'That One Part' in computer games

A lot of computer and video games have one particular part of the playthrough that is least looked forward to because it's boring, difficult, frustrating, or annoying in some other way. In this article, i'm going to be making a list of some of these. Now, this is only going to encompass things that are mandatory for completing a playthrough, not extra bonus features that are optional.

Warning: Contains spoilers for Hollow Knight, Dig or Die, Minecraft, and Terraria.

　

Collecting essence and the White Palace, Hollow Knight

The majority of Hollow Knight is very fun and reasonably fast paced. However, once you get the dream nail and exhaust all the exploration options, you need to collect 2800 essence to access the White Palace. Essence is dropped rarely by all enemies, spawned throughout the nearby area after using the dream nail on a whispering root, or gotten from defeating dream bosses. Unfortunately, it's only very rarely dropped from normal enemies, whispering roots only give around 20 each, and dream bosses give around 100, are difficult to find, and can be frustrating to fight. Additionally, it's possible to not have enough after beating all the dream bosses, which means you have to hunt down whispering roots and slowly accumulate enough essence to access the White Palace.

Which brings me to the next part: The White Palace itself. Basically, it's a really long platforming/parkour session, where precise movement and perfect timing are mandatory. If you don't finish it, you can't fight the true final boss and get two of the endings for the game. People who aren't good at parkour or don't have enough patience to get through this part won't be able to complete the game, and the fact that it comes right after the essence grind only makes it worse.

　

Building a rocket, Dig or Die

In Dig or Die the goal is to build a rocket to escape the planet you're marooned on, but the majority of the playthrough consists of exploring, fighting monsters, and upgrading your gear. However, once you get the final auto-builder, you need to make a rocket to escape. This means that you have to spend hours mining deep underground looking for rare ores, climb high into the sky to collect a giant rock core(which constantly regenerates, attempting to crush you), and worst of all, use explosives to mine diamonds in a volcano, which causes an eruption that only a teleporter(powered by a rare thorium generator) can let you escape from. The teleporter and the generator are both destroyed in this process. You also have to return to your house(or another well-defended position) before night falls, so factoring in travel time, you have very little time to waste all for one chance at getting a needed resource. Additionally, once you finally do get the rocket built, you have to sit inside it doing nothing while you get swarmed by monsters, forcing you to build a fully autonomous defense system capable of surviving being destroyed for a full minute. And how do you build this system? You guessed it, rare ores. After a certain point, the majority of your time is spent mining,

　

Collecting ender pearls, Minecraft

The goal of Minecraft(other than just building and having fun) is to find and activate a portal to the end dimension, and kill the Ender Dragon. Unfortunately, to even find these portals, you need eyes of ender. These are made from blaze powder(obtained from blazes in the nether) and ender pearls(obtained from endermen in the overworld). Blaze powder is easy enough to get hold of, but unfortunately, the same is not true for ender pearls. Ender pearls are an uncommon drop from an uncommon enemy, meaning you could go days without even seeing an enderman, and once you finally do see one, you have to beat it in a fight just for a chance at a pearl.

Once you get eyes of ender, you throw them into the air and they'll drift towards the stronghold, which contains the end portal. Unfortunately, they have a chance to break once you throw them, and you'll need to throw a good amount of them to make sure you're on the right path. Then, once you finally get to the stronghold, you'll need up to twelve eyes of ender just to activate the portal, meaning that you need around 16 ender pearls just to be safe. Then, once you get to the end, it's possible for you to spawn on a small island a good distance away from the main island(both of which are suspended in the void), so you'll probably need another ender pearl just to access the main island(throwing ender pearls teleports you to where they land).

