Games

Pokemon Silver. Beat the Elite 4 and surprise now you get to go back to Kanto.

The Last of Us II. I went in expecting the same act structure as the first and was surprised. If you've played it then you know what I'm talking about. Despite mainly taking place over just a few days it really feels so drawn out and a relentless struggle, which felt so perfect for the world of the game.

As an older gamer I want the opposite: shorter games. I don't have the time to sink.

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.

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.

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.

Ghosts of Tsushima.

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

Castlevania Symphony of the Night... At least when you defeat Shaft properly

An ENTIRE NEW CASTLE!?

Hollow Knight.

Surely this is the end of the map..... Ok but now Suuuuuurely this is the end of the map.... OK NOW SUUUURELY.....

New factorio dlc felt comically long, and yet I'm having to force myself not to make a new save.

Dragon's Dogma 2. IYKYK

I love persona 5 but always quit after 40 hrs of playing it. It's so damn long lol

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.

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.

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

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!

Nier Automata actually kinda pissed me off the first time I played it. Thought I was finished with the game and was confused by the ending, turns out that was just ending A. Gotta play again for B, and then C, and can't forget D and E for the full picture.

Had to take a break from the game but I went back for the rest of the endings and they're worth it. Also they cut out a lot of the side quests and grinding after ending A. Getting that first ending is actually like 50% or 60% finished. But yeah, at first I was getting flashbacks to the PS2 games that tell you the true ending can only be seen by playing again on the newly unlocked 'Very Hard' difficulty

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.

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.

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.

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 😅)

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.

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.

I've avoided this thread for a bit because I assumed there'd be a bunch of dick jokes. I was pleasantly surprised with a bunch of thoughtful and awesome comments. Fucking love the nerdiness of this community.

To answer the question - there's a number of them, but i think the first one for me was Fable: The Lost Chapters. It added a ton of new content on top of the base game, plus there were a good amount of extra side quests, challenges, puzzles, collectibles, etc, that I got so much beautiful and memorable gameplay from it.

It does feel like games nowadays are made to appeal to the masses and/or pump out a lot of games as quickly as possible in order to generate as much money as possible. Fortunately indie game studios and devs still exist for people that are looking for a little more substance. Shout out to the Indie Stone for Project Zomboid and their continued efforts to add more awesome features to their game!!

Yakuza games a completionists dream/nightmare

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.