Poll of the Day > Games where you can destroy your save file (that still work)

(+) Yeah! (+)

Who remembers when Bowser's Inside story remake basically had a section where solo Luigi could destroy your save? Thankfully that was patched. For those who don't know, it was when Mario got kidnapped in Dimble Woods and you needed to collect the Attack Pieces and save him.

Anyone know of any games where you can still destroy your save file by doing things you're not intended?

Yeah, I think the most common thing that triggers this is losing a key item when you're not supposed to.

Off the top of my head, one I triggered was a glitch in Skyward Sword that I think was patched out? During the final fetch quest of the game, if you do things in a certain order and talk to a goron NPC, it will lock the sequence and you won't be able to proceed in the game.

Oh, hey, there's a tropes page for it:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnintentionallyUnwinnable

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Yeah, I think the most common thing that triggers this is losing a key item when you're not supposed to.

Off the top of my head, one I triggered was a glitch in Skyward Sword that I think was patched out? During the final fetch quest of the game, if you do things in a certain order and talk to a goron NPC, it will lock the sequence and you won't be able to proceed in the game.

Oh, hey, there's a tropes page for it:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnintentionallyUnwinnable

Followup: I remembered another one I triggered. In Darkest Dungeon, your characters can get the kleptomaniac quirk which causes them to steal items you find in the dungeon. It was patched out, but there was a chance that characters with this quirk would steal key items you needed to complete missions, and in the case of the Crimson Court missions, this could permanently destroy your ability to proceed through that part of the game. Yes, this did happen to me. Argh.

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Most of the games that saved to a cartridge could ruin the save if you shut off power or pulled the cart while saving.

Time-traveling in the Animal Crossing series could sometimes do serious damage to your town, like causing all your turnips to spoil instantly, ending up with a town full of weeds, or having a bunch of villagers move out. The farther you traveled, the worse things could get.

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I was playing Jedi Outcast back on my OG Xbox and the game froze in the middle of a save. Whatever it did corrupted the whole hard drive and just bricked the console.

Yet somehow I still game on.

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captpackrat posted...

Most of the games that saved to a cartridge could ruin the save if you shut off power or pulled the cart while saving.

Time-traveling in the Animal Crossing series could sometimes do serious damage to your town, like causing all your turnips to spoil instantly, ending up with a town full of weeds, or having a bunch of villagers move out. The farther you traveled, the worse things could get.

I remember this happening with a rented Earthbound.
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You could almost get stuck in Final Fantasy Adventure/Adventures of Mana. There were several dungeons you could get locked into that required a key or mattock to complete and if you ran out, you couldn't continue.

The game did provide a way to acquire additional mattocks and keys in the dungeon, by killing certain specific monsters there was a small chance they might drop what you needed. So if you ran out, you had to start farming these monsters and you'd eventually get a drop.

Not exactly game breaking, but it could be a major pain in the ass. At the start of the game I'd carry like one antidote and then fill my inventory with nothing but keys and mattocks.

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OoT's Water Temple had an issue where using your small keys in the wrong order could prevent you from getting all of the keys you need to progress through the dungeon.

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IIRC there was a bug in Metroid Prime 2 like really late into the game where if you don't finish a certain puzzle after you start it and you leave the room then you brick the puzzle? Probably not 100% correct, but I know you can definitely lock an MP2 file out of finishing the game.

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Oh I just remembered this actually happened to me on Wild Arms 1. I went to that one tower too early and split the party up the wrong way so I couldn't get back up. Had to restart the game.
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Uninstalling Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor would also uninstall your system files.

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The bottle swapping trick in OoT comes to mind

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adjl posted...

OoT's Water Temple had an issue where using your small keys in the wrong order could prevent you from getting all of the keys you need to progress through the dungeon.

This happened to me.

I discovered this glitch in a Yu-Gi-Oh game that could potentially destroy your save file, but if would also overwrite it into essentially whatever the hell it wanted, including changing your story progress and giving you extremely powerful glitch cards that don't actually exist. It was really fun.

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captpackrat posted...

Most of the games that saved to a cartridge could ruin the save if you shut off power or pulled the cart while saving.

Time-traveling in the Animal Crossing series could sometimes do serious damage to your town, like causing all your turnips to spoil instantly, ending up with a town full of weeds, or having a bunch of villagers move out. The farther you traveled, the worse things could get.

