The only way I've ever found a tutorial enjoyable was when I didn't know it was a tutorial. Ever play Portal? Yes, I know, people bring it up all the time. Half of that game is a tutorial. It slowly introduces concepts to you to get you used to playing the game and using all the mechanics held within. The only portion of that game that "feels" like a tutorial is perhaps the first test chamber in which the computer voice tells you, "put boxes on switches to activate stuff" and then it lets you solve each puzzle in turn, which is each a new part of the tutorial. The puzzles then get more and more complicated and introduce lots of different concepts that you can use as you play. Portal 2 does roughly the same thing, except introducing new mechanics almost entirely throughout the game. The player doesn't realize that these are tutorials because they aren't introduced as tutorials. The computer voice tells you something you need to know (usually in clue form instead of straight up voicing what to do) and lets you solve each Test Chamber in your own way on your own time. Solving each Test Chamber is proof that you're ready to move to the next phase of the tutorial or even the game proper.
Other tutorials in games often text box the crap out of you (like was suggested with the scripts) and that tends to make players simply ignore them as you're taking control of the game away from the player until you do whatever task it is the dev wanted you to do, in order to prove you get the concept. Likewise, introduction to most mechanics follow this same rather strange way of doing things. Text box or voice over or what-have-you to show you how something works, but not usually enough to understand the nuances, and then it lets you mess with it as you please. This is bad. Very, very bad. It's especially egregious in crafting or collection systems. Often, you are given just enough materials to complete the tutorial and nothing beyond that. No room to experiment or explore the mechanic, just enough room to give you the basic ideas. Why? If you're going to include a crafting mechanic at all, why not give the player basic instructions on the concept (try doing this without a text box to explain it and by making it obvious what you should be doing instead) and then a good chunk of starting materials to experiment a little? Final Fantasy 7 suffered a little from this with its Materia Tutorial. They give you just enough basic starting materials for "crafting" on the materia thing, but no real room to experiment or explore the concept until about midway through the game when you're rolling in Materia. Final Fantasy X does the same thing with its crafting and enhancing system. FFX never really throws enough or many crafting materials (or even empty weapons) at you to let you spend some time tinkering with the system and discovering how to best utilize it on your own.
You want to know a good and interesting tutorial some classic RPGs use? NPCs. NPCs that give out interesting and useful information. "Thunder stun all dinosaurs, you know?". Why, thank you, NPC, now I know to use Chrono's Lightning based attacks to stun the dinosaurs so their defense drops and they won't attack as often. Lots of the better designed games forego traditional Tutorials of text spam and let you discover things through exploring (which I think most players would enjoy more if they were given the option) while providing you information as you go along through NPCs and other such things that the player explores. Think about that for a minute. Do you need to explain to a player how combat works? Probably not. Do you need to explain to a player how Overdrives work (limit breaks, etc)? Nope, most likely not. Lots of things in games are simply self-explanatory. By looking at them and making a few test clicks, the player figures it out without a wall of text and you stealing the controls from them to explain in excruciating detail how things work. Do you need to explain how crafting works? Only if your interface is so convoluted and hard to understand that it requires explanation (free tip, it shouldn't be). Do you need to explain elemental relationships in combat? Only if you're Pokémon and it's messily convoluted and crazy how elements work... in which case... provide a freakin' chart for players to memorize (or make it easy for players to pull up a chart anytime they need it... Something Pokémon still hasn't figured out after over a decade of games). Do we need to know how the minigame works? Yes we do! But, you don't need a tutorial for it. Give some basic instructions with some advanced tips and let the player figure it out. If that's not enough... well, your minigame is then too complicated and should probably be reworked.
Generally, I've found that most every game I've played that has a tutorial... Doesn't need one. At all. Sometimes, I require a minor explanation for something that is inherently unclear, but I don't need a full tutorial.
Now, let's move on to a truly horrendous tutorial:
The Witcher 2 on Xbox 360. I picked this game up through the "Free Games with Gold Membership" program they offer. I've never played any of The Witcher games before. The tutorial in this game was so God-awful that I was having issues remembering anything or accessing anything. They pop the button things up to tell you how something is executed, but leave them up until you've executed the prompt, whether you've figured it out or not. It got worse when the game kept adding more and more and more and more buttons with actions and contextual presses to have to remember. Okay, how do I attack? Uh... X for heavy attack, I think, and A for fast attack? How do I block? No block command, but I guess there's some kind of parry system and dodge mechanic, but the "parry" is actually a reposte move that revolves around some kind of timing and sometimes direction of joystick? Dodge requires the same button as reposte, I think, but it is a tap and a direction instead of a brief holding of the button just before being struck? Magic I think is the Y button, but you can only equip one spell at a time and every time you want to do something different you have to open the menu and select the new spell, but it's not clear whether the spells been selected or not in the tutorial because the tutorial only lets you select the spell it wants you to use and often that spell is already selected (but unavailable because the game wants you to select it). Then you have traps and secondary thrown items... I think the traps and thrown items are the same button, but if you want to change them you have to open the menu again and select them in the same manner as your spells... I'm not sure what the triggers do, maybe they aim? Then there's the D Pad which changes which primary weapon you're using (which is hard to use on the fly)... Oh, and then there are armored enemies which should be hit with this immobilize spell and some enemies should be hit with certain traps... There's enemies that block constantly, which the game never tells you how to break the block of (or how to even get behind). Oh, and after the tutorial battle, they throw you into a "real battle" to see what difficulty you should play on... Needless to say, it chose "easy" difficulty for me because there was just so much information, not enough context, and the placement of many of the actions (or constant opening of the menu to change things as the battle demanded) that I died after only killing a single enemy. This tutorial throws a crapload of information at you, doesn't let you get time to play with it and process it, then throws you to the wolves in an effort to see "which difficulty you should play at". No time for experimentation. No time for exploration. No time to get comfortable using each piece of equipment and command before moving you to the next chunk of it. It is, instead, a series of actions you must perform to move on and you are immortal the entire time you're performing them. However, it cuts you off from doing anything else or doing things differently than the game demands you do them, so your only option is to simply proceed through the tutorial whether you understand the concepts being taught or not. It also doesn't make some of its other components clear at all (like the crafting system). It tells you that you have a recipe for a healing potion, but not what items you specifically need to craft it. Instead, it's a bunch of weird symbols in the recipe list and the game just tells you to "go pick plants from the forest" until you pick all the available ones, which is what you need to make the potion. What if I need to make it again? Does anything with those same symbols match in those slots? How many of each do I need? How do I know what each plant is without opening my menu after each picking?
The Witcher 2 is an example of a tutorial done not just poorly, but horrendously. Tutorials should avoid all of those pitfalls and let the player learn through exploration and experimentation. It should only explain concepts the player would never be able to figure out on their own (or would have a good bit of difficulty with figuring out).
