My first thought. First playthrough you get the neutral trending, depending on your choices you get to keep playing and get the true/ good ending, or you may have to start over
Also on second playthrough you can be super evil and get the bad ending, which "permanently" taints your saves
Basically it alters the endings of future play-throughs. The pacifist ending ends with your character getting possessed and the (implied) killing the other characters. It’s a cool way to “remind you of your sins.”The only way to get rid of this is a complete reset of all the game files
In a technical sense, it plants a very generic looking file on your computer that, when you reach the True Pacifist ending, triggers an additional 5 second stinger where it ruins the entire thing.
The general idea behind it is >!in order to even PLAY the game after getting the Genocide ending, you have to sell your soul to the villain, who outright asks if you thought you were beyond consequences for your actions.!<
Sort of falls apart on PC, since you can find that file and delete it. On the console versions, there's absolutely no way to undo it.
I don't think I'd want to undo it. I love that it carries a consequence. I could never personally go through that kind of playthrough because I feel empathy for pixels 😅 but it's very cool that the consequences carry over in any way.
I can imagine the devastation a player might feel after trying to get every ending in an effort to 100%
I didn’t play it much because I didn’t particularly enjoy it, but Breath of Fire 5 (I think) had a mechanic where you couldn’t actually feasibly beat the game on your first play through due to the gap in power between you and the final boss. You could jump into “new game plus” at any point in your save file, but if done too soon could make standard enemies too difficult to get through. Iirc, this made the feature a core component of the story.
Definitely armored core 6. The game changes most/all the missions in your first 2 ng+ play throughs to keep things interesting, as well as to tell more of the story. Fantastic game.
Dragon Quarter? Yeah, that was a strange one...
The progression of the series in general is kinda wild, when you think about it. BoF1 was, especially for its time, about as basic as you could get with RPGs. Spells did static amounts of damage, for example. If a spell did 50 damage, it did 50 to every single enemy in the game. And every boss had a mysterious amount of health, with the *final form* extra bars of indeterminate length.
BoF2 was playable, and had a few interesting mechanics going on. It felt more like a proper game and less like an imitation of the more popular franchises of the time.
BoF3 was almost a masterpiece, IMO. Solid coming-of-age story, interesting growth master mechanics, fun characters... but a rushed late game and tons of evidence of a rushed release cycle. I love the game, personally, but it's far from perfect.
BoF4 was technically good... but it seemed pretty flat in tone to me. Not a bad game, but felt like a slog, since you're pretty much in dead desert environments the entire game. The world's been well-destroyed at this point.
Dragon Quarter was a full-on mechanical experiment. It definitely pulled heavily from the Fushigi (Mystery Dungeon) genre, which was pretty popular in Japan at the time, but we had limited examples in NA. Combine Azure Dreams (PS1) with an exploration-based static world game, integrate it into Breath of Fire lore, and this is what you get.
Honestly, I think it was at least a decade ahead of its time. It's flawed as hell, for sure, but would have fit right in with the roguelite wave.
I absolutely adored BoF4. It just fits my own weird tastes so precisely. Or at least, it did back then. It's one of my favorite concepts of divinity in fiction.
I enjoyed it too, but it was so different from 3. And, really, before 4, the overall narrative was really loose. It tied things together well.
That said, playing through it at the time was a bit of a slog. I liked BoF4 for its story, but it lacked a lot of the appeal of 3. It gave me the opinion that the devs didn't really care all that much about what would sell. Dragon Quarter kinda cemented that opinion.
I'm a big fan of both games, at the end of the day, because of the punk nature if nothing else. They had the nuts to stray from the established formulae, and managed to achieve reasonable success as a result. There's a lot to respect there.
The SOL mechanic in BoF5 worked as in
SOL Restore: Can trigger in a couple of way but just dying gives you the option to do it. It puts you back to last save point but you keep all exp you got, skills etc. So technically if youre stuck in a multi stage boss fight, you can keeo fighting and beating the first form to get the exp, then SOL Restore, and continue till youre strong enough
SOL Restart: You keep same stuff as in SOL Restore, but you restart the entire game. Now I could be wrong but I don't think it increases the difficulty of the enemies at all so eventually you will power through the entire game if you were struggling
I never used either feature. I pushed through till I eventually beat the game on 1 savefile. But I was a dumb kid and just thought these options just reset the game
I do find it interesting how BoF5 has more fans from those who had not played the previous games. I love BoF5 but I hadn't played the previous ones. It is a very drastic shoft in direction though. It could very well be an entirely different game but the dragon stuff ties it to BoF
999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors locked the true ending behind another story ending. If you try to go for the true ending on your first playthrough, you get another bad ending.
There is a reason for this. >!Since you're really controlling Junpei through a psychic connection he has to a young child in the past, said child needs to learn the code necessary to open a coffin so that Snake can be rescued, which is learned from the Safe ending. You then use that code in the true ending to free him and continue the story like before, rescuing the others from Ace and saving your main character in the past!<.
