Any Time Now - Games that Overcame a Slow Start

Twinfinite's Mike writes, "In the video game world we have Wolpaw's Law, named for former Gamespot writer and current Valve employee Erik Wolpaw, which states that at a certain point a bad game has sealed its fate and nothing could change its score, therefore absolving the reviewer of having to finish it. As with any rule however, there are always exceptions, and here are a few games that didn't start off that well but really turned it around at some point."

[Sly-Lupin]

A few minutes ago I saw someone post something to the effect of, "If you hate Final Fantasy 13, you either never played the game... OR didn't play for more than twenty hours."

Nearly fell out of my chair laughing.

Anyway, this article is awful. The title implies that a "slow start" is an inherently negative thing--it's not. And then, it lists several games that didn't have slow starts at all--Mass Effect, for example, drops the player down on Eden Prime almost immediately (and both sequels have similarly fast starts, in fact, one of the more interesting bits of ME3 was cut from the game in order to get the player into the action faster).

Mario & Luigi Dream Team doesn't have a slow start, either--you get to play the game, proper, fairly quickly--it just insists on tutorializing everything... for the entire game. That's not a slow start, that's just bad game design.

....

The only game listed that managed to overcome a (BAD) slow start is Assassin's Creed.

Just rubbish, all round.

[thecastroregime]

While a slow start may not necessarily be a /bad/ thing in and of itself, it really makes a game hard to get into. Your comment on the comedy of not going through 20 hours of FFXIII seems to support that--why should I have to play through so many hours of crap before something gets good?

Mass Effect did have a bit of a slow start. Yes, you were in the action fairly quickly, but action and gameplay are not the only things that matter. The narrative of the game didn't feel particularly well rounded out until quite a bit later in the game. Until then, I felt like I was just shooting, a very strange thing for a game that is so character and story-driven as Mass Effect.

Mario and Luigi had such a slow start that I quit on it after seven hours or so. Having all those tutorials really gets in the way of making you feel like the game has really launched. Tutorials are undoubtedly associated with the early stages of a game, so having them littered through the entirety of a title can certainly make it feel like you've never really progressed anywhere.

[Sly-Lupin]

It really depends on how the game is built.

I consider Dragon Quest VI to be one of the best games of all time, and it has a very slow start.

As in anything, there needs to be congruence between the game and the narrative. A bad "slow start" is simply a syptom of poor congruence.

The reason why Mario & Luigi had a "bad slow start," for example, is a lack of congruence--the game continued to bombard the player with tutorials long after tutorials were necessary, or even welcome.