Well, they say friendship is golden…
"This certifies that you have gathered no less than ten thousand carp. Please spend your time in a manner more beneficial to society. Your achievement is noteworthy for its utter lack of meaning." With heartfelt disapproval, Gallijaux & Joulet
In many games, some players strive for 100% Completion. A few of these dedicated players do it simply for bragging rights. Others do it in hopes of some big fancy reward. These games reward, alright... but that reward will definitely feel like a slap in the face.
In moments like this, rather than congratulating you on completing the game in full, the game decides to instead mock you for putting so many hours into beating it 100%, either by giving you an item or a wearable that only serves as a symbol of humiliation, or by outright telling you to get a life.
Not all of these examples need to complete the whole game itself. Sometimes, the mockery comes from taking the time to completing a needlessly-long Sidequest.
Compare Achievement Mockery, for achievements in games that serve as signs of humiliation, and Do Well, But Not Perfect, for moments that require you not to strive for perfect completion. Compare Earn Your Bad Ending, when the result of extra effort is a bad ending. Not to be confused with Easy-Mode Mockery, which is when the game makes fun of you for playing on the easiest difficulty. Related to A Winner Is You, when you receive a simple "congratulations" as reward and that's all.
Due to the nature of this trope, spoilers will not be marked. This is your only warning.
Examples:
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Action
- On the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 versions of Deadpool (2013), there's the platinum trophy earned for getting all of the other trophies: "Okay, you can sell the game now".
- Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening: While the game compliments players for SS ranking all missions on Normal and Hard, Very Hard (Special Edition) and Dante Must Die instead reward them with biting remarks:
Very Hard: All this, and you didn't break the controller!Dante Must Die: Man, you need to get out more.
- Beating Gradius III on the hardest difficulty has the game display "I'M GIVE UP YOUR APPELLATION TECHNICAL MONKEY".
- inFAMOUS: Second Son combines this with Achievement Mockery. Upon getting the platinum trophy, Delsin essentially breaks up with you.
Delsin: You know what, buddy? You and I have been through a lot, but I gotta tell ya. Officially... we're done.
- Beating In the Hunt with at least one continue has you go home and be celebrated as a hero by the remaining afloat human colony. Beating it without continuing will have you fail your escape and perish. Beating it in co-op ends with a one-on-one confrontation with the other player, and whoever wins will lead the remnant of the syndicate you're supposed to be fighting against as the new leader. If neither wins after time runs out, both players sink to the bottom of the sea.
- In Spider Man 2, you're told by Bruce Campbell that if you collect all the hint tokens, then he'll say something different when you collect them again. Collect every single one, and then go back to them, and what does he have to say? "Something Different".
- Spider-Man: The Movie: Simply beating the game has Peter Parker's last bit of ending narration urging you to go outside and play.
Action-Adventure
- The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: One of the many sidequests in the game is collecting Korok seeds, with there being a total of 900 in the game. You only need about half of these to unlock every single reward from the quest, but if you actually take the time to collect all 900 and bring them to Hestu, you are awarded with Hestu's Gift, which is a shining golden piece of Korok poop. The in-game description even says "It smells pretty bad". This joke carries over into The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom where you are awarded a slightly bigger poo after collecting 1000 Korok seeds.
- In the video game adaptation of The Lost World: Jurassic Park, if you take the time to find every DNA item in the game, you are awarded with a cutscene of Jeff Goldblum condescendingly telling you to turn off your game and get a life, as seen here
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- Paper Mario: Color Splash: During your first run-through of the Golden Coliseum area, Mario is faced against tons of enemies in the coliseum itself to get the Yellow Paint Star, while Iggy acts as the commentator. You're supposed to find a Super Star to become invincible and defeat all of the enemies instantly, but if you take the time to actually battle enemies, Iggy will become increasingly exasperated at your insistence on doing things the hard way.
Action RPG
- Played for Drama in the original Drakengard, where the more you complete of the game, the more psychotic the main character reveals himself to be and the worse the endings that you unlock become.
- Downplayed in NieR, where some of the sidequest rewards are practically useless and Weiss will criticize you for wasting your time if you take too many. Played straight for the final ending, however; completing the game after acquiring all weapons and seeing all previous endings is rewarded with having your save file erased, the only remaining evidence that you ever even played the game being a single white flower on the title screen.
Eastern RPG
- The first Arc the Lad game includes an arena that, after its role in the plot is finished, lets you grind for rewards. The last set of rewards is given to you after a total of one thousand victories: the arena announcer gives you several of the game's best accessories to take with you into the sequel, then tells you to turn off the console and get a life!
- Look Outside: You can play video games to gain special abilities by completing them. One such game, Massacre Princess Catholicon, costs twice as much as every other game you can buy, and takes by far the most time to complete. The game itself is also awful. The "special ability" you gain for completing it is "Meteor Strike", which is completely useless because it requires 999 STM to use, far more than you could possibly obtain (modding the game to give yourself 999 STM reveals the move to simply be a placeholder kick).
