Topic: Is 100% Completion Really that Important?

I personally can't stand hundred percenting games. To me it's the worst kind of OCD behavior, codified into the game design. There are a few games I've come close, into the high 90's just as a natural course of playing and wanting to find various things or complete all the activities available to me, but then there's always that elusive 1-4% that I'm never going to put the absurd amount of time into to Find ALL! The Things! Or to abuse myself to beat those absurd optional bosses just to get the completions or items behind them. Time is short and there are very many games to play, so I simply don't spend that time on that kind of activity.

Shantae, which I'm wrapping up right now, I loved the game, though it's a little short, but I got to the 4 optional things to do to get the "true" ending. I did two of them because they were fun. The other two are "find all the things hidden in all the levels" quests, and that, to me is tedious and unfun. So I skipped it and went to the final level. Of which using the stupid harpy to try to avoid all the moving spikes is also tedious and unfun. If I do it enough times I'd probably get it...but I'm more likely to just quit and try something else.

The Infamous serious though I tend to get at least close to 100% for some reason....all the activities just seem kind of fun so I end up doing them all. Not sure I've ever hit 100 though, in any game.

@Snaplocket please stop with the "alerts" and just edit your posts to add more content.

You seem to do it a little bit too often.

@NEStalgia Are you trying to fly through this bit with the harpy? 'Cause you shouldn't. I think that catches a lot of people out.

Depends.

Some games, particularly visual novels, are structured so that it's important to play the entire game to understand everything about the stories and characters. It makes no sense, for example, to only play something like 999 or Undertale until you get one of the endings, because all of the different routes come together to make the games greater than the sum of their parts.

I'll also usually try to 100% stage based games like Yoshi's Island or Super Mario 3D Land that are structured around doing/collecting specific things to fully complete a level.

If a game takes a loooooong time to beat, then even if different routes have important story content, I probably won't bother 100% completing them. Atlus games are often a good example of this. I am not replaying a hundred hour SMT game, no matter how much I enjoyed it, just so that I can get a different ending. Just not happening.

I also don't bother when it's just OCD behavior, i.e. people who can't stop playing Skyrim until they max out their skill tree and hoard every random item in the game. That's not for me.

@Zyrac ohhh i didn't see that! But...how do you get the mouse there?

@NEStalgia No, that's not what you do either. That sparkle is just... I dunno, I didn't take that picture, but it's not important. You have to use Monkey Bullet to jump through.

It does seem like a bit of a deliberate "gotcha" by the developers.

one thing about the devil may cry series...
all the blue orbs?
all the secret missions?
one try only secret missions?
all the different modes/difficulties?
there is no way in hell back in the day and even now that first time gamers are going to run through that series blind and stumble across all that in one play and call it a day.
i dont think so...for that series ill take the proper ending and move along.
alas...the symphony of the night kind of games are different to me.

I really liked how GoldenEye and Perfect Dark implemented difficulty levels - you could play through the game in 'easy' mode and experience the whole storyline from start to finish...if you fancied playing through again and giving yourself a bit of an extra challenge, there were additional difficulty modes which not only cranked the difficulty up a notch (stronger and more accurate AI, health depletes quicker etc.) but also added some additional objectives which subtly changed up how you'd approach each level, making each play through still feel fresh

@Snaplocket That doesn't really detract from my point though. I'm talking about what I think developers should do, and "most people won't play this bit" isn't a good excuse for sloppiness. Most people won't 100% Mario Galaxy either.

Mind you, it is possible to implement difficulty levels in ways that are more meaningful than number changes while requiring less work than tweaking all the levels. In Castlevania: The Adventure ReBirth, you don't take knockback from being hit on easy mode, so it's easier to just muscle through everything. That's pretty clever, I think.

@NaviAndMii Just don't say that near Fire Emblem fans. You'll be told that if you didn't play it on the hardest mode you aren't REALLY a fan and haven't actually played that game.

@Zyrac Ohh, that one...that one I figured out. No, the one I have trouble with is after that. It's where there's the series of the clamp-together spike walls to go through, and behind that if you manage to pull it off, there's the two square ones that are rotating counter clockwise. You can't go above because the top one is already moving right-to-left. If you go on the bottom, it's almost impossible to not touch the lava because of the DKC-rocket-barrel mechanics of the harpy, and if you manage not to, you get to the one in front before it moves upward , and the momentum of the harpy carries you into it..if you manage to stop forward movement but do it too effectively the back one comes up rigth to left and clips you. Must have tried it 20 times before giving up. The first half seems like you could do it with the bat....but those counter-clockwise square ones always have spikes across the middle so there's no way to get the bat through.

@NEStalgia Ah, well, I don't recall there being a trick to that one, I'm afraid. I didn't find it overly hard myself, but I can certainly see why you'd have trouble controlling the harpy. And the difficulty at this point is admittedly uneven, since all the magic and items in the world won't save you from the spikes.

