mDuo13

I've always hated how the most frustratingly difficult puzzles in some games (RPGs especially) are not actually meant to be hard. They're the "puzzles" where you simply did not see the place where you were supposed to go next, the button you were supposed to press, or whatever, and you spent hours wandering around looking for it under the misconception that it's actually much harder than it really is. The problem is, this happens to me all the time.

The most recent incident was with my play group in Tales of Vesperia. We were searching for the entrance to Phaeroh's mountain lair, and greatly confounded. As it turns out, one of the first things we spotted on the map was in fact his lair, but what we didn't know is that we needed to enter it from the air, despite having been told shortly prior that we could not land on rocky areas. This simple misinterpretation of messages left us wandering around the map for ages, until we consulted internet and were told that it is, in fact, right in the center of the place we initially went looking for it. Similarly, in Xenogears, there was a locked door, which I headed straight to after acquiring a card key... but which did not unlock. After searching the facility for hours for another door I might unlock, I found out that the door I wanted to open initially could be unlocked by looking at the tiny panel immediately adjacent to the door. How was I supposed to know to check the nigh-invisible panel instead of the door for unlocking?

I encountered an even stupider case of this phenomenon in my playthrough of Golden Sun - I talked to one of these old tree spirits, but couldn't find the path to the other one. After backtracking and retracing my steps through the last two or so towns, including doing some internet searching that proved unfruitful, I returned to the site of the first tree and came to the realization that there was a path I could have simply walked to to pass to the next screen over and find the other tree - it's just that, initially, I hadn't recognized it as a walkable path, and instead sought for long a way around. I blame this misunderstanding with a greater problem I had with Golden Sun in general, which is that its graphics were designed in a way that made them look really nice and "natural", but did not help the gameplay. It was often impossible to tell which parts of the scenery you could interact with, and furthermore, there was a massive repertoire of skills that could potentially be used to solve any given puzzle. So I found myself wasting TP trying every skill on every piece of scenery that looked potentially interactive. When I spent 4 hours trying to solve a puzzle whose answer was "walk five steps to the right", that was probably the tipping point at which I no longer wanted to play the game.

These problems are often hard to solve because they're really unique - the entire reason I get confused is that it is supposed to be obvious, but for whatever reason, it wasn't. That's why I suppose you can't probably get rid of the problem entirely. But some of these problems are pathological: and that's a flaw in the game design. I contend that my particular problem with Golden Sun was unique, but the bigger problem of delimiting what was interactive wasn't clear; that's one of many reasons Super Metroid is brilliant - because a morph ball bomb reveals the grid-based nature of the puzzles AND the required answer. (Not coincidentally, the one place I got stuck in Super Metroid was a point where the morph ball bomb rule did not apply.)

As an even more obvious example, Metroid Prime 3, fairly early on in the game, has a point where you have to let a group of bugs latch onto you and carry you up a wall. The problem is, when the bugs latch onto you, it makes a nasty sound, as if to indicate that you're going to take damage, so you have every reason to kill them rather than wait to see what happens when enough of them attach to you. When I was playing this game, my suitemate Eddie (who stopped playing the game because he was stuck at this point) told me they hurt you - which is not strictly true, but neither is it strictly false (since if you let them carry you forever, they'll lead you straight into a biting enemy)... so I didn't even think for a moment that I'd let them attach to me and end up getting lifted off. Perhaps my problem was influenced by Eddie's comments, but it stands that two of us got critically stuck there, and finding out the answer brought on feelings of disgust, not accomplishment. The worst part is, it would have been somewhat easy to avoid: it's well within the style of the game to have an early cutscene introduce the bugs by having them carry some round object away - and from there, the idea that you could use that to your advantage would more naturally flow.

For me, getting answers to stupidity puzzles is the best possible use of sites such as GameFAQs, but even moreso than that, I wish there was a site that was just a collection of answers to these kinds of things, as spoiler-free as possible, so that we could spend as little time as possible being frustrated by puzzles that were actually intended to be hard. (I'm looking at you, Ocarina of Time Water Temple.) Even better, game designers who looked at the site might be able to better intuit which parts are unintentionally cryptic. But would it really be useful all that often? It's hard to know.

... but, on second thought, I guess there's something of a precedent for this kind of thing.