10 MORE Video Game Secrets That Took YEARS To Find
4. The Nero Family Side Quest - Final Fantasy IX
Less a secret than an obscure questline that only went undiscovered in the west, when reading up on the process of accessing Final Fantasy IX's Nero Family Quest, it's not hard to see how it managed to fly under the radar for so long.
The side quest was well known in Japan thanks to the game's exhaustively detailed Ultimania guide, but western gamers had no such material to work from.
13 years after FFIX's release, several members of the GameFAQs forum noticed the convoluted quest in Ultimania and published its process online. The quest involved meeting up with a Nero family member on disk 4, engaging in a boss fight or other event, going and talking to another family member, and repeating the process several times over with some slight variations.
After this ridiculous series of back-and-forth errands, the player is finally directed to a treasure chest containing a protect ring - an item that is neither unique nor especially game-changing.
That sheer amount of effort involved for such little reward may not have been repeated until Breath Of The Wild's infamous Korok Seed side quest, which you probably all know by now.