Well, that's what I understand to be the popular legend; best to check the sources, etc. Ron is a rather a man of secrets and keeping them.
Amen to that, Genius Sonority did better 3D on the GCN, and Hal Labs did great 3D models for the Stadium games.

Thought of another one, involving Paladin's Quest (spoilers):
* In Paladin's Quest, there are two first-class party members. There's Chezni, who is the main character, uses fighter-type equipment, and starts with Fire magic. There's Midia, who is with you most of the game, is more mage-like in her equipment, and starts with Earth magic. It turns out, however, that Chezni gets Earth near the end of the game, but Midia never gets Fire, leading to an imbalance between the characters end-game, with Chezni being clearly the more powerful character, and it seems like the developers just neglected Midia in the end game.
* Also, at one point, you travel to the past. However, you can only explore a small portion of the world, and you can't return there after you return to the present.
* I could also mention that there's no mid-battle revive, and the final boss is so difficult that the game really did need one. (By contrast, Lennus 2 does have a mid battle revive, but it isn't as necessary there, with the final boss being *much* easier that time around.)
* (By first class party member, I mean that those two characters are the only ones who can equip new items or learn new spells after joining.)

I can also mention some issues with Dragon Quest 5 (again, there's a spoiler; also, this is based off the SFC version):
* DQ3 and DQ4 allowed you to make the main character either male or female; DQ5 doesn't give you the choice and instead forces a male main character (a problem that would persist in most later DQ games as well).
* For whatever reason, unlike every other Dragon Quest game from 3 onwards, you are only allowed 3 characters in the active party.
* Early on, there's a fight that you are supposed to lose; doing so will cost you half your money. At this point, you're likely to have an excess of money, and the bank isn't available at this point, so this feels rather cruel for the game to do this. (DQ4 has a fight like this, but it comes at the end of a chapter, and you don't keep money between chapters anyway.)
* You can recruit monsters, but the recruit rate is way too low for way too many of them; recruiting a Healslime is only a 1 in 32 chance, for example. (Recruiting a Healslime or a monster that's even harder to recruit is the only way to get access to Omniheal this time around.)
* Speaking of which, Multiheal and Omniheal are only usable during combat. Meanwhile, the Staff of Revival, which can revive a character for free with infinite uses, can be used outside of battle. (The fact that the staff can fail isn't a problem when you can just try again, and there's not even a turn cost for doing so because you aren't in a battle.)
* The weakest ice spell is, for whatever reason, not player usable, which seems rather odd.
* There's the Zoom spell (Return in older translations) that allows you to return to almost any town you've visited. For whatever reason, the use of this spell is blocked in many towns, even when there's no reason for it to be, and trying to cast it will waste your MP, which is quite annoying.
* Also worth noting that Chimera Wings, which act like Zoom in other DQ games, will only warp you to the last town you've visited in DQ5, which really does feel like a step back.
* Late game, you have two kids, a son and a daughter. The son gets to be the legendary hero, yet the daughter gets nothing. Furthermore, for whatever reason, the daughter doesn't learn enough spells to fill up her spell list window; she ends up one spell short.

Remakes of Dragon Quest 5 fixed some of those issues (the party size was increased to 4, Zoom now works unless doing so would break the plot scripting, the daughter's missing spell was filled with that one weak ice spell (which is useless at the point she joins, but at least it's now player usable)), but still left others in (low recruit chances for monsters, daughter still doesn't get anything special the way the son does).

Either way, it's interesting to be sure....thanks for the info.

I guess it can also depend upon whether your feelings (emotions) inform your gut.

Take Quake for instance. I always felt there should be more ... it was that good.

So subjectively feeling wise, there was something missing.

For some games, it is more apparent than for others.

And you could say the opposite for some other games ... there was too much ... and it was bad.

To be sure though, some games do feel rather empty ... at times anyway.

I wonder how many games these days go to market with the developer feeling like they had completed everything? Not a lot (if any) I suspect.

So it stands to reason some will be even more less complete than others.

The ending of RAGE definitely feels like someone said "That's enough, people, let's wrap this up real quick so everyone can go home. Forget about your fancy finale and epilogue, noone will play that far anyway."

