It took me 13 years and 2 attempts to beat Tomb Raider 4.
It took me 15 years and 4 attempts to beat Vagrant Story.
What’s your record?
What game are you still playing?
Why do you keep coming back?
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It took about 23 years to beat Daggerfall, but a lot of the times I played it growing up, I wasn’t explicitly trying to beat it, so I dunno if that counts! At any rate, got it for Christmas 1996, beat it in 2019.
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I have a PS1 memory card with a DQ7 save before the final boss from 2004 that I am absolutely going to finish one of these days.
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Started FF7 when I was 7 at my parent’s pastor’s house. I’ll pick it up every now and again, so it’s been like 25 years in the works. Pretty sure it’s a really boring game, but maybe I’ll finish it.
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Have tried to start Tales of Berseria about 25 times since it’s release and still have played less than an hour.
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I recall playing the Guardian Legend since time immemorial (before '95), but didn’t beat it (let alone make any headway in it) until like 2008.
What ultimately transformed the game from an inscrutable aesthetic object into something I could beat were the realizations that (a) the gratuitous umlats in the passwords were intentional (and not just my cart being glitchy) and (b) the map screen literally had objective markers.
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I played Majora’s Mask from scratch as a rental dozens of times and then again from scratch on the GameCube version before finally 100%ing it on the Wii in November 2008 after dropping out of high school
I still haven’t touched Act V of Kentucky Route Zero because it hasn’t been time yet
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I first played Pacman 2 around 1995. I got stuck at the last boss, even with a walkthrough (somehow)
I beat it last month. So that’s 27 years.
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It look me like 8 years (and 2 attempts, due to my saves getting wiped) to beat A Link to the Past. There was one thing I got stuck on and I wound up shelving the game for years until one day I sat down and discovered the solution through process of elimination/brute force. Then I powered through the rest of the game, lost my save progress to a freak resetting glitch or something, and then had to restart. Upon the restart, I played through the whole game in a single sitting because I was leaving nothing to chance.
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in progress it would have to be Fzero GX, where it took me over a decade to beat a single level, and then the next level shows up and i’m like “well, see you in a decade”
runner up might be Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, which I am still playing the same save on perhaps a decade on.
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I’ve been trying off-and-on to “beat” Nethack (ascend a single character) for about 24 years now.
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I never beat any of the NES SMBs as a kid in the late 80s. The last stage was always too much of a difficulty spike and the lives system tended to undermine my motivation to hit my head against the wall repeatedly until I beat them.
When I was in college in the early 2000s I mentioned to a friend that I never beat them, assuming basically this was a universal experience that everyone messed around jumping to random warp zones without taking the idea of winning the game seriously. My friend slightly shamed me by exclaiming “You never beat SMB1!?” So I finally got around to beating them on emulator.
It wasn’t really worth the trouble. I still think my original idea that the NES SMBs aren’t particularly intended to be won was the right idea. Their Stage 8s are something similar to modern “postgame” challenges: optional content for masochists.
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This but for literally every Bandai Namco RPG. I buy them all and they never stick.
I need to hire someone on retainer to spray me with a water bottle and shout “NO!” whenever I navigate to the page for a Tales game on steam, it would probably be cheaper in the long run
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it took me 22 years to get to level 70 in gemstone I STILL HAVE 30 LEVELS TO CAP
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Tangentially related, but I’m reminded of one of my buddies in the metroid hacking community when he was playing through Zelda 3 for the first time a while back. He was halfway through the dark world when we started to agree that second half of the game felt kinda like a “half-hack.” In the SM hacking community, the term “half-hack” referred to a wide genre of early hacks (typically bad) made by people who couldn’t figure out how to edit things like doors and room sizes, resulting in inescapably similar worlds filled with spikes, obtuse puzzles/progression, and other forms of inane difficulty (like a discount Second Quest, basically).
Anyhow, he eventually got to Mothula, the boss of skull woods, and the combination of the treadmill floor, spiked walls, and moving spike traps had us and everyone else in the audience agreeing “yep, that’s a half-hack alright.” (I believe the ice palace in general also elicited this reaction.)
Thinking about this more, your post has got me wondering if Zelda 1’s second quest was an attempt to properly sequester this kind of content into into a dedicated “post-game” mode, and if the dark world in Zelda 3 was an attempt to reverse course and narratively reintegrate it into the main game.
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Yeah, Nintendo has visibly for years been thinking hard about the question of how to make a game at once easy and difficult and pleases everyone, and never seem to settle on a specific solution. You’re probably right that production constraints tie into the question as well (since fewer people see the difficult content, it’s not worth the same investment).
Mario World’s answer, hiding the hardest content behind enticing secrets, was the most lastingly influential I think. Mario World 2 Yoshi’s Island’s answer, to make a linear game with relatively complicated levels and controls but replace death with an annoying baby-fetch chore, was the biggest flop
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Maybe Ikaruga. I have purchased that game on many platforms (starting with GameCube in 2003) and played it a lot, but I was never able to beat the final stage.
When I finally did, maybe a year ago, it was only because whatever version I was playing had unlimited continues.
If I consider only games that I played using one single save, then it’s probably Final Fantasy 9. I liked the game but I didn’t find it compelling enough to play more than a little at a time. It ended up taking me about three years. Never a huge gap between sessions but I also rarely played it more than a day or two at a time.
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22 years ago, I started a game. Today, I beat it.
That game is Donkey Kong 64.
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I beat Metroid for the first time several years ago and it was the first game I ever bought with my own money some months after release, so probably that.
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I got Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution on PS2 in 2003 and beat its Quest mode for the first time last year. Still working on VF5’s (2007) Quest mode. Probably won’t ever beat VF4 vanilla’s. = P
I think 2020 was probably the first time I ever beat Marvel vs. Capcom 2’s Score Attack mode. That was on PS3; I first got the game on Dreamcast, probably 2000. It intimidated me up until recently.
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