This article was written by Nick Scibetta and originally appeared on GameCrate.
As we’ve heard time and again in recent years, most players don’t actually finish the games they start. The reasons why are as varied as the individual players themselves, but it is a fact that most players never see the end credits of games they purchase.
Sometimes players try out a game for a few hours and find out it’s just not for them. Sometimes a new game comes out and grabs a player’s attention. Sometimes players just get abducted by aliens and taken to far off planets to play video games beyond the limits of our wildest dreams.
Boy that would be fun, huh?
Anyways, I’m no different in this regard than the gaming community in general. I have left plenty of games abandoned and unfinished behind me. I’ve forgotten about most of them, but there are three specific titles that stick in my mind; three standout games which I enjoyed and poured hours of my life into.
Three games in which I got to the very end but then, for some reason, never crossed the finish line.
These are my 99 percent.
Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King
Dragon Quest VIII was an enormous and extremely popular RPG for the PlayStation 2 from Akihiro Hino and Level-5, the developers behind Rogue Galaxy, Professor Layton, and Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch. It featured a team of four characters exploring a richly detailed fantasy world on a quest to break a curse.
The most memorable part of Dragon Quest VIII was the sheer size of its world. It was one of the first RPGs with a fully 3D world map to explore, and players who wished to could spend hours searching for hidden treasure chests and even participating in a totally optional Pokemon-style monster battling tournament.
Battles in Dragon Quest VIII were turn-based and, when it came to the boss fights, purposely difficult. And it was the final and most difficult boss fight that tripped me up when I played the game back in 2006. Try as I might, I just couldn’t get past the final boss, a bloated demon named Rhapthorne. My party was wiped out too many times to count, and my enjoyment of the game turned to frustration. Sure I could have loaded an earlier save and tried to level up a bit more, but I was tired of doing that. I had other games piling up I wanted to play. Psychologically I was ready for the game to be over, but there was no way I was going to get past the final boss.
So after a week or so of trying, I set the game aside. I told myself I’d just try out some other games as a diversion, and that I’d go back to Dragon Quest VIII soon to finish it properly.
And I did go back…about three years later. At that point I had moved on to the PlayStation 3 and had mostly forgotten about Dragon Quest VIII, but when I dug my PS2 out of the closet on a whim and hooked it up, the shame of leaving that game unfinished came back to me. Now that I was older and wiser though, surely I was ready to finally get to the end of the game!
Except I couldn’t find the memory card with my saved game, and there was no way in hell I was going to start all the way over from the beginning. So I never finished Dragon Quest VIII.
Grim Fandango
Grim Fandango is a classic adventure title from Tim Schafer and the team behind games such as Full Throttle, Psychonauts, and The Secret of Monkey Island. The game centers on Manny Calavera, afterlife travel agent, as he tries to save a recently deceased woman who has been given an unfair deal.
As in many classic adventure titles, the puzzles in Grim Fandango were frequently so difficult (or just plain weird) that they almost seemed like they were daring you to solve them without resorting to walkthroughs. While Grim Fandango is far from the worst offender in this category, I know that the game was a significant challenge for me at the tender age of 13.
I tried my very best to progress through the game without any help, but when I got stuck I would turn to the Universal Hint System website, a brilliant (and still active!) place in which walkthroughs are presented in the form of progressively less subtle hints, rather than complete solutions. Using the site, I was able to get a nudge in the right direction when I needed it while still feeling the sense of accomplishment which comes from figuring out a solution mostly on your own.
But even the Universal Hint System couldn’t help me when I encountered a game-breaking bug in one of the final areas of the game.
I’m not going to spoil anything about the late-game story of Grim Fandango, because if you haven’t played this game yourself yet I’m going to assume you’re rushing off to buy the remastered version right now. But in the middle of the game’s fourth section, probably about an hour from the end of it all, I needed to pour some coffee to solve a puzzle and I simply couldn’t do it. The option to pour the coffee just didn’t appear. It was bugged.
I spent what felt like forever on this puzzle. I broke down and read all of the hints and walkthroughs for this section that I could find, thinking I had missed something. I reloaded an earlier save and tried it again, but nothing worked. For some unknown, arcane, insane reason, I couldn’t pour the coffee and move on with the game, and so I never beat Grim Fandango.
Anachronox
Rock, Paper, Shotgun had a nice look back at Anachronox in which they called it “the one where a talking planet joins your party.” And that really does give you a good idea of the best thing about this odd RPG developed by Ion Storm and released in 2001. It featured turn-based battles which could get pretty tedious but which were improved a bit by an interesting elemental/status damage system called “MysTech.”
Over the course of Anachronox players encountered wise-cracking robots, saved and destroyed planets, and filled out their team with grumpy old men, talking planets, and a sueprhero named Paco. The game’s characters and story were what made it worth playing even when the combat began to drag, and fortunately these days you can watch all the game’s cut-scenes edited together by the game’s cinematic director, so you can enjoy the story without dealing with the gameplay quirks (though you won’t escape the painfully dated graphics).
I never completed Anachronox because I got stuck on the final boss (again, just like Dragon Quest VIII) and during the time I spent struggling to beat it my hard drive started to go bad, and my save game files were hopelessly ruined. This was a time before cloud backups, so there was nothing I could do to get back to where I was besides playing all the way through the game again and, as was the case with Dragon Quest VIII, that wasn’t going to happen.
There were other games waiting for me. There always are.
And 99 percent is basically 100, right?
