I look up information a lot when I’m playing a game. In this video, I discuss how I use walkthroughs when I’m playing through a game for the first time and how they fit into gaming as a whole.
Walkthroughs are always in the back of my mind when playing single player games. I’m always thinking about how I can best optimize my play, and sites like GameFAQs and even YouTube are extremely helpful tools in achieving that. You practically need a guide to find some Doom Secrets.
My recent Final Fantasy playthroughs got me thinking about walkthroughs in general, so I decided to make a video on it. Just like in Doom, it feels like the game design leans towards forcing a player to have external help to achieve some tasks. Whether or not that’s a good thing, is what I talk about in this video.
Transcript:
I’m gonna start this video out by saying something controversial. Something so offensive, so odious, that I’m afraid my channel will be shut down the moment YouTube’s servers check to see if I hid a song from the Backstreet Boys in my video. I’ll probably lose my gamer card after voicing such a distasteful opinion. I may fear for my life, but I have to say it.
Doom is a good game.
Phew. A weight is lifted off my chest.
Now I’m not a superfan, like a lot of you degenerates out there. Hell, I just finished the game for the first time in 2020. But after finally beating it, I can really appreciate just how great Doom is.
Though in this latest playthrough, I noticed something about the game design.
A lot of the secrets are placed in such a way that no sane human would ever find them on their own.
Like the only way to find a secret in some levels is to just slide alongside every wall, spamming the grunt button, until you hit the one chunk of wall that activates a door on the other side of the map.
There are other secrets that are well-choreographed. Like this wall on e1m1. If you have functioning eyeballs, you’re likely to notice that it’s discolored when you run past it on your way to the exit. And if you’re accustomed to the way secrets are found in Doom (spamming the use button), then you’ll press it and open the hidden passage.
But those obvious secrets are dwarfed by the sheer number of ones that are so well hidden, it feels like the developers didn’t want you to find them at all. There’s a spot in e1m3 where you shoot a wall to uncover a secret area. I can’t think of any other secrets in the whole game that are revealed that way. It’s kind of a thing in Doom 2, but even there, its still done very sparingly.
There’s a lot I love about Doom, but the secret placement is one of my least favorite parts of the package. One might argue that you aren’t supposed to get every secret in a stage, just the ones you notice, but I’ll get to that later.
For now, lets take a look at Final Fantasy 7. Specifically, the 2 optional party members. Yuffie and Vincent.
These two party members are easily missable. In fact, it’s almost hilarious how obtuse it is to get them if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Lets go over the process to get Yuffie to join your party. First, you have to have left the Mythril Mine. Then, anytime you’re in a forest area on the world map, like this, you have a chance to encounter Yuffie. But the encounter rate isn’t the same for every forest you come across. It’s lower in some areas, higher in others, I think it even has a 100% chance in one particular spot.
Just coming across and beating her isn’t enough though. You’re put in a small area with her after winning. You have a few options here, you could save at the save point, leave the screen, or talk to her. If you save in that save spot, she steals some of your gil and leaves. If you do anything but talk to her, then you have to encounter her again to recruit her.
Once you start talking to her, that’s when the bullshit really begins. You’re prompted with 5 dialog choices during this sequence, and if you mess one of them up, she leaves and you have to fight her again. I think that’s a cool idea in theory, but that hinges upon the fact that the dialog choices make sense to a new player trying to recruit her. Let’s look at each of the choices. Also, let’s assume that we know Yuffie is a recruitable party member in the first place and we’re doing our best to get her to join our side.
I’ll show you the choices and present the correct choice with an arrow.
First. Okay already off to a bad start. The logical choice in my mind, if I were trying to recruit her as Cloud, would be to get on her good side and indulge her with another fight.
Second choice. Again, it’s really ambiguous. In fact, I might even say it contradicts the answer of the last choice. Cloud says “Not Interested” to fighting again, implying that he’s taking the high road. Here, the choice of “Petrified” reads to me like he’s humoring her a bit, the opposite of the first choice.
Next up, okay. This makes sense. I want her to join the party, so I ask her to stay. But given the vagueness of the previous two choices, I would still be a little on edge.
Fourth, easy, logical, love it.
