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.

  • abraxasEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    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)

      • abraxasEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        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)