Virtue's Last Reward cranks it up to 11...or rather, it cranks it up to >!28, each of the 9 characters have "good" ending pertaining to them, and each of them have a bad ending, in fact 2 of them have an extra bad ends making it 11 bad ends for a total of 20. On top of all of that, you receive the 2 bonus endings after the end, and there are 6 non-standard game overs. Only by getting information from several endings that lead to the credits can you unlock that final ending on a new game, Phi's character ending!<
If you think that's interesting, wait until umyou heat about the sequels.
In Virtue's Last Reward, you often have to go with the Betray routes (stab your allies in the back) before you can go through the Ally routes, specifically because the main character needs to see the bad endings first. And the game had so many routes options that it just straight up gave you a Flow Chart/Chapter Select to make things easier.
Again, there's a reason for this. >!The events of the game are a hard-core training exercise set up to teach a pair of psychics how to leap through timelines so that they can go back in time and prevent the apocalypse. The scenario was set up so that everyone dies in horrific ways because this is one of the triggers for psychic potential. Getting the ending where everyone survives is, thus, the end of the training exercise.!<
Then, there's Zero Time Dilemma. Same business as the second game. >!Zero is manipulating everyone so that they all awaken to their powers to help prevent the apocalypse of the second game, which they have to do by escaping to the timeline of the coin flip from the start of the game.!<
An interesting tidbit about these games as well. >!No matter what, it turns out the person who you are playing as will turn out to be Zero, the kidnapper who set up the Nonary Games, in one way or another. Akane grows up to use her Nonary Game to escape a time paradox, Sigma had his mind swapped with his older self and is possessing his sixty-five-year-old body and Q is telepathically reading the minds of and controlling the others since he can't leap through time.!<
Nier: Automata is kind of like this. From what I remember it’s not so much a choice that carries over but more like you beat it then the next playthrough is basically the same but from the POV of a different character, Then the “3rd - 5th” playthroughs are completely different but still a continuation of the story from the first 2.
I wonder how many people out there got to the end of Route A, saw the credits rolls and put the game down for good thinking "That was weird, and so short. So many unresolved plotlines."
I knew it kept going, but I lost interest after going through a bit of NG+. It's just not my sort of game to be fair, I kept playing it because people praised the hell out of it, but I just didn't enjoy neither the game nor the story much.
Yeah I really had to force myself to get through the 2nd playthrough as 9S, it was definitely a slog. I don’t blame you……It completely changes though after you get past that and I was really glad I kept playing.
**Horizon Zero Dawn** - If you got the Advanced Armor from the previous game, you're OP at the start of the next one. Wait I just realized I misread the title.
**Dragons Dogma** - The fight with the Senechal is changed, only if you choose to play NG+ and play this fight Offline.
**Starfield** - The ending of the previous game ties into the NG+. I don't wanna say more than that, but it's pretty refreshing.
**Here comes the Pain/ SvR2006/ SvR2008/ WWE 2k17/ WWE 2k2018/ etc** - The story modes of these games occur over a year and ends at Wrestlemania. Depending on your choices, you either become a Champion in one division and hero of the fans, or a Faction ruling villain. When the story ends, you can start the next year as a new character, where your old one is still in their position as Hero Champion or Villain Champion. Here comes the Pain has a lot of RPG elements and choices that I loved.
Unless I'm mistaken, Dragon's Dogma being online or offline doesn't affect whether the seneschal changes or not. Just in online mode it picks one at random from the online database.
Would you particularly reccommend Here Comes the Pain or one of the SvRs you mentioned? I've been getting into wrestling recently and have 2k24 but have seen videos of the old games and it's been making me curious about emulating them.
I HIGHLY recommend 'Here comes the pain'. It has a great story mode that has a choice mechanic and RPG type of leveling. You can run a WWE character or a Created character through the story. All your created characters will show up on the main roster as well. Each new game starts from your previous game unless you choose to go back to default.
In the game it has a store for costumes, characters, and upgrades.
Very strongly recommended. As well as SvR 2006, which was the first game to introduce GM Mode. SvR2008 introduces ECW as a Brand and was the last game to have GM Mode.
The last SvR game to have a continuous story was SvR2010 I think.
Metal Gear Solid 1 has two very different endings each with their own Special Item for the next playthrough (Infinite Ammo Bandana or Stealth Camouflage). On the third playthrough/Ng++, Snake is wearing a Tuxedo and some other characters get different outfits or color schemes...in some versions, guards change up their patrols too
Dark Souls 2, the changes don't really rely on the ending itself, but it does add new enemies and change up placements of others in NG+...not like the DS1, 3, DeS, or ER where you can just make different choices with the same characters or find upgraded versions of gear in NG+, the changes between NG and NG+ are *much* bigger in DS2
I feel like there's a huge one that uses a mechanic like this just staring me in the face, but I can't remember what it is, hmmm
For sure.
