FFX-2 is a great pick.
Another good one is the horror game Siren. If you don't play this game with a guide, you will never figure out how to progress to the end of the game. It's so absurdly obtuse at times, you have to wonder how anyone figured anything out without spiraling into a fit of rage.
So the game works with branching timelines. Sometimes, you play as one character in one area, but you can directly affect the environment to influence another character's trip through an area later on, or go down one pathway by doing an objective or follow another pathway by doing something else as a secondary objective. Some of these are necessary to get through the whole game otherwise you just keep looping through the game, and holy shit.
One of the most infamous examples is getting an ID card from one of the enemies (which are sort of zombie-like monsters called Shibito, think zombie-looking people with some semblance of human intelligence). He's an officer with a pistol so you can't attack him head-on, and in order to get his card you have to be a certain character. However, to actually set up how to get the ID card, you have to:
- Play an earlier section as an entirely different character in the same area
- Find a random-ass face towel somewhere in the area that is completely nondescript
- Put it in a sink and soak it so that it's dripping wet
- Stuff it in a freezer
- Go to the other character's mission
- Retrieve the now-frozen towel
- Place it between a gap in the counter
- Put a piggy bank on top of it
- Wait for the towel to melt and the piggy bank to fall and break to lure out the enemy
- Beat him to death from behind and steal his ID card
In case you were wondering, no, the whole section as the first character has nothing whatsoever to do with their objective, not even their secondary objective so there's no indication ever that you have to do it. I cannot imagine how someone would piece this together by themselves, it's peak moon logic. I love Siren, but it's full of nonsense like the above example. I recommend the game highly, but I also highly recommend you use a guide. Otherwise a great horror game will become a mind-numbing frustration of the highest order.
P.S. That puzzle isn't even the worst offender. Just thinking about the candles and lanterns made me so angry I couldn't even type out the words without foaming at the mouth.
It's the theme of the game. It fits perfectly and there were enough clues to find it.I thought it was pointlessly cryptic, especially for a very, very, very long JRPG. How does a miss-able "true ending" improve the game at all?
Oh, I'm so glad you asked. ;_;I've tried playing around a little with Siren, just early game and found it all a little obtuse.
Reading this is how the game gets later on is hilarious. Thanks for writing it out.
Now i want to know about the candles and lanterns...
Yeah when I finally beat the game (or so I thought) and got kicked back to the beginning , I "noped" out of thatSome people are pros at this game, but me personally, I've never been able to get through Ghouls N Ghosts twice for the true ending! Maybe if I set my mind to it one afternoon.
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Oh, I'm so glad you asked. ;_;
It's simple, one puzzle requires you to light four lanterns. Oh wait, you need candles! Look, it's easy. You just need to go back to an earlier chapter that's also an escort mission, and out of the entire area you need to make the kid you're escorting hide in a specific locker. Because duh! Then later on in the chapter you'll get the candles from them.
Easy peasy. Time to light the... hey, where are the lanterns?
Oh that's right, I forgot. You need to uncover them first, and obviously this is done by, and I shit you not, going through to four different parts of the game as four entirely separate characters and uncovering a hidden tile in each one in order to reveal the lanterns later on for the character to light later on.
None of which, I would like to remind you, is telegraphed in any way, shape or form because none of it is related to any of these characters' objectives. You're just supposed to know.
That's not even the final ending, that's to beat the game at all. The FINAL final ending involves returning to the space you start the game at, teleporting one floor below that, and answering a bunch of riddles likely drawn from the 1935 book The Mystical Qabalah. Of course, this is the game where the very first puzzle involves getting an AI controlled monster to cast a specific spell during a random battle to make it have an effect outside of battle.Wizardry 4
Yall have no fucking idea...
Well... you do... and I'm honestly shocked to see someone bring it up lol.
Yes... oh my god yes. It's so much bullshit and the dots you are supposed to connect are so abstract... christ.
Yeah I urge people to look into it and if someone is truly interested I will try to compile a list of some of the most bullshit requirements.
