1103: One Hundred Percent

I very rarely “100%” the games I play. The reason for this is that in many cases, doing so involves a lot of abject tedium and just stops being fun after a while. Often it requires the systematic use of a walkthrough to find all the hidden packages/shoot all the pigeons/see all the events, and once you start playing with a walkthrough next to you, I often feel you’re missing out on part of the game’s fun — discovery.

And yet I find myself tempted to pursue all of the endings in Hyperdimension Neptunia Mk2 simply because it’s one of the most enjoyable, entertaining games I’ve played for a very long time. Whether or not this means I will actually play through the whole thing enough times to get each separate ending or just cheat the system with a well-timed save I haven’t decided yet… but I do sort of want to see all the different endings and all the content on offer.

An exception to the 100% rule is visual novels. I’ll usually try and see everything a visual novel has to offer before moving on, because it’s often quite straightforward to do so — though in games with a huge number of decision points like School Days HQ, it’s often quite a time-consuming process. I have, to date, 100%ed several visual novels, though, including Katawa Shoujo and Kana Little Sister. When I finished them, I did feel satisfied that I’d seen everything the game had to offer because, in those cases, very little felt like filler.

In the case of RPGs, though, a lot of that additional content to push you up towards the magic 100% figure is very grindy, rather dull and has nothing to do with the story. But in some cases, the game can wrap you up in its world and its systems enough for that to not matter. Final Fantasy VII is the earliest example I can think of that my friends and I worked all the way through and acquired (almost) all of the secret stuff — all the hidden materias, all the nightmarish Chocobo breeding and at least a good attempt at the secret areas and bosses. We loved that game so much we didn’t want to stop playing; pursuing these time-consuming, ultimately irrelevant and often game-breaking sidequests meant we could continue playing for longer, so we did. Then we played it again. To date, I have no idea how my friends and I found time to complete Final Fantasy VII as many times as we did.

So far as Hyperdimension Neptunia Mk2 goes, a single playthrough is apparently relatively short (for an RPG, anyway) and thus charging through it multiple times isn’t out of the question. The advent of the “New Game+” mode means that you can carry a bunch of stuff over from game to game, too; given that a number of the endings are dependent on some gradually-increasing relationship statistics that will likely be a bit of a pain to achieve in a single playthrough without some serious grinding, it almost makes sense to play it through several times to make building up these values a more natural process. Hmm. Hmm.

Oh, what the hell. I saw all four endings of Nier (and had my save file deleted by the game to prove it) and enjoyed the experience hugely. (Yes, I enjoyed Nier.) It is but a small jump from four different endings to seven, right?

Right?

Place your bets now on how many I get through before I give up.