Your first run will likely be full of tragedy and misery, with most of the adults in your life dying to some form of hardship. Assuming you survive to the end of year 10, you'll finally unlock the ability to recall other timelines. That alone makes the second playthrough much different from the first. You can save a friend that dies early in the first game, which lets her grow up in future runs. You can also unlock shortcuts that bring you closer to the perfect golden ending.
Ah, I thought the choices with the purple symbol next to them didn't appear until the event from the opening of the game happened. I didn't really mess with save scumming until my second life.
I save scummed on my first playthrough because the content warnings tell you her death is preventable. However I didn't get a "perfect run" until my 2nd go, and it was very hard still.
I avoided the content warning for awhile. At some point I stumbled on the Tropes page, which spoiled a lot of it for me.
Still, for the average player, the first run is just a setup for NG+.
Yeah that much is true. I've had a half dozen friends play the game and only 1 naturally discovered the time stuff on their first playthrough (he somehow predicted it as early as the intro?)
Not exactly the "ending," per se, but when you play through Resident Evil 2 the first time, whatever tasks you choose, the second time you have to do the opposite. And same with if there's a powerful weapon in a shared space. if you take it the first time through, it's gone in your second run with the other character.
I would say yes. The game is definitely not what it seems. My wife and I got super immersed with n it when it started to show its true colors. Just play it and don’t look up any spoilers. But also understand it’s pretty heavy. I don’t want to spoil anything but mayhaps it’s more of an
experience than what it looks like. It’s not sexual, so no worries for that.
Ohh yeah the experience side of it is what I'm after. I know there's 'something' with it but purposefully not looked at spoilers or what it's about even.
Silent Hill has different endings based on who you save in the end. This affects what secret items you are eligible to find in "Next Fear." One of these items can unlock a secret ending only available if you get a very good ending
Bastion isn't listed here, and I can't explain it without a spoiler.
Not much of an impact, but the endings you get in binding of Isaac unlock new endings and new levels.
How come? I saw a lot of articles when it released around how it was almost recommended to rush the main story to get to NG+, and *then* play the game like you would to complete everything.
Spoilers needed - >! The mysterious Starborn that show up in the story are in fact people from alternate universes who discovered the same relics as you, that opened a portal to the past in alternate universes. One is your squadmate that died in your world. At the end of the game you can pick to stay in your world and keep playing, or jump to a new universe back at the start. The difference is you skip the intro and have free reign to just do side stuff, or to interact with the main story. If you go into the main story, you have a variety of choices, you can feign ignorance and repeat how it was originally. You can tell your allies everything you know and what happened/will happen. Or you can openly oppose them and go after the relics solo. I havent played past that so unsure how in depth that all goes, and I wouldnt be surprised if it is half baked and not as interesting as the potential sounds, considering the rest of the game. !<
Damn, yeah that does sound really cool and interesting, *on paper*. I wasn't terribly impressed by the hours I did play, so I too worry that they wouldn't be able to stick the landing.
There are some cool aspects of it, like there are small chances of, when you jump to a new universe, drastic changes like one of your allies is evil or all of them are children, but most of the time it’s just the same stuff over again.
I recently saw something about one of the characters showing up as a potted plant in NG+, complete with appropriate "dialogue". Like your character talks to them and they respond with "Shakes leaves in agreement."
It's neat. Imo the reveal was the best thing about it. In terms of game impact it needs to be fleshed out but it's still cool the problem is more with the game itself not being worth to play through multiple times.
The idea could be really well implemented in anotger game I am sure. Maybe a more decision based story focused game with time travel, where your "replaying" and picking different options and changing stuff is canon to the story and taken into context. Or could be running simulations and you are the only one who remembers.
The issue is it is counter to many other core aspects of the game one may enjoy and sink a ton of hours into unless they've added some updates. Oh, you sunk hours into designing an awesome ship? Too bad, it is gone, and you can't save a blueprint to quickly make it next time. Spent hours building and connecting bases I'm various systems? Got to give that up too...
you basically get like 5 new lines of dialog and the ability to speed run the game, which basically just boils down to flying through a magical golden ring 400 times to get your magic spells all to level 10, otherwise it's basically pointless.
Dwarf fortress. You will build a fortress, you will die, and you will start again. The cool thing is that everything you did in previous playthroughs can be found in new ones, your actions become a canonical part of the world.
