History GuideDangIt / PlatformGames

** ...and it goes all the way back to the original DKC. To get 101% completion, you must first access a well-hidden bonus room in Kremkroc Industries, beat a BonusRound in the level "Oil Drum Alley" in a specific order (get three single bananas, which is considered the worst bonus combination in the game), which will then give you a barrel. You then have to break open a random wall to unlock ''a bonus room within a bonus room'', which you must ''also'' win. Nowhere in the game is this alluded to or even mentioned. Besides this, many bonus rounds in the first game are found by taking leaps of faith into bottomless pits, or carrying a barrel and running into every wall in each level in the hopes of finding secret openings.

* Like most Sonic games, ''SonicAdvance 2'''s true ending can only be seen if you collect all 7 Chaos Emeralds. However, to get to the Special Stage to even attempt to get a Chaos Emerald, you had to collect all 7 of the Special Rings hidden through a level. Unfortunately, as a later Sonic game, it wasn't really known for its exploration and most players would end up running right past them. It doesn't help that backtracking is pretty much impossible and players would either have to memorize an entire level to get them or get the game guide with the detailed maps. GuideDangIt indeed...
** ''Sonic Advance 3'' is similar in this respect, as you have to collect all of the Chao hidden throughout the three acts of the zone (and there are about ten of them), and ''then'' find a key that will let you in to the Special Stage.

*** Other Blue Coin Guide Dang Its: Yoshi can eat the bees that emerge from the beehives in certain levels. This in itself is something that a player is likely to discover. However, to get a Blue Coin, you have to knock down the beehive with Yoshi juice and then have him eat all ''those'' bees as well, which is ''not'' something that's likely to occur to the average player.

*** They seem to be hoping that pressing down and up like that would feel natural to the player, like how most people pressed A when they wanted to catch a pokemon, or pressing B to run.

** ... unless you saw (or knew someone who saw) the movie {{The Wizard}}, which is basically a marketing movie for the game (and the Power Glove... it's so bad).

* ''VideoGame/SuperMarioSunshine'' uses this trope in the form of blue coins, 10 of which equal 1 shine in exchange with an NPC. While they are not needed to beat the game, they will drive 100% completionists batty as they will search every nook and cranny, squirt water at anything that moves or doesn't move, and do all this for '''EVERY EPISODE IN EVERY LEVEL'''.
** Also, to get one of the shines, you have to stand at a certain point in one of the levels, look straight up, and ''spray water at the sun''. After you spray it, a shine will pop out.

** At least two secret shines can only be found by spraying normal looking SAND in apparently random places with water.

*** Once you've figured out the general pattern (spraying blue birds with water gets you blue coins, spraying yellow birds gets you shines, and in one level, spraying a red bird gets you a red coin), you can find all of the related secrets pretty easily. It still counts as a GuideDangIt, however, because nowhere in the game is it ever indicated that spraying birds with water has any kind of point to it.
*** Other blue coin Guide Dang Its: Yoshi can eat the bees that emerge from the beehives in certain levels. This in itself is something that a player is likely to discover. However, to get a blue coin, you have to knock down the beehive with Yoshi juice and then have him eat all ''those'' bees as well, which is ''not'' something that's likely to occur to the average player.

** Getting the first act of Grandmaster simply requires getting all the other stars in the game, which is intuitive enough. Getting the second act requires putting 9999 star bits in the bank, which is hardly hinted at all.

* Milon's Secret Castle on the NES is so cryptic that Nintendo Power Magazine included an article for it in their cheats section (where normally, things like the famous Contra 32 lifes code get published)... The title of the article? "Getting Started"! WebVideo/TheAngryVideoGameNerd made a [[http://cinemassacre.com/2009/01/27/milons-secret-castle-2/ video]] about it.

