty tropes to YMMV. Though a lot of instances were invoked, especially back in the era the only solution was to fork over extra cash for the official strategy guide, most of them for years now have neither been deliberate nor universally agreed to be such.

I am of the opposite opinion, I can see a YMMV attribute to it but the core trope is about the lack of direct guidance from the game on how to accomplish a task, which is centered on game mechanics like the lack of quest steps and in-game HUD markers. This ranges from "wander around a level until you stumble upon a keycard (via an "interact" prompt), then find the door that is supposed to open" to "collect 1,000 random coins scattered around the game for a cosmetic reward or special achievement" to finding a very well hidden Easter Egg to a 20 stage Puzzle Boss. I think it could be mistaken for "players unable to figure out how to progress the game" but I'm not seeing much of that in the examples I'm scanning.

Edited by EmeraldSource on Mar 10th 2021 at 6:53:48 AM

For what it's worth, I actually saw an entry on a YMMV page before transferring it.

I would very much think that this trope is YMMV. I'm a little surprised that it isn't already!

That would seem to suggest that a game may fall into this trope regardless of whether any players find it at all difficult.

Turning to the trope description:

Going by this, the focus seems to be on how difficult players find the relevant part of the game.

But what proves so difficult may well—perhaps even is likely to—vary considerably from player to player. What's obvious to one might be obscure to another.

See, for example, Jesse Cox and Dodger playing the Rusty Lake games. As I recall it, there were a number of occasions on which one of them would become thoroughly stuck on a puzzle that the other had little trouble with.

I'm personally on the YMMV side. I mean, when "Dang It" is in the name, it certainly sounds like YMMV. I don't think it's necessarily inherent to the game itself you have a frustrating time finding something. I thing it's a similar thing to video game "difficulty tropes", as has been said before.

I find this a lot in the Adventure Game genre, where solution to a puzzle may seem obscure to seem people, but totally obvious to others.

edit: After thinking it over, I can see how there would be a objective precedent if the game simply doesn't inform the player of the existence of something, so maybe a split?

Edited by antenna_ears on Mar 11th 2021 at 4:44:23 AM

That's how I originally understood the trope, systems that are essential to gameplay but the game never tells you aren't opinions but fact.

One of the biggest examples was Pokemon, who for years refused to acknowledge Effort Values or Individual Values or Egg Moves despite how much they impact gameplay. While they relaxed on this in recent years, it's still not a YMMV.

So if trope drift has occurred then maybe it's time to split it.

I think it should stay as an objective trope, but it probably needs a clean-up.

I personally dislike the trend of labeling everything regarding video games YMMV because one particular person's experience was different, when we don't do that for many other forms of media.

That's not to say that other tropes like Difficulty Spike or Demonic Spiders aren't YMMV, but there are clear objective components to Guide Dang It!.

Guide Dang It requires that there is some significant or obscure mechanic that the game doesn't tell you about or doesn't reasonably allow you to deduce.

Being able to encounter and unlock an optional character in some far-off corner of the world you haven't explored, by itself, isn't Guide Dang It!; you don't need the character to progress, and unlocking them is as simple as finding them.

If said character was required to proceed, and the game didn't tell you where they were, that would be Guide Dang It!, unless the game generally expects you to fully explore every area before proceeding (e.g. with a 100% exploration reward or the like).

If you needed to wait until 04:20 AM with 69 banana cakes in your inventory to hire them, as a shout-out to some content creator, and the game gives you no hints regarding this, that would be Guide Dang It.

If there is a mural featuring the character which has a sundial pointing to 04:20 AM and has the number 69 over a banana placed on top of a cake, and you can reasonably expect to encounter this mural in the main path, that's not Guide Dang It!. The game gave you hints. They might be a bit obscure, but they're there, and most people can be expected to at least identify what they're being shown.

Something which there would be absolutely no reason to expect anyone to deduce on their own would be the braille at the Regi caves Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire. Most people who aren't blind don't know braille, many wouldn't know that it's braille they're looking at, some (especially the game's target age group) wouldn't even know what braille is, and those who are blind and do know braille wouldn't be able to read it - it's purely visual, when braille is writing that's meant to be felt.