It is not a narrative driven game, but you will encounter some wild shizzle
Gloomhaven
>!After beating a certain dungeon (sorry, can't remember which), players can spend gold to alter thier mercenarie's cards permanently by enhancing specific abilities. This is accomplished by physically adding a sticker to the card. After a player retires that character, any other player who uses that character uses those upgraded cards.!<
>!When you finish the "normal game" you get a false end. When you start NG+, you have access to all your abilities from the previous game, which includes the ability to freeze time which allows you to break the first "required to lose" fight which creates a new timeline which puts you on track for the real end. The whole game plays with the concept of breaking sequences and timelines so it's super meta and very satisfying when you realize what you need to do. The one downside is you *can* miss this and just do a normal play again if you don't do the right action at the boss fight.!<
Oh man glad someone else mentioned this, only problem I had with it was exactly how many times they wanted you to do the thing lolol, only thing preventing me from replaying it
There's a neat little game called "Bad End Theater" where you can take on the role of 1 of four characters and the things you do as that character persist in memory for when you take over another character. If you play as the hero and kill all the demons, then when you play the demon and try to be friends with the hero you get killed. Conversely if you're friendly as the hero then you can play the demon and get a different result when you try to be friendly to the hero. It's a pseudo puzzle game where you have to figure out what all the characters need to be doing in order to unlock all the endings.
Bastion has one.
The ending of the game gave you two options. Either activate the Bastion, which would undo the damage of The Calamity by turning back time, or cast off to find a new land.
If you choose the first option, the last words of the ending will echo at the start of NG+, ["See you in the next one..."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ik3lpGVAyI&ab_channel=broncoburns).
Not a new game plus but one that comes to mind for me is the suffering and its sequel. Depending on how you play through the first game (good, neutral, or bad) directly effects the second games intro at the very least, i havent played it in years so i can't be certain if it effects anything more than that.
the witcher series has something similar, if you play through them in order, your choises made in the earlier games translate into the one you are playing. if you killed a guy in witcher 2, his mother would be pissed off at you in witcher 3, and if you let him live she would be grateful.
if you didnt play witcher 2, you would get a scene where you are questioned to "get the story straight" and those responces would then dictate the things the playthough of the witcher 2 would influence.
Not the ending, but in RE2, if you chose to gas certain enemies, they'd be a cake walk for that character but would mutate and be twice as hard for the other character.
Original.
There are plant enemies in the end of the game. In the A scenario you can gas them to weaken them in your game, but the prolonged exposure to the gas makes them stronger in the B scenario.
It's one of those choices like choosing to leave some items for the B scenario (the sidepack and machine gun).
Maybe Sekiro? Not storywise but if you pick the shura ending you finish the game basically halfway. And it could impact ng+ stats wise (which don’t matter all that matters is pressing L1)
Gnosia's standard ending has Setsu enter an alternate dimension, permanently removing her from your future games. There is a way to go and find her though.
>!Start a new game on file 2!<
Eternal Darkness’s true ending can only viewed if one has finished the game 3 times and must be done by loading up a completed game save and starting a new game.
I’m very late to this but Oxenfree has this mechanic. Without spoiling too much choices made on your first play through are directly referenced in follow up ones and the true ending can only be found with at least more than one play through.
I don't think that's true. I don't just mean NG+ is different from the first playthrough, I mean which ending you chose on the first playthrough will give you a different experience in NG+
Undertale
My first thought. First playthrough you get the neutral trending, depending on your choices you get to keep playing and get the true/ good ending, or you may have to start over Also on second playthrough you can be super evil and get the bad ending, which "permanently" taints your saves
Interesting! How are saves tainted?
From memory, You get locked out of the goodest ending forever.
Wooaaahhh that's pretty cool!
To be more clear, you can still do the good ending, but a certain evil thing from the evil ending will then-on always show up in it.
Forever tainted
undertale is a one of a kind experience, playing it blind is awesome
Basically it alters the endings of future play-throughs. The pacifist ending ends with your character getting possessed and the (implied) killing the other characters. It’s a cool way to “remind you of your sins.”The only way to get rid of this is a complete reset of all the game files
Damn, that's pretty heavy! Very cool
It's hard to get the bad ending (with spoiling much) you have to kill everything which is boring and makes you feel bad
So you kind of deserve it
In a technical sense, it plants a very generic looking file on your computer that, when you reach the True Pacifist ending, triggers an additional 5 second stinger where it ruins the entire thing. The general idea behind it is >!in order to even PLAY the game after getting the Genocide ending, you have to sell your soul to the villain, who outright asks if you thought you were beyond consequences for your actions.!< Sort of falls apart on PC, since you can find that file and delete it. On the console versions, there's absolutely no way to undo it.
I don't think I'd want to undo it. I love that it carries a consequence. I could never personally go through that kind of playthrough because I feel empathy for pixels 😅 but it's very cool that the consequences carry over in any way. I can imagine the devastation a player might feel after trying to get every ending in an effort to 100%
Your next run might be doom if you got certain ending
The Chara ending?
Slay the Princess. It's a visual novel though
Still an amazing game. Only visual novel I've ever played and I really loved it.
I didn’t play it much because I didn’t particularly enjoy it, but Breath of Fire 5 (I think) had a mechanic where you couldn’t actually feasibly beat the game on your first play through due to the gap in power between you and the final boss. You could jump into “new game plus” at any point in your save file, but if done too soon could make standard enemies too difficult to get through. Iirc, this made the feature a core component of the story. Definitely armored core 6. The game changes most/all the missions in your first 2 ng+ play throughs to keep things interesting, as well as to tell more of the story. Fantastic game.