MMORPG
- In Final Fantasy XI, one of the things you can do is fishing. Among the quests that you can work on is one that has you fish for ten thousand carp.note Do this and you are awarded with a new fishing rod and a certificate of mockery, as shown for the page quote. The quest is also repeatable.
Miscellaneous
- Zig-zagged for There Is No Game. Winning gives you the option to forgive the narrator or not. If you choose not to, he says, "Go to hell!", but if you choose to, you don't get insulted, but you do get told to go play a game instead because that was not a game.
- We Love Katamari: Upon completing the game, the king of the cosmos gives you one more challenge, which is to collect one million roses. After spending a long time and getting a million roses, the King responds by congratulating you and calling your time spent a pointless exercise.
Platform
- The only purpose of Achievement Unlocked is to get all the achievements, but when you do so the game, while impressed by the effort you put in, is also swift to remind you there was no point to any of it.
- Gex: In the first game, there is a secret world which after clearing and then beating Rez, you are given a series of text congratulating you on beating the game 100%... or at least it sounds congratulatory at first until it starts telling you to go outside and find something else to do with your life.
- A Hat in Time: 100% completing Death Wish mode by completing all 111/114note objectives only earns the ire of The Snatcher, who at least takes joy in denying you any kind of reward outside of personal achievement.
...Huh? You want a reward? Look, kid. We've done this before. You really need to learn to negotiate up-front.
- Sly 2: Band of Thieves gives you one of these in some text after the credits roll.
Ok. That's it. You've seen everything. You won. Go outside.
Puzzle
- In Wilmot Works It Out, the achievement for completing Marathon Mode, unlocked after beating the main game, is called "Touch Grass Wilmot!"
Roguelike
- In The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, getting 100% Completion with both Expansion Packs installed unlocks the 1000000% achievement, represented by a picture of a stop sign and the description "Just Stop!"
- Dead Estate: Achieving both the "Milkbar Lads #1 Fan!" and "Goodnight" medals comes with the unlock message "You can uninstall now!"
Western RPG
- Downplayed in Dragon Age: Origins, which awards you an achievement named "Easily Sidetracked" for completing almost all of the available side quests before the endgame.
- In Jade Empire, there's a Flunky Boss battle with a Jade Golem and an endless wave of mooks. Killing the golem ends the fight, but if you keep killing mooks, the announcer gives you an impressive title every 20 kills...until the 100th kill, where he goes "Just kill the golem already!"
- The Might and Magic series has very difficult dungeons in IV and VI which are optional to complete. Doing so will earn the player the "Super GOOBER!" title. IV took it a step further as you only got the "GOOBER!" title from completing the dungeon; you needed to get a password in the final dungeon and then go back to the optional dungeon to get the "Super" added.
- Undertale does this in multiple ways. The most famous is the fact that completing the Pacifist Run after the Genocide Run results in a spoiled version of the ending. The character Flowey also mocks the player for going back to get missed content, and after the Golden Ending he warns the player that resetting the game to play again and get different endings would just undo everything they worked towards. He also says "Don't you have anything better to do?" if you keep hassling him to uncover all dialogue. The PS4 version crosses this with Achievement Mockery. Most of the trophies already make fun of the trophy system. Even the platinum trophy, which is awarded by getting all the other trophies, is called "Don't You Have Anything Better To Do?"
Wide-Open Sandbox
- Grand Theft Auto: Vice City: Complete the game one hundred percent, and you are given a t-shirt. On the t-shirt, it says "I Completed Vice City and All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt".
Non-Video Game Examples
- In The Amazing World of Gumball episode "The Console" in which a magic handheld has turned Elmore into an RPG, Gumball earns the "No Life" trophy by finding all of the Homeless Crocodile Lady's pigeons throughout the world. He says it was Worth It.
- Jarhead: A group of soldiers wonder what happens after reaching the last level of Metroid 1. One of them already knows: "Nothing. You just start all over again." Subverted though because it's inaccurate: The Metroid series doesn't actually have game levels as any area can be visited at any point in the game with appropriate upgrades, and the first Metroid game had a legitimate, if short, ending.
- In a PONY.MOV panel cartoon for Canterlot Garden, Rainbow Dash manages to get the high score in a game that involves her punching a wolf. Upon doing so, the game calls her a "Pathetic loser virgin" and tells her to get a life.
- Ready Player One (2018) invokes this to a degree: When Parzival completes and wins the virtual game set up by James Halliday, all he gets is a trip to a virtual environment by Halliday's avatar and an Anti-Escapism Aesop. It was necessary to do so to prove how dangerous the virtual game had become to its players.
- In South Park, after Stan and Kyle earn a million points on Guitar Hero, they get the message "CONGRATULATIONS! YOU... ARE... FAGS!"
- Ross Noble's Unrealtime DVD: getting a perfect score on the trivia quiz takes you to a secret part of the DVD with some bonus footage, but the congratulatory message at the end of the quiz also informs you that "You have way too much free time on your hands".