If people are using Guide Dang It! to mean "I didn't get the hints the game expected me to deduce", it doesn't need to be YMMV, it needs an examples cleanup. We could turn half the wiki into YMMV if we added every trope that got misused.

Edited by AGuy on Mar 11th 2021 at 5:45:25 AM

I mean, unlike most other mediums, video games are interactive, meaning individual experiences can actually be different, but yeah as long as most examples hold an objective precedent, I agree and think it should remain a trope, we just need to clean it up a bit.

There are enough poorly-done Moon Logic Puzzles that the line is a bit blurry.

I appreciate the discussion, helps me understand this trope a bit more. Another thing I wasn't quite sure of but figured I should also bring up, I often feel like Guide Dang It! entries have a habit of being what I'd consider overly wordy, to the point that it can feel like it's treading into natter territory and that might be where I was getting the impression that some entries started feeling subjective.

To use another example, the entire Eeveeultion section in Pokémon under GDI seems to go off on a bunch of repeated tangents that dance around the obscure nature of figuring out how to evolve Eevee into a certain Pokémon. It feels more like a discussion of how to avoid making a mistake and ending up with the outcome you want as opposed to providing a concise understanding of why figuring out how to evolve Eevee probably requires help outside playing the game.

Does this look fine in general, or would examples like these be better served if they were trimmed down?

Yeah, Walkthrough Mode has a whole section dedicated to it. It's unsurprising that some people have difficulty saying why something is unintuitive without saying exactly (and I do mean exactly) what it is that's unintuitive.

As I mentioned, usually a game tries to make the pathway clear whether it be the progression of the level, story or player upgrades. To not inform the player of how to play the game would be bad game design. But sometimes designers want to leave things open ended to facilitate player choices, letting them wander off the path and find something interesting. That is not poor game design since it is often clear to the player what they need to do to progress, they are just not railroaded into doing that right now. Guide Dang It! covers any pathway that does not hold your hand but you may need some outside help unless you want to spend 30 hours figuring it out yourself.

I would say too that Goddamn Bats and Demonic Spiders should be objective tropes (different enemy composition is pretty consistent across large number of games between easy to kill swarmers to aggressive and deadly elites to Boss in Mook's Clothing), but the problem was running into debates on which examples were which. No definition could be clear enough across different types of games, so it was palmed off to YMMV and left it up to individual communities to make that decision.

Goddamned Bats, to me personally, felt more clear to objectively define:

• Are they common?

• Are they individually weak?

• Are they generally unrewarding to deal with?

• Do they harass you in a significant way beyond their individual (personal) ability to harm you or your party?

Do they steal items and force you to chase them around to get them back when they would otherwise just fall as collateral damage to you? Goddamn Bats.

Do they appear in such numbers that, despite being individually weak, they make a dungeon, level, etc. a slog to trudge through? Goddamn Bats.

Do they inflict some status condition on you that is dangerous regardless of the level differential (e.g. confusion, poison)? Goddamn Bats.

To summarize: an enemy that beleaguers you endlessly and causes you problems disproportionate to the reward you get for dealing with them.

Hell, many of these things can be compared to other things in the same game. Let's take Zubat, the Trope Namer, relative to Mt. Moon, the first area you can find them in the first game you can encounter them in.

• Common? Varies by location, but generally, yes - their appearance rate relative to other Mons has often been nerfed in later games set in the same area. They started at 79% of encounters in Mt. Moon Gen I, nerfed gradually over several generations to 40% in Gen VII.

• Are they individually weak? Yes - Zubat's strongest move at this point has 15-20 power, relative to a generic move like Pound with 40, and they're not strong defensively.

• Are they generally unrewarding to deal with? Yes - compared to any other Mon you can encounter at Mt. Moon, they have the lowest XP reward for being defeated. Their damaging move at this point of the game is pathetically weak, and Supersonic is unreliable doesn't do anything at that point that couldn't be done better with a stronger Mon, so they're not worth capturing compared to other Mons you could've gotten at that point.

