- 4 days ago
Category
🎈
FunTranscript
00:05Welcome to MojoPlays and it's time to relive some trauma. Unlocking collectibles was always
00:09harder on the PS1, mainly because we were all kids, but also because the 90s were built
00:13different. These are the 20 hardest characters to unlock in PS1 games. Let's go. Before we
00:19continue, we publish content all week long, so be sure to subscribe and ring the bell to get
00:24notified of our latest videos. What makes this one so ridiculous is that the actual unlocking
00:39isn't even difficult. The problem is the game basically lies to anyone playing co-op. You reach
00:44the final stage, spot the Titanium Ranger sitting there locked up, and naturally assume rescuing
00:48him is part of the mission. Fair enough, except the game never mentions one tiny detail. You can
00:52only free him in single player. My brother and I had no idea, so we spent literally weeks replaying
00:58the co-op campaign, trying different characters, routes, and probably several completely imaginary
01:02theories. Meanwhile, the answer was simply to ditch each other and come back alone.
01:06Fantastic design choice for a game heavily sold around playing together.
01:21Mortal Kombat really made you earn the right to even meet Reptile. First, you had to be fighting
01:26on the pit, then somehow win with two flawless victories, never block once, and finish the match
01:30with a fatality. Already ridiculous. But there was also one completely random condition. A silhouette had
01:36to fly across the moon in the background during the fight. Miss that little visual cue, and
01:41congratulations, you've just performed the world's most stressful, perfect match for nothing.
01:46Reptile himself was basically a green version of Scorpion and Sub-Zero, but fighting him felt
01:50like uncovering government secrets. He would rank higher, but unlocking him is just to fight him,
01:54not to play as him. So this Reptile can sit on a warm rock at number 19.
02:12There's something especially rude about a cute puzzle game suddenly demanding tournament level
02:15focus. In Buster Move 4, unlocking MITRE means making it all the way to round 16 of win contest
02:21mode, which sounds manageable until the CPU starts playing like it's just you, but from the future.
02:27You need to keep winning without one bad board completely ruining the run, and that's where
02:30the pain comes in. A nasty colour layout, one awkward mistake, or an opponent deciding it has
02:35become a tactical genius, can send you straight back to square one. It's not the most complicated
02:39unlock ever made, but it does demand consistency, patience, and the ability to stay calm while
02:44adorable dinosaurs quietly destroy your afternoon.
02:54Shenlong Bloody Roar 2.
02:55LONG THE TIGER LONG THE TIGER
02:58Bloody Roar 2 doesn't hide Shenlong behind some bizarre button code or secret menu. It just asks
03:04you to beat arcade mode without using a continue. Piece of cake. If the cake was made of concrete.
03:09You've got to survive the full ladder, keep your run alive, and then still beat Shenlong when he
03:12finally shows up at the end. At least you can use whichever fighter you know best, because you'll
03:16need every advantage you can get once the PS1 era AI starts behaving like 2026 AI. Reaching Shenlong only to
03:22lose is especially cruel, because the game immediately turns your impressive run into nothing.
03:34Ace One Piece Grand Battle 2.
03:37Ace One Piece Grand Battle 2.
03:37Battle 4!
03:39Fight!
03:40Here's one that you've probably never heard of because it was a Japanese exclusive. Ace feels less
03:45like an unlockable character, and more like the game checking whether you still have a social life.
03:50Before it even becomes an option, you need to unlock every other fighter and finish story mode
03:54with all of them. That alone is already a serious time sink. Then, because apparently you haven't
03:59suffered enough, you must run through story mode again as Smoker on hard difficulty, reach Ace at the
04:04very end and beat him. Only then does the game finally hand him over. There's no clever trick here,
04:09just a mountain of repetition and one final difficult run.
04:19Spider-Man Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2.
04:28For one of the coolest secrets in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2, the game basically makes your custom
04:33skater get through an absolute gauntlet first. You need to push the created character through the
04:37entire career, clearing the required goals, competitions and cash totals until there's
04:41almost nothing left to do. Only then does Spider-Man finally become playable. Thankfully,
04:46the payoff is worth it. Seeing him throw ridiculous tricks, grind rails and tear around stages to the
04:51soundtrack is exactly the kind of nonsense PS1 gamers were brilliant at. Back then, it also sounded
04:56like the sort of playground rumour nobody believed. And trust me, when you saw it for the first time,
05:00the pop was insane. For someone who looks like he's about to fall asleep mid-fight,
05:18Tekken 3 really makes you work your ass off for Dr. Bosconovich. You need to clear Tekken Force mode
05:23multiple times before he finally appears as an opponent. Tekken Force sounds like a fun little
05:28bonus mode until you realise it's basically a side-scrolling mugging simulator, with enemies
05:32constantly surrounding you and throwing hands from every direction. After several full runs,
05:37you finally get the chance to beat Bosconovich and add him to the roster. Your reward is an elderly
05:42scientist whose moveset involves collapsing, crawling around and generally looking medically unfit for
05:47combat. You endure all that effort to unlock a man who just needs a chair.