* Milon's Secret Castle on the NES is so cryptic that Nintendo Power Magazine included an article for it in their cheats section (where normally, things like the famous Contra 32 lifes code get published)... The title of the article? "Getting Started"! WebOriginal/TheAngryVideoGameNerd made a [[http://cinemassacre.com/2009/01/27/milons-secret-castle-2/ video]] about it.
* The Chick Coins, and some of the rarer eggs in ''{{Billy Hatcher And The Giant Egg}}''. For example: The 'Super Recky' egg requires you to hatch either a particular item (the Booster), or a particular mount (Datch) in a particular level in [[SlippySlideyIceWorld Blizzard Castle]], and then fly to a location which would not be thought of as acsessable (the second outer level of the Ice-Machine Castle). Another example would be where you have to jump ''around'' a gate, in order to get to a coin. This is never hinted at anywhere, and isn't that likely to be thought about, seeing as (a) gates are generally impassable until opened, and (b) it's in the second stage of the first level, whilst the game is still in '{{Easing Into the Adventure}}' mode.

* Milon's Secret Castle on the NES is so cryptic that Nintendo Power Magazine included an article for it in their cheats section (where normally, things like the famous Contra 32 lifes code get published)... The title of the article? "Getting Started"! WebOriginal/TheAngryVideoGameNerd made a [[http://cinemassacre.com/2009/01/27/milons-secret-castle-2/ video]] about it.

* Recently released ''SonicAndTheBlackKnight'' certainly seems to be walking this way. The game doesn't explain controls and gimmicks at all, except the very basic functions.

* As seen to the right, ''SonicTheHedgehog [[VideoGame/Sonic3AndKnuckles 3]]'', That F-ing Barrel in Carnival Night Zone, [[http://info.sonicretro.org/Carnival_Night_Zone#Barrel_of_Doom also known as]] "[[DoomyDoomsOfDoom Barrel of Doom]]" (solution: stand on the barrel and press UP and DOWN on the D-pad to shift the weight of the barrel). This was such a bad case of the trope, that Yuji Naka ''[[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XeBgeN5uG8 publicly apologized for it]]'' in 2011 at Summer Of Sonic in London.

* The "Find the Lost Chao" missions in ''SonicAdventure 2 Battle'' are crafted from a vein of the purest Guide Dang It ever seen. Not only do you have to find a gimmicky, often hard to find powerup for each character to even think about beating them, you also have to find the shrine in each level, 99% of which are hidden in bizarre places that the player doesn't even think of going.
* The critically bashed ''{{Sonic 2006}}'' also had its share of Guide Dang It moments. You're sometimes required you to talk to specific people in the hub areas in order to advance further in the game. To be fair, the important people were marked as orange on the map, but the map itself was so confusing, and the hub levels were so large, that you could easily spend over half an hour wandering around trying to figure out where to go next if you didn't have a strategy guide.

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* As seen to the right, ''SonicTheHedgehog [[VideoGame/Sonic3AndKnuckles 3]]'', That F-ing Barrel in Carnival Night Zone, [[http://info.sonicretro.org/Carnival_Night_Zone#Barrel_of_Doom also known as]] "[[DoomyDoomsOfDoom Barrel of Doom]]" (solution: stand on the barrel and press UP and DOWN on the D-pad to shift the weight of the barrel). This was such a bad case of the trope, that Yuji Naka ''publicly apologized for it'' in 2011 at Summer Of Sonic in London.

* Milon's Secret Castle on the NES is so cryptic that Nintendo Power Magazine included an article for it in their cheats section (where normally, things like the famous Contra 32 lifes code get published)... The title of the article? "Getting Started"! The AngryVideoGameNerd made a [[http://cinemassacre.com/2009/01/27/milons-secret-castle-2/ video]] about it.