• Do they harass you in a significant way beyond their individual (personal) ability to harm your party? Yes - to be brief, there's a good chance they can make it difficult to escape by outspeeding you, and the Supersonic that some of them have can leave you at the mercy of the RNG if you try to fight them. Not problematic in one encounter, but definitely can be when they're incessant. Paras has Stun Spore at earlier levels in later generations, but its base speed is laughably low, so it's almost impossible to not be able to run away from it with anything you have at that point.

I realize that my own idea about this wasn't universal - that's just the way I've always interpreted it.

Edited by AGuy on Mar 11th 2021 at 2:13:51 PM

EDIT for the sake of not triple posting: Regarding this page, I think the page itself has decayed over time in a similar way to Fake Difficulty before that page was taken to the shop, and the page needs to be fixed. Several bullet points have been added that deviate from its original definition, from "you need a guide or you'll have literally no idea what you're supposed to do here" to personal gripes about annoying things that made a player resort to a guide to circumvent them.

Take these bullet points from the page. My own comments on those things will be nested one level below them.

• Battles are tough but save points are terribly placed.
  • How does this mandate a guide? One can still progress normally by playing the game, and one still knows what they have to do to proceed - it's just an annoying dose of Fake Longevity.
• Inventory decisions must be made with extrasensory perception.
  • If knowing what's to come gives you an advantage, but a player can still progress even without a perfect inventory, that's not a problem of the game not educating you, that's a lack of player skill.
• Talk to Everyone and Try Everything three times or you will miss crucial stuff.
  • This would definitely qualify.
• Cannot tell when Mission Control Is Off Its Meds and when it's helping.
  • At worst, this is Trial-and-Error Gameplay when you do something lethal by order of Mission Control. That's frustrating, but that's not Guide Dang It! - you can understand what you need to do just by playing the game.
• Cryptic puzzles that betray what you've learned to expect, like resetting the game to move on when normal logic would dictate that doing so means losing all your progress.
  • This would definitely qualify.
• Instead of doing things within the actual game, the player has to mess around with the game interface itself.
  • This would definitely qualify in a game where messing around with the game interface in various ways isn't integral to normal gameplay, and the game does not inform you about it.
• After you get used to seeing a menu or message pop up as part of the game, a deceptively phony version of it pops up to catch you off guard and you might overlook it, causing a disastrous outcome.
  • That's Trial-and-Error Gameplay, not Guide Dang It!.

Okay, that was a bit of a tangent. I think what might help here is laying out more defined guidelines for what qualifies as Guide Dang It!.

I propose the following. I will be using "entity" in this context to refer to whatever it is in question needs to be acquired in order to progress. Anything which does not meet these guidelines would be classified as a Guide Dang It!.

I will provide notes to explain my reasoning.

• If the entity in question is critical to game progress, and it is not provided to the players in a way that cannot be missed, then the player should be directed to it in an unambiguous way. ^Explanation Progressing through the game is something with a much higher priority than doing anything else in a game. A player doesn't 'need' extras the same way they 'need' to do the things required to move through the main game. It's fair to expect that a player should generally be able to understand what they have to do in order to keep moving forward in a game. Most people aren't going to enjoy spending hours sifting through various 95-98% complete dungeons to see which hidden corner of the world has the crate holding the key forward (if they even think to start trying everything in their desperation).
  • If the information is provided in a skippable cutscene but can't be recalled, that's not Guide Dang It!; the game provides the information to you. That's just a failure to avoid Now, Where Was I Going Again? That's a different issue.
• If the entity in question is not critical to game progress, but has a significant effect on gameplay (e.g. a new character, unique weapon, access to a bonus dungeon), has significant effect on the story (e.g. necessary to unlock the best ending of a game, rather than just some banter between two characters), or is required for 100% Completion in a game that records such a thing, then:^Explanation Things a player could be expected to be very interested in, as opposed to an easter egg or some random mediocre item in the middle of nowhere.
  • The player should be able to get information relevant to the entity within the area they discover said entity, or an area one can reasonably relate to it.^Explanation If I find Bob in the wilderness, and I can recruit him, then I should be able to get information (or at least be directed to further information) on how to recruit Bob from Bob himself, or by digging around his room in his home city, or by asking his brother. Having to talk to everyone to learn from some dialogue option deep in a conversation tree with Carol, a random intern at a nuclear power plant among 20 others, that she is his old girlfriend and knows his favorite time to gorge himself on banana cakes? That's not something people can deduce by knowing about Bob or seeing the area he's in.
  • The player should be reasonably expected to understand the hint they're being presented, either because it involves things regarding the game, or because it involves universal concepts.^Explanation This doesn't mean they immediately get the hint; rather, it means they understand what the hint is presenting to them. If I see a mural in Bob's room of a sundial at 04:20, and the number "69" written over a banana and a cake, I can be expected to understand the sundial is at 04:20 (since most people playing a video game will understand how clocks work), the number "69" is written (since most people playing a video game will understand numbers), and that there is a banana juxtaposed with a cake (even if they don't what banana cake in particular is, most people playing a video game know what bananas are, and what cakes are.) By contrast, if the game has a pun involving a character named after a bird of one of five noble bodies of water, that's not something that will be universally understood; most people not familiar with North America (and even many of those who live in North America) won't know that there are five Great Lakes with Huron being one of them.

