Pokemon Silver. Beat the Elite 4 and surprise now you get to go back to Kanto.
Blew my tiny mind…
As an older gamer I want the opposite: shorter games. I don't have the time to sink.
I remember grinding my way through Pokemon Conquest, having a decent time but also kinda wanting it to reach its conclusion. I get to the end of the main campaign, scroll the credits, and then it tells me on next boot that there's now some more content to play.
"Oh cool, a postgame," I thought.
No. There was not a postgame. There were something like eighteen new campaigns to play.
To a certain kind of person this must've felt like Christmas morning. I put the game in a drawer and didn't turn it on again out of sheer intimidation.
Untitled Goose Game, but the other way. Got to the end of what I assumed was the first world, but it turned out that was the entire game.
Still a good game, but if I'd known I would have waited for a sale or something.
I got surprised by DeathStranding.
Did not expect that a game that’s basically about going from A to B through walking could be that lengthy, having great scenery and a weird, vague but good story.
I’m really excited for its sequel, just hoping it will also be available for PC on release.
I wasn't surprised by the length of the base game, or even by the presence of the post game, but by how much time the game spent ending. You beat the villain, that should be it, right? Lol no, you have to traverse the whole game world without vehicles and no network support. That's it, right? Lol no, here's a giant boss monster. That's it, right? Lol no, here's a shitload of cutscenes. Then the credits, then cut to black. That's it, right? Lol no, more cutscenes, then one last delivery... and one last burst of cutscenes, some of which should have come earlier. That's it, right? Lol almost, you have to watch the credits again, and then one blessedly short cutscene before the postgame, and then you can finally go to the main menu and quit.
I really liked the game, but good lord.
Classic kojima
Considering how simple its premise is, Another Crab’s Treasure seems pretty basic, like its story doesn’t have much left, at several points. People online gave some takes that four boss fights from the end, they thought each one would be the final boss.
Far Cry 3 also did this well. You finish the skill tree, do the last few missions where the increased power slides the difficulty down…and then it turns out you unlock a whole other island to make use of your full ability tree in every encounter.
Too bad villain Hoyt Volker, to have the motivation to continue it through was weak sauce compared to Vaas
Going back a ways here with Castlevania: Symphony of The Night. It seems like a fairly fleshed out game as it is when you get to the “final” boss but then you read a guide and find out “ending A” is only half of the game
Upside down castle
The Talos Principle. After a short bit in the game, you go to a hub area that goes to other areas like the one you just came from. Eventually, you find out that there is another hub area above this which leads to other hub areas. I didn't remember if there is another layer on top of that, but either way, once I hit that second hub layer, I remember realizing that the entire game was multiple times larger than I had thought, and I had no way to know if it would expand again when I made it to the next area.
It Takes Two. I thought the game would be over about four times, but then it kept adding even more mechanics and got HARD. I thought it would be super casual, did not expect that much length and depth to it (ignoring the cheesy story 😅)
Okami. Every time I finished an area, I thought I was nearing the end of the game. And every time, I was presented with a new, even larger area.
Ghosts of Tsushima.
The several Acts was a nice touch
Dragon Age: Origins. The base game was easily 80+ hours of interesting story and game play. Each DLC added 20-40 hrs a piece. I used to play it a ton.
I don't recommend giving money to EA, though. They have properly shit all over the sequels.
Hollow Knight.
Surely this is the end of the map..... Ok but now Suuuuuurely this is the end of the map.... OK NOW SUUUURELY.....
Elden Ring. Even after finishing the final boss there was so many areas I’ve not been to. And all those areas are unique - some with unique enemy types. It’s the game that dares to hide a secret area behind a secret area.
Xenogears. 80-hour game, and that’s without grinding for everything. And, it probably would have been close to twice as long if they’d been funded enough to complete it. As it was released, the second disc began with a 2-hour cutscene with a save point in the middle, which essentially summed up most of the second half of the story. Amazing game. Like playing through an entire mecha manga.
New factorio dlc felt comically long, and yet I'm having to force myself not to make a new save.
I've been wanting to play that. Considering it already takes me something like 30-40 hours to launch a rocket in base game, I'm anticipating that getting through the DLC is going to keep me busy a while.
Portal
For me Portal as well. I knew back then that people said it's an afternoon game but I thought "an afternoon for a good player, certainly not me". Finished it in an afternoon.
Surprised that it was so short?
