So what changed? Well, I ran out of games to play. I had completed absolutely everything available to me at that point in time, and the only way I had to play games I hadn’t played before would have been to buy another console (which would have been tough financially speaking). I also had stopped heavily playing MMORPGs at that time as my friends had become too busy with their lives and playing online alone was not as fun. So the only way I had was to wait for new releases I was interested in. But in the meantime, I would just revisit games I enjoyed and play them all over again, something I always did anyway from time to time for pleasure.
But then I thought, since I’m gonna play games I already completed from scratch again, why not give that trophy thing a go? I didn’t have any new games I was impatient to play anymore for now, so even if I had to go out of my way to perform longer and tedious additional tasks it was fine, I had time to do so. With this idea in mind, I decided to pick a game I wanted to play again and make it a challenge to spice things up. 

I also noticed that it added a bit more substance to the game for me. I probably had some predispositions being a completionist from the beginning, but it felt quite satisfying to unlock these trophies as I actively tried to go after them. It felt like new quests and objectives had been added to the game, giving it yet another layer to explore that I had ignored until then. For instance, while I naturally aimed at beating every boss and enemy that a game had to offer, here I had to not just beat them, but be able to grind them as well. I’m thinking about the giant tortoises in FF13 for instance. I had defeated one or two the first time I had completed the game, but here I had to farm them in order to get their rare material to upgrade all weapons for all characters. Same for the battle challenges. I had cleared everything on my first run, but not with full star ratings. So far, my idea of fully completing a game was to find all secrets, get all endings, and win all battles, including the optional ones, in the maximum difficulty settings. I did not, however, care for anything that was not necessary to achieve those goals, such as getting the ultimate weapons for characters I don’t use anyway or get maximum ratings or score, or doing it fast. As long as I would get everything I wanted and beat everything a game had to offer, I considered it completed (except for games I played dozens of time such as Final Fantasy 7 where I even had silly goals of getting every item in the game 99 times whevener possible, sometimes I did go far way before I got interested in achievements). 

Here, I was reminded that games could go even further than simple completion concept I had rolled with for years, and though it was quite tedious at times, I really enjoyed it and was happy to see even more potential in games and my way of approaching them. Now I could level up as a completionist, for better or worse, and get to do things I had not bothered with until then too much such as being able to complete things faster and being able to not just beat things but be able to farm them with great efficiency, and focus more on my gameplay to get better scores in general. In the end, what started as a little experiment would lead to further growth as a gamer.

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