To summarize:

• The player shouldn't be expected to Try Everything or the like to continue progressing in the main game if they've missed something. Even if they are expected to watch a cutscene that's skipped, that's not a result of the player not being provided the information.
• More obscure hints for optional content should generally be okay, as long as the presentation can be understood by most players, either because they relate to the game they are playing or because they relate to something that is more universally understood. There's not the same pressure to do something extra as there is to get through the main game, so people aren't going to be as frustrated trying to solve some issue as they would be if it stopped them from experiencing the rest of the game.

Most importantly: An individual not personally being able to solve something on their own doesn't make the entity a Guide Dang It!, any more than an individual struggling to dodge a really fast projectile makes the projectile a Homing Projectile.

Sometimes things are difficult. Not everyone can solve every puzzle that comes at them. That's what guides are for. You personally needing a guide for something does not mean that people can't reasonably be expected to understand it without a guide.

Those are my thoughts, anyway. I'm curious as to the thoughts of others.

Edited by AGuy on Mar 12th 2021 at 4:09:02 AM

The fact that there are objective components to a trope doesn't mean that it's necessarily an objective trope: if there is a subjective component, then the trope becomes subjective, it seems to me.

That doesn't match the trope description. To quote it:

• "[the trope] is any part of a video game in which that correct action or set of actions is so difficult to figure out from the game's own clues that, effectively, the only way to know what to do (aside from spending countless hours of trying every remote possibility until something happens) is via a Strategy Guide or an online Walkthrough."

And later:

• "Do note that quite a few of these examples may have been placed as interesting finds for players that accidentally get into obscure situations or curiously muck around with the game, especially in older sandbox titles where groping around in the proverbial dark was an intentional part of the experience. Examples that are required to complete the game are still nasty, however."

So an example needn't be required for completion in order to fall under this trope. It's any part of a game that's insoluble without external aid.

More to the point, perhaps:

Who determines what it's reasonable for someone to deduce?

I return to my example, above, of Jesse Cox and Dodger playing the Rusty Lake games: in a number of cases, as I recall, where one struggled, the other had an easy time, and vice versa.

Thus we see that different deductions may be easy for one person and hard for another. Similarly, what's obscure for one may be obvious to another.

Thus I maintain that this trope is subjective, and thus YMMV.

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Mar 12th 2021 at 11:04:23 AM

See my edit above.

> Who determines what it's reasonable for someone to deduce?

I'm just going to quote myself, since you missed that bit.

• This doesn't mean they immediately get the hint; rather, it means they understand what the hint is presenting to them. If I see a mural in Bob's room of a sundial at 04:20, and the number "69" written over a banana and a cake, I can be expected to understand the sundial is at 04:20 (since most people playing a video game will understand how clocks work), the number "69" is written (since most people playing a video game will understand numbers), and that there is a banana juxtaposed with a cake (even if they don't what banana cake in particular is, most people playing a video game know what bananas are, and what cakes are.) By contrast, if the game has a pun involving a character named after a bird of one of five noble bodies of water, that's not something that will be universally understood; most people not familiar with North America (and even many of those who live in North America) won't know that there are five Great Lakes with Huron being one of them.

