Manuals, as I’ve mentioned before, have been in steep decline for many years.  Now, as manuals generally serve the purpose to telling the player how to play the game, it’s pretty clear that something needed to take their place.  By and large, the in-game tutorial has stepped up to the plate to fill this void.

In-game tutorials have taken many forms in my experience – some are as plain as a big ol’ “Tutorial” button ala Civilization IV, where a guide takes you step by step through the various concepts you need to understand to play the game.  Some take the form of introductory levels that aren’t called tutorials per se, but introduce game concepts one step at a time, such as in the Advance Wars series.  Sometimes the tutorials are even more ingrained in the game, popping up only when needed to introduce a new mechanic to the player (Shadow Complex takes this approach).

Of course, in-game tutorials are not without problems.  Separate tutorial sections may be hard for a player to go back and reference as needed, or they may not want to have to play through several tutorials they don’t need just to get to the one they do need.  When it comes to introductory levels, the first time through in Advance Wars can be helpful, but when you play through the game again, repeating them again can be very frustrating for an experienced player.

The critical thing is, if you are going to forsake a detailed manual and go purely with in-game instruction, make sure you explain everything.  Over the holidays, I had put Hero’s Saga: Laeventein Tactics for the DS on my wish list because it looked like something I would enjoy.  A turn-based strategy RPG with a focus on formations (so it said) sounded like exactly the kind of game I could lose myself in for a while.  One of my friends was kind enough to get it for me as a gift, and so I got my chance to see if it was all it claimed to be.

The game’s manual is pretty flimsy, as is the standard these days.  It tells you the basic story, how to activate your unit’s super move, and the relative attack/defense strength of the different formations you can use.  Beyond that, there wasn’t much to it.  As such, I figured the game itself would have a more robust explanation in the form of in-game tutorials.

As you might have already guessed, I was mistaken.

The game starts you off with a very simple battle, and some very brief explanation of how your super meter works.  After that, well… that’s it.  From that point on the, the game does nothing to explain anything.  There is an entire class-changing system that goes unexplained, and the player is left to figure out how it works entirely on their own.  Damage to units, which you’d think would be a simple affair, is also left completely obfuscated.  A unit with 20 HP left can occasionally take far more than 20 points of damage, and somehow still be left standing.  Why this is, I have no idea.

Even more frustrating are when enemy units inflict status effects that are not covered in the manual, nor ever explained, and the player simply has to figure out what they are by stumbling in blindly.  In one particular battle, a group of enemies had a spell cast on them that left a little floating “W” over their head.  With absolutely no clue what this meant, I marched forward to meet them.  Turns out that it meant they got to act twice during a turn, which proved quite lethal to my advancing army.

In short, I had a game where how half of the mechanics worked was a complete mystery.  With no manual worth speaking of, and no in-game follow up, my only recourse was the internet, whose resources also proved flimsy because, let’s face it, probably only five people in the country bought this game.

Laeventein Tactics is an extreme example of the failure of designers to educate the player on the rules of the game, but it is a problem that seems to crop up more and more often.  Integrating tutorial without disrupting the player’s immersion in a game is a difficult task, and it seems to be one that not many people have taken up the challenge of tackling.  It can be done: Super Metroid, over a decade ago, did a brilliant job of demonstrating new gameplay ideas without even a single pop-up window or piece of text; falling into a seemingly inescapable pit, the player discovers that they can wall jump (and could do so all along!) by observing the actions of some adorable alien spectators.  More recently, Beacon, produced for a Ludum Dare competition, impressed me with its steady, clear introduction of new game concepts using only visual clues.

The overall complexity of a game often dictates how well “instructional” materials can be integrated in, but if developers are going to continue to eschew manuals, this is certainly an area they could spend a little more time working on.  A well-designed, well-integrated tutorial system can keep a player both entertained and happy, whereas a bad one can fail to get across important information and, even worse, completely bore a player.  While it may seem like a small element in an overall large game, it’s one well worth caring about.