Guide Dang It/Visual Novels


 * Dating Sims are notorious for this. Older games often required you to be at a certain location at a certain time to even get potential love interests to appear (For example, to unlock Anze in True Love 95, you need to do the "SHOPPING" activity at night between Aug. 1 and Aug. 5) and once the time period passed, that person is Lost Forever. Newer games (like Heart De Roommate) use "dialog trees" to establish your path and connections. The problem is that the dialog often is often so absolutely generic, it offers no clue as to which love interest which answer will effect. (Often the effect is toward someone who isn't even in the scene). Often made worse when a good portion of the game's initial story doesn't branch at all, and everything seen up to a certain point leads to a false idea as to who is available to pursue. Ex: In Roommate, the first half of the entire game involves establishing your character's place at school and building up Tomoe's confidence. Without a walkthrough, one would easily come to the conclusion Tomoe is the "default" love interest and you're on her path. You're probably not (Azumi is the default).
 * Roommate isn't the best example, largely because the only choice that really matters in the first half of the game is the one where you get bluntly asked "Which girl do you love?" Although you may not work out that choosing "Not sure" doesn't only give you a Nonstandard Game Over but also unlocks the 2 bonus scenarios.
 * Another example of a relatively common Dating Sim Guide Dang It would be when you actually have to mistreat one of the heroines to get their ending. In some...dodgier games, this makes sense, but in, say, ONE ~To The Radiant Season~ you probably wouldn't think being a continual Jerkass to Mizuka would be how you get her good ending.
 * Yume Miru Kusuri, while being a pretty good Utsuge, it's notorious because every choice counts, and not all of them look important or distinctive enough. If you don't have a guide handy, you're in for a long session of Trial and Error Gameplay. And given the nature of the Bad Ends...
 * The worst of these has to be a choice during a sex scene with Mizuki.
 * In Gakuensai no Oujisama, one of the Prince of Tennis dating sims, some of the guys are horribly hard to hook up with. Genichirou Sanada is actually so hard to date that he's been nicknamed "Bastardchirou Sanada" by some players. And about some guys who are supposed to be easier catches, like Choutarou Ohtori and Takeshi Momoshiro... well, talk to another male at the wrong place and time, get caught by either of them, and watch your love meter completely go POOF out of jealousy. Oi.
 * Tsukihime: just try to get the second Shakes and Shivers Animal Land Bad End without someone telling you how. Bonus points because the staff needed a flowchart to get it, as said in Kagetsu Tohya.
 * To be fair, your not really supposed to get it, as it is a Bad End, and actually really more of an Easter Egg than anything really needed to progress through the game.
 * Fate/stay night genuinely rewards you for seeing the BadEndings. Though most of them are fairly easy to figure out, one of them requires some hoop jumping to get Saber's Relationship Points low enough.
 * Getting the good ending in Unlimited Blade Works requires Saber to have 4 or more relationship points and Rin to have less than 8, making it the only Type-Moon ending that needs more than "reload and change the last choice" for the alternate ending.
 * One genuine example of Guide Dang It is in Heaven's Feel: at one point the player is asked by Rin wether to remove . Beforehand you are told/shown that removing it would practically cook Shirou's brain. Answering "no" leads to Rin congratulating you on your wise choice to not remove it so easily. Answering "yes" has Rin say that you shouldn't be so keen to sacrifice yourself. They decide not to remove it either way, no matter what you choose. Later in the route the player is given a choice of Hmmm...
 * Clannad: Obtaining Misae's Light Orb. This is because you actually obtain her light orb in Tomoyo's route if and only if you play Tomoyo's route right after clearing Misae's.
 * In order to get Kyou's good end, there are a number of choices you have to make correctly, not all of which are obvious, and some of which are downright unintuitive; for example, Whether or not you have made these choices correctly, you then have to sit through many pages of non-interactive reading before you find out whether you get the good end or the bad end.
 * The Flower Shop, released by Tycoon Games in early 2010, is a stat-driven dating/farming simulation. It's easy to see the characters' events. However, the game does not state the requirements for a good ending. If the player gets the default somewhat sad ending, there is a generic message encouraging the player to try harder. (Thankfully, Tycoon Games' website provides an FAQ.)
 * Ever 17: Good luck not hitting any of the 3 bad endings. Example: In Kid's route there is a choice during the 2nd day, which leads to automatic bad end during the LAST day of Sara's route. Backtracking, ho!
 * Remember 11 is also loaded with seemingly innocent choices that lead to one of the game's 30 bad endings, but it's more justified in this case. You also need to see most of them to completely understand the story.
