Illegal Operation: The Hundred Percent Solution

The .TXT was not a typo

Carda here.

Starting up here feels kinda like moving into a new house; you’re still figuring out where to put all the furniture and there’s still a bit of echo in each room because you haven’t really settled in yet.  So I’m going to try to “unpack” a bit, so to speak.  And even though I have Break’s and Flash’s blessings to be here, I still feel like I’m kinda stepping on their toes a bit.

Hence the title.  Illegal Operation is sort of a editorial rantspace for my video-game related musings.  They may relate to our favorite blue hero (no, the other one) or they may not, but either way I hope you’ll find what I have to say at least amusing if not informative.

For the first Illegal Operation, let’s cover a topic that I’m sure every EXE fan is familiar with: game completion.

I’m a selective completionist.  If a game proves to be compelling enough, I’ll put dozens of hours into collecting every last doodad and thingamabob needed to earn that coveted 100%.

But not every game can manifest this desire in me.  Sometimes even within the same series there will be games that drive me to succeed right alongside games that draw little more than a half-hearted “meh” from my lips once I’ve finished the story mode.  The Star Force series has been a good example of this duality: Star Force 1 never managed to get me to care enough about the game to progress beyond the end of the story, whereas Star Force 3 has seen me tackling every boss I can track down in order to collect all their cards.  To be honest, after earning the Forte mark on my copy of Battle Network 5, Star Force 1 seemed ridiculously lackluster in every department… but that’s another rant for another time.  (For what it’s worth, I’m of the opinion that Star Force 3 is what Star Force 1 should have been like.)

So all this got me thinking: what’s the secret formula?  What are the 11 herbs and spices a video game needs to get me hooked enough to want to gobble down every last byte?  Okay, enough Colonel Sanders references, I think you get the idea.

I think the first key element is a good story as a hook.  I’ll talk more about this in another article, but if a game lacks a compelling story, it’s not as likely to draw me in.  Naturally, many old-school arcade titles are exempt from this rule; they didn’t have nearly as much space to devote to things like story and worldbuilding… and yet Pac-Man fanfiction exists.  Seriously.  Go look it up if you don’t believe me.

So yeah.  Story is important.  For many people there’s also a social aspect to these games.  In some cases it’s built into the game intentionally; back when it was new, Pokemon was heralded for its innovation in encouraging its players to work with others to complete all the game’s goals.  Ironically, “pokemon-ified” is now thrown around almost as an insult, implying that a game isn’t “complete” if it has multiple versions with minor gameplay differences between them.

Oddly enough, this is a complaint that has been levelled at the Battle Network and Star Force series since BN3, which was the first game in the Blue Bomber’s franchise to go this route.  I say “oddly” because there is no game in either series that requires the player to make in-game trades with others in order to complete the chip/card libraries.  It can and does make the collection process go faster, but you can still solo your way through the game and collect everything yourself.

One interesting note is that a lot of games that focus on collection for their completion actually hold back until after the story mode is completed.  In some cases, finishing the story actually unlocks an epilogue chapter of sorts, which can serve as either a post script or an entirely new threat to the world/universe/internet.  In other cases it’s a bit more freeform but almost every example provides you with Infinity Plus One gear or other such Bragging Rights.  Oddly enough the only real use for this sort of stuff often is to blitz through earlier areas of the game as quickly as possible, since half the time it’s banned from any sort of multiplayer anyway for being such an unfair advantage.  You know, kind of like how legendaries are banned from participating in Battle Frontier events in Pokemon.  What’s the point of collecting all these awesome dudes if they can’t even help me win the challenge modes?

On a related topic, Square deserves a mention for popularizing New Game Plus.  This was a mode that allowed you to take all of your progress from your first complete playthrough and carry it over to a new game.  In the case of games like Chrono Trigger, this allowed you to easily see all the various game endings.  Personally, I always enjoyed taking my awesome gear and cleaning house on the early stages of the game, gleefully one-shotting bosses that had been such a headache the first time around.

With all these incentives to complete a game, it’s easy to overlook the roadblocks.  Not least of which is the dreaded Mandatory Sidequest.  Let me get this straight: The world is in peril.  I am the only hero capable of stopping said peril.  And you want me to haul lumber halfway across the world map, or else I can’t cross the only functional bridge leading to the next continent?

Riiiiiight.

Two other roadblocks to completion have been heavily influenced by the MMO genre: rare spawns and low drop rates.  While primarily problems with that particular genre, they can be even bigger issues in non-persistent-world games.  I’ve been playing through the latest DS entry in the Zelda series, Spirit Tracks, lately, and I’ve discovered that upgrading the various parts of your train require combinations of various treasures you find randomly all over the place.  The trouble is, in my experience that’s exactly what the treasures are: random.  They’ll occasionally pop up in jars or (possibly) drop off slain monsters, but there’s no apparent guarantee that a particular treasure will drop at any given time.

As you can imagine, this makes it extremely difficult to complete any of the train sets without amassing cash somewhere in the 5-digit range to purchase lottery tickets, which, incidentally, only give you a chance at winning a super-rare treasure each day.  And yes, that’s day as in real-life 24-hour day.  Hardly a solid case for replay value.

But really, when it comes down to the core of things, whether or not you’re a completionist is completely determined by the player.  Some of us just want to wring every last ounce of fun and enjoyment out of a game (though if it’s something of a collection grind, your mileage may vary).  Others are content to finish a story and move on to the next thing.  After all, it’s your game; play it how you like.

And now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go back to my copy of Battle Network 5 now; there’s the matter of a Mega Chip or two I’m still lacking.

Because that’s how I operate.