Walkthroughs?

[sabrage]

So I never really thought about a game where I NEEDED a walkthrough except the GBC Zelda games, which were impossible without one. Or Final Fantasy games. In fact I've kind of come to the point that I believe if I NEED a walkthrough laden with spoilers, I shouldn't be playing the game. It just ruins it. But then I realized I've watched dozens of hours of LoL replays, and then I played Oddworld and tried to rescue everyone. I can not do it without a walkthrough, so I just gave up.

How do you guys stand on walkthroughs? I kind of avoid them unless I feel I know the game but could know it better.

Also does Blood Money get so hard you need a walkthrough to complete? I don't know if I should buy any hitman games for this reason.

[Whitmore]

Hitman Blood Money is fantastic; You have to kill some dude and have multiple ways to do it. It can be tricky on it's hardest difficulty, but honestly, it's not a walkthrough game. It's about learning it and getting the hang of it.

As for walkthroughs in general? Personally, I love them. A lot of modern RPG's and those types of games are HUGE. Finish it once, then checking a walkthrough to see what you missed for the next run, that's fun. Or if you get really stuck and frustrated.. Eh, games aren't about getting stuck constantly. Challenge is great, but being stuck at one point for hours isn't fun.

It's all about knowing when to use one. Also, for judging the length of a game they can be useful. Quickly skimming through one in a store to, avoiding spoilers and seeing how long it looks can be useful.

Snake Eater had a great published one which I got with it and used it to find some secrets I missed and if I got stuck on a boss; and it had some fantastic extra content. Console, I know, but yeah. Planescape Torment is a game that could use one for a complete run. Game has a lot of hidden stuff.

So yeah, I like them!

[sabrage]

I actually own that Snake Eater one but alas, I only own Subsistence.

But my point in short is that I don't like feeling that a walkthrough is REQUIRED to get everything, despite some RPGs which require this.

[Anthile]

A real boon, as any seasoned adventure game player can tell you. It's like reading a book but every 1-2 hours someone sneaks up on you, punches you in the face and forces you to solve some stupid, unrelated logic puzzle or otherwise you will never see said book again. Bah.

[cosmicolor]

They're cool but some devs (particularly devs of JRPGS) have been known to add shit to their games just to sell guides, see Final Fantasy 12's infamous methods of getting the endgame-level Zodiac Spear for an example.

edit: And Namco's Tales Of series is notorious for doing this in every other game.

[Whitmore]

A recently released game for the Wii, Xenoblade is a good exmaple of a guide being really useful.

Huge J-RPG, with massive areas to explore, tons of collectables and sidequests. About 40% of the game is missable if you don't do some sidequests. This doesn't damage the main storyline, as they are seperate, but the game is so massive that doing it from trial and error just takes way, way too long. Didn't have time to run through it all myself, so a guide would've been useful, although not requiered.

[Kodeen]

I'm generally okay with them. If I'm stuck at a particular section, I'll load up a walkthrough, ctrl+f to what I need, and then close the window.

What I can't understand is people who play step-by-step along with the walkthrough. What's the point of even doing that? It essentially boils down to "press this button now." And then when I do go ctrl+f'ing (that looks bad in print) about, some of these walkthroughs take the tone that assumes that I'm following their every step. "Do again what I told you to do three paragraphs back."

[Fiyenyaa]

I needed a walkthrough for Ocarina of Time, back when I was 11. It was over 70 pages, used more than 1 black ink cartridge to print out, and did not ingratiate me with the parents when they found out. Still - useful to have it in front of the telly instead of on the computer screen.

[The JG Man]

My belief is that all games should be intuitive enough within their own context that you shouldn't need a guide. The times where that is not apparent, a guide becomes acceptable. I think the classic example is The Barrel. Everyone who knows, skip the following paragraph.

In Sonic 3, there was an obstacle in your way that required you to press up and down in rhythm to get past it. The problem is, nowhere is this mentioned in the manual or is it necessary in other levels and indeed, it never comes up again. Two things makes this worse: the first is that in the entirety of Sonic's 1-3 and Knuckles, you NEVER need to use the up button for anything, except looking up which is useless and for specific controls in one short level of Sonic 2 and some pulleys in Knuckles, which can be done through jumping too. The second issue is that through regular jumping, it looks like you can get past this barrel, so you keep on trying thinking it'll work. The funny thing is, with amazing luck, it's technically possible to do it that way, so people would try that until the time limit occurred. The fact this wasn't based on any reasonable logic meant that for a good few years, people simply did not finish Sonic 3 which is pretty crazy to think about now. In fact, had the game have been released now, not only would a solution likely have been officially declared, but it'd have probably been patched out!

I ended up watching a humorous Let's Play of Blood Money which tried to complete the levels both as efficiently as possible and as amusingly as possible. The series was just too entertaining so I ended up watching it, but as pointed out, the advantage with BM is that there are multiple successful ways of completing it and, it's one thing watching how to do it, it's another actually being able to do it.

I think games where guides are necessary takes away some of the fun from it all. It's why I detested when I played WoW having to watch 'How to beat Boss X' videos before attempting them because it took away some of the fun and the mystery of, you know, getting it wrong, which has been something seemingly removed from many games with weakened difficulty settings (I'd like to note that the Hard difficulty on the Space Marine demo was damn near fantastic) that in the long run mean if you can't get it immediately, you're hand held till you are. Additionally, I'd say many J-RPGs I've played have ended up requiring guides. The, unbeknownst to me then, hardcore RPG Star Ocean 3 was just rife of utter bullshit that was just so insanely put in the game it was both laughable and frustrating to my younger self. Mechanically, I'd actually go so far as to say it was a bad game, but I'm sure there'd be many who'd disagree.

