Current Events > What parts of games would you never have seen/beaten without outside help?

(+) Yeah! (+)

From friends/guides/the internet

Diffiuclt parts of games
Optional weapons/bosses/areas
Hidden levels
Extra endings

That kinda thing
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Only one that comes to mind is Beneath a Steel Sky. Real old school point n' click. It made me appreciate the storytelling skills of older games, as well as how painfully clunky old games are.
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Doopliss's fucking name from PMTTYD
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Like 90% of Dark Souls II.

I play them offline and dont use any outside help in fights, but I never would have figured out most of the direction and where I should/could go next.
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The "true" ending of SMT IV
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Castlevania 2: Simon's Quest I'm pretty sure is impossible without outside help. I imagine people back in the day only beat that game thanks to Nintendo Power.

The one that stands out for me is in Dark Souls 3 and Bloodborne, when both games require you to use a specific emote in a specific location to access a hidden area. Bloodborne requires you to use the make contact gesture and hold that pose until your arm position changes. Meanwhile, Dark Souls 3 requires you to use the sitting dragon pose, or whatever the fuck it's called, to access Archdragon Peak. Like we never would have found either of them without foreknowledge.
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Turok 2.
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Final Fantasy 7: Chocobo breeding. Never would have had the patience for the trial and error aspect of how to make a Gold

Final Fantasy 10: Those weird Cloister of Trials puzzles. First few are okay, but the later ones annoy me. I don't have the patience for all that back and forth.

Skyrim: Alchemy. I'm not spending four perk points to be able to see what ingredients do with out mixing them until I get lucky. Being able to look up which ingredient does what helps a ton.
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The Excalibur II from FFIX I never would've known existed without the help of internet guides. Also I probably would've assumed the Demifiend fight in Digital Devil Saga was glitched/unwinnable had I not sought out information on YouTube
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Just a small thing but it's the only thing that came to mind. The Zozo clock puzzle that gets you the chainsaw in FFVI. I was just a kid the first time I played it so it might be easy in reality, but I never would have figured that shit out on my own back then.
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I would have never gotten all the wigs or fights in Revengeance without a guide.
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Ive never played EarthBound without the guide, since it came with the game.
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Mike Tyson's Punch-Out

There's nothing in-game to suggest that you're supposed to dodge Mike Tyson's punches for a solid minute and a half before attempting to fight him.

It was a cheap marketing ploy as Nintendo included a Nintendo Fun Club ad in the game's dialogue. They expected kids to call a 1-900 number on their parents' dime to beat the game.

Everything in OoT
Lightning in Adventure of Link
Lots of secrets and puzzles from miscellaneous games
"smell" in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Like half of everything The Longest Journey
Everything in Myst 3
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Guide posted...

Only one that comes to mind is Beneath a Steel Sky. Real old school point n' click. It made me appreciate the storytelling skills of older games, as well as how painfully clunky old games are.

Yeah this too. A lot of PnC's were stupid hard to figure out.
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MagnusDJL posted...

Castlevania 2: Simon's Quest I'm pretty sure is impossible without outside help. I imagine people back in the day only beat that game thanks to Nintendo Power.

I think there is 1 super vague clue somewhere in the game for many things, but I only heard that was true years later and have not confirmed it at all.

I was stuck in that game for weeks.

DevsBro posted...

Guide posted...

Only one that comes to mind is Beneath a Steel Sky. Real old school point n' click. It made me appreciate the storytelling skills of older games, as well as how painfully clunky old games are.

Yeah this too. A lot of PnC's were stupid hard to figure out.

Discworld for the original Playstation. I read a walkthough for it a year or 2 later and the solution was total BS sequence of items and some obscure spot. (edited out spoilers)

(edited in) I dare anyone to beat it. Go on.

Googled it just now, decent capturing of the game's vibe:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gaming/what-to-play/the-15-hardest-video-games-ever/discworld/

Discworld (PC, PlayStation 1, Mac, Saturn; 1995), based on the Terry Pratchett series of the same name, was difficult not because it required skill, but because of how ludicrously obscure its puzzles were. Not content with being a frustrating pixel hunt, Discworld's puzzle solutions went something like this: Place a frog in Rincewind's mouth to stop him snoring and scaring a butterfly. Catch the butterfly, use it on a lamp post so that a monk in the future will get hit by a storm and remove his robe. This is something the developers expected people to work out for themselves.

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I'm playing Persona 1 (PSP) at the moment, and there are a few things in that:

- A secret character that requires you going to certain areas to talk to him and his mother (choosing specific dialogue options in the second case) and refusing all the other recruitable characters.
- Two main story paths that change the whole game from that point onwards (it's just a yes/no choice, but you might not realize it's a story split without knowing beforehand).
- A good/bad ending split (in both of the above paths). The good ending in the standard story path requires some fairly standard dialogue choices, but it's a bit more involved in the other path.

Other Persona games have similar things, but 3/4/5 aren't that difficult to figure out. Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne does too, but again, it's telegraphed.

- Rune Word combinations in Diablo 2
- Sword Dancers in Tales of Symphonia (if you miss the first, who only appears within a short window, #2 and #3 don't appear)
- Gogo in FFVI (probably not that hard to stumble across I guess)
- Various unlockables in the Super Robot Wars/Taisen games. See: http://akurasu.net/wiki/Super_Robot_Wars/A_Portable/Secrets (that's one of the better games for it)

Puzzles in UC games. Maybe Tomb Raider. But the difficult ones I remember are optional.
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Also I don't really mind outside help for side quests / hidden quests kinds of things.

Mostly just for getting from point A to point B The Ending.
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The Shadow Temple and that one late-game forest area in Tales of Symphonia. Plus finding the Sword Dancers, as another user mentioned.
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Dark_Garioshi posted...

Doopliss's fucking name from PMTTYD

But... they tell you. They give you actual clues. And.... his bird literally says his name aloud.
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I'm an old school gamer who grew up without the internet so I naturally love and prefer playing games the old school way where I didnt have a strat guide or the internet. But I did once use a strat guide to play final fantasy 7 in some parts since it was my first dog and I knew nothing about the genre
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Sage JJ posted...

I'm an old school gamer who grew up without the internet so I naturally love and prefer playing games the old school way where I didnt have a strat guide or the internet. But I did once use a strat guide to play final fantasy 7 in some parts since it was my first dog and I knew nothing about the genre

I have the opposite experience. If I can't figure something out more or less immediately, the developer screwed up big-time.
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DevsBro posted...

Sage JJ posted...

I'm an old school gamer who grew up without the internet so I naturally love and prefer playing games the old school way where I didnt have a strat guide or the internet. But I did once use a strat guide to play final fantasy 7 in some parts since it was my first dog and I knew nothing about the genre

I have the opposite experience. If I can't figure something out more or less immediately, the developer screwed up big-time.

I started gaming in the 80s so it just became natural to do blind playthroughs and figure everything out. It amazes me that gaming has gotten to the point of holding your hand
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Sage JJ posted...

DevsBro posted...

Sage JJ posted...

I'm an old school gamer who grew up without the internet so I naturally love and prefer playing games the old school way where I didnt have a strat guide or the internet. But I did once use a strat guide to play final fantasy 7 in some parts since it was my first dog and I knew nothing about the genre

I have the opposite experience. If I can't figure something out more or less immediately, the developer screwed up big-time.

I started gaming in the 80s so it just became natural to do blind playthroughs and figure everything out. It amazes me that gaming has gotten to the point of holding your hand

Ah. I started in the 90's, when games excelled at teaching you without dialog.
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