Just because I can reasonably expect a player to be capable of beating a Boss Fight, for example that doesn't mean that every player is going to be able to beat that Boss Fight.

Edited by AGuy on Mar 12th 2021 at 4:12:34 AM

The point of GDI is not if a hint is eaay or difficult to get. Those can go to That One Puzzle, That One Level or That One Sidequest. The point of GDI are features critical to proceed or important to understand in the game that simply aren't told.

See my edit above.

Ah, sorry, I missed that edit.

Skimming through the page history, I don't see edits to the sections that I posted. Now, it's possible that I missed it—there's a fair bit of history—or that it comes from a time from before the history's start.

However, right now I don't see a reason to not take the trope description as accurate.

Nor, come to that, do I see any reason to consider the trope to have decayed if it is a historical change: tropes may expand, after all.

Please don't get snarky with me; I read what you posted.

However, taking your quoted section:

Expected by whom? Reasonable from whose perspective? Again, what's reasonable and clear to one may not be to another; that a given puzzle is reasonable to you doesn't mean that it's reasonable to some other person.

Those are very different things, to my mind: a projectile homing is a behaviour on the part of the projectile, and thus a game-mechanic trope. A player struggling to dodge is a matter of player-skill, and thus a difficulty trope, and thus subjective and YMMV.

Oh hey, I just realized that I should probably use the quote formatting you're using.

That's not your fault; the edit was done after your post.

Regarding that section, the latter three bullet points were added in 2015. The page has been around quite awhile - well before the oldest edit history logs - and it didn't have those bullet points initially. But that is a fair point.

In this situation, I don't have anything but my own memory to claim Trope Decay; following that, I will instead ask "what should this trope be?"

Would you have supported the expansion of Fake Difficulty when it decayed from what it currently is, to complaining about any sort of difficulty someone didn't like (such as Warring Without Weapons, Invincible Minor Minion, etc.)? (the cleanup of that page is something that definitely predates the logs - it was an absolute mess then, of complaining about everything.)

The expansion of this trope from a specific thing regarding how information is presented in a game (i.e. you need a guide in order to have the information for this section) to "this annoyance is something I personally don't like and chose to use a guide to circumvent" turns the trope from something meaningful into just an license to complain about anything about a game someone doesn't like. That doesn't make the trope more meaningful, it makes it less meaningful. There are many YMMV tropes for various things regarding frustrating difficulty, such as That One Level, That One Boss, etc.

In addition, Guide Dang It! existed for a business reason; part of the allure of a strategy guide was because it had the insanely obscure details (if the d were presented at all) that one had to know in order to unlock the game's secrets. Though Guide Dang It! wasn't exclusive to games with strategy guides, it had a very clear focus; there's something in a game, and there's no way a player without ESP or insane luck by entropy would be able to figure out certain details needed to unlock things.

My own suggestion for the trope is laxer than that; I think it should include anything that a player, while not necessarily needing a guide for (such as a key item to progress that's stuck in some dungeon because you didn't 100% explore it), could lose the track on without a guide. That is - a complex puzzle wouldn't be a Guide Dang It!, but not having any idea where to find the information you need to solve the puzzle would be a Guide Dang It!.

I also feel that the main game should generally not require anything obscure to progress through; it's generally agreed as a faux pas nowadays if a player has to struggle to figure out what they need to do to complete the main game.

Are you seriously arguing that understanding things like how clocks work, or numbers, or what bananas or cakes are, is not a reasonable thing to expect of someone playing a typical video game? Too Dumb to Live might as well be YMMV by that logic, because what's dumb to one person isn't dumb to another.

To elaborate: a lot of tropes on the wiki require some base judgment, such as what is Obviously Evil. Most people can agree that Butcher the Baby Killer in huge, spiky black armor, cackling maniacally on his throne of bones, is Obviously Evil. We don't have the trope YMMV for the people who aren't familiar enough with fiction to identify that. Per the moderator response I received on ATT, the mere fact that someone can disagree with some facet of the principle of a trope doesn't make it YMMV by itself.

