"Of course, this is not always a bad thing if it is actually fun."
If the long stuff is actually fun, isn't that simply a case of genuine longevity, rather than fake longevity being somehow good? It seems to me the sentence was just an excuse to insert a link to Tropes Are Not Bad. Fake Longevity seems to me a bad trope by definition. Unless I'm not fully understanding what is meant here.
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I think it's really more a hedge against fun often being a case of YMMV. I've always had a fondness for "quicksand boxes" myself, for example, but I recognize how it qualifies as adding a fake concept of longevity to a game. Likewise, many 'socializers' have come to appreciate the forced-downtime or tedious elements for creating opportunities to actually socialize rather than button-mash, while more action-oriented gamers see them as blatant and egregious elements of fake longevity.
That said: the article could probably use at least a token description or example of 'genuine longevity' to contrast the fake version against for more clarity. And because I can't actually think of such a thing myself, I'll concede that you may well have a point on the trope itself being questionable.
Edited by KaosProphet
Paper Mario: 1000 year door has you chase someone over the whole kingdom - except the people are all adjacent to pipes in the "warp zone", or Twilight Town, which is a hop, skip, and a jump away. The chase is only long if you take the long routes to each place.
"And in Twilight Princess, you had to find a bunch of little twilight insects before you could bring a new area out of the Twilight realm."
I'm not sure how that applies. What, should Link just touch the area of Twilight and have it fade before his awesomeness? If finding the Twilight insects counts, then the collection of *any* plot-related item counts. You may as well say that all of Mario 64 is just one big piece of Fake Longevity.
" Xen Syndrome." - removed
Xen Syndrome usually has nothing to do with making the game longer. It is usually the result of the development team putting the last level off until last. So they've run out of ideas or run out of time to implement them. The plan was always that the level would be there, so it's not like they said, "We need an extra level to pad it out". The problem is that it's a poorly-designed level.
"(The 2D Suikodens, for instance.)"
No edit made, as this is Your Mileage May Vary, but — sheesh! Suikoden as an AVERSION? When I thought about Fake Longevity that was the first series I thought of! The hours I wasted just walking through the d*mned home base castle to find the ridiculously spread-out NP Cs ...
Edited by cynwakefield
Braid: I'm not sure it's example counts. Something that takes minutes/hours of waiting to achieve is not something to make you play the game for longer, because you're not playing the game while waiting for the counter to finish.