Sounds intentional

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PeterPumpknhead posted...

I was playing Jedi Outcast back on my OG Xbox and the game froze in the middle of a save. Whatever it did corrupted the whole hard drive and just bricked the console.

Yet somehow I still game on.

Jeeeez wtf

Id be super pissed if that happened to me. Like, having to start a game over from scratch definitely sucks but its no biggie.

Completely fucking up an entire console though? F*** that.

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adjl posted...

OoT's Water Temple had an issue where using your small keys in the wrong order could prevent you from getting all of the keys you need to progress through the dungeon.

Im always anxious about something like this happening. Never had it happen to me in the Water Temple, but still, thats fucked up.

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rexcrk posted...

Jeeeez wtf

Id be super pissed if that happened to me. Like, having to start a game over from scratch definitely sucks but its no biggie.

Completely fucking up an entire console though? F*** that.

I remember back during the days of PSO, because the game was a bit buggy, there was an ever-present threat of encountering FSOD - the frozen screen of death. Most of the time, that was just annoying and you'd just have to restart the game and lose all your progress since the last save, but if it happened during a save, it could corrupt the entire memory card. Worse, there were various ways you could trigger an FSOD for other players during online play, so that was a constant fear, especially given how many thousands of hours it took to get anywhere in that game. Fortunately, that was just the memory card, not the entire system.

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Gaawa_chan posted...

In Darkest Dungeon, your characters can get the kleptomaniac quirk which causes them to steal items you find in the dungeon. It was patched out, but there was a chance that characters with this quirk would steal key items you needed to complete missions, and in the case of the Crimson Court missions, this could permanently destroy your ability to proceed through that part of the game. Yes, this did happen to me. Argh.

Oh Jesus Christ that game is hard enough, thank you.

My Crusader was a klepto but he never stole anything really worth too much. I do think it's kind of funny when he just suddenly jumps in all "AH, I THINK I WILL KEEP THIS FOR MYSELF!"

UltraIchi posted...

Sounds intentional

Yeah, any sort of time travel will instantly ruin your turnips. They do this on purpose to prevent scumming the stalk market.

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The GBA Monster Rancher games were notorious for their batteries burning out because of the nature of the MR games where you'd reload on failures which put a strain on the battery.

MRDS (which didn't have this as an issue, but repeated saves damage the cart) got around this by punishing you for saving/reloading

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Zeus posted...

The GBA Monster Rancher games were notorious for their batteries burning out because of the nature of the MR games where you'd reload on failures which put a strain on the battery.

MRDS (which didn't have this as an issue, but repeated saves damage the cart) got around this by punishing you for saving/reloading

Kinda cool actually. Raises the stakes like typewriter ribbons

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Zeus posted...

The GBA Monster Rancher games were notorious for their batteries burning out because of the nature of the MR games where you'd reload on failures which put a strain on the battery.

MRDS (which didn't have this as an issue, but repeated saves damage the cart) got around this by punishing you for saving/reloading

That also kind of came up with PSO. If you were farming rare versions of enemies (which happened a lot), a common strategy was to repeatedly teleport back and forth between the "town" and the field, since any enemies that had spawned could reload as a rare variant. In extreme cases, though, the repeated loading of the same area resulted in people's discs being burned to the point of being unreadable.

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An ex-friend of mine told me about how you can fuck your save up in RE if you used the keys in a very specific order. I never checked if it was true since I don't like the older RE games, but he beat them like a million times and knows pretty much every thing about all the older RE games, so I'm assuming it's true.
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Black_Crusher posted...

Oh Jesus Christ that game is hard enough, thank you.

My Crusader was a klepto but he never stole anything really worth too much. I do think it's kind of funny when he just suddenly jumps in all "AH, I THINK I WILL KEEP THIS FOR MYSELF!"

That game is lucky I love it so much. Over 280 hours clocked on it, I think.

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papercup posted...

IIRC there was a bug in Metroid Prime 2 like really late into the game where if you don't finish a certain puzzle after you start it and you leave the room then you brick the puzzle? Probably not 100% correct, but I know you can definitely lock an MP2 file out of finishing the game.

