When completion is suffering.
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00:00 There are few things more satisfying to gamers than fully completing a game.
00:03 But sometimes it can feel like the developers have made it their mission
00:07 to make getting to that 100% completion rate as miserable as possible.
00:12 With that in mind then, I'm Josh from WhatCulture.com,
00:14 and these are the 10 Worst Video Games to 100%.
00:18 Number 10 - Assassin's Creed Valhalla
00:21 Assassin's Creed as a franchise has never been all that fun to 100%,
00:25 but it seems that for whatever reason, it just keeps getting worse and worse and worse with every new entry.
00:32 Probably because the games themselves just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
00:36 Which leads us to the newest installment, Assassin's Creed Valhalla.
00:40 It has all of the same fixings as other Assassin's Creed games,
00:43 bloated out to a ridiculous size, but there's even more collectibles this time around.
00:49 In fact, in total there are 782 collectibles throughout the whole game,
00:54 and with about 21 different regions to explore, it can be a lot to handle to say the least.
01:00 However, it was even worse when the game first launched,
01:03 because there were two collectibles that were just completely missable.
01:07 That's right, you could be at the very end of the game, collect 780 out of these 782 different things,
01:14 and then find out that you would never ever be able to get the other two without restarting the whole thing.
01:20 Now if this was me, I would quite literally erupt like a tiny little hairy volcano.
01:26 This was such a bad problem in fact, that the developers had to patch the game
01:29 in order for people to be able to actually collect those two objects.
01:33 And it makes you wonder why, after all the different entries in this franchise,
01:38 they still can't ever seem to get the completionist aspect of it right.
01:42 Number 9, Batman Arkham Knight.
01:44 Oh, the Riddler Trophies, those genius, fantastic, absolutely awful Riddler Trophies.
01:53 Having Riddler's involvement in the Arkham series be connected to the collectibles of the games was initially a great idea.
02:00 But after the first title, the devs went absolutely stone cold berserk when it came to adding in all manner of them.
02:07 This is most apparent in Arkham Knight, the last title of the Arkham series for now at least.
02:12 With a wide open Gotham to explore, and with a giant focus on the Batmobile,
02:16 the people at Rocksteady decided to take the opportunity to fill the map up completely with these little riddles.
02:23 With a good chunk of them being locked behind obtuse puzzles, that you almost certainly needed a guide to get.
02:29 With trophies entirely dependent on certain gadgets that aren't mandatory for the main story,
02:33 the Batmobile needed to be used in a million different ways that may not even make sense,
02:39 and the sheer volume of them will guarantee that they will be the absolute last thing you do in the game,
02:44 and will guarantee to give you a migraine.
02:47 The worst kicker though, well, that's that the secret ending that you get after you 100% the game as a reward,
02:53 absolutely blows, and barely even makes sense. What a whimper for this franchise to go out on.
03:00 Number 8, Red Dead Redemption 2.
03:03 Red Dead Redemption 2 is one of the greatest games of its generation.
03:06 Telling the tale of a gang of outlaws slowly coming undone thanks to their crimes catching up to them,
03:11 and the rising madness of their leader.
03:13 However, it can be a very, very hard title to 100%.
03:17 Why? Because it's so freaking big. Like, capital B big.
03:21 Like that Tom Hanks movie where he plays the piano with his feet big.
03:25 The map of the Wild West is dense and vast, and it's incredibly easy to miss a giant chunk of what Red Dead 2 has to offer because of that.
03:33 You can pass by side missions without ever knowing they were there,
03:36 or you can be introduced to collectibles that you'll never even see again.
03:40 I mean, seriously, how do you find those dinosaur bones without a guide?
03:44 The game, of course, seems to know this, and is a little bit lenient with its requirements to get 100%,
03:50 but even with that, it can be impossible to find all of the cigarette cards you need,
03:55 hunt down all of the legendary animals to catch the legendary fish,
03:58 and to find the collectibles tied to side missions.
04:02 And that's not even mentioning all of the combat challenges and stuff.
04:05 So if you want to be a real Legend of the West, just know you're going to have to earn it.
04:10 Number 7 - Returnal
04:11 Returnal is one of the best shooters of the past few years.
04:14 It was a personal favourite of mine as well.
04:17 The very first roguelike to properly get me into roguelikes.