Here is a teaser - One of the requirements just to find a single hint was to pull out your graph paper and 100% accurately plot out all the maps in this game because on several floors letters formed out of void spaces/ walls.
There are teleporting/ transporting/ spinning tiles and there is no mini map/ compass. You would have to use a compass spell and whatnot to properly gauge your position in several places in a way that leads me to believe that it was intentionally designed to be impossible for you to properly plot out each room correctly in a game that is played in first person.
There is no indicator that there are hints hidden within the map you could create yourself so depending on how you did it the map may or may not yield the hint regardless. The best you get is that a hint is "under your nose". That's it. And what is under your nose? If properly plotted.. this is.
This game is truly fucked if you expect to find the final ending on your own.
That's a major, major reason I haven't finished a single playthrough. Why bother when it's not even the playthrough?!
Yep. You're supposed to assume there is a hidden door and because of previous games you are supposed to realize that one of the things you can summon, a priest, can cast the light spell which allows you to search for hidden doors. Eventually. During random battles. Lol.That's not even the final ending, that's to beat the game at all. The FINAL final ending involves returning to the space you start the game at, teleporting one floor below that, and answering a bunch of riddles likely drawn from the 1935 book The Mystical Qabalah. Of course, this is the game where the very first puzzle involves getting an AI controlled monster to cast a specific spell during a random battle to make it have an effect outside of battle.
I normally look up true ending requirements (spoiler-less) when I'm around 75% done with a game just to make sure I know what I can do to get it. When I saw Persona 4's in a spoilerless FAQ I laughed at how it basically WAS a cheat code. "Pick the options in this order: 2435263."
(the numbers were made up for this comment)
I didn't even finish the game because of this collecting nonsense. Same happened with Banjo Kazooie. I was enjoying and loving these games but once I hit a wall because I didn't collect enough *whatever nonsense the game throws at you* I stopped playing.I never got the true ending to Jet Force Gemini as a kid. I finally get to the end only to be told I have to collect all those dumb teddy bear creatures to get the full ending.
I had been shooting most of them so far, so this never happened.
OP even mentioned it himself, do people even read?
Halfway through the battle, the boss actually becomes very compliant to your strategy. If you time your actions correctly, it'll never screw you over. It only does so before you've taken away a chunk of its health.Chrono Cross, have to hit a pattern of select color abilities, and the end boss can easily screw you over.
Chrono Cross was so disappointing....
This. So not worth it.
Oh my gosh I forgot all about Final Fantasy X-2. Absolutely ridiculous!
Oh my gosh I forgot all about Final Fantasy X-2. Absolutely ridiculous!
Not required to get the true ending at all though. All you need is to get ALL the memoriesWhile not the WORST, I think the Korok seeds in Breath of the Wild are pretty out there. 900!?
Not really. If you want the true ending, it means you like the game, so you play again, it's cool. If you have enough, you just stop and you go to youtube. I don't think there is such thing as lack of respect for player's time with video games.As a follow up question, does anyone else feel that this "true ending" bullshit shows a complete lack of respect for the player's time?
Reading this thread, so glad I dropped Arkham Knight and Persona 4 when I did. I just hit a point where I did not feel the time invested was worth it.
That's the whole point actually :pThis.
It's totally this.
The requirement is literally impossible.
That doesn't unlock the true ending. You just have to finish the game to get the true ending.Kingdom Hearts 2 Final Mix.
Finish the story, 13 optional bosses, THEN another 10 hours of grinding.
Check out the insanity that is earning all 900 battle trophies in Star Ocean 4. A bare minimum of 3 playthroughs in a game whose notion of NG+ is "here's your monster book". Kill 10k enemies with a character for multiple characters. Consecutive rare drops, by item type. Hitting bizarrely specific damage numbers. Landing a killing blow on a superboss with a specific, weak character in a time limit for the battle where failure forces a reset losing hours of work. Off the top of my head. I've seen estimates place it upwards a 1000 hours.
I collected all the trophies on Reimi, one of the easier characters, just for the hell of it. It still took a long time.
That doesn't unlock the true ending. You just have to finish the game to get the true ending.
