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Where did you get stuck?

Büge

Arm Candy
(she/her)
The junk freighter in Space Quest III.

How was I supposed to know there was a reactor you can take from the rat hole?
 

Yimothy

Red Plane
(he/him)
I remembered another Zelda one for me: I got stuck in one of the dungeons pretty far into Link to the Past. The only apparent path forward was through a locked door, but I couldn’t find the key. I looked up a dungeon map online and the key I needed was behind the door I needed it to unlock, so there was no way to progress. When I got stuck in Link’s Awakening, I started over, but aLttP is not as good as awakening so I’ve never finished it.

Looking back, I think I must have missed something since if it were possible to get into an unwinnable situation like that in such a popular game it’d be a well known problem. I wonder if I still have the save.
 

Issun

Chumpy
(He/Him)
I think OG Zelda is the only one where you can lock yourself out of getting all the keys in a dungeon but you can buy keys in that game so it's no problem there.

In LttP, Misery Mire can be confusing and it's easy to miss things but even there there's no way to get in an unwinnable situation. I'm guessing that might be the dungeon you got stuck on?
 
As a kid, I definitely did whatever glitch in Link's Awakening lets you lose the ball or get it stuck in Eagle's Tower and had to re-do a bunch of stuff, but I honestly have no idea how I even stumbled into that. Probably did it to myself using other glitches.
 

ThricebornPhoenix

target for faraway laughter
(he/him)
To this day, I have never beaten this game. I played to the very end, up to the final boss, and couldn't beat it. My english was probably still not good enough to understand what the guide said (I think you need to cast a spell on your weapons, or something?). I tried to fight the boss, doing very low damage while still surviving a long time. Didn't work, of course.
Defeating the previous boss unlocks Dryad's final spell for both casters. Have them both cast it (simultaneously) on the boy when he's holding the sword. Every swing at 100% should do max damage until the spell wears off.

Or, as I did the first time because I also didn't understand what I was supposed to do there, charge your attacks really high. This takes way more time, obviously.
 
When I was a kid, I played Ikari Warriors with a Game Genie, and there's a spot where, apparently, something is supposed to happen and blow a hole in a wall so you can proceed. Only the wall wouldn't blow up. To this day, I don't know if it was a bug caused by the Game Genie, or if I just couldn't figure out the right thing to do. I spent hours shooting everything on screen with a million bullets, so I suspect it was the GG.

Every single time I replay Link to the Past, when I'm picking up Pieces of Heart, I get to the Digging Game. I let out a deep sigh, use the restroom, grab a snack, and let all my loved ones know they won't be seeing me for a significant amount of time.
 
Thanks for reming me @otakujeb. Ikari Warriors and Gauntlet IV. Both had what I would describe as WTF endings / stuck endings.

Ikari Warriors we got to the end and there is some general at a desk and we would fire and insane amount of weapons at him. I don't know that we ever saw the ending. Perhaps it was a glitch in our copy of Ikari Warriors or we had to do something different.

In Gauntlet IV my friend and I played multiplayer. At the end one person becomes the boss dragon and the other person fights them. I don't know if we had a fair fight with both players trying to do each other in. I do remember us agreeing to let one or the other win after what seemed like a stalemate. Then there was some cryptic end screen with text that did not make it seem like an ending, but it was?
 

gogglebob

The Goggles Do Nothing
(he/him)
Unless I am thinking of something else, Ikari Warriors definitely has a dedicated ending screen, as I remember it being a typical bit of SNK inscrutable translation.
 

Olli

(he/him)
I think OG Zelda is the only one where you can lock yourself out of getting all the keys in a dungeon but you can buy keys in that game so it's no problem there.
Some guy on YouTube tested this and apparently it's only possible in Death Mountain in Second Quest if you specifically try to get stuck
 

Paul le Fou

24/7 lofi hip hop man to study/relax to
(He)
When I was playing Xenogears, I got to the Tower of Babel and simply could not make the jumps in the jumping puzzles no matter what I tried. Frustrated, I put the game down, and ended up not going back to it. I did pick it up several years later from that same point and immediately and easily made the jumps and continued through to the end. Shrug!
 

Patrick

Magic-User
(He/Him)
I put the game down, and ended up not going back to it.
I haven’t been able to come up with any examples of being legit stuck in a game, but I do this all the time. Like, there’s a difficult challenge or I have to redo a section, and I just never get around to it.
 

YangusKhan

does the Underpants Dance
(He/Him/His)
There was a puzzle in Lufia II I never got past as a kid, and then it just stopped showing up at rental stores so I never played it again until years later with emulation. I don't remember exactly which puzzle, but I believe there was a series of 3 puzzles where you had to pick up tiles and match all the colors on the floor?

Also as a kid I never got past the part in Link to the Past when you first go to the Dark World as a bunny; I had no idea what to do if I couldn't swing a sword!
 
