What games had easy soft locks that prevented you from either progressing or getting a true ending? angielski

The thought came to mind after reading a recent post about Baldurs Gate 3 here but it reminded me of the Japense only PSX game Mizzurna Falls where if you don’t perform a certain action early in the game you are prevented from getting a true ending. While this might not be a traditional soft lock because you can still progress to a point it made me wonder none the less.

I understand BG3 might be a hard lock because the game abruptly comes to a close I am not going to get into the semantics. The only other soft locks I can think of are with Pokemon.

Shout out to the fan translation of Mizzurna Falls. An article on the ROMHacking.net website can be found here.

M500,

In cave story, there is a decision around the middle of the game. If you make the wrong decision you can’t upgrade to the best weapon in the game.

I forget all the details, but i was annoyed when I found out about it.

azulavoir,

there’s several decisions like this, it’s just the way the game is

cobysev,

Undertale is an indie game that promotes and encourages kindness toward others. You can play the game however you want, and there are a multitude of endings depending on how nice/mean you are in your playthrough.

But if you’re not 100% kind to everyone you meet; if you take even one unkind action toward someone, you’re locked out of the perfect good ending. And it remembers your playthrough, so you can’t ever earn it by replaying the game. I dunno if that’s been patched; I haven’t played it since about 2015, but that was the rule when I started it.

And there was no indication starting out that you had this choice. Most people default to fighting bad guys in games. There wasn’t even a hint that you could play the game as a passive, kind person and never harm anyone, despite their aggressive and harmful actions toward you.

So most gamers got locked out of that perfect good ending. Which I guess is kind of the message of the game. Every small act, whether good or bad, can affect people around you permanently. But it’s still annoying as a completionist, knowing that I could never perfectly complete a game because of a rule I wasn’t informed of when I started.

bentsea,

The game remembered a lot of things but you very much could do a pacifist run by starting a new game. I read about the pacifist run after about an hour into the game, decided I wanted to try it, and restarted and was able to achieve the best ending.

ditherwither, (edited )

Yeah, you’re only locked out of pacifist if you previously did a genocide run

Edit: looking at the wiki, this isn’t true, there are minor differences in the soulless pacifist run tho

Ganbat,

Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. If you don’t grab the newspaper at the beginning of the game, you get totally softlocked near the end.

turtlepower,

Final Fantasy Legend for the og Gameboy. I remember getting pretty far in the tower and there was some weapon or item you had to have to pass or beat something and I missed getting it and couldn’t progress and never played it again.

Aztechnology,

FF12 had some bullshit chest near the beginning of the game… If you opened it you lost the ability to 100% the game and get the Zodiac spear ( reportedly some ability to get one in a very tedious grunts fashion but it’s been ages)

Basically the straw that broke the camel’s back for me with ff… The games story and combat was already a let down after they dropped the turn based combat like all of them ff1-ff10

But yeah generally I dislike many soft lock mechanics or illogical things that punish you for just playing the game… Oftentimes these were put in games just to sell strategy guides.

Speculater,
@Speculater@lemmy.world avatar

The original Neverwinter Nights, you could kill main story NPCs and lock yourself from progressing. If you saved after this without realizing your mistake because you’re dumb, you have to restart.

Also, the original pre-order Ocarina of Time, if you did the keys on the water temple in the wrong order, it made the temple nearly impossible. Data sleuths have found a way to progress, but 14 year old me spent 20 hours trying to figure it out and quit the game.

leaky_shower_thought,

this one reminds me of Farcry 4. The one with Pagan Min.

if you just stay and be a good boy, you get a free trip to where you really wanted to go.

It’s easy to not do this because maybe the welcoming committee is not around anybody’s standards.

Starglasses,

Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced had tons of missions that required items and gave items. Your inventory had a cap so once you reached it you needed to decide on which inventory items to dstroy to make space for new rewards, or leave the rewards behind.

There were so many repeating quests so those rewards were safe to destroy. But if you destroyed a required item from a one-time quest(i don’t think there was anything special to mark these one-time side-quests)… no 100% game for you.

