10 Video Games With Frustrating Tutorials That Ruin First Impressions

Let's get the disclaimer out of the way: calling a tutorial the worst part of a good game is a touch of theater. These are not ruined masterpieces, and most of them recover the moment they stop explaining themselves. But the opening hours are where a game does its thing, and there are plenty of games that slightly fumble the first handshake.

Some lock you in a corridor for hours. Others won't stop telling you or drop you into a spreadsheet and wave goodbye. Good things await on the other side; you just have to survive the boarding to reach it. Here are ten openings worth putting up with.

10

Persona 5

Persona 5 starts with a smart casino paradise, then promptly confiscates it. What follows is a flashback that takes its sweet time: hours of school orientation and social busywork before the Metaverse opens its doors for good and the game becomes the stylish dungeon crawler everyone is raving about.

Kamoshida's Palace, the first real dungeon, doesn't start until you've sat through quite a bit of stage setting, and Royal left the slow building intact rather than tighten it up. None of that is bad, exactly. That's a huge amount of throat clearing for a game this confident, and many newcomers bounce away before the hooks sink in. Push through the first few hours and it lives up to the hype.

9

Crusader Kings 3

Crusader Kings 3 has a tutorial of sorts. It guides you through the buttons while calmly refusing to mention the game itself: intrigue and inheritance math, the slow-motion family apocalypse that starts the moment your heir turns out to be incompetent with three pretentious cousins.

New players end up knowing how to press buttons but nothing about why or when you would actually press them. The true lesson comes from failure (or having a friend who has already been through it all lecture you), repeated over several ruined dynasties, until the systems finally click into something glorious. It's one of the best strategy games of its generation buried under one of the scariest front doors. Paradox is Paradox, after all.

8

Red Dead Redemption 2

Red Dead Redemption 2 begins with you trudging through a blizzard, and it has no rush whatsoever. The opening chapter ties up the Van der Linde gang in the snow-capped mountains and guides you through systems at the pace of a man wading uphill through syrup.

Horses handle like canal boats, and tutorials come thick and slow while the open world you were promised sits out of reach for a couple of hours. It's a deliberate choice that establishes tone and difficulty before the thaw, but many players ended up in that snow and never saw the extraordinary gameplay underneath. Once you descend into the valley, it transforms. Reaching that point is the toll.

7

Pokemon Sun & Moon

Pokemon Sun & Moon wanted to tell you a story, and it wouldn't be too rushed. Gen 7 swapped out the series' traditional gym structure for a more narrative penny-ride, which sounds great until you realize just how much hand holding bring it. Every few steps, someone stops you for a chat: Hau, Lillie, Professor Kukui, and your chatty Rotom Dex, all lined up to explain the mechanics Pokémon has been teaching players since 1996.

Veterans who could catch a Pokemon in their sleep went through tutorial after tutorial without a skip button in sight. The game itself, once it comes off the leash, is a bright and charming entry. Getting there involves a lot of patient nodding and mashing the A button.

The Phantom Pain gives you a sandbox of absurd tactical freedom and then makes you wait an age to touch any of it. The prologue catches you in a hospital where Snake, newly awakened from a nine-year coma, can barely stand. So you crawl, on your stomach and at a snail's pace, while the game stages a long and very Kojima sequence of fire and hallucinations around you.

It's striking the first time and endless on every replay, with no way to fast-forward to the open-world espionage that makes the game sing. As an overture, it is bold. As a tutorial, it's a test of dedication you can handle through sheer tenacity.

5

Final Fantasy 13

Final Fantasy 13 is the patron saint of this entire list. For something like twenty hours, it leads you down a single shiny corridor, the story playing out in cutscenes while the path forward refuses to branch. There are no cities to explore and barely a decision to make, just the next room and the next cutscene, with a combat system that holds back its best mechanics until you're hours deep.

Then Gran Pulse opens up, the game breathes out into something spacious and strange, and you finally understand what everyone meant by the slow burn. The catch is that “it'll be fine in twenty hours” can be the worst pitch in gaming, and many players never get that far.

4

The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess

Twilight Princess takes a couple of hours to remember that it's an action adventure. Before Link becomes a wolf or sees a dungeon, he's a peasant in Ordon Village, and the game has him doing peasant things: herding goats and running errands, fetching a slingshot for kids who didn't need any of his help.

It's pastoral and pleasant and goes on far too long, a leisurely stroll where you keep waiting for the adventure to begin. The 2016 HD version tidied up much of the game's later padding but left this opening almost entirely intact, slow goats and all. Once Twilight swallows Hyrule, it becomes a great Zelda. The way there goes through a zoo.

3

The Witcher 3

The Witcher 3 is one of the best RPGs ever made, and it opens in the dullest corner. White Orchard is the tutorial zone, a muddy starting village where the game teaches you the basics of riding and combat before the world cracks open. The combat tutorial in particular lands awkwardly, all fiddly controls and a difficulty curve that punishes you for not yet understanding systems the game hasn't clearly explained. It's a few gray unglamorous hours.

Then you reach Velen and Novigrad, the writing detonates and the side quests start to outclass many other good games. White Orchard is the price of admission.

2

Nier: Automata

Nier: Automata makes a hostile first impression, and it does so on purpose. The opening is a long series of fun-as-hell shooting and platforming, covered in a punishing boss gauntlet during which the game steadfastly refuses to let you save. Die at any time, even near the end, and you start all over again. It's a deliberate echo of old arcade design, an endurance test set before the melancholic, philosophical action-RPG reveals itself.

The intention is admirable, but the reality for a newcomer who has yet to buy into Yoko Taro's vision is a forty minute wall that has sent more than a few people back to the main menu for good.

1

Kingdom Hearts 2

Kingdom Hearts 2 opens with a bait-and-switch that has frustrated newcomers for nearly twenty years. You start it up expecting Sora and Keyblade battles in Disney worlds, and instead you get Roxas, another boy on summer vacation, for the next two to three hours.

The prologue has you working part-time jobs and going through tons of cryptic exposition that won't pay off for very long. It's slow and weird, and it stands between you and the game in the picture on the box. The Roxas part turns out to be thematically clever in retrospect, but as a first impression, it's a wall of homework. Survive it and one of the best entries in the series opens – eventually.