Fairy Fencer F in 3 hours: Text-Based Tutorials

If you’ve ever been around any anime forums, you might have heard of the infamous “three episode rule”, which is a guideline that some anime fans use to judge whether a show is worth their time. The idea is to watch three episodes of an anime series, and if the anime is able to make a strong impression on you by the end of those three episodes, then it’s worth continuing on, otherwise, move on to something else.

The same rule can also be generally applied for games, and it’s especially important for them because unlike TV and anime, games actively ask for the player’s commitment, and with so many games nowadays, it’s often much easier for a gamer to lose interest in a game if they don’t find it immediately engaging to play with. Therefore, a game’s opening is paramount in determining its success, and designers over the years have used many techniques to hook players in, whether that be the prospect of an enticing narrative, an interesting setting, or simply fun gameplay.

And so with that in mind, this is Fairy Fencer F in 3 hours, a series on video game openings, how they draw players in, how they keep them interested, and sometimes, how they scare them away.

Disclaimer: Spoiler warning for Fairy Fencer and Kingdom Hearts Tutorial 

JRPG Openings

JRPG’s are often the hardest genre to hook players with through its opening hours alone. Most of the time, they contain deep and complex game mechanics that can’t be reasonably explored thoroughly in just a few hours, as well as having stories that easily span to the 30th, 40th, or sometimes even the 50th-hour mark. While it is important that a game is able to show the player its core experience as quickly as possible, there is also the potential risk of alienating them from continuing on if they are given too much information too quickly.

Text Tutorials, and how not to use them

In Fairy Fencer F’s case, this is seen particularly through how the game introduces the player to its core combat mechanics, as well as its game world and lore. You see, Fairy Fencer uses text tutorials disguised as one of the game’s characters giving lectures to the player on how to for instance access the menu, attack an enemy, perform a fairize with their fairy partner, and how to move in the overworld. During these “lectures”, the players fully lose control of their character and have to read through the entire lecture before they are able to proceed. Now while text tutorials are nothing new, and aren’t inherently flawed on their own. They can easily become a crutch for developers to lazily teach their players the mechanics of their game. Moreover, if they aren’t used correctly, they can turn the act of learning a game into a frustrating experience.

One problem with how Fairy Fencer F uses text tutorials is the fact that the lectures come up far too frequently. Sometimes they even have multiple lectures that follow right after one another. This can often break any sense of immersion players had managed to develop for the game at that point, which makes it harder for players to stay engaged.

These lectures also more often than not contain very long explanations, which is especially bad since players simply won’t be able to keep up with the amount of new information that they have to learn. This can quickly become disastrous if the game then expects the player to have mastered all of these mechanics, and proceeds to places them in a tough battle that requires these mechanics to win. The biggest offense in all this, however, is that it makes learning how to play game feel like a chore instead of feeling fun, since the player is spending more time reading the tutorials than actually playing the game.

The game also uses these lectures to explain their world and essential lore, which is just a very lazy way of doing exposition. This is because by doing this, you aren’t actually letting the player experience these details by themselves, and instead are treating your lore more as just insignificant details that aren’t worth remembering (A classic example of how not to do “show, don’t tell”). It also doesn’t help that these lectures about their game world have no real discernable difference with the lectures about the game’s mechanics. So any detail players might actually find interesting about the world will be overshadowed by the subconscious feeling that players will have with the game’s tutorial, which in most cases, will likely be the feeling of frustration.

For a more accurate example of what I’m talking about, please see the video below

How do I use it then??

While text tutorials are by and large a very outdated way of teaching the player about how to play your game. There are still ways that you can use them effectively. For example, developers can use them to explain the more simple aspects of their games. Take for instance another JRPG, Kingdom Hearts.

While they also use the same type of text tutorials, they only use them to explain short sections of their game such as how to play minigames. The tutorials are brief, and straight to the point. If you must use them to explain your core mechanics, use them sparingly, and intersperse them with sections that allow the player to test out the mechanics right after the explanation so that they can easily commit it to memory. For an example of this, I have linked a video of Kingdom Hearts 2’s tutorial below.

Conclusion

Video game tutorials can be a tricky thing to implement correctly, especially in the case of JRPG’s, where certain mechanics will sometimes require a very thorough explanation in order for players to understand. While text tutorials can be a great and easy way to solve this problem, it’s important to remember that relying on it too much can make players feel as if they need to do some homework before they can truly have fun with your game.

But that’s just what I think. What do you guys think of text tutorials? Do you like them, hate them? What is your favorite way of being taught about how to play a game, especially for JRPG’s? Please leave a comment, I’d like to know!

Thanks for reading as always, and I hope to see you next time.

Video Credits and copyright belong to Shirrako  (Kingdom Hearts) and ★WishingTikal★ (Fairy Fencer F)