What I'm saying in this essay is, I love having GameFAQs, but I usually dislike when I have to use it.

[archonsod]

What I can't understand is people who play step-by-step along with the walkthrough. What's the point of even doing that? It essentially boils down to "press this button now." And then when I do go ctrl+f'ing (that looks bad in print) about, some of these walkthroughs take the tone that assumes that I'm following their every step. "Do again what I told you to do three paragraphs back."

Depends on the game. Take a TES game for example the walkthrough can be invaluable. You know what it's like, you pick up a quest or two to go do something important in the Dungeon of the Living Underpants, get distracted duffing up some elf bandits for some loot, which leads you onto this newly undiscovered dungeon that you just have to explore, and by the time you get back to what you left the town for in the first place it's been six weeks in real life and you're no longer sure which of the two guys in the quest journal you were supposed to off and which is supposed to be paying you. Admittedly, it would be redundant if the quest journal entries were actually useful, rather than reading a bit like my Facebook posts during an incredibly heavy night drinking.

It's also handy for those games which suffer from horrible translations. Pathologic for example, I suspect that's virtually impossible to complete without a guide thanks to the current translation reading like it was written by a philosopher who was struggling with his inner surreal poet.

[vinraith]

I avoid them like the plague, and only break them out if the game has frustrated me to the point where it's "check a walkthrough or snap the disc in half." Even then, my instinct is to uninstall and drop the game in the dustbin, I only end up using a walkthrough if the plot's so compelling I have to see it out. In short, if I need a walkthrough to play it, it's a poorly designed game. The same goes for cheat codes, come to think of it.

[archonsod]

Ooh, that's another one. When a game fails to sustain your interest past say the half way point, sometimes I'll go look up a walkthrough to see if there's anything worth persevering for or not.

[Flint]

I personally try to avoid them regardings games I'm playing for the first time, but I've got nothing against them. A well-written walkthrough or a guide is a fun read even if you don't need the guide or haven't played the game. I suppose it's because a gaming magazine I read religiously from cover to cover when I was younger always had some excellent walkthroughs in each issue and I got into reading those as well, and later on bumping into some excellently helpful and well-written walkthroughs on the internet which I've actually still kept on my hard drive. I just love reading them, provided the writer's a good one.

That said, even I I usually try to avoid them I still have a tendency to search for info if I'm hopelessly stuck for ages. I'll usually lean on to Universal Hint System (http://www.uhs-hints.com/) these days though rather than a complete guide.

[Juan Carlo]

The only games that can get really boring without a walkthrough (but also, are basically ruined by walkthroughs) are adventure games.

Most adventure games don't have much to do beyond the puzzles, so if you are stuck you are basically stuck looking at the same 4 or 5 backgrounds until you figure things out. It can get really tedious.

Especially if you read a walk through and realize that your only problem is you didn't click on some tiny pixel (which, 90% of the time, is usually the problem in adventure game puzzles).

[Ian]

I used to use them as an absolute last resort. But as I get older and my gaming time (and patience) is relatively more scarce I will use them a little more readily. I'd still much rather not but if I'm stuck on something for ten or fifteen minutes and am at the point where I'm just trying random shit to see what will work by trial and error then yeah, I'll just look it up.

[desvergeh]

Have had to use them (FF12 being the worst offender), but agree completely in that it seems the game design has failed if you need to use them. Japanese RPGs seem to be the worst for this, but collecting all the letters, or killing all the pigeons also seem to be guide-mandatory. Much preferred the collection quest in Crackdown where you could actually do it without a guide.

What I frequently will do is if a game is renowned to be hard I might read up on opinions about tactics for the game. For example when playing The Void and Pathologic it was helpful to read the tips before playing, making it easier to not end up painting myself into a corner. With Pathologic the walkthrough was also helpful due to the sometimes poor translation of the dialogue. The poorly translated dialogue plus the poorly translated walkthrough enabled you to figure out what you were supposed to be doing on some quests.

One other thing I do kind of like to do using walkthroughs is look at alternative choices after I have made my own. ie complete a quest in Planescape Torment, then look up the other ways I could have done it. I won't go back and reload, just find it satisfies my curiosity.

[Lukasz]

Since i don't play games for a challenge I really don't mind walkthroughs. Especially adventure games. It is really not fun at all if i get stuck because i missed an item on one of 100 screens.
I can either spend next 2 hours running around and clicking everything or I can check gamefaqs and solve the problem in 5 min.
the second option is waaay more fun.

[Berzee]

When the pacing of the game is jeopardized I'll go get a hint or two (more often than I used to) -- but most of the time I only use walkthroughs for things that I wouldn't really be proud of accomplishing anyway. So for example, in DXHR, I wouldn't use a walkthrough my first time through one of the "conversation battles"...because talking guys into things feels like a real achievement.
But I don't have a problem checking a map if I get hopelessly lost, or checking a keycode for a story-critical door (rather than backtracking for 10 minutes re-looting bodies to figure out if I missed a pocket secretary). Usually when I'm confident that I know EXACTLY what I need to do, but because of my lack of attention or plain stupidity I missed the obvious hint about HOW to do it...that's when I'll use a walkthrough.

The other time I'll use a walkthrough is right after I solve a puzzle in DXHR and am then overcome with oppressive curiosity about how else it might have turned out! So I tend to accidentally-on-purpose spoil many alternate paths for myself after a single playthrough. (Gamebanshee is nice because you can limit the spoilers to your current geographical area =P).

Also, five times minimum on every single screen of The Longest Journey, I would use a walkthrough.