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.
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.
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)
And I thought 4 & 5 was brutal…
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)