I 100% Tunic in 15 hours. I expected it to be longer and harder, considering it's not even in a real language and you have to translate it to solve most of the puzzles.
Final Fantasy 12
I had just come off of FFX while running through all the FF games that I could. With FF12, I got to a point where I had a solid amount of freedom and did a bunch of side quests and stuff. Then the next portion of the story takes you to this mountain, and I thought, ah cool, this looks like "new base" material. They lay out new information about the plot and then the next stop is to assault an air ship.
Kick ass, I think. This is probably roughly the story equivalent of the assault on Bevelle from FFX, you go in, fight your way through, a cinematic happens and the thrust of the story changes, new info drops, motivations change and are renewed just like in FFX.
Nope. You get to the boss on that ship, it's some dude you have little to no investment in fighting. You kick his ass, he transforms, easy fight, and the game just ends.
I sat in actual open mouthed disbelief. There was no way the game ended there, at what I felt was dramatically and game time wise to be the obvious mid point. And yet, there the credits rolled.
I was so disappointed.
I haven't played since the original release, but I vaguely remember feeling the same way. If I remember correctly you get to the boss and he is practically like who are you guys. I felt so let down there was no build up between the boss and your characters.
And then Square repeated it with FFXV. Whole time I was like why do I care about this villain? Apparently you had to play some side game or read a story to understand why you were meant to care.
Nethack.
The first few dozen times I played it, it felt like it took forever to get anywhere. The most recent time I played, it felt quick and easy to get to the bottom. (I got stuck on something, though, and haven't been able to continue past the valley of the dead.)
Yakuza games a completionists dream/nightmare
Biggest surprise for length was Dragon Quest VII, the PSX version. Started playing it close to release, dropped it several times and finally finished it years later.
I'd played multiple games in the series before and I think the longest one topped out at 40 hours, so I really was not expecting a 100+ hour marathon like that was (although the very, very long prologue should probably have served as a warning).
In most JRPGs of the time, at the 30 hours mark you do your endgame sidequests, collect ultimate weapons and whatnot. In DQ7, you unlock the job system 🙃
I’m not usually surprised by the length but by the girth.
Fallout 4. The amount of world exploration and itty bitty stuffs almost makes me lost myself in exploration, even though the story can be really short depending how you progress the content. On my first playthrough, I clocked at ~90hrs of play time and only just passed the 1/4 of story progression just because I sucked in sidequest and exploration.
Never thought I enjoyed the base building and assisting settlements aspects, Bethesda did great job on Visual storytelling speaking as Interplay/Obsidian Fallout fan.
Another case is STALKER Anomaly mod which can gives you theoritical endless playtime as long as you creative to build your own CYOA Stalker story. Though I don't recommend Anomaly if you're looking for the STALKER lore (as they're fan project) and should be treated as post-vanilla playthrough.
Celeste. I was not expecting the core and farewell
DDLC. It was a free dl, and I never played anything like it, so I figured I'd see what everyone was on about. It was surprisingly short!
XCom2 the content just DOES NOT END.
And MGS Peacewalker. How they cramed so much stuff unto the tiny PSP disk is beyond me. The list of unlockables is insane.
Deuteros. This is pre 1995, I believe.
Played the game for over a day, got to conquer the entire system, thought I was done but then I found out that that was only 10-20% of the game
Lufia: Rise of the Sinistrals. JRPG for the SNES published by Quintet. VERY large game for the era, there are a LOT of towns with dungeons to go through. Gets a little grindy mid-way through, it also manages to fit such a large quest with such a large game map on the cartridge by having relatively little variety in visuals. There's one town tileset, there's one dungeon tileset that gets palette swapped, there's one cave tileset that gets palette swapped, there's a relatively small number of music tracks you'll be hearing a lot.
The North American release of its sequel had a very late game dungeon that was corrupted, and technically possible to move through but you'd have to have played the PAL version to know what you're doing. One of the few broken games I'm aware of to get a Nintendo seal of quality. Lufia II is actually a prequel, you play out the full adventure of the legendary heroes you play in the cold open of Lufia. There's a cool detail between the two games, in the first, when the legendary heroes were legendary, the dialog is spoken very formal and pompous. In the second game, when we've been with them this whole time and they're just people, the same dialog plays out the same way but it's much more casual. "Come forth and show thyself!" becomes "Come out and show yourself." Probably my favorite detail of the whole series.
I love persona 5 but always quit after 40 hrs of playing it. It's so damn long lol
Drakenguard 3, Nier.
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