Or are we counting a concept teaser trailer for another game as a "true ending"?
I'm surprised people don't bring this up more, I mean, who wants to go through that game so many times?
That's false.
That's a major, major reason I haven't finished a single playthrough. Why bother when it's not even the playthrough?!
Oh, I'm so glad you asked. ;_;
It's simple, one puzzle requires you to light four lanterns. Oh wait, you need candles! Look, it's easy. You just need to go back to an earlier chapter that's also an escort mission, and out of the entire area you need to make the kid you're escorting hide in a specific locker. Because duh! Then later on in the chapter you'll get the candles from them.
Easy peasy. Time to light the... hey, where are the lanterns?
Oh that's right, I forgot. You need to uncover them first, and obviously this is done by, and I shit you not, going through to four different parts of the game as four entirely separate characters and uncovering a hidden tile in each one in order to reveal the lanterns later on for the character to light later on.
None of which, I would like to remind you, is telegraphed in any way, shape or form because none of it is related to any of these characters' objectives. You're just supposed to know.
Illbleed's a fun one. Illbleed is a survival horror game for the Dreamcast. Premise is that the protagonist (named Eriko) has to venture into a murderous amusement park to save her friends that are trapped inside. You won't know that there are multiple endings, but there are three: bad, good, and true. The ending you get is based on how many friends you save.
You meet the friends at the start of the game. There are three of them. This is a swerve.
Saving the first friend is easy. You find him lying unconscious on the floor near the end of the first level. You walk up to him and a cutscene activates where you wake him up, and that friend is now considered saved. In fact, you can't walk by him without activating the cutscene, and he's right in the path you need to go on to reach the end of the level, so there's no worries about missing him. That's something to remember for later. One friend out of three saved!
Saving the second friend is a little more difficult. In the second level, the friend is in a room that you don't have to go into to complete the level, so it's possible to leave her behind. If you enter the room, you're put into a fight that can be somewhat difficult if you're not expecting it, and upon winning the fight a cutscene activates where you save the friend. Two friends out of three saved!
Saving the third friend isn't any more difficult than the second. In the third level, you need to find a special item (the friend's brain). Later in the level, there's a fork in the path. One way leads to progress, the other leads to a dead end. At the end of the dead end is the friend lying on a gurney. You fight some enemies, and upon winning you put the friend's brain back in his head. A cutscene activates where the friend wakes up. Three friends out of three saved!
Ok, so all the friends are saved. You then continue through the game (six levels in all), and after all the levels are completed, you end up in the final boss area. The owner of the park speaks to you from a balcony, and has you fight a boss monster. You defeat the monster, the owner congratulates you, showers you with prize money, and then just leaves.
At this point, you then get a credits roll and a post-credits stinger where Eriko mourns the death of her friends. This is the bad ending, you get it if you fail to save any of the friends. This can be confusing, because you'll get this ending even if you saved all three friends.
So, it turns out there's a fourth friend. In the fifth level, there's a character that Eriko meets. This character (named Jorg) follows Eriko around for most of the level. Eventually, Eriko and Jorg travel into a big maze, where Jorg is kidnapped by zombies.
Now, you're in a maze at this point. One option you have is to look over the map to find the exit, and work your way there. If you do this, you'll leave Jorg behind. The other option is to look at the part of the map where Jorg was kidnapped, figure out where on the map the zombies were moving towards, and then figure out how to work your way there. If you do this, you'll find Jorg, and a cutscene will activate where you save him. Four friends out of three saved!
So now you continue on to the final boss area of the game. You get the same cutscene as before, you fight a monster, and the park owner gives you money and leaves. The credits roll, but this time, the post-credits stinger is of Eriko and her friends relaxing on a beach, talking about how they'll spend their prize money. Eriko walks away, and says that she needs to return to the park. She has unfinished business there. This is the good ending.
This is still confusing. It's weird that the good ending has Eriko returning to the park. It's also weird that you never get to fight the park owner, the main antagonist. Is there something else you can do?
Well, you saw what happened if you saved all of the friends. What would happen if you saved none of them?
