1591: Beat It

I beat the “bad” ending of The Witch and the Hundred Knight this evening. I’m not going to talk about that right now, though, because I feel there’s at least one MoeGamer post in that game and its interesting story. What I instead wanted to talk about was the idea of “beating” games.

I love finishing games. I love the satisfaction of fighting the final boss — usually, if the game’s sound team has any sense, accompanied by the best piece of music in the game — followed by the story’s conclusion and the credits roll. Well-designed games feature satisfying conclusions that wrap everything up nicely, but at the same time leave you a little sad that you’ll be leaving the main cast behind. Even poorly designed games can give a palpable sense of relief once they’re all over.

Interestingly, though, I don’t seem to see an awful lot of people talking about beating games. There’s occasional talk of scoring a Platinum trophy — usually from trophy whores who make a point of earning Platinum trophies on even games they don’t particularly like — but I very rarely see people publicly expressing satisfaction that they’ve completed a game, seen its end sequence and have finally achieved some closure.

I wonder why that is? Perhaps it’s to do with the excessive spoilerphobia we have on the Internet these days. You can’t mention a single plot point from recent popular media — be it games, movies or TV — without someone complaining about spoilers. It’s a fair concern, if we’re being honest; it’s always nice to have a few surprises in an unfamiliar story. But it does make talking about interesting stories extremely challenging at times. How can you talk about School Days without talking about the ending where Kotonoha kills Sekai? How can you talk about Nier without mentioning the bit where it deletes your save file piece by piece in front of you as your character is erased from existence? What discussion of Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory is complete without mentioning the fact that the main villain is a disgruntled, embittered Atari? (Okay, maybe it’s just me who cares about that last one.)

Or perhaps people simply don’t finish games as much as they used to. And if so, that’s rather sad: all those dangling plot threads, ever to be unresolved; all those final bosses, waiting to show you their awesome piece of battle music, ever to remain unfought; all those 20-minute staff rolls left unread.

I’m actually the opposite; I finish a whole lot more games these days than I used to. I remember one of the first games I ever beat — Super Mario World on the Super NES — and it being a huge deal. It was an even bigger deal when I got that magic “96” on the main menu: the 16-bit equivalent of earning a Platinum trophy. Despite the fantastic feeling that came from beating that game once and for all, it would be quite some time before I’d beat any others, though by the time I started getting into point-and-click adventures you couldn’t stop me from reaching the end credits of even the most stubborn games (hello, Discworld) if you tried.

I’d be interested to see the statistics for how many people beat particular games. It sort of is possible to get a general idea these days by looking at achievements — the cynical (or observant) might suggest that achievements are more a means of metrics-tracking for developers than an actual reward mechanism for the player, anyway — but it’s not always easy to get the global picture using these. I have a strange feeling that a lot of games might get started but never finished by a lot of people, and this can be at least partly attributed to the ridiculous pace with which things come out these days. In some cases, you’re barely out of the tutorial levels of one game before the Next Big Thing comes along vying for your attention, and the natural thing to do is to want to try out that Next Big Thing, which leaves the Last Big Thing languishing.

I’ve had to discipline myself pretty ruthlessly to avoid this going on. Once I start something, I try and finish it — unless I’m really not enjoying myself, in which case I’ll abandon it. Spanners have occasionally been thrown in the works by review obligations, but after the end of June I won’t have to worry about those any more, meaning I can concentrate on clearing my ample backlog. (And purchasing all the titles I mentioned yesterday, of course, along with a couple of others I’d forgotten about — Mind Zero and Hyperdimension Neptunia: Producing Perfection). For the most part, this strategy works well; I’m in the good habit of playing a game as much as I find enjoyable, then setting it aside once I’m done, perhaps to be replayed at some time in the future. For games I particularly enjoy or want to show my appreciation to, I make an effort to obtain that Platinum trophy; not only is it satisfying to know I’ve been rewarded for everything the game is offering rewards for, it also provides the aforementioned feedback to developers that someone, somewhere out there enjoyed their game enough to want to see everything it had to offer.

So, an open question to anyone reading and comment-inclined: how often do you beat games? Do you tend to focus on a single game and play it to completion, or juggle lots of games at the same time? How do you keep track of them all, if so?