It depends on the game. Some games leave the feeling that you miss something if you don't get the 100%. But I think a good game should try to avoid to leave this feeling, it's a fault of the game when that happens in my opinion. Then when a game give you a great amount of freedom and choices it could also be more meaningful to purposely avoid 100% completion. When I played Oblivion I wanted my character to be 100% good, so I avoided many options and activities that were available and it felt so good just because such things were available and it was me who decided to avoid them, it felt much more fulfilling than if I did get 100% completion with a messed up and pointless character. Other times I purposely avoided 100% completion in some games because I liked more the non completion ending. This does not happens often but sometimes it can happen

@Snaplocket It depends on why you play games though. For casual gamers they just want to have fun. But if you're a real, honest-to-goodness hardcore gamer then you're gonna want to win and be good at it. So even if its not fun you have to 100% the games, man. Now this is just if you're a real gamer. I know casuals don't mind, but the 100% is for true blue gamers.

Sounds more like OCD than being a "true gamer".

@NEStalgia I've not played the most recent Shantae game (yet) but I found quite a few little annoying things like that in Pirates Curse, particularly towards the end. I understand their idea "this game is for people who finished loads of NES games and know how to push the controls beyond their limits - we'll design a few challenges for them" but it's just not fun. It wasn't in the NES era either really.

In general I very rarely 100%ing games. I play until I feel like I've seen all of the substantial content but I've no intention of, for instance, finding and fully leveling up all/any of my armour on BoTW (let alone finding all 900 Koroks!).

I'd go slightly further still and say something that many will find heretical: I sometimes wish that games didn't even indicate how many collectables are in a level or how many I've still not found. I think many would enjoy that approach more.

You can see a clear evolution in the Mario games

• Mario 3 - plenty of secrets but no returning to levels to find them once beaten and no indication of how many (or any) are in a given level.
• Mario World - plenty of secrets. Yoshi coins in every level (always 5). Presence of hidden exits given away on the world map (by the colour of the icon).
• Yoshis Island - regimented scheme of collectables and you even get graded at the end of every level as to how many you've found.

It's a logical progression and I understand why but... it's restrictive and sets expectations going into every level. It implies that there is only one right way to play.

@StuTwo I very much agree with nearly all of this. For some reason there's this legend of the really difficult NES games (some people still don't seem to recognize that they weren't SUPPOSED to be that difficult, most of it was bad design, poor controls, a need to compensate the fact there were only 4 levels that fit on the cart, and/or an arcade development mentality that was supposed to make it as rigged as a video poker machine to encourage spending.) There IS a fan base that seems to like that, but you're one of the lone other voices in the Nintendo verse that seems to have the same outlook I do: Games that hard/cheap are simply not fun. Heck even the DKC barrel levels were just not fun. They were frustrating. DKCTF made them more fun somehow...but the DKC ones were just annoying to waste time on. Across all platforms I've lost count of the multitude of games I never actually beat. I often play up to the absurd difficulty spike that most games have at the last level or last world, and just put it away. It's not worth the frustration. I've never understood that spike. To me, logical progression in difficulty, or constant difficulty would make sense. Suddenly throwing large barriers up at the end strikes me as very inconsistent. It makes it feel like the last parts of the game are not part of the game, but a bonus section for those that want to really push into it.

I somewhat agree with not showing how many collectibles there are. Though it depends on the game. In some cases finding all the items is important for the game. Take Planet Robobot. When you know there are 2, or 3 cubes, you want to go look for all of them, and you know that getting all of them unlocks the extra levels (and you' know it's not absurdly placed for max torture.) The whole checklist/collection idea in games never appealed to me too much but in some cases it makes some sense.

Also, those were DRAGON coins, not Yoshi coins. The manual explicitly said DRAGON coins. Even though they had Yoshi's picture on them. And even though it said Yoshi was a dinosaur, not a dragon. Even though Miyamoto said Yoshi's not a dinosaur either. Get your facts straight!

@NEStalgia There is, of course, a difference between hard and cheap.

Now, I'm not really a big NES fan. Even some of the most well-regarded games from that era feel unfair by today's standards. Heck, for some reason I can't even handle the NES Mario games - the level design is fine but the controls just feel off to me, despite my ability to breeze through Mario Maker levels based on those same games.

But when Shantae gets tough on me? I love it. I love DKC Rocket Barrel levels too. And if a game I've played has a difficulty spike at the end, that's probably my favourite part of it. Game design has come a long way, and good developers know how to make a game challenging in such a way that you blame yourself rather than them when you fail. Even the NES throwbacks benefit from this fact - Mega Man 9 is a lot less frustrating then Mega Man 2.

I enjoy the feeling of tension in a tough section, the feeling of relief when clearing something after several tries, and the feeling of pride after clearing something in one try.

But obviously it's not for everyone. And you're right, you shouldn't be unexpectedly hitting a brick wall at the end of the game if you can't handle it. I may want it to be there, but I know there needs to be a way around it, whether through difficulty settings, stuff like the Super Guide, or whatever else.

I agree with all of you who don't like overly difficult games. A game should be fun, being too much difficult makes sense only for arcade coin op games that were meant only to drain coins out of your pocket like a vampire would drain your blood, and that is why I never liked those kind of games that much. People got used to it and somehow many now think that the only way a game can be fun is being frustrating. Some of them probably are just masochistic and genuinely enjoy such things lol. But for sure I'm not and I prefer my games to have a more "friendly" difficulty... or maybe find different ways to be fun, like Endless Ocean games that were great but had no difficulty at all.

this is very true, which can mean different things to different people.