SCREENSHOT SURVIVAL 20XX

author=Sevens_Ace
@Badluck, Yes this is what they need to know at the beginning. Basically the entire dialogue is a message from a man who has placed it in a seal that is binding the gates of that fortress.

I'm more than sure that a warning message of an attack on the world, is worth 3 and a half minutes to describe, in the best way you can. lol.

There are plenty of other ways to give that information bar text dump in the introduction. Have the player find a book that tells of it, which they can read through, or have it told to them when they actually visit the seal, or they can hear it from a descendant of his.

Like, how does your game play out? Typical 'teen hero wakes up and goes off to do mundane task and oops, adventure through accidentally finding out about something special'? If so, then leave the explanation until they find the thing or try to find out more about the something special.

The only way this could be played well is if the hero wakes up in bed after this and goes all "What a weird-ass dream" or if they start the game actually at whereever and talking to this dude who is telling them all the details. And even the dream sequence could take place another time or be cut really short (give them the last 10 seconds, have them go "wow, what a weird dream... I don't remember much though?" and then have them unlock the rest of it over the course of the game instead of being info-dumped.)

The reason we're telling you this isn't to criticise but to help - we've all done the slowly timed text dump starters before and we all cringe a bit at them looking back. They're slow and bland and instead of getting you interested in the world and it's history, they force you to break away from the character and their story and instead think about other things and - worst of all - guess how the game will play out. If someone feels like the know where the plot is going in the first 10 minutes, unless it's super interesting, they will be less likely to want to play the game because they know where it's going.

Give the player a chance to get to know the character and -care- about them before you go shoving them into the cooking pot, OR go all in and have the game start with them already in the middle of the cooking pot and being melted.

There's a reason Final Fantasy games stopped doing the slow text scroll intro-dump, and it's because it wasn't very good. Maybe look at how some other games do their introductions instead.

For example, Chrono Trigger has you wake up in bed and rush off to a fair, where a princess gets sucked through a time hole and you follow after. Breath of Fire II had your father tell you to go look for your sister, only to come back to your home town after finding her to realise everyone there has forgotten you and both father and sister are missing. Suikoden had you turn up for your first day of work at the palace and having to deal with jerks and collect taxes from a nearby town (and fighting bandits). Suikoden II had your youth brigade attacked by your own country and Prince, in order to make it seem like a peace treaty had been broken, and to escape you and your best friend jump from a cliff into a river.

There's a lot of ways to introduce a world and conflict without dumping a bunch of text at the beginning.