Days Gone

There are numerous flashback cutscenes (using in game graphics) showing the main characters in a ruined city falling to the zombies during the early stages of the zombie outbreak, in which the dialogue clearly indicates that there was meant to be levels in-between these cutscenes. From what the characters say these levels would have introduced you to certain types of boss zombies, human military opponents and had a complex driving section while attempting to flee and show the overall collapase of America to the zombies. All the levels are gone however but the cutscenes are kept and shown intermittently between chapters of the game likely where the flashback levels would have been placed.

I haven't played it but Styigian: Reign of the Old Ones was called incomplete by every review I saw / read. It was a kickstarted horror RPG set in a Lovecraftian world and many reviews say its obvious that it was rushed and released before completion.

EDIT: Reigns of the Old ones, not Tales of the Old Ones

From what I remember they did a Kickstarter for $400k for Broken Age with the intent of making a simple but whole game but ended up with $3.3m. This caused them to massively over-expand their vision and start spending on orchestral soundtracks, celebrity voice acting, etc, and despite having 8x more money than they originally asked for, they somehow ran out of money half way through. They then split Broken Age up into two parts hoping that the first half would fund the second (which it did), but people complained the puzzles were too easy in the first half, so they increased the difficulty of the puzzles in the second half (and not in a good way, they were just more obscure rather than clever) but spent so much time on them the ending & late-game plot got very little attention and felt very rushed / unfinished.

Whilst the game itself has a lot of charm, there was some serious project mismanagement and I often wonder how much better the game could have been if it were made in a more Wadjet Games style manner as they originally intended without the "game of two halves" bi-polar design.

I agree, the body of the many was the worst part, really didn't enjoy it. Combat wasn't that difficult by then (I had two assault rifles and more than enough ammo, most enemies died quickly), but the level design wasn't enjoyable at all. Despite its linearity I had to look several times in a walkthrough, because I had no idea how to progress.

Assassins Creed Odyssey

Really, so many open paths, left open... I spend a good 50 hours in the game so make no mistake, learning how tackle the toughest fights and explore the story was quite nice, even had some teasers with finding area's where mythical monsters roamed about but, overall, the whole thing lacked coherency

I could also mention SaGa 1, in a way.

For a gamer who is used to the length of "short" RPGs, this game would feel incomplete, simply due to its length. You get to the end ans are like,"That's It?", and then proceed to go through withdrawal, or you decide to restart the game with a new party (as you are not even close to being burned out on it yet).

I read that, apparently, Kawazu designed the game to be playable from start to finish on a single flight between the US and Japan. (Worth noting that the fact that the game could even be *played* on such a flight was rather novel at the time; the Game Boy had just been released, and I believe there were no RPGs on the system prior to this game's release.)

Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader

The first city had a very "Baldur's Gate" type feel to it with a good amount of NPC dialog and role-playing opportunities. But after that, the game changes into a much more hack-and-slash experience with just enough dialog to kick the story down the road. It picks up a little at the end, but still nothing like the first part.

There wasn't anything to overtly indicate that a bunch of planned content had been dropped. But it sure felt like management came in one day and said, "OK folks, our budget is getting slashed. You've got two months to wrap this up."

Stonekeep is a nice game, but the ending is so sudden and leaves you with so many questions that you can't help but wonder if you somehow found a bug the launched you into the final confrontation a little too early. And after the ending cutscene that doesn't show much you're like "okay but how does my character get out of that place? What of my companions? Did they even live? Did Enigma get back to the arms of Whats-Her-Name? Did that exiled dwarf get accepted back to dwarven society or at least found a decent place to live alone on the outside?"

They left too much unexplained, and it's not like they were plot hooks for a sequel. It must have been that management disease called SRU (Sudden release urge)

If I could judge that first part in Barcelona as a separate game it would be one of my fovorite RPGs of all time. I just love the setting, the characters, everything about it just sings. Too bad the rest of the game falls so flat. I never even finished it - my mage wasn't a very good character for all the hacking-and-slashing, and the game just wasn't fun enough anymore to persevere. Still, the game is well worth playing for that first act alone.