Basic Trope: An action or puzzle in a game that you could not possibly figure out without a guide or walkthrough.
- Straight:
- To complete the game, the player must solve several puzzles that have no in-game hints and would stump a first-time player. Most of these puzzles are near the end.
- To get the Best Ending, the Five-Man Band has to follow twelve steps - two of them are "talk to certain NPCs", three are "go to a certain area", one is "check things before they're actually useful", one is "listen to rumours", and one is "make the right decisions". After that, turn down all the Optional Party Members, let one of your party members have a fight with someone, talk to someone who is featured in the best ending exactly once, and then just continue until the event happens. None of this is hinted at anywhere and no-one could figure it out without a guide.
- Exaggerated: The whole game is Trial-and-Error Gameplay, and absolutely nothing is hinted. There are no true exceptions whatsoever.
- Downplayed:
- In order to forge the Divine Crimson Slicer, you have to turn down every special reward in the game. It's not mentioned anywhere in the game and despite that it's the best weapon you can find, almost any other end-game type equipment can take down the final boss in a few hits.
- There is one confusing puzzle late in the game.
- There are two ways to open The Cursed Door to Nihil Land. Either use the key dropped by Emperor Evulz after you beat him, or use a series of Ascended Glitches to bypass the Door's magic barrier. Doing the latter nets you the Infinity +1 Sword half a game earlier than usual.
- Justified:
- The game Zigzags Mission Control Is Off Its Meds.
- The translators forgot to add extra clues for a puzzle deeply soaked in the original's local mythology.
- Inverted:
- The game bashes you over the head with so many hints that the answer to the puzzle becomes obvious instantly.
- The game is something like the Vampire Saga series and hints come back instantly, with no time limit or penalties to the puzzles.
- Beating the game is so easy that any guidebook would be an example of Captain Obvious.
- The official strategy guide is useless, walking you through the simple and obvious parts of the game, but giving you little-to-no advice (or really vague advice, or no advice at all) for the parts you'd actually want a strategy guide for, or giving you very poor advice (such as suggesting that you Level Grind for hours until you can just brute-force your way past That One Boss, when you could beat it in a fraction of the time with the right setup or strategy), or giving you the bare minimum information to get through the story with almost no information on sidequests and directing you to a now-defunct webpage if you want more detailed information.
- Subverted: There aren't any hints to the password, but the answers are obvious anyway.
- Double Subverted: ...but when you use the obvious answer, you have to enter it in a certain way that's not hinted at.
- Parodied:
- The game tells you to phone somebody. They're very rude on the in-game phone and you need to call them in real life.
- There is an in-game riddle with no correct answer, which exists solely to toy with the player.
- Zig Zagged: At first, the game seems to provide helpful hints, but then suddenly stops giving any guidance. Eventually, the hints return but are delivered in a bizarre and cryptic manner, until becoming helpful again.
- Averted:
- The ending is easy to get - it's all about choices at the beginning of the game.
- Alternatively, the game doesn't have any parts which leave players wondering on how to proceed.
- Enforced:
- "Make it harder so people will pay $29.99 for the strategy guide."
- The ending is a secret ending.
- The makers knew that cheats would get out over the Internet, so tried to delay this phenomenon and stop anyone from knowing about the existence of it without checking said cheats.
- It was a setup by the designers. Mark, the character in the best ending, notes before you fight the true final boss "You went out of your way. I like heroes who do that. You cared so much about them that you looked for a way to save them all even though nobody here knew how."
- To frustrate software pirates, the developers put the clues to one puzzle in the manual as Copy Protection.
- Due to the game being Christmas Rushed, a few of the NPCs fail to spawn, so the devs decided to add their plot critical clues to either the manual (if there was still time for that) or a guide.
- Lampshaded:
- "Look for the secrets in our game! You'll probably never find them all!"
- The main character, being asked about the password, asks, "How the Hell were we supposed to know that?"
- Invoked: The final boss sets up the puzzles and passwords to hinder the player.
- Exploited: A speedrunner uses their knowledge of the game's puzzles to breeze through the levels, effortlessly bypassing obstacles that would stump a casual player.
- Defied: There is a foolproof Hint System in the game to prevent the player from being stumped.
- Discussed: "It sure wasn't easy to complete That One Sidequest. You'd think there would be some sort of hint somewhere."
- Conversed: "How am I supposed to know how to solve this puzzle? I never saw any hints."
- Deconstructed: It is this feature that makes the game disliked and mocked by critics everywhere.
- Reconstructed: Some players enjoy the challenge and like that they're being treated with respect rather than scorn by the creators. The game finds its niche.
- Untwisted: There is a Hint System in the game, but it doesn't work.
- Implied: While the game doesn't provide any explicit hints, some observant players have pieced together certain clues within the game's environment, NPC dialogues, or item descriptions to decipher the solutions to these enigmatic puzzles
- Plotted A Good Waste: The game designers intentionally included these inscrutable puzzles as a commentary on the nature of challenge in video games, essentially wasting the player's time.
- Played For Laughs: The game takes a comical approach to these perplexing puzzles, with characters in the game world expressing their disbelief and frustration at how nonsensical the challenges are.
- Played For Drama: The game incorporates these seemingly unsolvable puzzles into the storyline, using them as metaphors for the characters' internal struggles and challenges.
Guide Dang It! It doesn't say how to get back to the main page.
