I played Slay the Princess recently. It's a neat little game, inspired by the likes of The Stanley Parable and Disco Elysium. The core conceit is that you - the player character - are entrusted with the eponymous task, lest the Princess destroy the world... somehow. For the purposes of this post, it got me thinking about some other games and how they're formatted in such a way to encourage or discourage replaying.
(Broad spoilers on the game's structure to follow, by the way.)
I'd say Assassin's Creed 2: Brotherhood (which has so much fuckin stuff) was the turning point for me when I really stopped replaying games I had previously beaten occasionally. Before that, most games I liked I'd play through again after a few months or a year just to experience it again. I've played through FF7 maybe 3-4 times, Final Fantasy Tactics like 5 times, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night probably close to 80 although that's more a sickness in me than a reasonable count.
The point is, even without branching paths I still replayed games a few times just to re-experience them, and subsequently my memory of them is way better than of games I played not even a year ago. I can remember more moments from Metal Gear Solid 1 than Final Fantasy XVI despite there being a 20 year gap since the last time I played MGS and when I played XVI. Part of that might just be mental health-related memory issues but I'm fairly confident part of that is that I've played through MGS 3+ times.
I'm a completionist, but isn't the point of 100%ing a game to make it so that you never have to play it again?
That's the context behind why this statement kinda hit me like a brick. Nowadays I'm not compulsive 100% completionist but I'm pretty thorough; I did all the intel in FF7 Rebirth despite having major complaints about the intel sidequests as filler content without much impact on the story.
And like, yeah... I guess it does feel like the point of 100%ing a game is to never play it again. Perhaps I should consider changing my habits. I think I was happier revisiting games I particularly enjoyed instead of checking them off the list and moving on.
