I had a Deadly Premonition save file get corrupted with all weapons, all suits, all cards, and all but one sidequest complete. I've slowly been bringing a new file up to the same point.
A kid in pre-school wiped my Pokemon Yellow save. I hadn't even gotten that far in or anything, but it's absolutely the most heartbroken I've ever been over lost save data. I have lost a fair bit of saves over the years, but I'm mostly kind of fine with it. It's been a very long time since I lost anything I either didn't want to or couldn't recreate. And the times where I didn't want to start over again, I probably wasn't that into the game anyways.
I remember a long time ago I was at my grandfather's house and my step dad brought his PS3. I decided to start a new game on Final Fantasy XIII and accidentally replaced my step dad's save with a save that was right at the start. I don't know how far he was, but I think he was at a very green field and was able to ride a chocobo. 7 years later I almost cried while playing Theatrythm Final Fantasy because I was playing the fight theme from Final Fantasy XIII, which had the background from the start of Final Fantasy XIII.
I was about 50-60 hours, some crazy number like that, into Persona 5 when my PS4's HDD decided to fail. Didn't have PS Plus and, for some idiotic reason, never paid attention to the free online save slot they give you in that game. In any case, I tried to replay it and I think that largely contributed to the reason why I'm not a fan of the cast/story this time around. 3 and 4 didn't exactly have world class writing either, but 5's is like...not good. Two of the best characters in that game get nothing to do: Ryuji and Haru. One feels completely disconnected from their confidant story and is the butt of joke in the main storyline. The other is introduced far too late and and practically gets sidelined.
But I digress. It's still kinda sorta relevant to my point though. On my first playthrough, not a lot really bothered me. On my second, I feel like I started to notice all the shortcomings and it ruined the magic.
Worst saving file problem for me was pc game files used to be too big for hard drive example Half Life 1 save files is take up a quarter of the hard drive space
The three that stick out in mind are my sister accidently overwriting my Wind Waker save which was pretty much at the last stages of the game. It had taken so long to get there that I never got back into the game to my detriment.
Crackdown on my 360 corrupted the save twice, both times after I had completely levelled up my agent. The first time it happened, weirdly I was quite happy, I got to have a surprise story do-over. The second time though, I was much more, eff this, time to move on.
The last was less a lost save but more a combination of bad manual save management and poor quicksaves. But I got trapped in a doorway of death in Fallout 3 on the strip with aggroed NPCs on either side. It was so far back to the last save after a particularly troublesome section that I retired that playthrough with extreme prejudice (well aware that the fault on that entirely rested with me). I am a poor manual saver.
Just lost many hours of progress in Angren because of a broken, bizarre save system. I'm sure I could figure out how the system works, or is supposed to work, but I will not bother.
How hard is it in 2018 to simply save progress? How about creating a save at checkpoints? There's an idea!
One of the 'saves' says return to Angren 11 days ago, but I wasn't there 11 fucking days ago. The other said 3 days ago and both saves are the same progress...beginning of the map. Don't know if that is gametime or realtime. I bet the dev doesn't know either.
Would return/trash this game were it not good otherwise.
Midnight Club: Los Angeles would crash frequently on my Xbox 360. I'd finished the main storyline and unlocked most of the vehicles and unlocks when one of the crashes happened during an autosave.
I didn't even like the game that much. But I replayed it all the way through a second time--unlocks and all--just for the same thing to happen again. Probably a solid hundred and fifty hours lost in total.
I replayed FF7 over and over a bunch as a kid and I definitely saved over a (essentially) 100% save file with a brand new file.
More recently I was replaying Persona 3 FES on the PS3 and after about 20 hours the save file literally just disappeared from my list. I'm guessing it got corrupted or something, because the second save slot still had it's data.
I have some pretty slow nights at work during the winter, so I would take my 3DS in with me. One night, I went to get it out of my bag and couldnt find it. Assuming I left it at home, I cursed myself for being so forgetful, and found something else to do.
When I got home, there it was, sitting in my driveway. I went over to grab it, thankful it hadn't snowed the night before, only to find that it was crushed and mangled beyond any sort of repair. It must've slipped out of my bag when I put it in the back seat and gotten run over on my way out. The big loss was a 650+ hour Monster Hunter Generations save.
I've since purchased another 3DS, but I haven't had the heart to play much of anything on it. At this point I'd just play the ultimate edition on the Switch, if I ever convince myself to buy one.
Skyrim - Once upon a time I didn't bother to learn how to mod Skyrim properly. After around 600 hours my save file stopped working because the mods corrupted my save file. This might have been the one time I actually played the game again.
I can definitely relate to many of these. Without telling anyone, my older brother took our family's Wii to his apartment over last summer because all of us were moved out of the house and no one was using it very much. He loses the entire system during moving to a different apartment and says he has no idea where it is. How do you lose an entire game system!? The system, all its cords, four controllers, four nunchucks, and a few games, all gone. Of course, our GameCube memory card was in the Wii, so that's gone too. Most video games I have every played, gone. I had spent so many hours of my childhood playing Super Smash Bros. with friends and my brothers getting all the coins of every world (worst loss, all time fav game/memories for everyone), playing Super Smash Bros. Brawl and Melee unlocking all characters, playing the classic Wii Sports and Wii Play, making a dope Animal Crossing town, playing Guitar Hero World Tour, messing around with making Mii characters, and playing many, many other games. To replace it my family bought a Wii on eBay, but since all the saved data is gone, I can't get myself to play any of the games again. Totally did not realize how much I'd miss that Wii.
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