OVERBEARING TUTORIALS
Having tutorials in a game – any game – is important. Even if you might be someone who’s played a certain kind of game, or a game from a certain series, for your entire life, the fact remains that there are so many people who haven’t, and who might be trying out the game for the first time ever. But tutorials need to strike a balance between being educative and being intrusive. Something like the later Pokemon games, or like The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, would be an example of the latter, where the game over-explains even the simplest of things, which ends up harming the player’s enjoyment. Instead, Skyward Sword’s immediate successor, Breath of the Wild smartly sidesteps that problem, and teaches the player all of its most important mechanics without ever over-explaining – or even explaining, really – anything at all. It does so through gameplay itself.