EDIT: Because I know this will come up again, I will use an example more specific to games: Obvious Rule Patch. That very much relies on the change to a specific interaction being highly apparent due to its specificity. One could, by a similar logic, argue that Obvious Rule Patch is YMMV because someone doesn't see the very specific hard cap that one weapon has when used with one particular ability of one character as anything glaringly obvious compared to other balance adjustments.

In fact, Obvious Rule Patch very clearly defines that it's not just about anything someone thinks obviously needs or needed a rule patch. Similarly defining Guide Dang It! as not just anything someone needed a guide to help with would do a lot for it.

• And just so we're clear, "Obvious Rule Patch" refers to the rule that obviously exists solely to patch up something rather than the something that "obviously" needs a rule patch.

EDIT 2: Upon rereading that particular comment, it seems to me that you're confused as to what I'm saying, so I'll try to clarify more (and this sort of clarification, to avoid these misunderstandings, is exactly why I am very verbose and thorough with what I say - I could not elaborate on my point deeply enough in just a few sentences, so a critical detail was missed, which leads us to all of this.) I'm not saying that the puzzle in question can reasonably be solved by anyone. What I am saying is that the elements of the puzzle should have hints based on things an average player of the game can understand.

The example puzzle I made up would not be a Guide Dang It!, for example, not because everyone would be able to deduce that the puzzle is telling you to meet Bob with 69 banana cakes in your inventory at 04:20 AM, but because the hints the puzzle expects you to use (the numbers, the time, the banana and cake) all involve things most people playing the game would understand.

By contrast, the braille puzzle in Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire involves a visual form of a language that blind people read by feeling. Being able to read braille is far from a universal skill, especially for the game's target age group - the people the language is made for don't read it, but feel it, and no one who's neither blind nor has any reason to work with blind people will have any reason to ever learn braille.

Forget about solving the puzzle - the typical player who runs into the puzzle isn't even going to know what they're looking at, or what they're being told, or shown. That is what I'm referring to.

Most people who play video games can read a watch, can understand numbers, and know what banana and cake are. Most people won't be able to understand the braille they're reading in Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire, if they even know it's braille they're looking at, or know what braille is. Those who do know braille are either blind or work with the blind, and the former aren't going to be solving braille visually. Not only can they not deduce the hints; they can't even tell what the hints are.

Exactly - the player's lack of skill doesn't make Homing Projectile a YMMV just because they can't dodge the projectile. Homing Projectile isn't about a player not being able to dodge a projectile, but about how the projectile acts. Likewise, I don't feel that a puzzle being difficult qualifies it as a Guide Dang It!; the trope is, or was, about how information is presented (or rather, how it is not presented) in the game, not about a player struggling to solve puzzles.

Edited by AGuy on Mar 12th 2021 at 6:04:03 AM

You know what? After typing all that, I realized that my proposition is insane and would never work. It's too nuanced, impossible to explain simply (or at least, for me to explain simply), and is bound to be misunderstood and misused as a result.

I will see if there's something simpler I can propose to get a consensus on.

That being said, this trope becoming YMMV and turning into "this thing frustrated me so I used a guide to deal with/circumvent it" would render it almost completely meaningless. Such an idea at its base is too broad to be meaningful, and it would just become a Video Game exclusive version of what Wall Banger used to be.

The wiki as a whole is generally very careful about adding YMMV tropes regarding negativity. Guide Dang It! is about something that is inherently frustrating - lack of information. If the trope becomes YMMV, and accepts anything someone felt they needed (or wanted) to use a guide for due to frustration, then we are, in essence, adding a YMMV about negativity, because we didn't feel it worth cleaning up the trope like we did Fake Difficulty.

I see the Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire example being brought up a lot. Isn't that more of an example of All There in the Manual, since the manual actually does explain what Braille is and provides the full alphabet as reference?

EDIT: All There in the Manual appears to be something else. Looks like it should be Read the Freaking Manual.

Edited by YourIdeas on Mar 12th 2021 at 5:55:20 AM

No. Per Read the Freaking Manual, the page you linked:

• In video games, and sometimes other software, the manual may be of no help. For most games, the manual only tells you how to play the game, not how to beat it. (For that, see Guide Dang It!.)