06:03Speedpunks makes unlocking Beamer feel like surviving a kart racing conspiracy,
06:07and not a fun playground one. I mean, a tinfoil hat one. Before you even challenge him, you first have
06:13to win every race in the Hard League. Not most of them, every single one. That would already be annoying
06:18enough, but the game loves rubber band AI, random weapons and last second disasters that can turn
06:22a comfortable lead into eighth place before you know what happened. Once you finally conquer the
06:26entire league, Beamer still isn't yours. You then unlock his personal challenge and have to beat him
06:31there as well. So after proving you can dominate the hardest championship, the game says, lovely,
06:36one more thing. Beamer isn't a character unlock, he's a full-time job.
06:45Zack Urguys, god bless the ring.
06:53Zack isn't sitting behind one nasty requirement in Urguys, he's buried at the end of an entire
06:58unlock family tree. You need to finish the game with all the available Final Fantasy 7 characters,
07:04which sounds straightforward, and to you remember, some of them are hidden as well.
07:07Yuffie needs a clear with Cloud, Vincent needs one with Tifa, and only after opening up the roster
07:12can you keep working towards Zack. Still, back in 1999, fans were absolutely going to do it.
07:17This was years before Crisis Core, when getting to play as Zack anywhere felt like discovering
07:21alternate costumes in Super Smash Bros. Wait, there's Ultimate Costumes in Super Smash Bros?
07:28The 200th Monster, Tobal 2.
07:36Okay, this is a bit different from the other entries, so let's put it here to split the list.
07:40Give us a little break. Calling this a character unlock barely covers what Tobal 2 expects from you.
07:46Quest mode lets you capture defeated monsters and gradually turn them into playable fighters,
07:50eventually building a roster of roughly 200 characters. The catch is that some of the rarer
07:55creatures are buried deep inside the game's six dungeons, so collecting every one means plenty of
08:00exploration, survival, and carefully timed captures. At that point, Tobal 2 stops feeling like a fighting
08:05game and starts resembling Pokémon if every creature immediately punched you in the face.
08:13Devil Tekken 2
08:20Tekken 2 gives you a nice little trick at the character select screen. It shows 10 fighters and
08:25quietly lets you assume that's the whole roster. It isn't. If you want the boss unlocked, you need to
08:30finish the game with every character, including the ones you unlock along the way. So each successful
08:35run doesn't bring you closer to freedom so much as reveal another person you now have to learn.
08:39Before long, you're cycling through wildly different movesets while also wrestling with controls that feel
08:43prehistoric compared to modern fighting games. Beating arcade mode 10 times would be tedious enough.
08:49Tekken 2 instead keeps expanding the homework until you've practically completed a degree in the entire roster.
08:58Tekken 2
09:00Squall Chocobo Racing
09:08Chocobo Racing is mostly a breezy little kart racer where you can switch your brain off
09:13and just enjoy yourself. Then Squall turns up and apparently decides friendship's over. Unlocking every
09:18character means beating him on his own track and he has one enormous advantage. His special ability
09:23basically works like an unavoidable blue shell from Mario Kart. It hits everyone, there's no real
09:29defense against it and naturally the game gives it to the guy who you're desperately trying to beat.
09:33Suddenly this cute Final Fantasy spin-off becomes a lesson in controlled rage. Squall may be the hero
09:39of Final Fantasy 8 but here he races like someone who's been banned from Mario Kart and is still upset
09:44about it.
09:53The OG Tekken game and the OG for expecting you to figure things out the hard way. To unlock Armor
09:59King you had to clear arcade mode using King which sounds simple until you remember how unforgiving those
10:04old fighting game ladders could be. There were no glowing objective markers, helpful pop-ups or friendly
10:09little hints explaining what to do next. You just kept playing, losing, retrying and hoping you were on
10:14the right track. Eventually beating the mode with King revealed his darker masked counterpart Armor
10:20King and suddenly all that frustration felt worth it. He looked meaner, he hit harder and immediately became a brag.