But the journey doesn't end there. The Enderdragon is constantly healed by ender crystals, which are located at the top of giant obsidian pillars. Building up to them or shooting them with a bow are the two main options for destroying them, one of which carries the risk of them killing you(as they explode when destroyed) and the other of which takes a lot of arrows and good aim. Finally, once you've destroyed all the ender crystals, you can actually fight the dragon. Unfortunately, it flies around randomly, sometimes staying away from you for several minutes at a time before finally charging. Additionally, sword enchantments deal no damage to the dragon and it's rarely in melee range, which means you will need a powerful bow and even more arrows. All this while avoiding the swarms of endermen which constantly spawn on the island, which will attack you if you look into their eyes. All in all, it's extremely frustrating and can take real life hours or even days to complete.

　

Mining hardmode ores, Terraria

In Terraria, defeating the Wall of Flesh boss(which takes a lot of preparation on it's own) will cause the world to convert to hardmode, spawning new, stronger enemies and new biomes. Upon entering hardmode, the first thing you will want to do is upgrade your gear to be able to survive the new threats easier. Unfortunately, that takes the form of a lot of mining. Hardmode ores, cobalt, mythril, and adamantite(sometimes replaced by palladium, orichalcum, and titanium) spawn each time you destroy demon altars, which also spreads the corrupting biomes faster. Cobalt requires the strongest prehardmode pickaxe to mine and is rarer(depending on how many altars you smash) than any previous ores. To continue, you need enough cobalt for a pickaxe(at least, more if you want to make armor or weapons out of it), which you then need to collect mythril. Mythril is even rarer than cobalt, requires more to craft things, and requires a cobalt pickaxe to mine. Upon getting a mythril pickaxe(which you need to make at a mythril anvil), you use it to mine adamantite, which is even rarer and even more is needed, as you need to make a forge, weapons, and armor. All for it to become obsolete as soon as you beat the next boss.

　

Games are much more enjoyable when the annoying bits have been taken out and the whole game is fun to play. If you're a game developer, i would strongly encourage you to look at your game and see if it has "that one part" that players won't like. If so, either provide an alternate option, or remove that part entirely.

