When trying to complete a game, what is it that we want to get out of it? It has been my experience that in the process of completing a game, I tend to start to see it differently. The aspects I might have enjoyed on a first go-around begin to corrode the longer the game asks me to focus on them. When I try to complete a game, I am after two things. I seek, firstly, a kind of control over the game experience. I want to know how the game ticks. What secrets does the game still have? What mechanics have yet to be fully explored or mastered after a first playthrough of the game’s narrative? Secondly, if I’ve enjoyed something to such an extent that I want to complete it, I think by necessity it means I want to signal my enjoyment of it, whether to myself, or to a lesser extent, others.

With all that said, Yakuza 4 is a hard game to talk about. It got me thinking anyway – about quite a few things. Because on the one hand, I think it has the raw potential to be the best entry in the series (that I’ve played so far, starting from 0). Four unique characters, each with their own viewpoints on the Japanese underworld? Each with their own dynamic, interesting, and fun fighting styles? Each character has their own world they fight to protect, and are all tied by a common – oh? What’s that? The links get pretty tenuous? And… the world they each fight to protect barely has time to sink in before we get shuffled along to the next character? Oh, and that’s before we even mention that Yakuza 4’s relationship to women is possibly the most problematic it has been thus far in the series.

For every good idea Yakuza 4 has, it seems determined to squander that advantage. This results in a game that feels like it could have been much more. For the first time, I feel that the Yakuza series has given us a game that doesn’t really know how to stick the landing. This is not to say that I dislike Yakuza 4. Far from it. I ended up investing about seventy hours in it. It hardly feels fair to complain about something that held my attention for that long, over a prolonged period of time. I kept coming back to Yakuza 4. It ended up being a good escape for me. But a discomforting formula has begun to creep into the series at this point. It’s not that the gameplay tires me – there’s still so much fun to be had there. And there are many great moments in the narrative. Plenty of character moments to enjoy. But most of those are derailed in the last few hours of the game.

Putting that aside, Yakuza 4 demands that you take time to master its mechanics in order to complete it. You must know how to play a variety of minigames, from mahjong to golf; you must do all of the training missions with every character to learn all of their abilities; a player is made to complete every side mission and beat a bevy of optional bosses to proclaim their mastery over the game. A single game in a long, long franchise. What, then, is the point? Is a sense of “mastery” enough? I did enough to get 100% on the achievement list, while avoiding doing absolutely everything in the game’s completion list (though I did do a lot). Much of that was tiring busywork – running a cabaret club in this game is as repetitive as you can get.

While playing, I was drawn to a few different games still sitting on my shelf, gathering dust, waiting to be played. What is it that kept me fixed to Yakuza 4, even when new experiences were waiting for me? Completionism is generally looked on as a negative experience; just searching “game completionism” on Google returns results like “Being a completionist is so tiring”, “Being an obsessive completionist ruining games for me”, “Completionism mentality is a plague upon gaming industry”, “Confessions of a semi-reformed video game completionist”, and videos like “Five Reasons Being a Video Game Completionist Sucks”. There is no shortage of people (like myself) fretting about game completionism. I am certainly much better than I once was – I am no longer compelled to keep playing a game I am not enjoying. But why do I suffer through a few hours of extra drudgery at the end of a game I’ve otherwise enjoyed? It leaves a sour taste in my mouth. Even knowing I enjoyed wandering the streets of Kamurocho for the nth time, how can I recommend the experience to others, if they might get sucked into managing a hostess club and wasting their precious time? Do I expect others to have more self control than me? Probably! But it’s still a path I am weary to tread.

As I get better at recognizing my own compulsive flaws when it comes to video game consumption, my desire to play through and complete games as much as possible fades. But still, sometimes the idea that a “100%” marker can signal, truly, that a game is shelved. If it is shelved, then, you can put it fully out of your mind. You can say “okay, it’s done. I never ever have to look at that game, or install it, again”. But is that the right way to approach video games? Probably not.

Giannis Georgiou, writing on GameDeveloper, compares completing a game to hedonism, but truly completing a game to OCD. He continues, prompting the question: “[i]s this tendency something skin-deep or the tip of some mysterious iceberg that reaches unexplored depths of our existential angst”? Georgiou’s ultimate argument rests with the idea that games offer an existential balm for our troubled souls. In a way, games are vehicles with which we can obtain some kind of control over our wild lives, which I can’t disagree with. When everything feels capricious and up for grabs, it is comforting to return to a video game experience, which is algorithmic, able to be managed. We can press a button and get a comfortable response. And we can do everything in a game. In life, we can’t. We always miss out on things. But even if a person’s game is designed to make you miss things, you can always restart it and do another playthrough, as in the case of Pathologic 2. That game is designed around resisting player agency, forcing you to choose how to spend your time. Yet restarting or reloading a save remains an option. In video games, we are still in a privileged position of control.

I certainly do not always get that position of control out of my daily life. Completionism is not the balm it used to be for a younger version of myself, because just having the time to play games is significant enough to me. But I know there are plenty of games I will never complete. Plenty of games I have shelved, never to return to. I’ll never get all the achievements on a game like Europa Universalis IV, for instance – that would take thousands of hours and maybe a significant chunk of the rest of my life, time I do not feel I owe. The sense of control I get would not be worth the feeling of time having been wasted. But nonetheless despite Yakuza’s repetitive tasks across each game, I am compelled to complete each and every one. It is definitely a way to demonstrate my love for the series at this point, but I am the only one for whom that matters. The little niggling thought in my brain is – at what point do I stop?

Will I really go through each Yakuza game, regardless of what order, and 100% them all? Will I even one day reinstall Yakuza 4 and do the tasks I didn’t complete? I’m not sure. Who knows what the future will bring. But completionism remains a large question for me, revolving around my entire hobby. It still assuredly brings me joy, but does the joy I receive at the end resonate? Why not just do all the stuff I find fun, leave the repetitive or frustrating stuff, and call it quits there? Because that way the game wins? Is that really a good enough reason?

I’d be curious to hear from others and your relationships to completing games. Has there ever been a game you went above and beyond for? It might be interesting to share these experiences with one another, to draw closer to some kind of universal reason – if one does exist.

I am left sitting at the gates of another 100% playthrough, this time for the Silent Hill 2 remake. Is playing through this enormous survival horror game a minimum of four times really justifiable? Shouldn’t I just play through something else?

Probably.