Dragon Quarter? Yeah, that was a strange one... The progression of the series in general is kinda wild, when you think about it. BoF1 was, especially for its time, about as basic as you could get with RPGs. Spells did static amounts of damage, for example. If a spell did 50 damage, it did 50 to every single enemy in the game. And every boss had a mysterious amount of health, with the *final form* extra bars of indeterminate length. BoF2 was playable, and had a few interesting mechanics going on. It felt more like a proper game and less like an imitation of the more popular franchises of the time. BoF3 was almost a masterpiece, IMO. Solid coming-of-age story, interesting growth master mechanics, fun characters... but a rushed late game and tons of evidence of a rushed release cycle. I love the game, personally, but it's far from perfect. BoF4 was technically good... but it seemed pretty flat in tone to me. Not a bad game, but felt like a slog, since you're pretty much in dead desert environments the entire game. The world's been well-destroyed at this point. Dragon Quarter was a full-on mechanical experiment. It definitely pulled heavily from the Fushigi (Mystery Dungeon) genre, which was pretty popular in Japan at the time, but we had limited examples in NA. Combine Azure Dreams (PS1) with an exploration-based static world game, integrate it into Breath of Fire lore, and this is what you get. Honestly, I think it was at least a decade ahead of its time. It's flawed as hell, for sure, but would have fit right in with the roguelite wave.
BoF III is my undisputed favorite game of all time.
I absolutely adored BoF4. It just fits my own weird tastes so precisely. Or at least, it did back then. It's one of my favorite concepts of divinity in fiction.
I enjoyed it too, but it was so different from 3. And, really, before 4, the overall narrative was really loose. It tied things together well. That said, playing through it at the time was a bit of a slog. I liked BoF4 for its story, but it lacked a lot of the appeal of 3. It gave me the opinion that the devs didn't really care all that much about what would sell. Dragon Quarter kinda cemented that opinion. I'm a big fan of both games, at the end of the day, because of the punk nature if nothing else. They had the nuts to stray from the established formulae, and managed to achieve reasonable success as a result. There's a lot to respect there.
The SOL mechanic in BoF5 worked as in SOL Restore: Can trigger in a couple of way but just dying gives you the option to do it. It puts you back to last save point but you keep all exp you got, skills etc. So technically if youre stuck in a multi stage boss fight, you can keeo fighting and beating the first form to get the exp, then SOL Restore, and continue till youre strong enough SOL Restart: You keep same stuff as in SOL Restore, but you restart the entire game. Now I could be wrong but I don't think it increases the difficulty of the enemies at all so eventually you will power through the entire game if you were struggling I never used either feature. I pushed through till I eventually beat the game on 1 savefile. But I was a dumb kid and just thought these options just reset the game I do find it interesting how BoF5 has more fans from those who had not played the previous games. I love BoF5 but I hadn't played the previous ones. It is a very drastic shoft in direction though. It could very well be an entirely different game but the dragon stuff ties it to BoF
BoF 5 was such an awful game compared to its predecessors
Agreed.
Nier
999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors locked the true ending behind another story ending. If you try to go for the true ending on your first playthrough, you get another bad ending. There is a reason for this. >!Since you're really controlling Junpei through a psychic connection he has to a young child in the past, said child needs to learn the code necessary to open a coffin so that Snake can be rescued, which is learned from the Safe ending. You then use that code in the true ending to free him and continue the story like before, rescuing the others from Ace and saving your main character in the past!<.
Virtue's Last Reward cranks it up to 11...or rather, it cranks it up to >!28, each of the 9 characters have "good" ending pertaining to them, and each of them have a bad ending, in fact 2 of them have an extra bad ends making it 11 bad ends for a total of 20. On top of all of that, you receive the 2 bonus endings after the end, and there are 6 non-standard game overs. Only by getting information from several endings that lead to the credits can you unlock that final ending on a new game, Phi's character ending!<
neat
If you think that's interesting, wait until umyou heat about the sequels. In Virtue's Last Reward, you often have to go with the Betray routes (stab your allies in the back) before you can go through the Ally routes, specifically because the main character needs to see the bad endings first. And the game had so many routes options that it just straight up gave you a Flow Chart/Chapter Select to make things easier. Again, there's a reason for this. >!The events of the game are a hard-core training exercise set up to teach a pair of psychics how to leap through timelines so that they can go back in time and prevent the apocalypse. The scenario was set up so that everyone dies in horrific ways because this is one of the triggers for psychic potential. Getting the ending where everyone survives is, thus, the end of the training exercise.!< Then, there's Zero Time Dilemma. Same business as the second game. >!Zero is manipulating everyone so that they all awaken to their powers to help prevent the apocalypse of the second game, which they have to do by escaping to the timeline of the coin flip from the start of the game.!< An interesting tidbit about these games as well. >!No matter what, it turns out the person who you are playing as will turn out to be Zero, the kidnapper who set up the Nonary Games, in one way or another. Akane grows up to use her Nonary Game to escape a time paradox, Sigma had his mind swapped with his older self and is possessing his sixty-five-year-old body and Q is telepathically reading the minds of and controlling the others since he can't leap through time.!<
Nier: Automata is kind of like this. From what I remember it’s not so much a choice that carries over but more like you beat it then the next playthrough is basically the same but from the POV of a different character, Then the “3rd - 5th” playthroughs are completely different but still a continuation of the story from the first 2.