Starglasses,

You could also save your game mid-battle. I learned the hard way I shouldn’t have saved in a major story battle. Death in those were Game Over. There was only one save slot, so I was locked in a battle I had no chance of surviving.

csolisr,

I went through that exact problem, didn’t have space to stuff a single item from a mission I thought would be repeatable and so I got stuck in 99% completion - the only solution was to trade it from another cart and that was not gonna happen

Theharpyeagle,

I loved that game but there’s no way in hell I’d ever have the patience to 100% it, good lord.

pastermil,

In every game in Suikoden series, you’d have to recruit 108 characters in total to get the true ending.

Around half of these are part of the story, so you’d get them whatever you do, but the rest you’d have to do some sidequest to get them, a lot of them are missable.

Also, you can get some characters killed, dooming you from ever getting that true ending.

abraxas,

Suikoden 1 and 2 in particular have very precise soft-locks.

In Suikoden 1, Pahn has to win a battle that seems to be a scripted loss.

Suikoden 2 (my favorite RPG of all time) is actually beyond brutal. There’s a 3-5 second timed input that doesn’t even make much sense and if you get it wrong, nothing predictable changes except you don’t get the 108th star (just one person having a private word with the strategist that only makes sense later)

pastermil,

And I thought 4 & 5 was brutal…

abraxas,

I dunno which of the two is worse. I fell for the Pahn one in S1, but managed to guess right in S2 by sheer luck (it’s between a default “Watch Out!” and “Nanami!”. You have to pick “Nanami!” or you lose out on the good ending. And you automatically say “Watch Out!” if you don’t pick fast)

AceFuzzLord,

Don’t know if anyone has said it yet, but Fallout 3. There is a story quest where you have to ask a radio host named Three Dog information about your father and it’s a percentage based skill check that if you fail it, I don’t think you can progress (unless I am completely mistaken since it’s been more than a half decade since I last played).

To make matters even worse, even at a maximum 100 in speech, the skill check can still be failed. Again, not 100% sure whether or not the Three Dog skill check is even required or if you can just run to the right place to progress the main story, but if you are a first time player you could absolutely screw yourself over not knowing about this.

loutr,
@loutr@sh.itjust.works avatar

IIRC failing the speech check is the “normal” outcome. If you convince him he gives you info you would have come across later, allowing you to bypass the next main story quest.

abraxas,

Yeah, that was always a weird one to me. It’s one thing for speech checks to give you advantages and shortcuts, but that straight up cut 30 minutes off the game.

Coelacanth,
@Coelacanth@feddit.nu avatar

Disco Elysium has a number of potential soft locks, though you kind of have to go out of your way to actually get into one. The easiest one is probably paying for your hostel room the second night. Usually a combination of decisions and unlucky dice rolls are necessary to actually get locked, and/or poor use of skill points (meaning you can’t spend one to re-try the crucial roll).

There is also a seemingly minor decision in a side quest that can make a certain check during the ending unwinnable and thus lock you out of one of the most impactful moments in the game.

figjam,

I played Earthbound as a kid and got stuck in a golem without the item needed to get out. Since I got it used I didn’t have the game guide. No idea how much stuff I missed but I never picked it up again.

abraxas,

I remember that, and I remember finding a way out too. I just don’t remember what it was.

I’m pretty sure that’s not a full-on softlock. Just so bad it feels like one if you miss something.

hogart,
@hogart@feddit.nu avatar

Little Big Adventure 2. Just before the last boss I managed to save myself on the last island without a way to leave it. But I needed to leave and get another Ball or w/e it was to unluck a door. It was my first real pc game experience ever. Dunno why I stuck with this hobby after that tbh :)

GenBlob,

The Ooze. My memory on this is fuzzy but on genetics lab part 2, there is a room you can enter that has a checkpoint. If you enter the room then you’re locked inside and if you collect the checkpoint and die, you will respawn back into the room and your only option is to lose all your lives or reset the game. I remember getting really pissed off finding this when I was a kid because I spent days trying to beat the game and I had a really good run up until that moment.

bomanicious,

Ys 8 has a soft lock toward the end where if you didn’t do enough side quests to build up enough affinity with your castaway group and party members you would get treated to a bad/neutral ending. Fortunately at that soft lock point there are enough ways to build up those points so you can progress past that point.

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