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.
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.