History SlowPacedBeginning / VideoGames

* ''VideoGame/KnightsOfTheOldRepublic'', both the first game and [[Videogame/KnightsOfTheOldRepublicIITheSithLords its sequel]], have less than stellar opening levels that take a long time to complete and have a severely limited Jedi experience. It's only when planet selection is available that the games really pick up. The sequel in particular has an [[NoSidepathsNoExplorationNoFreedom incredibly linear]] ProlongedPrologue that takes over three hours to complete, before dumping you into ''another'' prolonged prologue, albeit one with more openness and actual dialogue (but you still don't get a lightsaber until much later).

* Invoked in the 2004 UsefulNotes/PlayStation2 and UsefulNotes/{{Xbox}} release of ''VideoGame/TheBardsTale'', where an extremely talkative Viking explains at length how he got into the situation he's in. The Bard himself can choose to shut him up before he finishes, but doing this denies the Bard a useful trinket a little later on.

* ''VideoGame/DarkCloud2'' opens with an extended sequence of main character Max... going to a circus. The player mostly watches cutscenes--including a lengthy sequence of circus acts that has no bearing on the plot--and only gets to control Max for a few minutes as he chases around a small boy who stole his circus tickets. What makes this particularly frustrating is that there's a sequence that could have been a lot of fun to play--when EvilClown Flotsam and his goons chase Max through the city--but this, too, is an FMV.

** ''[[VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaTwilightPrincess Twilight Princess]]'' forces you to go through a ton of tutorial-style content before you get to the actual game. From the start of the game, it tkes about roughly two hours for players to enter the first dungeon, another hour to gain access to Hyrule Field, and far longer still to explore it in its entirety. The tutorials include how to fish, which is usually completely optional. Then when catch something, you need to find out how to drop it so the cat takes off with it.

** ''Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix'' sort of fixes the problems with the base game by adding asome things to make Roxas's story more relevant, [[spoiler:most notably a battle against him towards the end of the game.]] Also, knowing what happened in the later-released ''VideoGame/KingdomHearts358DaysOver2'', which features Roxas as the main protagonist and is intended to be played (or watched, in the case of the ''I.5 [=ReMix=]'' collection) before ''II'' according to WordOfGod, makes it much easier to get invested in the events of the prologue.

* ''VideoGame/YakuzaLikeADragon'': There's about three hours of cutscene-heavy backstory and exposition to get through before you can start doing all of the wacky stuff that you saw on Website/YouTube.

* The first level in ''VideoGame/ForbiddenSiren'' was called "easily the worst level in the entire game" by one website.

** ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXI': The first 20 levels of your first character are ''painful'', as the game drops you in your hometown with absolutely no instructions on how to do anything. They're by far the hardest, most frustrating, most unintuitive, grindtastic levels you will ever play in the entire game.

** ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXV'' opens [[with a glimpse of the final battle]] before cutting back to the group bidding Noctis' dad and town goodbye before... pushing your car forward for a bit. Afterward, it plods through a very uneventful first few hours where you have to fix the car, save some random guy and then make it to a seaside harbor. Aside from meeting the villain, nothing really happens and the sections are just a bunch of fetch quests. Chapter 2 picks up slightly by actually introducing the main threat of the game, but otherwise it isn't until chapter ''9'' that the game finally begins to pick up steam and never stops. Various sequences during the first few chapters even take control away from you, forcing you to go through the main plot, every so often. Exciting events like the Titan battle are few and far between, and most of the time we barely get any appearances by villains other than [[BigBad Ardyn]]; more often you're forced to sit through long sequences like the boat ride to Altissia.

* One especially controversial part of ''VideoGame/Doom3'' is the incredibly drawn-out opening where your marine arrives at the Mars base, signs in, meets a few people, observes some stuff, gets a mission from his sergeant to find a missing scientist, gets a standard-issue pistol from the quartermaster, goes looking for the scientist, and it's only when you finally find him that the hellgate blows open and demonic forces rip through the base, turning 90% of the staff (including the scientist you were looking for) into zombies, unleashing the legions of hell on the rest, and ''finally'' giving you something to shoot. Considering this is supposed to be ''Doom'', aka "the quintessential non-stop demon murderpalooza series", some people felt a bit betrayed that the series had apparently decided to [[FollowTheLeader take cues from]] ''VideoGame/HalfLife'' instead.

** ''VideoGame/ShadowTheHedgehog'' has Westopolis, one of the worst opening stages in the entire ''Sonic'' franchise, which exposes many of the game's flaws and helped lower the already rock-bottom public opinion of the game. Things get considerably more fun around the halfway point when better weapons compensate for the targeting system's shortcomings at close range. And in order to get the final ending and face the TrueFinalBoss, you have to get all ten normal endings... meaning you have to play through Westopolis ''ten times.''

** ''VideoGame/SonicAndTheBlackKnight'' is... tolerable at first, and gets ''much'' better by the end. This has less to do with gaining abilities and more to do with the player learning what to do combined with bad level design for the first few stages. The game picks up significantly around Molten Mine.

** ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXIII''[='s=] has one of the slowest beginnings in the series, to the extent it was one of the biggest criticism towards the game. It dumps you straight into [[LostInMediasRes a plot-in-progress]] with no real clue of to what's going on, who these characters are, or what they're trying to do. Speaking of characters, most of them don't make a good first impression, so you'll liekly spend a while hating at least one or two of them. Gameplay-wise, the crystarium and paradigm systems are completely absent, leaving you with nothing to do but use the Auto-Battle command every turn, and maybe an item here or there to mix it up a bit. It's not until the Anima fight that the gameplay gets interesting. On the bright side, it's all uphill from there.