This doesn't seem possible. I mentioned before that you can't walk past the first friend without saving him. The game doesn't let you do it. Except it turns out that when you reach the first friend, if you just stand there and wait for fifteen minutes or so before walking up to him, you'll just walk past him without saving him. This is because he's dead. He bled to death, I guess? It's not clear. There also wasn't anything in the game indicating that this would happen or that there's any reason to wait around. But if you tried waiting around for some reason, then congratulations, you let your friend die.
After finishing the first level without saving the friend, you'll notice something. Eriko's clothes are now torn. This didn't happen before. I guess this represents the tough time she's having in the park? The drawings of Eriko in the manual tends to have her clothes torn, but that hadn't actually happened in the game until now.
You continue through the game, and it's easy to leave the other friends behind. As you do, Eriko's clothes become more and more torn, and by the time you reach the end of the game, she's basically only got a few threads left.
So this time you enter the final boss arena, and the scene is different. The park owner begins to give his usual speech, but stops upon seeing the state that Eriko is in. He freaks out and runs out of his balcony area into the arena to get a close look at her. The true final boss fight against the park owner begins, as well as one of the weirdest scenes in a videogame.
It was kind of mind-blowing to me back in 2001 that the true final boss and ending was hidden in this way. It's not some small bonus content, it's the most important part of the game, and it was hidden in such a way that most people who played the game wouldn't find it. You also have to play the game multiple times to do it, as the true ending path can't trigger until you've gotten the good ending.
It's worth it though. The true ending is *amazing*.
While it isn't anywhere near as obtuse as some of the shit in this thread (hi, FFX-2) I can't see how anyone would be able to get the best ending of Suikoden 2 without using a guide.
Full requirements (including some plot spoilers)
Then, and only then, do you get to see the best ending. And it's worth it.
- First you need to collect all 108 Stars of Destiny (an enormous feat in itself, even with the use of the ingame detective, as some of them are timed and missable) and make sure none of them die in war battles;
- Before the infiltration of Rockaxe - a part of the game you have no way of knowing is going to be so important - Nanami's DEF stat needs to be above a certain number, either through levelling or giving her the best quality armour;
- When Nanami jumps in front of Riou to deflect the arrows, you need to select one of the dialogue options in less than a second (none of the other dialogue choices in the game are timed and the game gives you no indication that this one is);
- (Oh, and even if you do everything right up to this point Nanami still "dies" so you have no way of knowing whether you fucked up or not until the very end of the game, several hours later)
- After beating the final boss you have to refuse the offer to stay and lead the new country, instead choosing a life of wandering;
- You then have to go back to the very first area of the game where you'll meet Jowy and duel him...but throughout the duel you can't fight back at all, and must only choose to defend;
- AFTER this, Jowy will attempt to offer you his rune. You have to refuse him several times, all the while fighting the instinct that you're stuck in one of those "the game is giving you a choice except not really" loops.
You can KIND of argue that the final stage of the process can be figured out without a guide - after all, you and Jowy did promise to meet back at that spot at the very beginning, and just remember all the parallels the game's been drawing between Riou/Jowy and Genkaku/Han, who held the same runes a generation previously and refused to fight one another despite being on opposite sides of a war - but good luck even getting to that part on instinct alone.
Probably already posted, but it's impossible to get the true ending in Steins Gate without a guide. So much random shit you have to do.
Not a fan of locking the true ending of a story behind an obscure gameplay wall.
Metro Last Light. The requirements are kinda bonkers if you don't use a guide. You have to make arbitrary good moral choices, kill under a certain number of enemies, listen to specific ambient npc dialogue... it's ridiculous.
Illbleed's a fun one. Illbleed is a survival horror game for the Dreamcast. Premise is that the protagonist (named Eriko) has to venture into a murderous amusement park to save her friends that are trapped inside. You won't know that there are multiple endings, but there are three: bad, good, and true. The ending you get is based on how many friends you save.
You meet the friends at the start of the game. There are three of them. This is a swerve.
