What’s some good post game content? The stuff you unlock in single player games after the credits roll. The stuff that doesn’t make you feel bad for sticking with it. The stuff that doesn’t make you feel like you’ve eaten too much.
New Game+, bonus levels, harder difficulties, 100% collectibles, high scores, speedruns, whatever it is, tell me about it, especially if it’s better than “the regular game”. Because I almost never engage with any of it, a game tells me “The End” and I drop it like it’s hot.
Am I missing out? Am I doing it right? SB pls educate me.
Any game that stuck with me in some way I feel inclined to go back and spend more time there since there’s usually some system or additional world stuff I want to see.
I had this for Control. The game’s end doesn’t really feel like you’ve wrapped everything up. If anything you now just do your job and a lot of side content is pretty good.
I wanna go back to Hi-Fi Rush and Bayonetta Origins to fully explore their stuff as well even though they’re mostly linear. I think it’s about finding the few games you actually resonate with along the conveyor belt of Games You Play.
I think it’s why most people are probably very sensible with their game choices and only play one or two games a lot each year. Unfortunately I have that backlog disease that makes me compelled to annually play 50 games I sort of tolerate because I’m unable to settle down and have end game.
I see people replaying games and I never understand, that would bore me to tears. Even as a kid I could never do it. I loved Link’s Awakening. I finished it once.
Even a game like Baldur’s Gate 3 I can’t stomach a second playthrough just because I dread going through all the puzzles again. Maybe if the game was shorter, like one act only, but it already took me 60 hours the first time. And some people spend over a hundred hours and start over. It’s a mystery to me.
shiren the wanderer 5 has many times more post-game than main game, and it’s all great
fire pro wrestling world’s not only a game i’ll probably be playing forever, but its fire promoter expansion is essentially a whole extra game that i’ll also be playing forever.
tenchu stealth assassins has legitimate ways of getting you to re-play, like having three possible enemy layouts for each stage, more fancy special items for getting higher scores on stages, and just being a really great, atmospheric game. but it also has the best debug cheat of all time, where you can do all kinds of crazy stuff. you can give yourself infinite usage of any item in the game, including enemy and boss-exclusive items. you can give yourself armies of pets and followers, you can set up your own enemy layouts in a stage, transform yourself into any character, and so on. another game i’ve been going back to for decades, and probably always will.
i guess the secret is not to bother with giant long epic open world games, since most of them aren’t even fun the first time round. i recently re-played gta 2, and you can do that in less than 8 hours easily.
i tried replaying fallout 3/new vegas/4 not long ago. 3 and 4 i couldn’t even get an hour into before getting bored, new vegas lasted a little longer, but i still didn’t get anywhere near finishing it.
guess it is similar to watching a motorrace or a soccer match as someone who doesn’t understand why people love watching it:
the variability of the undertaking is what makes it so enticing, and very often it is a crowd-thing, i.e the company you have is half the fun… it’s not about what you do, it’s about who you are doing it with!
wellll… eh, for single player games
Serious answer:
replaying a game 20 years later can be lots of fun, aye. You can relate with the elderly NPCs or dorksy filler-cast more easily, tropes that never went away or faded into oblivion are kitschy/fun out of place artifacts, and you can enjoy rough edges for what they bring to the table, rather than crave for the technical perfect game that lacks soul (because we also have a ton of that on offer).
It’s about enjoying a piece of entertainment in a different context, since you aren’t the same you anymore. You can bounce off of shit much quicker, try that monk class you never really ‘got’ as a kid, enjoy difficult bits that are well crafted (whereas you lacked the insight to enjoy them for what they are) and in general walk away for good from it if it doesn’t click with you anymore.
If you can do that the first time, congrats, you saved yourself lots of time!
i also drop games as soon as they are done, except pokemon. red/blue has the really cool fight with…red or blue depending on which version. gold/silver has basically a whole second game and it rules.
i play disgaea for the story, i say in all seriousness, so i never do post game content for those even though that’s like 90% of the content
It’s cheating because the post game is obviously just the second half of the game but… Super Mario 3D Land technically let’s you ‘beat’ it at the halfway point. The second set of levels are what push it over into being the best Mario game since 64.
I love replaying games. I wait a few years until my memory is fuzzy enough that it feels somewhat new again, but enough awareness of the game is still there that the stuff I glossed over before pops out at me now
I also like when the pressure of harder modes lets you see things with new clarity. I remember going through Goldeneye with a friend a few years ago and finding out you can shoot a single time with loud weapons without alerting guards, which we would’ve remained oblivious to if we were only cruising through the easier settings
The Dragon Quest 11 postgame was pretty neat. Basically feels like a second season of an anime, with a fun mystery hook to keep you going and anticipated resolution of some of the party members’ stories. I normally would have instantly dropped the game upon first credits roll, but that one did convince me to keep going for a little while. I didn’t finish it but I respected it nonetheless!
