What are the most impossible to find "secrets" you've ever found in a game?

Well, the title pretty much says it all.

Most people like to have little easter eggs and hidden fun stuff in games. It gives us a reason to explore, to spend fifteen minutes trying to just across that pit of spikes, just to see what's on the other side.
And the harder something was to find, the greater the feeling of accomplishment when you finally find it and you can act like a smug bastard to all your friends for a while because you're just that much better than them.

Some games take this a bit too far, resulting in "if you buy the guide, we'll tell you how to find it", a.k.a. Guide Dangit.
And some just go way beyond that so that even with the guide in hand, you have to refer to it more often than you look at the actual game just to keep track of what the hell you're supposed to be doing.

An example of the first type of "secret" is the old classic from Final Fantasy 7. Chocobo breeding.
Sure, you can probably make your way up to Black Chocobo with trial and error, and with a bit of luck maybe even get a Gold. But in the end, to know for sure what you're doing, you need help. (And if you found the "ideal chocobo breeding family tree" through your own thinking, or even found it reasonable at all, you still need help. It loops in on itself, Gods damn it!)

I'm unnecessarily wordy tonight, but what I'm wondering is, exactly as I wrote in the title, do you have any good examples of the second kind of secret?
The ones that even the people who wrote the guide must have been told of beforehand, otherwhise only the programmers and, maybe, the scripwriters would be the only ones to know of it.


I have one, but it is a VERY long and complicated one.
It's from the game Tactics Ogre, a strategy game similar to Final Fantasy Tactics. (FFT actually ripped off much of it's gameplay from TO.)

This is the VERY SHORT description. Almost all details have been cut to shorten the description as much as possible.


The secret itself is a group of ultra-mass-destructo-death-kill spells. To get all of them (there are five in total) you need to:

Run through the mandatory X number of floors dungeon. In this case 100 floors. In order to not automatically get booted out after you beat the third floor, you have to move a soldier to a specific square during the battle to find a secret door.
Not to mention that you have to read a specific piece of news about a mysterious explosion, found in a huge pile of mostly pointless "news". As far as I know, only about three of the dozens of texts actually serve any real purpose.
After you beat the evil lich at the 100th floor, you get the first spell.

To get the other four you need to:

Recruit for different special characters.
The first of which you meet in the beginning of the game (probably at least 10 hours before you have the chance to do this). If you choose the wrong dialogue option there, you're screwed. Start over. From the beginning. That is, assuming you manage to save her in the battle. Suicidal AI programming is a bigger enemy than the actual enemies.
The second also has a WIN/LOSE, but this one is more fair. At least this time you know that she might be important.
The third just joins you.
The fourth requires you to go through the most arbitrary sequence of events I've ever seen. When you first meet her, she's an enemy and you have to kill her to win the fight. If you kill her, you're screwed. Instead you have to beat her to ridiculously low levels of health. Below 20 health. At that point in the game I think you can hit people for 80+ damage per swing, if not more. So you'll have to stop hitting her at ~100 health and slowly wear her down by throwing rocks at her which, on a critical hit, might do 15 damage. At most. Otherwhise almost always single digit. She will then escape from the battle.
After that you go to a specific town and use one of the least useful spell in the entire game to make it rain. That's the only thing the spell does, and that the only times it's actually useful for anything. After all that, you've finally finished the first step.
The second step, which may, or may not, be done in between recruiting them (can't remember) is to gather four special shields.
Blah blah blah, beat people up, steal loot. Again, possible to ruin everything if you just accidently miss one of them.
Step three. Fight four different battles at four different locations, recieving one of the spells after each.


And the really fun part is that after you've done all this, you have the five spells that are even less useful than the "make it rain"-spell. At least the rain doesn't kill your own characters.
That's right. These five spells will deal heavy damage to, and probably kill, everyone but the caster assuming your spellcaster has enough spellpower. Since male casters suck in that game, odds are your main character won't be that caster, which will lead to this short chain of events:

Waiting to charge enough mp to cast the spell... ... ...Keep waiting... ... ...Wait a little longer... ... ...Just a bit more... ... ...Okay, cast it! Everyone but the caster takes ludicrous amounts of damage and most of them, including your main character, die.

GAME OVER

Quote :

I'm unnecessarily wordy tonight

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I discovered you could beat Final Fantasy 7 without being forced to use any of the sick men.
It gets kinda hard after your staff woman is raped and killed by the players mentor, who I'm told is who many men look up to when playing the game.

Acquiring and decking out the ultimate weapons in FFX.

End thread.

Getting Zodiac Spear from Final Fantasy XII without a guide.

Myst. All of it.

Okay, so I suck at anything that I can't solve by shooting something.