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* Many ''Game/MegaMan'' bosses are weak to a particular weapon. The catch? You're not told the weakness, and new weapons are only acquired through beating bosses, so you have to beat the bosses in a particular order unless you want a (unnecessary) SelfImposedChallenge. And then in ''9'', the first area of Dr. Wily's fortress has a room with three horizontal tubes that shoot instant-kill lava from one side of the screen to the other, and you need to get from bottom to top. You'll need to figure out how to get up there. There are several ways to do it though.
** Mega Man make it so that every boss was weak to one of the weapons, in a recursive loop, and then balances so that all are theoretically beatable with the Mega Buster. In ''[[MegaManX X]]'', however, the question of "how do I know which weapon to get first?" is replaced with "How am I supposed to know that I'm supposed to beat Chill Penguin first?" (so you can get the leg attachment). The ability to dash was far more important than any weapon, even in some boss fights (particularly the Octopus). Mega Man X2 learned from this mistake and gave the player the ability to dash from the start of the game.

** To acquire the most powerful armor in ''MegaManX 5,'' you are required to drop X down what appears to be a bottomless pit in one of the final stages; if you're on the correct side of the shaft, you'll fall through a false wall into the room with the armor in it. The kicker is that the armor won't be there at all if you played through the stage with any of X's other armors, and there's nothing in-game to suggest this is the case. To be fair, the game will allow you to collect the armor with Zero regardless (although if you complete the stage with either character and neglect to pick up the armor, it's LostForever).

* The hidden stars in {{Braid}}, one of which specifically has to be obtained by making a star out of two of the puzzle pieces from World 3 and part of a star visible in the window above the puzzle frame in the house. And you assemble the puzzle before finding this out, you're boned and have to start the game over. And don't get me started on the one in World 2-2, where you have to go to a particular spot and just [[WaitingPuzzle wait nearly 2 hours]] for a particularly slow-moving platform to get to a spot where you can climb up on it so you can get to the star. No, really. And these two are actually the easiest stars to get.

[[quoteright:257:[[Sonic3AndKnuckles http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/gamefaqscy6x.jpg]]]]

* As seen to the right, ''SonicTheHedgehog [[Sonic3AndKnuckles 3]]'', That F-ing Barrel in Carnival Night Zone, [[http://info.sonicretro.org/Carnival_Night_Zone#Barrel_of_Doom also known as]] "[[DoomyDoomsOfDoom Barrel of Doom]]" (solution: stand on the barrel and press UP and DOWN on the D-pad to shift the weight of the barrel). This was such a bad case of the trope, that Yuji Naka ''publicly apologized for it'' in 2011 at Summer Of Sonic in London.

* ''SonicRush Adventure'': As opposed to nearly every other hidden island that is hinted at where there is shallow water, there are two that you may have to scour the entire sea map for, as there is no sign that they're at the very top of the map, far away from any other island. Also, ThatOneBoss Ghost Titan has one of the most absurd strategies behind it ''ever''.

** ...and it goes all the way back to the original DKC. To get 101% completion, you must first access a well-hidden bonus room in Kremkroc Industries, beat a BonusRound in the level "Oil Drum Alley" in a specific order (get three single bananas, which is considered the worst bonus combination in the game), which will then give you a barrel. You then have to break open a random wall to unlock ''a bonus room within a bonus room'', which you must ''also'' win. Nowhere in the game is this alluded to or even mentioned.

* The Jumpman games had a large number of these. Pretty impressive, considering there were only two games :

* In ''VideoGame/SonicHeroes'', there is at least one point (Extra Mission for BINGO Highway) with Team Chaotix where you have to use Leaf Swirl to turn Espio invisible so he can pass some lasers. There is no point in the game where the fact turning invisible makes Espio able to pass through lasers is mentioned.

* In ''SonicHeroes'', there is at least one point (Extra Mission for BINGO Highway) with Team Chaotix where you have to use Leaf Swirl to turn Espio invisible so he can pass some lasers. There is no point in the game where the fact turning invisible makes Espio able to pass through lasers is mentioned.

[[caption-width-right:257:"Too bad GameFAQs won't come out until 1995"]]

*** And you can easily get into Sonic & Tails area with Knuckles if you feel like having Knuckles face the barrel.