 * One of the most common complaints about Nine Hours Nine Persons Nine Doors is that you blindly stumble through the game, without knowing what choices are correct or incorrect. Thing is, most of the good and bad choices make sense AFTER you've beaten the game, not WHEN you're beating it.
 * The route you decide to take in Divi Dead mostly hinges on where you decide to go next rather than what you chose to say to people, so in a first play through you'll end up accidently deciding which route you're going down even if you have no idea what that means. The choices are so few between and seemingly random that it's incredibly difficult not to end up with the "bad" ending where nothing is explained to you. It doesn't help that the few guides on the internet are actually incorrect so just working out what you need to do from the guides alone is a puzzle.
 * D Nd Poisoned, a Death Note fangame, is known for being pretty frustrating. Not only what you say affects the resulting ending, but also Mello's thoughts, even going to a specific place, at an specific time and the previous place you visited before going to that place affects directly the ending, and probably you got the "Unreachable" ending the first time you played it. Thankfully, the creator made a guide to get all the endings.
 * For Frozen Essence, the path that gives players the most trouble is Aurelius's because while it's relatively easy to unlock his path, one of the requirements to getting his good ending is having a high enough relationship with Aysel, which means that unlike for all other paths where the ending is determined solely by the choices you make when you get on that path, it's fully possible to unknowingly lock yourself into Aurelius's bad ending even before you open his path by simply not being nice enough to Aysel at the very beginning of the game, and the most obvious "be nice to Aysel" option (letting her spend time with Aurelius) renders you unable to open Aurelius's path. And even if you get Aysel's affection for you as high as possible in the first half of the game, you still have to say the right things to her on Aurelius's path and the choices involving her are misleadingly vague at times (who'd have thought that asking Aysel about Rune would make her like you more, but that apologizing to her wouldn't?). And even if you do everything right with Aysel, you can still wind up with a Bad End anyway by not reminding Aurelius about Cascade's letter even though it doesn't seem to make a real difference at first!
 * In Fantasia: Requiem of the Abyss, getting a good ending with Cain is obtusely hard and hinges largely on you buying the right item during the shopping section. The book about demons seems like the most logical choice for Cain's path, considering that Cain is a demon and has confided to you earlier that he wanted to know more about the life cycle of his kind to avoid becoming a mindless Hellbeast, but in fact locks you into getting a bad ending for him no matter what you do after that point. The Curse Removal book isn't much better, either. So what's the item you should buy if you want to get a semi-decent ending for Cain? A painting kit. Yes, that's right, a painting kit. It makes better sense when you see what happens after your purchase, but there's no indication before this that Cain would like painting or that a painting kit would be more useful than a book about demons or curses in the long run, and the one hint you do get about this occurs long after you've made your purchase.
 * And that's just for Cain's second-best ending. To get his true ending, you have to know something that you're highly unlikely to figure out without a walkthrough: namely, that buying the Curse Removal book after - and only after - you get Cain's second-best ending causes the merchant to give you a free painting kit and crucial tip about helping Cain. Of course, if you tried buying the Curse Removal book before you got Cain's second-best ending and saw that it led to a normal ending at best, you almost certainly won't have any idea that doing the same thing after seeing a specific ending leads to an entirely different result.
 * In Katawa Shoujo, most of the endings are pretty easy to get - if you get it wrong the first time it's generally not that hard to figure out where you went wrong. Even Rin's route, which is much more fiddly and experimental regarding choices than the others, isn't too hard. However, if you want One Hundred Percent Completion you're going to need to see every scene in the library. Again, not too hard, except for one specific scene in Act 1 which very few people are likely to get by chance.
 * In Rin's route, when Rin is advised, you can choose three options, all of which involve urging her to do it. However, those three come out of six possible options based on what you say at three earlier decisions, and of those six decisions, four take you to one scene a few scenes later, while two take you to another. Depending on your choices, you may very well end up with a set of decisions that does not include an option for the second scene.
 * For Yo-Jin-Bo, it's fairly obvious which choices get you on which paths. What probably won't be nearly as obvious at first is that the two choices you make before getting into the main part of the game, in spite of appearing to be unimportant But Thou Must! decisions, actually affect whether or not you're able to progress down specific characters' paths. Did you take the pendant instead of trying to leave it alone (and then being forced to do so anyway)? Better not go after Yo or Monmon, or you'll get a very sudden Game Over for absolutely no reason that could be remotely connected to that fateful first decision!