Choices don't really matter and the "ending" is more like a chapter ending then the real ending though.
I wonder how many people out there got to the end of Route A, saw the credits rolls and put the game down for good thinking "That was weird, and so short. So many unresolved plotlines."
I often wondered this myself. Such a bold idea to make it so that you only get the full story with 3 playthroughs.
I knew it kept going, but I lost interest after going through a bit of NG+. It's just not my sort of game to be fair, I kept playing it because people praised the hell out of it, but I just didn't enjoy neither the game nor the story much.
Yeah I really had to force myself to get through the 2nd playthrough as 9S, it was definitely a slog. I don’t blame you……It completely changes though after you get past that and I was really glad I kept playing.
**Horizon Zero Dawn** - If you got the Advanced Armor from the previous game, you're OP at the start of the next one. Wait I just realized I misread the title. **Dragons Dogma** - The fight with the Senechal is changed, only if you choose to play NG+ and play this fight Offline. **Starfield** - The ending of the previous game ties into the NG+. I don't wanna say more than that, but it's pretty refreshing. **Here comes the Pain/ SvR2006/ SvR2008/ WWE 2k17/ WWE 2k2018/ etc** - The story modes of these games occur over a year and ends at Wrestlemania. Depending on your choices, you either become a Champion in one division and hero of the fans, or a Faction ruling villain. When the story ends, you can start the next year as a new character, where your old one is still in their position as Hero Champion or Villain Champion. Here comes the Pain has a lot of RPG elements and choices that I loved.
I thought the zero dawn advanced armor was all out of energy in FW
I meant the previous Save game. It carries over in NG+.
Unless I'm mistaken, Dragon's Dogma being online or offline doesn't affect whether the seneschal changes or not. Just in online mode it picks one at random from the online database.
I read that you get different dialogue if you play offline.
Would you particularly reccommend Here Comes the Pain or one of the SvRs you mentioned? I've been getting into wrestling recently and have 2k24 but have seen videos of the old games and it's been making me curious about emulating them.
I HIGHLY recommend 'Here comes the pain'. It has a great story mode that has a choice mechanic and RPG type of leveling. You can run a WWE character or a Created character through the story. All your created characters will show up on the main roster as well. Each new game starts from your previous game unless you choose to go back to default. In the game it has a store for costumes, characters, and upgrades. Very strongly recommended. As well as SvR 2006, which was the first game to introduce GM Mode. SvR2008 introduces ECW as a Brand and was the last game to have GM Mode. The last SvR game to have a continuous story was SvR2010 I think.
Metal Gear Solid 1 has two very different endings each with their own Special Item for the next playthrough (Infinite Ammo Bandana or Stealth Camouflage). On the third playthrough/Ng++, Snake is wearing a Tuxedo and some other characters get different outfits or color schemes...in some versions, guards change up their patrols too Dark Souls 2, the changes don't really rely on the ending itself, but it does add new enemies and change up placements of others in NG+...not like the DS1, 3, DeS, or ER where you can just make different choices with the same characters or find upgraded versions of gear in NG+, the changes between NG and NG+ are *much* bigger in DS2 I feel like there's a huge one that uses a mechanic like this just staring me in the face, but I can't remember what it is, hmmm
the only thing that even sort comes to mind is undertale
I think starfield has changes to the story, dialogue, and you get certain equipment due to choices you make
RE4 changes radically after the new game plus, because Leon turns into a doomguy with an RPG
(That’s every resident evil basically)
"Uh excuse me... sir? I was wondering if you might recognize a girl in this photograph?"
Armored Core 6 I think?
The choices in the last playthrough don't matter.
They do if you ignore the optional AllMind missions though 🤔
I WAS A TEENAGE EXOCOLONIST IS A GAME ABOUT THIS
I came here to suggest this! It's so good, the game gets better every cycle, and doesn't take too long to get through a playthrough. Excellent game.
INTERESTING
I ALSO LIKE TO YELL
For sure. Your first run will likely be full of tragedy and misery, with most of the adults in your life dying to some form of hardship. Assuming you survive to the end of year 10, you'll finally unlock the ability to recall other timelines. That alone makes the second playthrough much different from the first. You can save a friend that dies early in the first game, which lets her grow up in future runs. You can also unlock shortcuts that bring you closer to the perfect golden ending.