04:21 But the procedurally generated nature of its level layouts, weapon drops, and yes, collectible drops,
04:27 made it a nightmare to 100%, and not in the kind of way the game intended.
04:32 The two collectibles that were particularly difficult to find the final entries of
04:37 were the audio recordings and the lore glyphs.
04:39 While the bulk of these naturally do show up in your playthrough, others existed in unique rooms,
04:46 and it was total RNG luck as to whether they would show up on your run.
04:50 Consequently, you can spend 30 hours completing the main game,
04:53 and then another 20 rerunning rooms and not making any progress at all.
04:58 Simply keeping an eye out for a single room that you had a minuscule chance of spawning.
05:04 At release, the actual percentage chance of these dropping was ridiculously small.
05:09 Like seriously, I must have played that first area literally hundreds of times
05:13 before the one I needed actually spawned.
05:16 Though the devs did drop patches that apparently alleviated this task.
05:20 Still, for such a good game, the memories of 100%ing it can absolutely taint an otherwise flawless experience.
05:27 Number 6 - Ghosts 'n Goblins
05:30 When you think about the hardest games in history, Ghosts 'n Goblins will no doubt be on that list.
05:35 And not only will it be on there, but it'll be high up the ranking as well.
05:39 Starring Sir Arthur as he fights his way through the supernatural terrors haunting his kingdom,
05:44 this title is absolutely tough as nails, unforgiving, and just downright punishing.
05:50 More than living up to its reputation.
05:52 With crazy enemy placement, death in two hits, and very little room for error,
05:58 beating Ghosts 'n Goblins at all is a crazy accomplishment.
06:02 And it will take a lot of dead monsters, a lot of broken sets of armor, and a lot of luck in order to do it.
06:08 But in order to fully complete the game, you actually have to beat it twice.
06:12 That's because after getting to the end the first time around, you're then transported all the way back to the beginning,
06:18 and now you have to go through everything again on an even harder difficulty to see the true ending.
06:23 And yep, if you're thinking, "Well, I'll probably just look it up on YouTube," you are absolutely right.
06:28 That is definitely what you should do.
06:31 Number 5 - The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild
06:33 There are few games that absolutely nailed the joy of the open world genre like The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild did.
06:40 Anything you saw, you could interact with, any direction you went to, there was something there.
06:44 The world was your oyster.
06:46 And because of that, it was a completionist's nightmare.
06:49 The problem with having a game stuffed to the gills with content is that you need to explore all of it to see everything.
06:55 Hidden side missions, shrines, pieces of content you would never naturally see if you weren't digging through every inch of the map,
07:02 this game had it all.
07:03 And then, there were those Korok Seeds.
07:06 For the love of everything holy, there were those damn Korok Seeds.
07:11 These things were everywhere, with a grand total of 900 of them hidden in the game.
07:17 900 of them!
07:19 And to make matters worse, the developers knew how incredibly dumb getting all of them would be,
07:24 and that's why if you did collect them all, you would receive a gift of friendship from the person who tasked you with it in the first place,
07:32 and that gift of friendship is literally just a piece of poop.
07:36 It's a piece of poop, that's all you get.
07:38 900 of them, sorted, done, boosh, what's me reward?
07:41 It's literally poop.
07:43 Cool, love this, I'm gonna shut this game off and throw my Switch into the sea.
07:47 Number 4 - Dead Space 2
07:48 Dying is a certainty in Dead Space 2.
07:51 With Hero Isaac's fight for survival against the Necromorphs, you are bound to get torn apart in incredibly gruesome fashion
07:57 by the horrific monsters more times than you can count.
08:00 This certainty of dying in the game then is why it's so hard to get a 100% completion,
08:04 because it also has the challenge of all challengers waiting for those that want to get every single achievement.
08:10 The "hard to the core" achievement sounds simple enough on paper, just beat the story on Hardcore mode.
08:16 Simple, piece of piss, right?
08:18 Well, no, not when you find out what it entails, because it gets much, much more complicated.
08:24 See, Hardcore mode is of course the hardest difficulty available, with fewer supplies and more deadly and aggressive enemies.
08:31 What makes it an absolute pain in the ass though, is that you only get a grand total of three saves for the entirety of the game,
08:38 with zero checkpoints otherwise.