The fucking whale from King's Quest IV. See, there's a part of the game where you have to get eaten by a whale (to get to a particular island where a necessary item is). Once inside, you have a limited amount of time before you die of stench. Hopefully you have the peacock feather (by encountering the whale on the way BACK instead of the way THERE), but that part's fairly intuitive.

To get out of the whale, you have to tickle its uvula -- also intuitive, it's a giant thing hanging there and the description of it is very prominent. But to do THAT, you have to climb the whale's tongue -- in the EXACT PERFECT WAY, which is a very narrow diagonal that takes a lot of trial and error to get right even once you know what you're supposed to do -- up toward the teeth, and then tickle the uvula. From the front of the whale's mouth.

That was the impasse it took me many years of hiatus and the creation of GameFAQs to get past.

/old

Edit: Okay, so it's not a secret, but it was hair-tearingly frustrating. Most Sierra games are.

I actually have a YouTube video dedicated to a secret I discovered in Megaman 4. Behold!

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I feel so special.

Miss Prince wrote:

The fucking whale from King's Quest IV. See, there's a part of the game where you have to get eaten by a whale (to get to a particular island where a necessary item is). Once inside, you have a limited amount of time before you die of stench. Hopefully you have the peacock feather (by encountering the whale on the way BACK instead of the way THERE), but that part's fairly intuitive.

To get out of the whale, you have to tickle its uvula -- also intuitive, it's a giant thing hanging there and the description of it is very prominent. But to do THAT, you have to climb the whale's tongue -- in the EXACT PERFECT WAY, which is a very narrow diagonal that takes a lot of trial and error to get right even once you know what you're supposed to do -- up toward the teeth, and then tickle the uvula. From the front of the whale's mouth.

That was the impasse it took me many years of hiatus and the creation of GameFAQs to get past.

/old

Edit: Okay, so it's not a secret, but it was hair-tearingly frustrating. Most Sierra games are.

I don't know. I figured out how to climb the whale's tongue with a little trial and error. One of the most nonsensical Sierra puzzles I've encountered, though, would have to be Leisure Suit Larry 3. How would you have any notion to go get your divorce papers from the lawyer while wearing the showgirl costume?

Miss Prince wrote:

To get out of the whale, you have to tickle its uvula -- also intuitive, it's a giant thing hanging there and the description of it is very prominent. But to do THAT, you have to climb the whale's tongue -- in the EXACT PERFECT WAY, which is a very narrow diagonal that takes a lot of trial and error to get right even once you know what you're supposed to do -- up toward the teeth, and then tickle the uvula. From the front of the whale's mouth.

I used up about half the save directory climbing the spiral stairs in the same game, and don't even get me started about the beanstalk in the original version of King's Quest I. I didn't finish that until ScummVM came along and added mouse support, and even then it took me the better part of a day.

As for actual secrets, I'm not a thorough enough player to be good at finding gameplay secrets, but I like to open resource files and try to puzzle out how the game was put together, or find stuff that the developers made but never implemented. F'rinstance, King's Quest IV (again) has some kind of bouncing jack-o-lantern face that looks like an animation test, and the nighttime rooms all look unfinished, so that means there must be some way of superimposing one pic on top of another, and now I have to look through the documentation to see if I can find it, and *wanders off in a fit of nerdity*

Secret message in Metroid Fusion, anyone? The one where you have to do
a nearly impossibly long and convoluted shinespark sequence in sector 4
to get around the balloon things without the Ice Missiles and get to
the navigation room to see a few extra lines of text? Not only have I
never been able to do that, I probably never will because even items
that require a single shinespark in a certain spot have a tendency to
elude me like the jerks they are.

And let's not forget Regirock/ice/steel in Pokemon R/S/E for anyone who can't read Braille. It doesn't help that the method is slightly different in Emerald. But at least this one, I can actually do because it doesn't require insanely perfect timing with something I can barely do anyway.

Miss Prince wrote:

The fucking whale from King's Quest IV. See,
there's a part of the game where you have to get eaten by a whale (to
get to a particular island where a necessary item is). Once inside, you
have a limited amount of time before you die of stench. Hopefully you
have the peacock feather (by encountering the whale on the way BACK
instead of the way THERE), but that part's fairly intuitive.

To
get out of the whale, you have to tickle its uvula -- also intuitive,
it's a giant thing hanging there and the description of it is very
prominent. But to do THAT, you have to climb the whale's tongue -- in
the EXACT PERFECT WAY, which is a very narrow diagonal that takes a lot
of trial and error to get right even once you know what you're supposed
to do -- up toward the teeth, and then tickle the uvula. From the front
of the whale's mouth.

That was the impasse it took me many years of hiatus and the creation of GameFAQs to get past.

/old

Edit: Okay, so it's not a secret, but it was hair-tearingly frustrating. Most Sierra games are.

That whale is my mortal enemy of gaming (that and the Hoppa from
Altered Destiny). We had King's Quest IV at one point a long time ago,
brought it over to some cousins' house, watched them try to get out of
the whale... never even saw the friggin' game again.