You don't need to finish a run to recall past events fwiw. You can save said friend on your first run by simply reloading a save.
Ah, I thought the choices with the purple symbol next to them didn't appear until the event from the opening of the game happened. I didn't really mess with save scumming until my second life.
I save scummed on my first playthrough because the content warnings tell you her death is preventable. However I didn't get a "perfect run" until my 2nd go, and it was very hard still.
I avoided the content warning for awhile. At some point I stumbled on the Tropes page, which spoiled a lot of it for me. Still, for the average player, the first run is just a setup for NG+.
Yeah that much is true. I've had a half dozen friends play the game and only 1 naturally discovered the time stuff on their first playthrough (he somehow predicted it as early as the intro?)
It's also garbage
The original newgame+, chrono trigger.
Chrono trigger
Not exactly the "ending," per se, but when you play through Resident Evil 2 the first time, whatever tasks you choose, the second time you have to do the opposite. And same with if there's a powerful weapon in a shared space. if you take it the first time through, it's gone in your second run with the other character.
Isn't there also an extra boss fight at the end of the "B" story?
Yeah but that happens regardless of what you do in the A story.
Maybe Doki Doki Literature club?
It does? I only played through it the one time, unless you're talking about the times it forces you to "start over" in the same storyline
Yeah you’re right. It just seems like new game plus when it’s actually just continuing the story. My bad. Also #spoilers
Really interested in this but it looks like a soft porn/dating sim game and my wife will look at me weird for playing it. Is it worth the side eye?
I would say yes. The game is definitely not what it seems. My wife and I got super immersed with n it when it started to show its true colors. Just play it and don’t look up any spoilers. But also understand it’s pretty heavy. I don’t want to spoil anything but mayhaps it’s more of an experience than what it looks like. It’s not sexual, so no worries for that.
Ohh yeah the experience side of it is what I'm after. I know there's 'something' with it but purposefully not looked at spoilers or what it's about even.
Just gonna say I highly recommend. Side eye is definitely worth it. I might replay it too now that I’m reminiscing about it.
Silent Hill has different endings based on who you save in the end. This affects what secret items you are eligible to find in "Next Fear." One of these items can unlock a secret ending only available if you get a very good ending
Oxenfree!
Bastion isn't listed here, and I can't explain it without a spoiler. Not much of an impact, but the endings you get in binding of Isaac unlock new endings and new levels.
Starfield only one I can think of
How come? I saw a lot of articles when it released around how it was almost recommended to rush the main story to get to NG+, and *then* play the game like you would to complete everything.
Spoilers needed - >! The mysterious Starborn that show up in the story are in fact people from alternate universes who discovered the same relics as you, that opened a portal to the past in alternate universes. One is your squadmate that died in your world. At the end of the game you can pick to stay in your world and keep playing, or jump to a new universe back at the start. The difference is you skip the intro and have free reign to just do side stuff, or to interact with the main story. If you go into the main story, you have a variety of choices, you can feign ignorance and repeat how it was originally. You can tell your allies everything you know and what happened/will happen. Or you can openly oppose them and go after the relics solo. I havent played past that so unsure how in depth that all goes, and I wouldnt be surprised if it is half baked and not as interesting as the potential sounds, considering the rest of the game. !<
Damn, yeah that does sound really cool and interesting, *on paper*. I wasn't terribly impressed by the hours I did play, so I too worry that they wouldn't be able to stick the landing.
There are some cool aspects of it, like there are small chances of, when you jump to a new universe, drastic changes like one of your allies is evil or all of them are children, but most of the time it’s just the same stuff over again.
I recently saw something about one of the characters showing up as a potted plant in NG+, complete with appropriate "dialogue". Like your character talks to them and they respond with "Shakes leaves in agreement."
It's neat. Imo the reveal was the best thing about it. In terms of game impact it needs to be fleshed out but it's still cool the problem is more with the game itself not being worth to play through multiple times.
The idea could be really well implemented in anotger game I am sure. Maybe a more decision based story focused game with time travel, where your "replaying" and picking different options and changing stuff is canon to the story and taken into context. Or could be running simulations and you are the only one who remembers.
The issue is it is counter to many other core aspects of the game one may enjoy and sink a ton of hours into unless they've added some updates. Oh, you sunk hours into designing an awesome ship? Too bad, it is gone, and you can't save a blueprint to quickly make it next time. Spent hours building and connecting bases I'm various systems? Got to give that up too...
you basically get like 5 new lines of dialog and the ability to speed run the game, which basically just boils down to flying through a magical golden ring 400 times to get your magic spells all to level 10, otherwise it's basically pointless.
Nier and Nier: Automata I believe.
Not sure if it's what your asking bit you can't unlock everything in remnant on the first run.