How to hide Plot armor

Plot armor is a term for the idea that the main character(and sometimes others) can't die because that would end the story. However, the characters still get into difficult and dangerous situations, so the author needs to make them survive somehow. Unfortunately, this usually involves something called "deus ex machina", which is when something happens in the story without any sort of explanation, such as the hero getting rescued right in the nick of time.
Plot armor is necessary for most stories, but when it's that obvious, people tend to get bothered by that, so here's some ways to make your plot armor less obvious.
　
1. Don't put your characters in a situation if you can't see a logical way for them to get out of it alive.
　
Many authors put their characters in ridiculously dangerous situations, like locking them in a room with a nuclear bomb set to go off, guarding the room with giant, fire-breathing wolves, and putting the whole building on an island in the middle of the pacific ocean surrounded by starving sharks. Then they make up some half-baked explanation for how the hero survived because he managed to defuse the bomb with a mere second left before detonation, single-handedly fought off the wolves with only a screwdriver, and was miraculously rescued by a helicopter that conveniently just showed up despite never having been mentioned before. This is bad writing.
To avoid this, only put your plot-important characters in situations that you can think of a reasonable way to get them out of, like locking them in a room that has a window for them to climb out of, or poisoning them with a slow-acting poison that leaves plenty of time to find an antidote. Basically, if you can't think of a way someone could survive this in real life, you shouldn't put your characters in that situation in the first place.
　
2. Don't give your characters supernatural levels of luck.
　
Many stories, such as the How To Train Your Dragon books and Harry Potter, have their protagonists survive through a combination of extreme cleverness and irrationally high luck. For example, if the protagonist is fatally wounded, and their only hope is to take an experimental treatment that has a 99.999999999% chance of killing them, you know they'll take it and survive. Instead, don't let them get injured that badly, or if you must, time it so they have access to medical attention immediately after receiving the injuries and draw out their recovery. When your heroes survive tons of experiences of which each one should have killed them, it becomes obvious that the only thing keeping them alive is plot armor. To avoid this, make it so that they would have had a decent chance of surviving even if they didn't have plot armor. otherwise, don't put them in that situation.
　
3. Don't make your characters survive suicide missions unelss it's through their own cleverness.
　
This is shown many times in Stargate, where the main characters will go on "suicide" missions many times and survive each of them. It's even lampshaded(noticed by the characters themselves) in Atlantis, when Sheppard says(paraphrased), "I've been on tons of suicide missions before." They're called suicide missions for a reason: They will kill you. How many times did you hear of kamikaze fighters surviving their attacks? Exactly. (In case you didn't know, kamikaze fighters were Japanese pilots in world war II that crashed their planes into targets, killing themselves in the process.) But if you insist on this sort of thing(which you probably do, or you wouldn't be reading this article), make there be a decent chance of survival, and let your characters figure a way out themselves.
　
An example of this would be a character planting a bomb behind enemy lines and then figuring out a way to stay alive afterwards, such as setting the bomb on a timer and hiding it, then taking shelter in a place that's far enough away from the explosion to be unaffected, or maybe escaping by stealing a car and driving to safety. This is much more believable than the character surviving against all odds through sheer luck alone, as that rarely happens in real life.
　
4. If your characters are going to be rescued, hint at that ahead of time.
　
Here's the situation: Phil is trapped, his back against the wall, down to his last bullet fighting evil mutants. Suddenly, his allies break through the enemy line, gunning down the mutants right before they can kill Phil. If this rescue happens out of the blue, however, with no warning, it will seem like a cop-out. Instead, mention earlier in the story that Phil's friends are going to go on a mission in the same area as Phil at around the time he will need saving. This is known as foreshadowing. This way, it will show that you planned the rescue all along and make it seem plausible for it to happen just as Phil needs it the most.
　
5. Don't make your characters beat the clock at the last second.
　
This is shown in the classic "Defuse the bomb with 1 second left" cliche. It's a blatant example of unnatural amounts of luck, which, as i've said before, should be avoided. Instead, have your heroes finish whatever time-sensitive thing they need to accomplish maybe 20 seconds before they need to, or even a few minutes. No, it's not as dramatic, but everyone knows they'll survive anyway, so you might as well make it believable.

6. Don't make your villains incompetent.

Many works make their villains stupidly insist on killing the heroes themselves, giving the heroes a fair chance, or monologuing their evil plans so the hero has the information he needs to win(called "bond villain stupidity"), or giving the bad guys terrible aim(called "stormtrooper marksmanship") and constantly just barely miss the heroes so as to keep them alive. This should be avoided at all costs.
First off, the villain likely isn't going to have any specific vendetta against the heroes so as to insist on killing them himself, and even if he does, he's not going to give them chances to escape. No one who gets to a position of power high enough to have an entire army at their beck and call is going to give the heroes chances to escape unless it's absolutely necessary.

As for minions with atrociously bad aim, just scrap that altogether. If they can't hit what they're aiming at, they're not going to be recruited as soldiers. In fact, most untrained people would have better aim than stormtroopers, death eaters, or what have you. Instead, make your heroes never get in the line of fire at all, have something to block projectiles(like a shield or bullet-proof vest), or just never give the bad guys any reason to shoot at them in the first place(like pretending to be on their side from the beginning and only fighting them while undercover). Alternatively, you could have them get hit, but not fatally, such as being shot in the shoulder or foot. It will require some time to heal, but it will make it seem like they don't have plot armor, or that it's not very strong.
　
Plot armor is necessary for most works unless you want an "everyone can die" scenario, which requires more characters and more effort. But this is no reason to make it so blatant as to be boring, ridiculously implausible, and predictable. People enjoy stories more when they don't have to suspend disbelief as much, so making plot armor less obvious makes the story as a whole much more enjoyable.

You're doing magic fights wrong

Wizard duels in fiction are a staple of the fantasy genre. Unfortunately, they often suck. In this article, i will attempt to show why this is the case, and how to avoid it.