Kitbug wrote:

Acquiring and decking out the ultimate weapons in FFX.

YES! With the utmost conviction, 100%, never been so sure of anything in my life YES!

Some of them weren't so bad if you checked online. As I recall, Auron's and Rikku's were cakewalks, and Yuna's was just a bit time consuming. After that, it's hell.

That butterfly game for Kimarhi's was irritating, that fucking Chocobo racing game for Tidus's was infuriating, that lightning dodging bullshit for Lulu's is impossible.

You just sit there, pressing X at the perfectly right time. "One... Two... Three..." *Two hours laters* "One hundred and ninety-seven... One hundred and ninety-eight... One hundred and ninety-nine... BZZT! MOTHERFUCKER!!!" *Smashes PS2 with a ball peen hammer*

Wakka's wasn't MUCH better. Basically, it's a sickening amount of Blitzball. I actually liked Blitzball. Nothing makes me forget that the Savior is an idiot and the Big Evil looks more ridiculous than any video game character EVER like going into quadruple overtime against the Al Bhed in the finals of some tournament. But still, the amount of Blitzball you'll likely have to play to get a CHANCE at the item you need has probably caused a few deaths. :redangry:

Also, anything you can't backtrack to get if you have the option can go fuck itself. Like Pokey's example of how the wrong dialogue option screws that save FOREVER. Or how you can't finish your Al Bhed learnings if you miss the two or three book thingies in Home.

The way to beat the end guy in Fire Warrior.

But then again, that game was complete shit.

My best (only?) is the date with Barrett at the Gold Saucer in FF7. :flirty:
A moment brought to me by dozens of fickle little dialogue choices and
probably too much time and enthusiasm. Hi my name is Trivia and I'm a
recovering fangirl.

Hmm, I wonder if I still have that save file...

Scratches -- trying to find the right spot to dig. If I hadn't resorted to UHS I could conceivably have spent the rest of my LIFE looking for the right spot to dig.

(Scratches has other issues, like why the hell I'm spending the weekend in an empty house with no power, no food and no working plumbing, but that's probably a topic for a different thread.)

Triti in Trauma Center, either version.

Yes, it's just a normal part of the game's progression. I don't care. The in-game hints dropped by the characters are the most obtuse hints I've ever seen in my life, and I can not, for the life of me, figure out how anything they say is supposed to lead you to the conclusion of "Don't gank pieces until no two thorns line up."

And if that's not bad enough, fucking Savato. There is no suggestion at any point that the final phase of the boss requires your Healing Touch, thus if you use it beforehand, you're screwed. And nothing will tell you that this is why you failed, either, so you may very well attempt it more than once, unknowingly making the same mistake every time. And there is absolutely no indication even when it's time to do it, which is made worse by the fact that this point is marked by Derek doing a free one as part of the plot.

Stefan from FE9/10

In both games he will only appear if you move one of your units to a very far off corner on the map. And even then he won't join you unless you meet him with a laguz. In the chapters prior, there's not even a single hint thrown towards you that there's this Swordmaster stashed way far away.

.... and he wasn't even that good anyway. Sure the sword he came with was, but Zihark was a far better Swordmaster

Milon's Secret Castle totally lives up to its name. It took me four months, a couple of essential Nintendo Power hints, and a phone call to Hudson Soft to beat the game. Still, I figured out the rest through a lot of brute force messing with every damned thing in sight, and you bet my 10-year-old self was proud.

There are plenty of hidden doors with no clues or hints to their location. You'll be blasting and fruitlessly shoving blocks all day until you happen upon one. Many of the essential items are found behind said doors. The fastest way out of the castle well involves standing at a specific corner of some platform and blasting an octopus monster to get a balloon that automatically lifts you out. (Seriously. I couldn't make this up if I tried.) Some of the bosses don't appear unless you've collected certain items already. The game does have a few badly translated hints which are more of a laugh than a help. I still don't understand what a maharito is.

The worst trick of the castle is a tower consisting of an infinite stairway down. To proceed, you have to break some blocks and jump and float through the empty spot. To float, you better have bought the balloon before heading in there. The only other way out is suicide.

Why did I subject myself to this? Milon's Secret Castle has a trippy charm that kept me coming back for more. (And infinite continues so I could keep coming back again and again and again after getting creamed by some cheapo boss.) It also has surprisingly nifty touches, such as the music boxes that take you to a note-catching bonus round. There are seven in all, and each adds another instrument to the song. The last is a violin playing a separate harmonizing melody that was quite impressive to me at the time. This runthrough video includes the full set of bonus rounds for your 8-bit listening pleasure.

Ogre Battle 64.