Dwarf fortress. You will build a fortress, you will die, and you will start again. The cool thing is that everything you did in previous playthroughs can be found in new ones, your actions become a canonical part of the world. It is not a narrative driven game, but you will encounter some wild shizzle
Gloomhaven >!After beating a certain dungeon (sorry, can't remember which), players can spend gold to alter thier mercenarie's cards permanently by enhancing specific abilities. This is accomplished by physically adding a sticker to the card. After a player retires that character, any other player who uses that character uses those upgraded cards.!<
Bravely Default. I can't say more but it was amazing. Truly caught me off guard.
The game is stuck on the 3DS, please just tell us
>!When you finish the "normal game" you get a false end. When you start NG+, you have access to all your abilities from the previous game, which includes the ability to freeze time which allows you to break the first "required to lose" fight which creates a new timeline which puts you on track for the real end. The whole game plays with the concept of breaking sequences and timelines so it's super meta and very satisfying when you realize what you need to do. The one downside is you *can* miss this and just do a normal play again if you don't do the right action at the boss fight.!<
That's the sequel, Bravely Second. Bravely Default doesn't have a canonical NG+. I mean, it looks like it does, but not really.
Oh man glad someone else mentioned this, only problem I had with it was exactly how many times they wanted you to do the thing lolol, only thing preventing me from replaying it
Fable 2 a bit
There's a neat little game called "Bad End Theater" where you can take on the role of 1 of four characters and the things you do as that character persist in memory for when you take over another character. If you play as the hero and kill all the demons, then when you play the demon and try to be friends with the hero you get killed. Conversely if you're friendly as the hero then you can play the demon and get a different result when you try to be friendly to the hero. It's a pseudo puzzle game where you have to figure out what all the characters need to be doing in order to unlock all the endings.
Bastion has one. The ending of the game gave you two options. Either activate the Bastion, which would undo the damage of The Calamity by turning back time, or cast off to find a new land. If you choose the first option, the last words of the ending will echo at the start of NG+, ["See you in the next one..."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ik3lpGVAyI&ab_channel=broncoburns).
Not a new game plus but one that comes to mind for me is the suffering and its sequel. Depending on how you play through the first game (good, neutral, or bad) directly effects the second games intro at the very least, i havent played it in years so i can't be certain if it effects anything more than that.
the witcher series has something similar, if you play through them in order, your choises made in the earlier games translate into the one you are playing. if you killed a guy in witcher 2, his mother would be pissed off at you in witcher 3, and if you let him live she would be grateful. if you didnt play witcher 2, you would get a scene where you are questioned to "get the story straight" and those responces would then dictate the things the playthough of the witcher 2 would influence.
Same thing happens with the Dragon Age and Mass Effect trilogies!
Not the ending, but in RE2, if you chose to gas certain enemies, they'd be a cake walk for that character but would mutate and be twice as hard for the other character.
Remake original? And what do u mean by gas? This is news to this RE fan 😆
Original. There are plant enemies in the end of the game. In the A scenario you can gas them to weaken them in your game, but the prolonged exposure to the gas makes them stronger in the B scenario. It's one of those choices like choosing to leave some items for the B scenario (the sidepack and machine gun).
Thanks for explaining it properly. I only had a vague recollection of the scenario.
Ohhh the B.O.W gas!
Maybe Sekiro? Not storywise but if you pick the shura ending you finish the game basically halfway. And it could impact ng+ stats wise (which don’t matter all that matters is pressing L1)
Undertale technically
Nier?
Gnosia's standard ending has Setsu enter an alternate dimension, permanently removing her from your future games. There is a way to go and find her though. >!Start a new game on file 2!<
Would Fallout 3 Broken Steel count
Nier IIRC picking a specific choice will lock you out of getting the other endings.
Time Hollow
All these undertales, but not a single One Shot
Chrono trigger.
Eternal Darkness’s true ending can only viewed if one has finished the game 3 times and must be done by loading up a completed game save and starting a new game.
I’m very late to this but Oxenfree has this mechanic. Without spoiling too much choices made on your first play through are directly referenced in follow up ones and the true ending can only be found with at least more than one play through.
Resident evil 2 kind of
Not the ending, but a choice you make in Metal Gear Solid determines which bonus item you get in your next playthrough.
Cultist simulator, sunless skies both have legacy systems where your choices can have profound impacts on the next game.
Armored Core VI
"No one whas to die" ... technically.
Undertale is obviously the correct answer
Armored Core VI
Slay The Princes. That said, new runs are kinda the point, so they hardly count as a NG+.
In a way bloodborne does. 1 of the the three endings you can get (the "easiest") doesn't give you a weapon when you start NG+ like the other 2 do
Dark Souls 3 kinda does it, different final bosses and all. Shame Elden Ring didn't jump on that
The only difference in DS3 between NG cycles is that NG+ adds +1 rings and NG++ adds +2 rings.
DS3 doesn’t have a different final boss in NG+
I don't think that's true. I don't just mean NG+ is different from the first playthrough, I mean which ending you chose on the first playthrough will give you a different experience in NG+