The Last of Us II. I went in expecting the same act structure as the first and was surprised. If you’ve played it then you know what I’m talking about. Despite mainly taking place over just a few days it really feels so drawn out and a relentless struggle, which felt so perfect for the world of the game.

Xenogears. 80-hour game, and that’s without grinding for everything. And, it probably would have been close to twice as long if they’d been funded enough to complete it. As it was released, the second disc began with a 2-hour cutscene with a save point in the middle, which essentially summed up most of the second half of the story. Amazing game. Like playing through an entire mecha manga.

As an older gamer I want the opposite: shorter games. I don’t have the time to sink.

Pokemon Silver. Beat the Elite 4 and surprise now you get to go back to Kanto.

Castlevania Symphony of the Night… At least when you defeat Shaft properly

An ENTIRE NEW CASTLE!?

I remember grinding my way through Pokemon Conquest, having a decent time but also kinda wanting it to reach its conclusion. I get to the end of the main campaign, scroll the credits, and then it tells me on next boot that there’s now some more content to play.

“Oh cool, a postgame,” I thought.

No. There was not a postgame. There were something like eighteen new campaigns to play.

To a certain kind of person this must’ve felt like Christmas morning. I put the game in a drawer and didn’t turn it on again out of sheer intimidation.

Untitled Goose Game, but the other way. Got to the end of what I assumed was the first world, but it turned out that was the entire game.

Still a good game, but if I’d known I would have waited for a sale or something.

Considering how simple its premise is, Another Crab’s Treasure seems pretty basic, like its story doesn’t have much left, at several points. People online gave some takes that four boss fights from the end, they thought each one would be the final boss.

Far Cry 3 also did this well. You finish the skill tree, do the last few missions where the increased power slides the difficulty down…and then it turns out you unlock a whole other island to make use of your full ability tree in every encounter.

Ghosts of Tsushima.

I love persona 5 but always quit after 40 hrs of playing it. It’s so damn long lol

Lufia: Rise of the Sinistrals. JRPG for the SNES published by Quintet. VERY large game for the era, there are a LOT of towns with dungeons to go through. Gets a little grindy mid-way through, it also manages to fit such a large quest with such a large game map on the cartridge by having relatively little variety in visuals. There’s one town tileset, there’s one dungeon tileset that gets palette swapped, there’s one cave tileset that gets palette swapped, there’s a relatively small number of music tracks you’ll be hearing a lot.

The North American release of its sequel had a very late game dungeon that was corrupted, and technically possible to move through but you’d have to have played the PAL version to know what you’re doing. One of the few broken games I’m aware of to get a Nintendo seal of quality. Lufia II is actually a prequel, you play out the full adventure of the legendary heroes you play in the cold open of Lufia. There’s a cool detail between the two games, in the first, when the legendary heroes were legendary, the dialog is spoken very formal and pompous. In the second game, when we’ve been with them this whole time and they’re just people, the same dialog plays out the same way but it’s much more casual. “Come forth and show thyself!” becomes “Come out and show yourself.” Probably my favorite detail of the whole series.

Deuteros. This is pre 1995, I believe.

Played the game for over a day, got to conquer the entire system, thought I was done but then I found out that that was only 10-20% of the game

New factorio dlc felt comically long, and yet I’m having to force myself not to make a new save.

DDLC. It was a free dl, and I never played anything like it, so I figured I’d see what everyone was on about. It was surprisingly short!

Going back a ways here with Castlevania: Symphony of The Night. It seems like a fairly fleshed out game as it is when you get to the “final” boss but then you read a guide and find out “ending A” is only half of the game