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.
It only kind of counts but dead rising 1 fits. You have to follow an exact sequence of events, be at exact spots at exact times, or the main story ends and you can only get bad endings.
It’s actually really hard because you end up having to run from one boss to another and if you’re late there isn’t enough time to resupply. I eventually got to a boss fight where I didn’t have enough time to do anything else and I just couldn’t get past him. It isn’t that the game ends, but it just completely scaps the main story progression and says something like ‘the truth is lost forever’ .
I almost give that game a pass purely because of how much you’re meant to start over again anyway. It’s not like you spent the entire time on one perfect go through with no do overs, you’d probably already restarted a bunch of times by then, it’s just another crazy mistake you couldn’t have known you could make in that game.
Not that that really makes it better, but it’s not on par with doing the same thing in a giant RPG, unless you only got one shot or something, but knowing that game I would doubt it. I never got that far, though, that game is… weird and particular
Definitely a weird game but it worked.