I only tried TOME (Tales of Middle Earth) due to posts called “A Day in the Life of -” on the main forum. The game’s been updated now, and supposedly it’s changed to the point where the familiar features are quite different from the game I remember. Still, the stories were basically explaining game mechanics, odd and interesting events, and weaving a story for the character around them. One of the best writers tended to take odd character combinations (a sorcerer with amazing speed, but ridiculously low health) and turn them into interesting characters (the one he was writing was a sort of British professor type) as well as explaining how to survive.
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I watched, the other night, someone speed run through Unlimited Saga.
This is a standard mission screen in Unlimited Saga.
While the game was in Japanese, I could basically tell their tactics. First of all, they avoided almost all battles. Secondly, they got skills that seemed to emphasize speed. Finally, they used two main tactics – knife skills with a high chance of a deadly strike, and a specific axe technique which tends to kill the final boss quickly. The player finished the game in about an hour and a half.
I think you can kind of separate tutorials into a few categories. For example, there’s games that assume you are very young. There’s games that assume you don’t know the genre conventions. There’s games that want to give you information about the world. A final category might be games that want you to be able to look up mechanics.
Here, in Final Fantasy II / Final Fantasy IV, the game makes sure you know how to move and talk.
If people don’t use interpretation, or reading between the lines, or trying to find fun in a game, they tend to love games that I only like, and they tend to hate games that I’ve been able to enjoy. By interpretation, I think I mostly mean something akin to the concept of “active reading.” In literary criticism, this often means looking at a work both as the text on the page, and looking for the work as what the text could be interpreted to mean. So, for example, you might take Freud and say that he’s saying A, but he means B, and B is a lot more interesting than A. If someone’s just looking at what the game does, they may like a game with a stronger theme to the plot (but may ignore the clunky ways that the theme is set out.) If they can’t look past a bad translation, they may ignore what the plot is trying to say in favor for how poorly the plot is saying it. I think it might help to discuss specific games to try to explain what I mean.
A cutscene shows bats fluttering up and away from the fortress with a large moon in the background. This plays when you approach Magus' fortress.
In Cosmo Police Galivan, you have two experience bars. One is for levels, which governs HP amounts and CP amounts (basically magic.) The other is for your weapon. If you die, you lose level experience but not blade experience. This means that new areas are incredibly fustrating since you often need CP to open doors and do special attacks. However, death removes your CP, and it removes your level experience (which governs the limit of how much CP you can have.) A friend of mine played the game using cheats for the blade experience and refilling HP. He got stuck at one point because he needed to grind up his levels to have enough CP for an event. While death in the game didn’t throw you that far back, it is an inconvienence, since it hurts you in ways that actually does matter.
Death in a rogue-like such as Dragon Crystal is usually a learning experience. You die so you can learn how to survive.