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Most progress you've ever lost in a game?

N

NaughtyCalibur

Member
I'm sitting here playing Demon's Souls and I just lost about 10,000 souls. Feels pretty bad. I'd equate that to about an hour or so of playing, but this isn't the most progress I've ever lost.

Back during the PS1 era I was playing Final Fantasy VIII and my data got corrupted sometime during the second disc. I had to start all over. I was devastated as a kid...

Similarly my data got corrupted towards the end of Arkham Asylum. I thought it was finished saving and turned it off. Guess not. Strangely enough it only bugged me for about an hour, as the game was so fun I didn't really care to have to replay it.

What about you, GAF?
 
L.A Noire, loaded up a mission from the separate level select screen. And the game completely reset the progress of my main game.


No warnings or indications that it would do so.
 
Was like on 111th star in SM64, my little brother deleted my save.

I had to beat RE4 on GC without a memory card. Of course, you need a memory card to get to the second disc, so once I got to the end, it was pointless.

And recently, Arkham Asylum. Apparently there's some glitch that deletes your save if you don't go back to the dashboard before turning your Xbox off. I was like 75% through. I don't know why they haven't fixed this glitch.
 
Well, my PS3 recently died and I was too stupid to back it up, so I pretty much lost all progress in all games, at once.

Mostly pissed about the loss of GT5, Dark Souls, RE6 and Sleeping Dogs data specifically. Although I've already more than made up Dark Souls progress. The GT5 one particularly hurts though, many, many hours put into that.
 
I made the mistake of letting my cousin play my Pokemon Red back when I was little. We were at a family barbecue, so I was off doing my own thing. When I let her borrow the game, I specifically told her when she wanted to start a new game, "Don't Save." She said, "Okay." and like the innocent child I was, I believed her.

When I started up my game with my all level 100 team (including Mewtwo) I was shocked/horrified when I saw my name as, not what I normally call him "Jack", but as "Cookie!" (The exclamation point was actually used.) Everything. Gone. I had beaten the elite 4 like 20 times and was in the middle of trying to "catch em all"

To this day, I have never spoken to that cousin.
 
Well....my 360 hdd died, along with it I lost everything.

So keeping that in mind...hm.

Dark Souls -~200+ hours, spread across 3-4 characters. Not that I mind.
Bayonetta - I just replayed it again from a fresh save, got until unlocking Infinite Climax mode, and BAM, that is when the HDD died: so that is that....40-50 hours?
SSFIV:AE save...not like it counts, but gametime was over 1000 hour.

I like it, though. Fresh starts are good.
My girlfriend shed a tear for that lost Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise save, though. I understand why :P

...oh, and that 70+ hour FFXIII save should hurt me, but it really does not. Have no intention of getting back to that.

Back in the old days, the most important thing I lost was my first Diablo II exp character, an Assassin, lv73, only using single target skills (DO NOT ASK ME, did not feel like trying out anything besides claw and dagger passive buffs, lol :D). That one is sad.
 
Back on on the Gameboy I had Final Fantasy Adventure, a game I absolutely loved. One night I sat down with the game with my dog next to me and decided that i was going to sit there and play the game until I beat it even if it took all night.

I made it all the way to the final boss which was a series of three fights. I managed to beat the first part of the final boss and the second one showed up Not wanting to have to repeat the first boss I saved the game here. The problem with this was that I was relatively low on life when I did this. The boss killed me and this lead to a rather large problem.

When the game was reloaded I was in the middle of the screen and the boss immediately would come down and hit me. there was no way to avoid this, I didn't have enough HP to take a single hit so I was killed instantly and the game had a real time battle system so I could not heal myself before getting hit. I also did not have a backup save so i had to start the game over from the very beginning.

The plus side was that the game was awesome so even though I was bummed that I had to restart, I still enjoyed the replay and avenging what happened there made the final victory even sweeter. I also learned a painful lesson bout saving and back up saves so in the long run I benefited from it.
 
A perfect file of Kingdom Hearts due to my knack to not look when saving. I started a new game on hard and at the first save point I just completely erased the old one. Crap.

Also I've lost quite a bit of time due to faulty PS1 memory cards.
 
Well back when I was playing Dark Souls pretty hardcore I lost 180 million souls after losing a pvp match and on my way back to picking up the souls I looked at my phone and fell off the stairs into a pit fall.

It didn't matter too much since I was SL120 and had already maxed out all my consumables and materials all but man I really liked having all those souls ;_;

Other than that the only time I can remember was when I got an awful partner in RE5 during my first play through and it had been about an hour since a checkpoint and I just had to quit because she was so awful and was so annoying we couldn't progress.
 
150~ hour near perfect save on the original Disgaea randomly corrupted itself. Wasn't happy about it at the time but retrospectively it did break my semi-addiction with that game.
 
I played FFVII without a memory card because my girlfriends little brother didn't know he needed one. We almost made it to the Golden Saucer and lost all of the progress when we died.
 
487 agility orbs in Crackdown doing a recover gamertag back when it wasn't as streamlined as it is today.

Fuck it all to hell.
 
160 hours in Skyrim. My cousin decided to go into the hard drive settings and delete a few things. This happened a year ago and I still bring it up when he pisses me off.
 
There was a legendary PS2 demo disc with Viewtiful Joe on it that would erase your memory card. My tin foil hat theory is that Capcom devs were so angry about bringing these formerly Nintendo exclusives to Sony's console that they made the demo wipe your memory card (they were furious about being told to port RE4 & Viewtiful Joe at that time).

Why else would a demo need memory card access?