10:38Of all the secret characters you could spend hours unlocking, Resident Evil 2 somehow decided the
10:44ultimate prize should be healthy. It's Tofu. Getting there is no joke either. First you need to unlock the
10:49fourth survivor by completing the required A and B scenarios with strong enough rankings. Then you have to
10:54beat the bonus mode and satisfy even more completion conditions before Tofu finally appears. Your heroic
11:00reward is a wobbling piece of soybean curd armed with nothing but a knife thrown into one of the game's
11:05nastiest survival runs. It's completely absurd, incredibly difficult and somehow exactly the kind of secret
11:10the PS1 was built for.
11:15Morrigan and Nakaruru Capcom vs SNK Millennium Fight 2000 Pro
11:20At this point fighting games really were addicted to the phrase beat it with everyone. Capcom vs SNK
11:31Millennium Fight 2000 Pro, god that's a long name, takes that idea and makes it especially painful thanks to
11:38its enormous roster. Want Morrigan? You'll need to finish the game using every Capcom fighter. After
11:43Nakaruru instead? Same deal, except now you're working through the entire SNK side. That means
11:48dozens of arcade mode clears before both characters are finally available. It's not technically complicated,
11:54but it is a serious test of patience and free time. By the end you won't just know the roster,
11:58you'll know their moves, habits, weaknesses and probably what they had for breakfast.
12:09N-Tropy Crash Team Racing
12:11N-Tropy doesn't care whether you simply win races in Crash Team Racing,
12:25he wants proof that you've basically memorised every corner of the game. To unlock him, you need
12:30to head into time trial mode and beat his ghost times across every track. That means learning the
12:35best racing lines, chaining drifts properly and squeezing speed out of the shortcuts that casual
12:40players might not even know exist. One messy turn can ruin an otherwise perfect attempt, so this quickly
12:46turns into a battle against both the clock and your own sanity. Once every ghost has finally been beaten,
12:50entropy joins the roster. Fittingly, unlocking the time-obsessed scientists requires sacrificing a
12:56fairly unreasonable amount of your own time. Wolverine Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3
13:04Of all the places Wolverine could randomly appear, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 was probably not going to be on
13:12my list. Unlocking him is the real problem because the game basically asks for two near-perfect career
13:17runs. You need to complete every career goal and win gold in all three competitions with two different
13:22skaters. So yes, that's essentially doing everything twice before Logan finally decides
13:26to pick up a skateboard. Even experienced players can stumble on some of these objectives, which explains
13:32why plenty of people never knew he was hiding in the game at all. At least the reward is great.
13:36Wolverine gets unique animations, custom moves and plenty of personality. Turns out adamantium claws are
13:42surprisingly good for grinding rails. Raiji Revelations Persona
13:53Raiji might be one of the most aggressively missable characters ever put into an RPG. In Persona,
13:59you don't unlock him by winning some brutal boss fight. Instead, you have to make a weirdly specific
14:03chain of choices across the game. Oh, and one wrong move can permanently ruin the attempt. Yeesh. You need
14:09to visit the right places, choose exact dialogue options, talk to his mother only once, recruit
14:14the correct party members and trigger events in the proper order. Miss a step and that's it. Raiji is
14:20gone. This is the kind of secret that practically screams please buy the strategy guide. Considering
14:26he's also one of the strongest characters available, hiding him behind this nonsense feels especially
14:31cruel. Cloud Strife Final Fantasy Tactics
14:45Cloud is usually about as subtle as a medial crashing into Midgar, but Final Fantasy Tactics hides him
14:51behind a ridiculous side quest chain. You need to wander well away from the main story, complete
14:56optional battles, help Esrudio get his strange dimensional machine working, then defeat Construct
15:02VII at Nelvesca Temple. After all that, you're still not done. You also need to buy a flower from
15:07Aerith and later step in when Cloud helps defend her from a group of thugs. Only then does Final Fantasy
15:12VII's
15:12hero finally join your party permanently. It's a fantastic cameo, but the game makes you work so hard
15:18for it that it's borderline not worth it. Like, why is he even here?
15:27Skelly Chrono Cross
15:32Skelly isn't so much recruited in Chrono Cross as slowly rebuilt like the world's creepiest Ikea project.
15:38His skeleton has been scattered into six separate pieces across the game, and every bone is hidden
15:43somewhere different with its own little requirement. Finding all of them is already a huge scavenging hunt,
15:47but collecting the parts still doesn't actually give you Skelly. You then need to track Danny's
15:52grandmother, bring her the complete collection, and trigger the right conversation so she can finally
15:56put him back together. After all that effort, you're rewarded with an undead clan who isn't
16:00exactly a statistical powerhouse. Sorry Skelly.
16:11Did you enjoy this video? Check out these other clips from MojoPlays and be sure to subscribe
16:16and ring the bell to be notified of our latest videos.
Comments