Top 10 Worst Video Game Prologues

For a game that’s eager to flaunt its beautiful world and awesome giant robots, it also eager to play hard to get with these things. The game starts with your silent avatar being found in a life-pod, with your first task being to get to the Human colony city of New Los Angeles. However once you actually get to NLA, the pace comes to a screeching halt as the game gives you a 40-minute sight seeing tour of the city, with your character lucky to move 10 feet before another cut scene triggers. We get that Xenoblade X is a game with a lot of features to manage but this could have been handled way better.

Tutorials need sharp pacing lest players lose interest early on. Sadly, this is an issue faced by “The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess”, and one that could be deemed a misfire. Starting out, the player – as the hero Link – is put through a series of tutorials for the game's mechanics: Sword fighting, fishing, horseback riding, and even a lengthy process as a wolf. Only after several hours does Link obtain his iconic tunic and commence his adventure in earnest, but even then, they still have to finish the first dungeon before they can explore the world of Hyrule.

There's building up a difficulty curve, and then there's throwing people headfirst into a challenge. In the prologue of “The Witcher 2”, the monster hunter Geralt is forced to recount his role in King Foltest's siege on a castle. In theory this would be an exciting taste of the gameplay... but in execution it quickly turns into an unnecessary chore. The player has to progress through several parts of the siege, not having had more than a brief sequence of combat training beforehand. Add in particularly fierce enemy fighters, and you have a rough introduction. The worst part of all is that this is a barrier of entry to an otherwise fantastic game.

Sometimes small things can lead to great frustration. Such is the case for “Okami”, an action-adventure game about the sun goddess Amaterasu appearing in wolf form to rid the world of darkness. When the game was originally released on PS2, it featured a lengthy unskippable opening cutscene that explains the nature of the world and the game's backstory in plentiful detail lasting about 20 minutes. That may have been excusable, had the audience not been subsequently greeted with characters making chattering noises to voice their dialogue. Not exactly the best narrative decision, right there.

Hey It’s Ren and Stimpy and in features Time Travel, what more could you want? Well actually being able to travel in time is an insane challenge. The opening to Time Warp” has its titular duo hunting down proofs-of-purchase tickets to get the time machine. There's just one issue: if Ren and Stimpy don't collect 47 million of these items before the second level, it's game over for players. While that number actually translates to collecting just 65 tickets thanks to an in-game joke, the fact that this isn’t conveyed until after you collect that quota certainly put players off by the whole affair.

While the opening to “Assassin's Creed III” may drag on, this feels more frustrating. After a well-directed opening scene introducing gamers to Ezio Auditore and his older brother Federico, the promise for greatness was set. Said promise was soon tempered, though, by the slow-burn nature of Ezio's acceptance into the Assassin's Order, with the signature blade only becoming available after a traumatic event. And even then, Ezio – and by extension, the player – is drip-fed tools and weapons for hours afterwards, taking up several of the game's twelve core Memory Sequences.

Slight though its issues may be, this game's intro never ceases to irritate. First released in arcades, “Ikari Warriors II” opens shortly after the events of the first game, with heroic duo Paul and Vince sent thousands of years into the future. Anyone playing the NES port of the game, though, may find their patience worn out within seconds, and take a good guess why. (Show the morse code intro) Yes this is the exact pace of “Victory Road” introductory dialogue... and Morse Code-esque noises ring out each time a letter appears on-screen? We are not amused.

Simple and clean, this is not. Gamers experiencing “Kingdom Hearts II” were likely surprised to find themselves starting the game as Roxas, rather than series hero Sora. Surprise turned to frustration, though, as the game's prologue has Roxas go through a lengthy string of completing various jobs and and mundane tasks to establish the broader narrative. The few hours spent wandering around Twilight Town, up until the game proper commences, come across as padding of the most blatant sort. While Roxas’s story does have a rather heartbreaking conclusion, taking almost 3 hours to get there is hardly an enthralling introduction.

Developed by Reflections Interactive, this acclaimed driving game has a rough opening. You're dropped immediately into the first mission, in which the goal is to perform car stunts for gangsters in a parking garage. If that wasn't enough, the game neglects to provide a clear idea of how to perform said stunts... and the player has sixty seconds to pull them off. While we imagine a given player's attempts to figure out these manoeuvres would be stressful enough, the game adds insult to injury by having the gangsters berate you for failure.

Before we unveil our top pick, here are a few honorable mentions:

“Mass Effect” (2007)
“Heavy Rain” (2010)
“Fable III” (2010)

Few games demand such immense trust and dedication on the player's part early on. And yet “Final Fantasy XIII” appears to strive for that, tossing players into the world of Cocoon before leading them along a linear string of areas. For many hours and several chapters, you're greeted by tutorial after tutorial that sluggishly reveal the complexities of the game's levelling, combat and role mechanics. Btw, you wanna rearrange your party? Well, you gotta wait until chapter 10 – and there are only 13 chapters in the whole game. Meanwhile, the story – chronicling six heroes of varied dispositions evading Cocoon police while dealing with their status as L'Cie beings – delivers details in piecemeal fashion and comes across as obtuse. The common refrain of “it gets better after twenty hours” basically proves our point for us.

Do you agree with our list? What’s your least favorite video game prologue? For more intriguing Top 10s published daily, be sure to subscribe to WatchMojo.com.