When has a man beaten a game?

 Is it when he rolls the credits? Or is it when he experiences 100% of the developer intended content of that game? Or is it when he sets himself a stupid goal and then achieves said goal? Or is it when the game is forgotten? I was sitting here thinking what I wanted to write and also thinking about Pokopia, which is what I stopped doing to write this, and this weird and really not that funny mash up of Dr. Hiriluk’s dying speech from One Piece and my thoughts on Pokopia occurred to me, so I decided to write it out and see what I could say about it.

So, I beat Pokopia’s main story yesterday. I’ve had the game for approximately a week, and I played the fuck out of it: 55 hours in 7 days according to my profile, which is less per day than when I beat Xenoblade Chronicles X in eleven days and 160 hours of gameplay, but still a lot. I’m still playing, however, as I at minimum want to unlock every Pokemon in the game, which could be considered roughly 100% the game, although there is also a catalog of items and unlocks to get and I’m sure you could rack up some other things to do for true 100% if you wanted to. But I also have another self appointed goal, and this one is not one the game necessarily points you to doing, at least not in the way I am doing - I want to build an underground city in Palette Town, which I named Moonside.

Palette Town is the free build area in Pokopia, the one town without a main plot, but it is not entirely without direction. You start with Eevee there, and are given a set of challenges which when completed unlock various eeeveelutions, which will likely shape most peoples choices when building this custom town. It also has three plans hidden in it for giant temples that when completed spawn legendary pokemon, so most peoples Palette Towns will likely contain these temples eventually. My goal, however, innspired by Dwarf Fortress, is to dig down and mine out an underground complex, which I will then fill with these three temples and enough housing for all the Pokemon who live there, and decorate the cave with glowing stone for a cool glowy underground cave aesthetic. This will prove to be a huge effort - I managed to place the blueprint for the ice temple today and the amount of rock I need to mine out just to start building is ridiculous, not to mention the other two and anything else I want to build in this city.

So why am I doing it? Well, for fun, obviously. But I do have an issue with games. I used to always quit games right before I beat them. A big reason is likely ADHD - I get distracted and hyperfocused on something else. But I also think part of it was if I beat something, I tend to lose interest in it. By never beating games, I’m more willing to go back to them later, and thus prolong the enjoyment. Before I started streaming, I had beaten relatively few games - FF7, 8, 10, and Tactics, Earthbound, Super Mario RPG, Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2, Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, and Fallout 3 are ones I know I had beaten before streaming, I’m honestly not sure how many more. Oh, a bunch of Pokemon games. So maybe a decent amount, but far more that I played for twenty or forty or sixty hours but stopped before the final moments. But streaming made me feel like I -had- to beat games or my audience would be disappointed. Was that true? Probably not to be honest, but it gave me motivation and ultimately changed my habits so that now I tend to stick through games I like and beat them.

But I also found that once I beat a game, I pretty much always lose all motivation to play further. I’m not a 100% person. I’ve beaten FF7 probably more than ten times, yet I have beaten Emerald Weapon twice and Ruby Weapon never. Once I’ve finished the main content, even if I was super into a game and had elaborate post game plans, I usually lose motivation and move on. Sometimes I can sustain it for a while, particularly in games less story focused or with a lot of post ending story, but I only on the rarest occasions can do anything close to calling 100% of a game. This is only really a problem because I often have quite elaborate post game plans - the last time I played FF7 I wanted to master all materia and had complex post game builds planned out for my characters and intended to beat Emerald weapon for the second time and Ruby Weapon for the first. I ended up beating Emerald Weapon at like L55 before going into Midgar while still on Disc 2, put down the game for six months and then came back to beat it the game, which still quit there, and I was even streaming it so had extra motivation. Actually thats a lie, I’ve started FF7 twice since then, but thats the last time I got out of Disc 1.

So will I end up finishing either of my post game goals in Pokopia? I dunno. I hope at least to actually get all Pokemon, but I kinda doubt I’ll get my city anywhere close to complete. And if mining out area for the temples proves arduous, I may not even get all Pokemon. But I’m having fun, for now, which is all that actually matters.