This quaint little strategy RPG has six endings, but even if you play a hundred times, you will only see the two neutral endings at most. The things you need to do to get the four other endings in this game are so mind-boggingly obscure and convoluted, you can even read a complete, detailed guide and STILL fail. It's just that ridiculous. To this day, people are still trying to understand in full just how in hell this game works.

So, I'll try and give a short explanation.

The most important mechanic in determining the ending is something called the Chaos Frame (what an appropriate name). It's an invisible counter that changes depending on a lot of factors and decisions throughout the game, most important of all being your battle behavior.
When in a mission, you have a bunch of strongholds scattered over the map, that work as chokepoints. Your objective is conquering the enemy HQ without letting him get yours. However, if you want to get the endings, you have to do it the right way, and EVERY BATTLE COUNTS.
Each of your units (a bunch of characters that fight together) has an alignment counter (hidden), calculated off the (visible) alignment of the characters in it. So, if the characters are mostly chaotic, the unit will be classed as chaotic, and vice-versa if they're orderly. Of course, since the damn counter is hidden you have to guess.
That's not all. Your units' alignment is affected by how you fight battles. You get chaotic by fighting lower-level enemies, killing lots of people, and fighting orderly enemies. The opposite goes to orderly units. Of course, that just means you'll have to devote more attention to managing alignment than, you know, actually winning the damn battles.
Why is it important? You see, each stronghold has an arbitrary "Morale" number you can see when checking it. To gain Chaos Frame points, you have to take high-morale strongholds with orderly units and low-morale strongholds with chaotic units. And each time you do it wrong, you lose FOUR TIMES the amount of points you'd gain for doing it right. And you lose points by taking neutral strongholds, but you gain points if you take all enemy strongholds before beating the mission. If you don't do that, you lose points anyway.
And the game doesn't tell you a thing about that, so you have to guess how an arbitrary number matches up with another arbitrary number that you can't even see so you can decide which of yoru ekagkhashfd.

I think my brain short-circuited.

The four non-neutral endings and most special characters can only be gotten if you have very low or high Chaos Frame values. There's absolutely no chance to get those unless you know how and devote your entire play-through to it.

And it's a LONG-ASS game anyway holy shit.

I only ever beat it once, got the "fade into obscurity" ending. After playing over 100 hours, that's a little annoying, to put it mildly.

Miss Prince wrote:

And it's a LONG-ASS game anyway holy shit.

I only ever beat it once, got the "fade into obscurity" ending. After playing over 100 hours, that's a little annoying, to put it mildly.

I innocently picked all the good-guy plot decisions, thinking it would lead me to a good ending. Got the "People think of me as a bloodthirsty monster, I get ostracized and later everyone else gets killed by barbarians" ending. Lovely. [You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

I'll go with any of the Suikoden games, which require you find the 108 stars of destiny- 108 PC's and NPC's. And there are limited times within the game that you can recruit certain characters or they're gone...and you miss the good ending.

Exodia's Right Leg wrote:

Miss Prince wrote:

And it's a LONG-ASS game anyway holy shit.

I only ever beat it once, got the "fade into obscurity" ending. After playing over 100 hours, that's a little annoying, to put it mildly.

I innocently picked all the good-guy plot decisions, thinking it would lead me to a good ending. Got the "People think of me as a bloodthirsty monster, I get ostracized and later everyone else gets killed by barbarians" ending. Lovely. [You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

Don't get me wrong, I love Ogre Battle 64. Like, to death. But that whole Chaos Frame thing and everything associated can suck nuts. Who the fuck thought that was a good idea? It's not like the original Ogre Battle had too few hard-to-get secrets to begin with, and that was when you could both SEE the Chaos Frame (called "Reputation" there) and it was much easier to manage.

The the "hatching a shiny" version of the RNG abuse trick using the RNG reporter. Basically you plug in a level 50+ Pokemon's stats, nature, and characteristic as well as the time you got it; down to the hour and minute. This then generates a code called a "seed" in which you use to generate the possibilities of hatching a shiny of a certain nature. All that's needed then is that you input the double taps* through the happiness app on the Poketch(tapping the empty space that makes your party jump), then the required amount of coin flips. If you're going to go for a certain nature, it's almost guaranteed that you won't get nature you want right away.

Honestly, this thing wouldn't be so difficult if it weren't for the fact that it absolutely requires your secret ID. That alone is difficult as fuck to pull off correctly. I love how this thing sounds more insane than some Pokegod hoaxes, but it really works! I got a shiny Adamant Magikarp/Gyarados named "Asuka" this way.

PROTIP: The higher the frame, the higher the double-tap count. If you only see frame numbers of 12k+, reset that shit. Unless you feel like tapping the screen 2 thousand times. :unskilled78:

In Wizardry 6, if you tell Rebecca "I Love You", she'll give you a wonderfully powerful Diamond Ring. Unfortunately there are no hints anywhere in the game to advise you to do that, nor in her dialogue.