I lost end game saves of GTA:San Andreas, Final Fantasy X, Gran Turismo 3, Jak & Daxter 2, and a bunch of others I don't remember. It was a disaster.

But Sony gave me some free games to compensate, and I'm thankful because one of the games I got was Sony's very own MLB series.
It opened my eyes to how good baseball games could be.
 
200+ hours of Pokemon Ruby because I let my nephew play it.

tumblr_maum35GoV61r2auyto1_500.jpg
 
SA2: Battle.

I was so tired I was messing around the memory card save files for another game IIRC, then I accidentally killed the save file and I just got all 180 emblems not too long prior. This was like in late 2002/early 2003.

I was in TEARS! :'(
 
Two big ones, my computer fucked up in 2005 so every saved game I ever had from 1999-2005 was gone forever. That one hurt a lot.

Then in early 2011, my house was burgled and my Playstation 3 was stolen. This was the month before cloud saving was introduced on Playstation Plus. I also had my Gamecube memory card and all of my PS3 and most of my Wii games stolen (though they left my Wii for some reason :P) . I lost all my progress in Tales of Symphonia, Final Fantasy XIII, Baten Kaitos, Skies of Arcadia, Valkyria Chronicles and Eternal Sonata amongst others.
 
Lost years worth of progress when I had to format my two gamecube memory cards in 2010. I had files on those from 2002 and possibly earlier. That hurt.
 
I was at Deep Darkness in Earthbound last year and I accidentally saved over my ROM save file. The remaining save went all the way back to Onett at the start. I was pretty angry.
 
I lost the character on Skyrim I platinum'd the game with because I got too used to the autosave system... then created a new character just to test something.

It was lvl 61 or 62 with almost all quests complete, so I can't even calculate how many hours was it.
 
metroid prime 2 final boss, lost all progress
f-zero gx, lost all progress and arcade tracks

both happened years apart when different roommates trying to play on a separate save slot, corrupted the main save slot..

oh and dragon quest 5, lost about 20 hours...

great thread idea
 
I removed my memory card when I played Sunshine for the first time in 2009 (on the Wii). I had it in Slot B apparently. So I didn't turn it off when I removed it, so when I put it back in, it said the memory card was corrupted. I was so cheesed, so many hours on GCN games lost. I knew it was a bad sign about Sunshine...
 
Phantasy Star Online on the Dreamcast - no question. A level 90+ character Noled by a hacker. It wasn't just the time investment either as I a spent a fucking fortune playing that game over dial-up.
 
Not really "lost", but before quitting World of Warcraft - I had racked up like 480~ days in-game. So glad to have broken that addiction, ty MoP for making it so easy to say "no".
 
I've lost my progress too many times to determine what games I lost the most on. My GC memory card had to get formatted twice (once randomly, another time due to my sister corrupting the data), had all my DS games stolen over 2 years ago, and lost all my Wii saves since the system froze during the transfer to the Wii U.

I guess it would be Animal Crossing: Wild World. Everything paid off, had most of the furniture I wanted, completed museum, etc. I was rather heartbroken that all that progress was just stolen away from me like that.
 
I borrowed my brother's friend's PS2 and nearly beat FFX (made it to Lady Yunalesca) when he came to take it back. I later learned I was just a few hours away from finishing the game.
 
Not sure how many hours, but my progress in the 100 match coliseum in Pokemon Colosseum (not the story mode one). I didn't understand the way the saving worked in that mode I guess, so when I found out I lost my progress...I cried lol. I was 10 at the time though.

I ended up redoing it again and got that Ho-oh though, f yeah.
 
The data on my Perfect Dark cart got erased. There were a few combat sim characters I had that had shitloads of kills, I was sad to see the stats reset.
 
Zelda II, late 1980's - The last part is incredibly frustrating. Just getting to the last palace was hard, then the bosses kept killing me. After one death at the hands of Shadow Link, I threw my NES controller. It hit the NES, and the cartridge (this was a US model) popped up.

Restarted the game...saves erased.

I've never gone back.
 
The Relm sketch glitch in FFIII (VI).

I was in the World of Ruin, bulking up before the final battle, the game glitched/locked, and deleted my save. The only other save I had on the cartridge was way back at the Returners hideout before the 3-way split.

That was heartbreaking and it delayed me beating it for another few weeks. :/
 
Thanks to my SSD's firmware corrupting last year, I lost the ~23 hours I put into Titan Quest. It took me a good 6 or so years to muster the bother for a second playthrough, so there's a strong possibility I'll never play it again -- though perhaps the Grim Dawn alpha will get me back into the mood.
 
Had unlocked almost all the cheats on Perfect Dark (probably around a 100 hours, all in all) when I let my friend borrow the cartridge. Had to ignore him for over a month when he gave me the game back with all the save files erased to prevent me from punching him to death. And I’m not a violent or aggressive person.
 
I lost my entire save of Fallout 2 after switching PCs cause I deleted the wrong folder.


And I was the kind of player that raided every freaking town, every freaking container, etc. The constrain I had to have to not kick my PC...

I still kicked it after a few minutes of having it stir up my mind
 
I imported Rhythm Tengoku (GBA) for my wife. She only loves one game on her DS (Rhythm Fever).

I put the GBA game in her DS lite game slot. I was all like "Okay, I'll clear the game so you can start fresh. Somehow, I loaded the DS slot and proceeded to delete her progress.

She had about 20 perfects and was up to the last mix. I have never felt so bad in my life. The worst thing was that I was using the stylus to delete her progress. I was like, "Wow the Japanese people really like using English". I was such an idiot.
 
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