Side Quests

[NerfedFalcon]

tl;dr: See thread title.

As the title implies, this is a thread for discussing memorable side quests: the good ones, the bad ones, and the just incomprehensible ones.

I thought of it because I've been watching several Castlevania game playthroughs while grinding in Runescape, and learned about the furniture side quest from Harmony of Dissonance. While searching Dracula's castle for his missing friends, Juste Belmont discovers a room that he decides would look much better with some furniture in it. Structurally, this is a standard collection quest: find the 31 pieces of furniture hidden around the castle, or don't. Stylistically, this quest is insane on multiple levels. Juste doesn't know how much time Lydie and Maxim have left, but decides to put off their rescue in order to lug chairs, tables, silverware and paintings all over Dracula's castle, just so he can decorate a room he isn't even going to be spending much time in. And then there's the fact that (spoilers for a 20-year-old Game Boy Advance game) the entire castle is destroyed at the end of the game as is series tradition, meaning Juste couldn't even go back to that room after saving his friends if he wanted to.

Oh, and your reward for finding all the furniture: Lydie will lean on Juste's shoulder in the ending instead of standing on her own. That's all you get for it, besides being able to admire the fully furnished room instead of stopping Dracula's reign of darkness.

PS: This isn't verified, but it's claimed by the Castlevania Fandom wiki that Igarashi intended to do this in Symphony of the Night, but it failed to make the cut in that game.

 

[hanselthecaretaker2]

Most insane I’ve played is “A Better World, A New Friend” in RDR2. It can start as early as chapter 2 but can’t be finished until the epilogue. The trophy involved is icing on this grindy cake which, if anyone’s nabbed without a guide they should consider themselves one of the extremely lucky, fortunate few.

Most satisfying would probably also be from this game, “The Widow of Willard’s Rest”, with different outcomes depending on how much of it is completed. There are others like this depending on player choice across the game, but this one felt so detached from everything else that it stood on its own as a personal bright spot for the main character.

 

[BrawlMan]

My personal favorite is in Evil Within 2. If you do all of Sykes (an employee/part of an extraction team that works for Mobius) side quests, you try to help him get a back door out of Stem. The catch? That one specific pod only has a twenty five percent success rate. The other seventy five percent go into a deeper part of stem and is considered a fate worse than death. It's kept ambiguous. Sykes never finds out and Sebastian only learns after helping the former when an audio log plays. Sebastian nor the player ever find out if Sykes made it out live. For your reward in helping the guy, you do get a sweet double barrel shotgun he left for you. It can't be upgraded, but it packs a lot of firepower.

EW2 has a good amount of side quest you can find on your own or given hints on where to go. Mainly exploring the small open world. By keeping the open world small, there's a large amount of content that doesn't go to waste nor is overly long. Sebastian even has a personal side quest dealing with his own personal trauma and PTSD. Where if you do all three of them, you are given his old revolver from the first game. If you have been saving you're upgrade gel, you can dump points into it and it is actually the most powerful handgun in the game. Though most players won't fully upgraded until new game plus.

God, this is such an amazing game!

 

[Drathnoxis]

Memorable side quests... Hmmm... For some reason, the first one that comes to mind is that one from Oblivion where you buy a house for very cheap and it turns out it's haunted and to fix it you need to get a guy to come and rub a wall in the basement forever. At least he did in my game because the quest bugged out. I spent literal hours trying to figure out how to progress the quest, and I think I eventually had to give up because I didn't have a save from before I started the quest.

I guess to balance it out, there's actually a really good one in Oblivion as well. Of course I'm talking about the murder mansion Dark Brotherhood quest. You need to kill all the guests of a house party without getting caught, and you have so many options to murder them or to turn them against each other and all the dialogue is different depending on what action you take and when. It's amazing, this one quest has as much depth as all the rest in the game combined.

 

[meiam]

If we use "memorable" as in "I'll fucking remember it till I die" then those goddamn FFX lighting.

 

[Old_Hunter_77]

Don't worry I'll refrain from writing yet another novel about The Witcher 3. Let's just say it has like my top 50 side quests and move on...

God of War: Ragnarok has this side quest about freeing some creatures- it's one of those things that you come across while exploring but it goes into this whole big thing. One bit of dialogue that stuck with me is right at the end- depending on where you are in the story, your companion is either Atreus your son or Freya your ally. When you first can come across these creatures it's with Atreus and he wants to do the side quest. At the time I decided to come back when leveled up more, and it was with Freya. After we freed the creatures she said something like "would have been nice if Atreus saw this" and I felt really bad- but it jived with the theme of Atreus becoming his own man so it was really bittersweet. Was really effective after the long action/exploration sequence to get it done.