See I want to push back against this and the approach Nintendo took with it and 3D World as… so much of them was basically re-used stages remixed to be harder. I think Nintendo has gotten so far in its own head about challenge and approachability that in these games are full of fluff, just have half of these be the easy versions, half the hard ones, balance accordingly and leave the super hard psycho stuff for the post game completionist fare. 3D Land’s back half is great because its first half is almost intentionally not.
The World Ends With You was still fun post game. There seems to be a lot, and the battle stuff is actual fun times. And it helps that there’s certainly a lot of post game stuff to do
It may have been a full separate release but let’s be real Persona 3’s “The Answer” is just a full on post-game dungeon with the story’s epilogue tacked on.
I feel like it’s really hard in a way for me to take the perspective this thread is about kind of…but I will do my best! I tend to think of any game as more of an “activity” that you do until you feel done with it, at any given moment in time…I think I can enjoy almost any game for about 5 minutes—like, I can find something to do I think is fun. Some games I stick with longer than that, some I don’t. There are some games of course that do just run out of almost anything else for you to do past a certain point, and those maybe are more natural for you to think of as a game that you “beat and then are done with,” but (a) if you like them they’re usually fun to replay eventually as many have people seem to have noted and (b) if you’re really desperate you can often think up something else to do in the game after you clear it. If nothing else, you can always start modding it or experimenting with memory pokes or cheats or that sort of thing—that can put a fresh spin on just about any game of course. But anyway. As I understand it this discussion is kind of focused on games that you beat and then do like “postgame content” in, I think, and I can think of some games I’ve enjoyed that way.
When I first played Chrono Trigger, when I was maybe 10, I did immediately start a New Game+ game after I finished the main story, and I went and got all the secret endings as I did it probably following a guide on GameFAQs. I thought that was a fun twist on the game at the time—you just waltz through all the combat scenarios since you have endgame characters, so it goes fairly quickly and you get to enjoy all these little skits and riffs on the main plot as you revisit it (I’m sure many people here already know of this but in any case ). Today I think I would probably take it a little slower than “immediately do the entire New Game+ thing right after the main game” but I bet if I played Chrono Trigger for the first time now I probably would still do all that sooner or later.
Gen 1 Pokémon (Blue in my case) I played for hundreds of hours when I was in 2nd/3rd grade or so. I didn’t want to give it up kind of although luckily I did know other kids who were into it and we would trade and battle with link cables and things, which probably did a lot to keep me interested. Past a certain point I did get really into playing around with glitches and using weird GameShark codes and that sort of thing. I remember I become determined to step on every tile feasibly possible, and I went on a long quest to do this using an item I’d got via GameShark with a name that was a long string of nonsense, that when you used it, replaced your character with the six pokémon icons on the left side of the screen that appear in the menu, and then you could walk through walls, and when you used the item again you would switch back to being “tangible” and could interact with things again. Using that item, I went out-of-bounds systematically everywhere possible in the game just to see if there were any tiles I could actually walk on, although usually the game would crash when I “reappeared.” But I did have a glorious moment when I tried hopping over the S.S. Anne guard and realized that all the trainers on the S.S. Anne were reset if you did this, so you could battle them all again, and I was absolutely beside myself with joy as I replayed the S.S. Anne section.
I can’t even remember what my first times through the levels in the Hitman trilogy felt like. My love of the games came from learning the properties of every item and NPC route in the game, and groundhog daying my way through as efficiently as possible.
I tend to think of any game as more of an “activity” that you do until you feel done with it, at any given moment in time…I think I can enjoy almost any game for about 5 minutes—like, I can find something to do I think is fun. Some games I stick with longer than that, some I don’t. There are some games of course that do just run out of almost anything else for you to do past a certain point, and those maybe are more natural for you to think of as a game that you “beat and then are done with,” but (a) if you like them they’re usually fun to replay eventually as many have people seem to have noted and (b) if you’re really desperate you can often think up something else to do in the game after you clear it. 
If nothing else, you can always start modding it or experimenting with memory pokes or cheats or that sort of thing—that can put a fresh spin on just about any game of course. But anyway. 
but I bet if I played Chrono Trigger for the first time now I probably would still do all that sooner or later.