The absolute worst part about Ikari Warriors is that even infinite lives cannot help you in certain circumstances. I was repeatedly victim to this certain part of Level 3 where if you die, you can literally respawn at an inopportune point in the level geometry and be stuck, unable to move forward or backward anymore. I think it's most likely at the points with the barrels - https://vgmaps.com/Atlas/NES/IkariWarriors-Stage3.png
 

Issun

Chumpy
(He/Him)
Since the advent of the world wide web, getting stuck in video games has become something of a feat, as simply complaining on a message board guarantees your next attempt to progress will succeed.
This is why Zoomers can't finish real video game and only play Fortnite
 

nataeryn

Discovered Construction
(he/him)
So, I just finished Final Fantasy 6, but for a minute, I thought for sure i was well and truly stuck in Cyan's dumb dream. I brought Relm, Strago, and Sabin into dreamland and just absolutely blew past the 3 dudes, but then this stinking boss that means i have to kill one of my own dudes is a real pain and Sabin would then decide not to target the boss when he does pop out. And I have no idea if there's any way to leave the dream. I thought for sure i was going to have to reload an earlier save. It took some good luck, but after about a dozen tries I got through. Phew
 

Adam

the :motion: stands
(He/Him)
When I was playing Xenogears, I got to the Tower of Babel and simply could not make the jumps in the jumping puzzles no matter what I tried. Frustrated, I put the game down, and ended up not going back to it. I did pick it up several years later from that same point and immediately and easily made the jumps and continued through to the end. Shrug!
If the game is loading up a battle, you can't jump. Thanks to the disc-based technology, it takes several seconds to load up said battle, leaving plenty of time for jumps to just not work.

My stuck is Snake Rattle and Roll, which is an abosolute cuss of a game. My friends and I only made it to the end via an unlimited lives Game Genie code, and whether or not it was due to this, we spend several hours trying to lick the final boss foot to death, and it just wouldn't die. According to the Nintendo Game Counselor we got my friend's mom to let us call, we just had to lick the foot enough and we'd beat the game.

We never beat the fucking game.
 

RT-55J

space hero for hire
(He/Him + RT/artee)
When I was a youngun I had no idea how to progress in The Guardian Legend after the initial shmup segment (if I even cleared that). I might have gotten to the second area a couple times, but that was it.

Returning to the game in my late teens, I was gobsmacked to see that the map literally had objective markers, and that the cute mascot characters provide ample hints for every single riddle in the game. (I also realized that all the lowercase password letters having umlauts was an intentional design decision, and not my cart glitching out.)

After that I was able to clear the game with no major issues (aside from the final couple levels being ridiculous nonsense).
 

FelixSH

(He/Him)
My stuck is Snake Rattle and Roll, which is an abosolute cuss of a game. My friends and I only made it to the end via an unlimited lives Game Genie code, and whether or not it was due to this, we spend several hours trying to lick the final boss foot to death, and it just wouldn't die. According to the Nintendo Game Counselor we got my friend's mom to let us call, we just had to lick the foot enough and we'd beat the game.

We never beat the fucking game.
I only ever played the gameboy version of this game (still had to look the title up, had completely forgotten about its existence, I also only borrowed it one or two times). That version seems, from the pure looks, to be the same, except that the perspective was from the side, like a plattformer.

Anyway, I made it to a level with an evil snake, or at least what looked like it. Maybe it was the endboss? I tried licking it, from a save spot (it's route was always the same), but after nothing happened for a long time, I gave up.

That game was really weird. Not necessarily bad, just weird.
 

Büge

Arm Candy
(she/her)
I HAVE NEVER BEEN ABLE TO GET MARRIED IN QUEST FOR GLORY V: DRAGON FIRE

NO MATTER WHAT I DO
 

Isrieri

My father told me this would happen
I've got one for Tears of the Kingdom: When I went to the climb the approach to the Wind Temple for the first time, I actually did it half with Tulin and half without him. It was taking a long time to climb up and it was obvious we were heading toward a dungeon so I teleported out to take care of some sidequests I really wanted to finish before coming back.

Well what happened is, Tulin just kinda stands around somewhere waiting for you to talk to him before continuing and I didn't see where he was thus I never talked to him. So I just carried on without. I figured he'd be back at the bottom of the mountain and I'd just fetch him later (I wasn't keen on having a follower - I deliberately turned off the champion powers in BOTW and figured the helpers were a similar thing), but once I finally got to the wind temple I didn't get far because of all the locked doors and the mysterious tubas I couldn't figure out how to interact with. Well damn. Must need Tulin. I scoured the outside and blew up some cannons before going to find him.

Well try as I might, I couldn't find him. He wasn't at the bottom on the mountaintop and he certainly wasn't at the top of the storm! He wasn't at Rito Village! He wasn't anywhere I thought to look! There was no way I was combing the entire temple approach top to bottom, so I caved and looked up the answer: He's waiting for you at the shrine in the middle of the approach. The guide pointed out that this seemed to be a common problem as Tulin in particular was in a hard-to-guess spot.

I also got stuck later under Death Mountain because I knew where the last dohicky was but no clue how to get inside the closed room. So after a lot of climbing around and trying to make sense of the map, I had a brain-wave and made some water platforms in the lava, and ascended from underneath.
 
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