Last one. This is the one that really pisses me off. If you’ve played any Final Fantasy game, you know that when a prompt comes on screen to name a character, there’s a 99% chance they’re going to join your party. I can’t think of any instance when that wasn’t the case, but I’m just covering myself for that 1 weird time when you name a non-party member that probably exists.
So me, in my big, throbbing logical brain, I would obviously click “What’s your name” so I can get into the character naming screen that pretty much guarantees she’s gonna join with the gang. But that’s *the wrong answer.*
You have to pretend not to care about her name for you to actually get her to join you. It’s just… I don’t get it.
You might think I went a little too in-depth with my assumptions about what Cloud would logically think in that scenario to recruit her, but that’s all there is to go off of. Her character isn’t explored before this encounter, so you can’t base your choices off information given to you previously. It’s just a straight guessing game, there’s no strategy in choosing the right answer.
As for Vincent, I don’t think he’s nearly as bad. He’s hidden behind a neat puzzle where you have to find the combination to safe dotted around an abandoned mansion. But he’s still optional. It’s entirely possible that you miss him on your first playthrough.
Now allow me to ask, are you a bad person for using a walkthrough so you don’t miss out on stuff like that?
Okay, maybe not a bad person, but I think there’s an interesting discussion to be had here.
Does using a walkthrough harm your experience playing a game for the first time? It’s a question I genuinely don’t know the answer to. I think most people would say no, in theory, but a lot of people would disagree on where to draw the line. Like looking up a “missable content Final Fantasy 7” might be okay in the eyes of a lot of people, but looking up “max xp glitch Final Fantasy 7” to hit level 99 in the first few hours of the game would be mostly frowned upon I’d imagine.
Before I go any further into this, I feel I should clarify my intentions with this discussion. I’m not here to gatekeep your experience with a single player game. If you want to breeze through Final Fantasy 7 overlevelled without worrying about the battle system at all, more power to you. I’m a person who generally wants to experience a game closest to the way the developer intended. And the developers definitely didn’t intend for the player to know where every single item, weapon, and materia is located. So looking up a guide to make sure you pick up every tiny crumb of content might not be how the developer envisioned the player engaging with the game.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has 900 korok seeds planted all around the world of Hyrule. For those not familiar, you gain more inventory slots as you collect more korok seeds. Gaining a new slot costs 1 seed for each inventory category, but the cost quickly inflates as you buy more slots. You need 441 seeds to fully upgrade your inventory. Notice that leaves 459 seeds that are effectively worthless. So what’s the point of having over half of the korok seeds in the game do nothing?
There’s 900 korok seeds in the game so every player comes across a fair amount of seeds on their own. They wanted Korok seeds to be these tiny rewards for players that notice something off or special about their environment, like a circle of rocks with an empty space or 2 shrines with apples in front of them and 1 beside them that doesn’t have an apple. If they removed 459 of the korok seeds, so there was only the 441 seeds that you need to fully upgrade your inventory, it’d be a lot harder to find them. They’d be more spread out. But by having the placement of the seeds be so dense, it’s pretty easy to get your inventory upgraded fairly quickly.
They don’t want you get to all 900 korok seeds. No player in their right mind would do that, on their first run at least.
Doom is designed in kind of the same way I imagine. You aren’t expected to find every secret on your first playthrough. It’s something that comes to you after dozens of playthroughs or even discussing with your friends. “Yo dude, if you stand right here, then BOOK IT to this spot, then you can get that Soul Sphere you see in the window earlier in the level.” You don’t need that soul sphere to complete e1m3. It definitely helps when you get to Shotgunner hell at the end of the level though.
Its the same with Yuffie and Vincent. You don’t need them to complete the game, but you’ll be missing out on what they add to combat and all their dialog. Yuffie is hilarious in FF7. I don’t think my opinion of the game would be worse if I didn’t read her multiple exchanges with Cloud about how sea-sick she is, but it is content I ended up enjoying that I wouldn’t have even known about if I didn’t look up how to find her.
To be honest, I kind of like secret characters like Vincent and Yuffie, when they’re done right at least. If I stumbled on Yuffie and Vincent for the first time during my second or third playthrough as a kid, that would have blown my goddamn mind. It would have felt like anything was possible. If I missed out on them the first few times playing, who knows how many characters are hidden within the game, just waiting to be discovered?? It helps in making the game feel like it’s limitless.
