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.
Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced had tons of missions that required items and gave items. Your inventory had a cap so once you reached it you needed to decide on which inventory items to dstroy to make space for new rewards, or leave the rewards behind.
There were so many repeating quests so those rewards were safe to destroy. But if you destroyed a required item from a one-time quest(i don’t think there was anything special to mark these one-time side-quests)… no 100% game for you.
You could also save your game mid-battle. I learned the hard way I shouldn’t have saved in a major story battle. Death in those were Game Over. There was only one save slot, so I was locked in a battle I had no chance of surviving.
Mid-battle saves were a separate temporary file. Once you loaded the file, it deleted itself. Basically an extented pause since it was a mobile game. Your main save would have been unharmed, though saves were manual so who knows how far back you were. Some battles were forced whenever you entered the tile, so you could easily be surprised an unprepared. Especially that babus fight with marche alone. Was always tough back in the day.
Oh that was it, the temporary save thing. I loaded it, and then I was stuck.
I loved that game but there’s no way in hell I’d ever have the patience to 100% it, good lord.
I went through that exact problem, didn’t have space to stuff a single item from a mission I thought would be repeatable and so I got stuck in 99% completion - the only solution was to trade it from another cart and that was not gonna happen