Saving the first friend is easy. You find him lying unconscious on the floor near the end of the first level. You walk up to him and a cutscene activates where you wake him up, and that friend is now considered saved. In fact, you can't walk by him without activating the cutscene, and he's right in the path you need to go on to reach the end of the level, so there's no worries about missing him. That's something to remember for later. One friend out of three saved!
Saving the second friend is a little more difficult. In the second level, the friend is in a room that you don't have to go into to complete the level, so it's possible to leave her behind. If you enter the room, you're put into a fight that can be somewhat difficult if you're not expecting it, and upon winning the fight a cutscene activates where you save the friend. Two friends out of three saved!
Saving the third friend isn't any more difficult than the second. In the third level, you need to find a special item (the friend's brain). Later in the level, there's a fork in the path. One way leads to progress, the other leads to a dead end. At the end of the dead end is the friend lying on a gurney. You fight some enemies, and upon winning you put the friend's brain back in his head. A cutscene activates where the friend wakes up. Three friends out of three saved!
Ok, so all the friends are saved. You then continue through the game (six levels in all), and after all the levels are completed, you end up in the final boss area. The owner of the park speaks to you from a balcony, and has you fight a boss monster. You defeat the monster, the owner congratulates you, showers you with prize money, and then just leaves.
At this point, you then get a credits roll and a post-credits stinger where Eriko mourns the death of her friends. This is the bad ending, you get it if you fail to save any of the friends. This can be confusing, because you'll get this ending even if you saved all three friends.
So, it turns out there's a fourth friend. In the fifth level, there's a character that Eriko meets. This character (named Jorg) follows Eriko around for most of the level. Eventually, Eriko and Jorg travel into a big maze, where Jorg is kidnapped by zombies.
Now, you're in a maze at this point. One option you have is to look over the map to find the exit, and work your way there. If you do this, you'll leave Jorg behind. The other option is to look at the part of the map where Jorg was kidnapped, figure out where on the map the zombies were moving towards, and then figure out how to work your way there. If you do this, you'll find Jorg, and a cutscene will activate where you save him. Four friends out of three saved!
So now you continue on to the final boss area of the game. You get the same cutscene as before, you fight a monster, and the park owner gives you money and leaves. The credits roll, but this time, the post-credits stinger is of Eriko and her friends relaxing on a beach, talking about how they'll spend their prize money. Eriko walks away, and says that she needs to return to the park. She has unfinished business there. This is the good ending.
This is still confusing. It's weird that the good ending has Eriko returning to the park. It's also weird that you never get to fight the park owner, the main antagonist. Is there something else you can do?
Well, you saw what happened if you saved all of the friends. What would happen if you saved none of them?
This doesn't seem possible. I mentioned before that you can't walk past the first friend without saving him. The game doesn't let you do it. Except it turns out that when you reach the first friend, if you just stand there and wait for fifteen minutes or so before walking up to him, you'll just walk past him without saving him. This is because he's dead. He bled to death, I guess? It's not clear. There also wasn't anything in the game indicating that this would happen or that there's any reason to wait around. But if you tried waiting around for some reason, then congratulations, you let your friend die.
After finishing the first level without saving the friend, you'll notice something. Eriko's clothes are now torn. This didn't happen before. I guess this represents the tough time she's having in the park? The drawings of Eriko in the manual tends to have her clothes torn, but that hadn't actually happened in the game until now.
You continue through the game, and it's easy to leave the other friends behind. As you do, Eriko's clothes become more and more torn, and by the time you reach the end of the game, she's basically only got a few threads left.
So this time you enter the final boss arena, and the scene is different. The park owner begins to give his usual speech, but stops upon seeing the state that Eriko is in. He freaks out and runs out of his balcony area into the arena to get a close look at her. The true final boss fight against the park owner begins, as well as one of the weirdest scenes in a videogame.
It was kind of mind-blowing to me back in 2001 that the true final boss and ending was hidden in this way. It's not some small bonus content, it's the most important part of the game, and it was hidden in such a way that most people who played the game wouldn't find it. You also have to play the game multiple times to do it, as the true ending path can't trigger until you've gotten the good ending.
It's worth it though. The true ending is *amazing*.