Unfortunately, I’m not a kid anymore. I don’t replay games. When I was a kid, I wouldn’t get a game very often. My mom would take me to the local EB Games once every few months and I’d spend $20 bucks on something used. And I enjoyed the ones I got. I might be showing my age here, but one of the best games I ever bought on a whim was Dave Mirra’s Freestyle BMX 2 on the Gamecube. I still have it, like a decade and a half later. Got it for 3 bucks. I spent so much time riding my bike around in that first level as the slim jim guy. Something I discovered with my friend (shoutout to Kongsley, link to his channel below), is that when you bail off your bike, you can grab onto things. So we’d spend hours grabbing onto the golf carts and laughing at how the character would just ragdoll about.
I did a lot of that stuff in games back then. I’d explore every nook and cranny, try and break out of bounds, and speedrun every game I played because I was limited to what I had. By the time I got a new game, I was likely burnt out on the previous one, so I never returned to it, but I definitely spent a lot of time in those games after the credits rolled.
I was about to go into my step into PC gaming and all the game deals that come alongside it, but I think that’s best saved for another video. Needless to say, my gaming habits changed after I got a Steam account. I bought a few humble bundles, stocked up during a few steam summer sales, and amassed quite a collection of games. And on top of that, there’s games from previous generations that I want to play as well. There were a lot of important areas of gaming I missed as a kid. I didn’t have a Playstation 2 or Xbox, and anything before that I was too young to appreciate. And even though I had a Wii, I still missed out on a ton of games. So in addition to wanting to play all the games that I grab from steam sales, I also have games on the PS1 and Super Nintendo that are in my backlog. Check out my HowLongToBeat page in the description if you’re interested in checking that out.
I have 224 games listed under my Backlog category. And that’s just the games I could think of when I made my profile, I’m sure there’s other games I wanted to play at one point but forgot about. Now I’ll grant you, there’s no way I’m going to play all of those, like, ever. I more so use the site to keep track of when I beat games and how long it takes me.
When adding games I’ve beaten to that account, I realized that I don’t finish games very often. So I’ve made it my mission to FINISH more games. As you can see, 2020 is going pretty well for me, it’s my best year so far. Just gotta keep my momentum through the last few months.
So making a pledge to finish more games includes some fine print in my mind. That being, don’t replay games. Time spent playing a game I already played could be time spent finishing a new experience. If I’m only going to play a game once, I want it to be the best playthrough possible. How do I achieve that? Wait for it…
Walkthroughs.
Did you think I’d never bring it back to that? I didn’t, I just kinda rambled there.
Anyway, walkthroughs have been essential for me in my game finishing campaign. Let’s look at Final Fantasy 7 again to see how I used an online guide to help me get the best playthrough I could.
Before I started, I looked up how to get Vincent and Yuffie, since I knew they were missable. The only other things I looked up were how to progress after trying to figure out certain scenarios myself. I don’t remember any specific instance, but I knew there were a few moments when I needed to talk to a certain NPC to progress the story, but I didn’t know who I was supposed to talk to. So after doing my best to progress the story my own way for 10-20 minutes, I’d look it up.
I think that’s the sweet spot for maintaining a healthy outlook on the game for me. A lot of people get satisfaction after dying to a boss in Dark Souls 15 times, only to beat it after that, but I’m not that type of player. I don’t like throwing myself at a brick wall for 30 minutes to an hour to accomplish one task that I don’t fully understand or, more likely in the case of FF7, wasn’t explained properly.
Failing at a task for 10 to 20 minutes is my threshold for when I say, “I’m not wasting anymore time, I’m googling it”.
Some people would argue that looking it up at all isn’t “the true experience” of the game, which I sympathize with to a degree. When I play a game like Final Fantasy 7, I want to play it as people played it back in 1997 for the most part. I don’t want to use any balance mods that mess with the developers intentions or add new content, at least on my first playthrough. Because I want to say “I beat Final Fantasy 7”, not “I beat Final Fantasy 7, but it was with a balance mod”.
But I’m not 100% attached to the idea of purity in my first experience with a game. I played FF7 on the Switch, which is a pretty barebones port. But it does have 3 new major additions, in the form of cheat hotkeys. You can press a few buttons and activate No Random Encounters, Max Health and Limit in battle, and times 3 speed. The first 2 I never really used because it felt like they deliberately threw the balance out of wack for player convenience. I’m not gonna put anyone down for playing the whole game with god mode enabled, it’s just not for me.