Not sure about Prime 2, but that sounds very similar to a bug in Prime 1 where one of the key items will despawn if you leave the room without collecting it... was fixed in later versions of the game

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I guess you don't mean for gameplay reasons but I always toy with the idea that the game-world should be to some degree aware of your ability to save/load because that is really the ultimate power that the player has at their disposable and is essentially time-travel as far as the game-world is concerned.

if you really wanted a boss to mess with the player, it should start to be able to "break the fourth wall" or whatever and really attack the player themselves in some way, but it's hard to see how you could get away with that without it just being a pain in the ass or even basically malware.

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Sahuagin posted...

I guess you don't mean for gameplay reasons but I always toy with the idea that the game-world should be to some degree aware of your ability to save/load because that is really the ultimate power that the player has at their disposable and is essentially time-travel as far as the game-world is concerned.

if you really wanted a boss to mess with the player, it should start to be able to "break the fourth wall" or whatever and really attack the player themselves in some way, but it's hard to see how you could get away with that without it just being a pain in the ass or even basically malware.

That sounds like what every indie game tries to do and be "meta" and I think it's the stupidest thing ever, Undertale made me cringe harder than I ever have and I used to read a shitload of crappy fanfiction as a teen.

Cruddy_horse posted...

That sounds like what every indie game tries to do and be "meta" and I think it's the stupidest thing ever, Undertale made me cringe harder than I ever have and I used to read a shitload of crappy fanfiction as a teen.

yeah almost any implementation I can think of seems like it would just be dumb in practice. (not familiar with undertale).

the main thing I would want to do something about or at least call attention to is the overpoweredness of the save system. the player has basically literal time-travel at their disposal and it's always just glossed over.

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Sahuagin posted...

yeah almost any implementation I can think of seems like it would just be dumb in practice. (not familiar with undertale).

the main thing I would want to do something about or at least call attention to is the overpoweredness of the save system. the player has basically literal time-travel at their disposal and it's always just glossed over.

Then play Undertale, that is literally the plot once you get towards the ending.

Sahuagin posted...

I guess you don't mean for gameplay reasons but I always toy with the idea that the game-world should be to some degree aware of your ability to save/load because that is really the ultimate power that the player has at their disposable and is essentially time-travel as far as the game-world is concerned.

Animal Crossing did this, but in reverse. A character named Resetti would pop up the next time you started the game if you DIDN'T save. And he would give you a long annoying lecture on why you shouldn't power off or reset without saving.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEh4dDTWajk

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rexcrk posted...

Jeeeez wtf

Id be super pissed if that happened to me. Like, having to start a game over from scratch definitely sucks but its no biggie.

Completely fucking up an entire console though? F*** that.

It would be for me. At least now. I don't have the same free time I had back then.
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Revelation34 posted...

It would be for me. At least now. I don't have the same free time I had back then.

449 Active Posts

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Playing Nobunaga's Ambition on the Game Boy I accidentally saved like 3 or 4 turns from the very last daimyo dying of old age. And he was sick for most of that time and couldn't do anything. I had to reload the save and try a bunch of times to take over the very last territory before he died and the game ended.

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Sarcasthma posted...

449 Active Posts

Lmao

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Sarcasthma posted...

449 Active Posts

I literally have nothing to do on my lunch breaks. Plus most of those were recently on the politics board.
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Sulugnaz posted...

Read a book.

I have none right now. They all got ruined a few years ago and I have no storage space to rebuy.
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Sulugnaz posted...

If only there were repositories to download and read free books from the internet on any internet connected device...

I don't have a reader.
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Eat lunch

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Who gives a fuck what other people do on their break? This is dumb.

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captpackrat posted...

Playing Nobunaga's Ambition on the Game Boy I accidentally saved like 3 or 4 turns from the very last daimyo dying of old age.

Wow nice I didn't realize this came out for Gameboy, my brother and I used to play the NES one all the time as kids.

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Sulugnaz posted...

Good thing you don't actually need a reader, but I guess "Any internet connected device" was too vague...

People who watch movies or read novels on a phone screen are weird because they are far too small to be properly enjoyed.
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UltraIchi posted...

Lmao

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On a related note, ever since I heard about the "New Game+" glitch in Legend of Dragoon (Basically just overwriting one save file with a different one, but stopping partway through saving to create an amalgam of both files), I've often experimented with other games to find similar exploits. Most modern games have save some form of save protection where if anything doesn't add up properly then you can't load the save. But I've found success with a few older games, like Mega Man Legends 1 & 2,and Pokemon Trading Card Game.

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