Completionism

With speedplays on one side of gameplay styles, the other has completionist runs, in which the player attempts to do every little thing the game asks of them to do, and no other game prompts this style of play than the Pokemon series as it’s built around the catchphrase “Gotta Catch ‘Em All.”

I rest my Pokemon White 2 game a couple days ago, nostalgic for the pixel rendered game. Though I had been enjoying Ultra Sun, something about the pixel graphics is cute, simple, and stylized. As a kid, I was less concerned with the completionist aspect of the Pokemon games than I was with the story. To some extent, I still am when I do any first playthrough of a game, but replaying them is something else.

I forgot how much I enjoyed the habitat list in the 5th gen games, knowing what else I could find or that I hadn’t found them all yet, made it easier to stick to an area until I move on to the next spot.

The upsetting part about Pokemon games, as it’s been this way for almost the entirety of the series, is that in order to have a completionist run of the game, you either have to have both copies of the game (Ruby and Sapphire, Black and White, X and Y, etc.) to trade with in order to get the Pokemon exclusive to the other game, which renders the completionist aspect of the game impossible to fulfill on your own. This could be an attempt at making more money, instigating social connections in games, or both, but it makes it hard to have a completionist run of a game using only the game itself, similar to some of my criticism in making critical story content DLC you pay extra for.