08:40 This means that if you die, you can lose literal hours of progress depending on when you last saved.
08:45 In a title that is already not for the faint of heart, this challenge weeded players out even more.
08:51 If you completed it, you earned all the admiration possible in my eyes.
08:55 Number 3 - Crash Bandicoot 4 - It's About Time
08:58 After years of silence from the orange marsupial, Crash finally returned in a brand new adventure a few years ago,
09:04 ready to continue where he left off by platforming, spinning and smashing his way through level after level,
09:10 as he jumped through the time stream.
09:12 However, the developers at Toys for Bob went a little too crazy when it came to one aspect of this Crash game,
09:17 and that of course is the collecting.
09:20 See, the previous Crash entries were well known for their enticing challenge to get 100% completion.
09:25 Smashing every box and collecting every time trial in order to see the true ending and unlock the secret levels.
09:31 Crash 4, however, took that and bumped it way past 11 and all the way to like a million.
09:36 And that is not hyperbole.
09:38 This time around, you had six gems per level to collect,
09:41 VHS tapes that required you to not die at all before you got to them per level,
09:46 some of the hardest time trials in the history of the series per level,
09:50 perfect relics that required you to master every level,
09:53 and you had to do all of this, except the tapes, twice thanks to the inverted levels.
09:59 This was a whole lot of capital C content, and as a result, it could take you more than 50 hours to do it all.
10:06 And that, in my opinion, was a terrible decision in an otherwise perfect platformer.
10:11 And that's mostly because I couldn't hack it myself. Dark Souls has nothing on this.
10:16 Number 2, The Stanley Parable.
10:18 The Stanley Parable is one of the best indie games ever,
10:20 and one of the best experiences you can possibly have with any video game ever, really.
10:25 It's an absolutely hilarious, yet insightful look at the nature of choice in games,
10:30 with the title giving you control of Stanley as the narrator reacts to everything you do.
10:34 It can be incredibly hard to know if you've even gotten every ending,
10:38 but even putting that aside, it's not an easy game to 100%, despite its length.
10:43 And that's because, by design, the game is terrible for achievement hunting.
10:47 The original game had an achievement called "Unachievable" that was literally impossible to unlock.
10:52 There was nothing you could do to actually earn it in the game,
10:56 and the only way for you to get it was to go into the Stanley Parable's files and hack it so it would appear.
11:01 On top of that, there was an achievement called "Go Outside",
11:04 which required you to not boot the game up for five whole years.
11:08 And this achievement was actually modified for the new Ultra Deluxe version of the game,
11:12 which cranked this bad boy up to 10.
11:14 So yeah, this is a fantastic game everyone should experience, just please don't try to 100% it.
11:20 Number 1 - Rock Band 2
11:22 Ah, the days where Rock Band and Guitar Hero were at the top
11:25 were some of the most simple fun a gamer could have.
11:27 Getting a few buddies around, a few plastic accessories, and just jamming out together
11:31 was always a great time, and Green Day Rock Band in particular will live in my heart forever,
11:37 even though it wasn't that good.
11:39 But despite this joy, there was a part of Rock Band 2 that caused utter suffering.
11:44 A part that erased any memories of your fun times and made you wonder
11:47 why you even bought the damn game in the first place.
11:50 This part, of course, is the appropriately named "Bladder of Steel" achievement.
11:55 You earned this achievement by going through the entirety of the endless setlist.
11:59 You had to go through every song without failing,
12:01 and you had to do the entire thing without pausing,
12:04 which meant you had to do it all in one sitting.
12:07 And how long would that take, I hear you ask?
12:09 Well, over six hours of rocking out.
12:12 So yeah, getting this achievement is not easy in the slightest,
12:15 and if you messed up one song or accidentally paused,
12:18 you'd have to restart the entire process again.
12:21 So please spare a moment to think of the poor bladders
12:24 of the people who fully completed this game.
12:26 So that's our list.
12:27 I want to know what you guys think down in the comments below.
12:29 Which of these games did you 100%?
12:31 And were there any nightmare titles you think I missed off here?
12:34 While you're down there as well, could you please give us a like, share, subscribe,
12:37 and head over to whatculture.com for more lists and news like this every single day.
12:41 Even if you don't know I've been Josh, thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you soon.