The main problem lies with a lack of imagination. Wizards are basically reality warpers, and yet they spend most of their time during fights shooting fireballs and raising magical shields to block their opponents fireballs. Boring. What is this, laser tag?

Instead, they should be using the environment(and their imagination) to it's fullest potential. For example, turning the floor beneath their opponents' feet to ice. Heating up something their opponent is holding to make them drop it. Creating a smoke cloud around their opponent's head to prevent them from seeing. Heck, they're wizards, why can't they just forcibly stop their opponent's heart with magic?

In star wars, they have something called "force shields" that prevent jedi from being directly acted upon by their enemy's force powers. This is why jedi don't usually just choke each other in fights. Perhaps the same thing could apply to magic duels.

But even with that, there's still a ton of options. Why shoot fireballs when you can just set your opponent on fire directly? If you can't do that, set the area around them on fire. Ambient heat will still do a number on them. Collapse the ceiling above them. Blow something up near them and nail them with the shrapnel. There are so many options, but they're never used.

In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the most exciting wizard duel of the series takes place. It involves snape fighting mcgonagall, and actually has some clever ideas. Mcgonagall shoots daggers at snape, snape turns them into birds and makes them attack mcgonagall instead(or something, i don't quite remember it, but it was something like that). And then we get treated to boring "stupefy"(stunning spell) "protego"(shield spell) loops. Oh, well. At least we got one good fight.

A common trope in wizard duels, and one that, in my opinion, conveys a severe lack of imagination, is the battle of will. This is basically like the harry potter and voldemort's wands connecting and they have to "concentrate" really hard to force their opponent to lose. However, it's unclear what exactly they will gain by doing this.
Inevitably, the hero wins, without having to use almost any creativity at all. Unfortunately, this is common in many forms of battle in fiction, not just magic fights, but that's for another post.

What about defense? In magic fights, things could go south very quickly for people that can't think on their feet, so how would you defend against some of the attacks mentioned above? Well, if the floor turned to ice, you could dry it, removing the layer of moisture between it and your feet and thus removing the slipperyness. If they blew something up near you, you could use a simple shield to block the shrapnel. If they created a smoke cloud, you could dissipate it with a gust of wind.

Something many people fail to take into account is that at least half of any battle is psychological. Trickery and deception have been used countless times through history, to great effect. For example, in the american revolution, several soldiers disguised a log as a cannon to scare british troops into surrendering. They didn't even have to fire a shot. The best way to win a fight is to ensure that there won't be one.

In a magic fight, this might involve manipulating your opponents' mind, making them too afraid to fight or too sleepy to concentrate. If there's something that prevents you from directly manipulating them, you could make it into a colorless gas cloud that your opponent will breathe without even realizing it. We can do that even without magic, so it should be relatively simple to do it with magic.

Everything has a weakness, you just have to think differently. For example, in Stargate Sg-1, the military encounters a super soldier that is immune to all their weapons, and even explosions. How they eventually defeated it? Well, the first time, they used tranquilizer darts to make it lose conciousness, and later, they developed a weapon that literally causes them to have a heart attack. Now that's creativity.

Imagine that someone has armor that is too hard to be penetrated by any weapon. How would you kill them? Here's some ideas: Drowning, hunger, thirst, suffocation, falling from a great height, heart failure, sickness, etc. Heck, you don't even need to kill them. Just encase them in a viscous, jello-like liquid and they won't even be able to move.

So that's my ideas on how to make magical fights more interesting. It got a little rambly there at times, but i hope it was still helpful. If you have any responses at all, please leave a comment with your thoughts on this article, such as perhaps what you liked, didn't like, what i could change, etc. Thanks for reading this, and have a good day!

That wasn't an order, by the way. Having a good day is optional.

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Hello, close family member, friend i shamelessly advertised to, or possibly random person who clicked on this link by accident! I’m PlasmaMuffin(also known as neoselket), and i run this trainwreck i have the gall to call a blog.
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