You can bet I abused the hell out of times 3 speed though. I pretty much played the whole game like that. Speeding through simple combat encounters was a no brainer. I do regret enabling it for dialog though. I still read everything, but being forced to deal with the normal, not-sped-up, pacing of the dialog-heavy scenes would have helped me remember a lot of things. There’s a lot about the game’s story I forgot, but that can probably be attributed to me playing a bunch of other Final Fantasy games after that and blurring my memories.
That being the case, I’m still happy with the inclusion of a speed-up button. I beat the game with 28 hours on my file, doing a fair amount of side stuff, but not everything. I bet my playtime would be in the upper 50s if the port didn’t have the times 3 speed option. I beat all of Final Fantasy 4 in the time I saved with that feature.
You might call me a hypocrite for using the speed up function, while claiming I want a “true experience” my first time through, and that’s fine. You’re probably even right.
My point is, it’s all subjective. I beat Final Fantasy 7 while looking up how to get optional characters and grinding at 3 times speed. But that was all I did out of the original game’s vision. And that’s all that matters to me. I felt like I got the most out of my first playthrough, I don’t care if someone thinks I didn’t “truly beat” Final Fantasy 7.
And I think we’d be better as a community if we adopted that mindset. Don’t let people put you down because you enabled some accessibilty options in Celeste, or lowered the difficulty to very easy in Fallout 4, or even looked up where to get a good sword early on in Dark Souls. As long as you’re happy playing the game, then don’t care what anyone else thinks.
I don’t think that’s really a controversial take, but I think a handful of people will get a bit upset if someone claims they “beat Celeste” when they had every accessibilty option enabled. Or to tie it back into walkthroughs, if someone looks up every puzzle in portal after trying for a minute or two.
I feel like this doesn’t need to be said, but people often play the same games for different reasons. Go on any Team Fortress 2 server and ask why people love playing the game, and you’ll likely get a hundred different reasons.
It holds true for Singleplayer games as well. Portal 2 has a lot going for it. In addition to the puzzles, the dialog, environments, and set pieces all stand out as something special for the genre.
So how can someone experience those aspects of the game if they consistently have a hard time solving the puzzles? I think the game does a good enough job establishing concepts, then building upon them in a meaningful way, but I also don’t think it’s unreasonable to imagine that a few people had a hard time solving some the puzzles.
If the puzzles in the game are the least important element to them, I think they’re perfectly valid in subverting them if they want to experience the aspects that intrigue them more.
If someone wants to explore the world of Lordran in Dark Souls 1, but the combat gives them a hard time, who are you to say that they should “get good” at the game? You could make an argument that the developers intended for combat to be embraced, but you can’t really convince someone that they would have a better time playing the game by interacting with an aspect of it that they just flat out don’t enjoy.
A lot of people get caught up on that. You can like certain aspects of a game while not liking others. And because someone wants to play it differently than you doesn’t mean your playthrough is invalidated. I believe every game should be as accessible as possible.
Celeste has all the options in the world to make the game as easy as possible, but I bet a majority of people don’t adjust them at all. They just want the default experience and trust the balance the developers settled on. But for those people that can’t handle the default experience, they can adjust the settings to fit them like a glove. And it’s the same for walkthroughs, at least for me. I try and get the most vanilla experience I can out of a game, but if looking up how to unlock a secret character or how to progress in a side quest improves my enjoyment of the game, you bet I’m gonna do that.
At the end of the day, I just want people to play games and be happy. If you get stuck on a puzzle in a game though, don’t beat yourself up for googling it and not figuring it out on your own. There’s only so many hours in the day, best to spend those not being frustrated.
Thanks for watching. If you (mumbles), you know what button to smash. Let me know in the comments if you’ve ever had an interesting experience with a walkthrough of a game. Like if you looked something up and realized you were just doing the solution wrong. There was a puzzle in Metal Gear Solid 3 where I tried everything and couldn’t find the solution, but when I looked it up, it was something I had already thought of and thought I tried. Felt so stupid after that. Have a great day, and I’ll see you on the flip.