Board 8 > Games that can be made impossible to beat?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Iirc

In Kotor2 while on the ship you can get stuck there because of the way getting keys or whatever works. Idk. Like you can save on the ship and be stuck forever.

Also, while not what the topic is looking for, in Old versions of ffvii there is a bug where if you place your save crystal somewhere close to the spike where you climb up the action to trigger the climb will never appear meaning if you have not beaten the weapons yet to 100% you'll never be able to. Not sure if this was fixed in non ps1 versions.

I think there was a bad glitch in the gba version of Broken Sword that prevented you from progressing but I don't remember what it was. Probably doing things in the wrong order.

The US version of the 7th Saga greatly nerfed the stats your character gets on level up in order to make the game more difficult. Anyway if you're not familiar with the game there's a system where the other possible playable apprentices are "competing" with you to get the runes, and will either join you or challenge you to a duel. The problem is that these duels scale to your level, and their stats are still based on the japanese version. It's not too bad at first, but eventually (probably somewhere around level 40) the stat difference is pretty much insurmountable. Oh and one of the apprentices gets a super broken healing spell (also around level 40 too), which completely restores all of his hp and mp each time it's used including the mp it takes to cast it so he can cast it an infinite number of times.

You can avoid fighting apprentices in most cases (it's rng based, so as long as you haven't fought them before to make them permanently hostile you can reroll whether they will offer to join you or challenge you to a duel by fighting another 10-20 battles before talking to them again), but there's two cases where you have to fight one for a rune. The first isn't bad since it's early on, but the second to get the Sky rune is maybe 2/3rds into the game and you'd likely be about the level duels become practically unwinnable by that point.

Though, you can still get the apprentice with the Sky rune to join you and give it to you instead of having to fight for it, if you reset/reroll the rng enough. Also I guess you can cheat the battle a bit in this specific case only by KOing your main character so the apprentice will challenge the partner instead, and when the battle starts use an item to revive your mc to make it a 2 on 1 fight.

Also you can actually take advantage of the level scaling too, since apprentices that join you as a partner are scaled to your level with stats based on the japanese version so they would be much more powerful than if you recruited them early and tried to grind up their levels yourself.

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trdl23 posted...

Isn't that the premise of "soft locks," or am I misunderstanding?

I've always understood "soft lock" to mean the game hitting a state where it's basically a crash state where the game is still "running" but there's simply nothing the player can do. Usually inputs aren't recognized at all, but even if they are there's no way to "escape" the situation back to a playable state. Like getting into a solo battle where neither character can damage the other but you also can't run so the battle would just continue endlessly until the player turned the game off. The game is "functioning" it's just they're locked into an unplayable state. As opposed to a hard crash where the game would abruptly crash to the system startup/the application would just self-terminate on PC (or these days to the XMB, dashboard, etc)

Topic seems to be asking more about situations where you can break the sequence of progression such that you make advancing impossible. This could result in a soft lock but in many instances you could keep playing... you would just never be able to advance the game to its proper ending. That TVTropes link would be a good list of examples.

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