I’m a completionist at heart, so to say I’m grateful to have a job where I get paid to play the heck out of my favorite games is a massive understatement. I landed my current role just before the launch of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and I read along excitedly as those with prelaunch codes explored this revamped Hyrule in the days before I could do it myself. When I finally booted the game up on launch day, I didn’t even make it off the Great Sky Island because I was busy questing for the first set of in-game armor (and getting lost in the process) so I could write the guide on it ASAP.

I was new in my role, and Tears of the Kingdom was performing expectedly well - I really wanted to knock this out of the park. And so, I bested all 152 Shrines and then located their correlated Lightroots before taking to the sky to find all the Zonai Device Dispensers, too. I found all the armor sets, and then I upgraded them one by one. I braved the Depths for Bargainer Statues, trekked across the oversized overworld in search of all the Stables, made every single dish in the recipe book, and even advertised for President Hudson in all 81 weird, remote locations. Addison, my guy, who exactly do you think will see a billboard on this random rock in the middle of the Hebra Mountains?

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But what I never did with Tears of the Kingdom was finish the game. According to my Switch, I spent 410 hours in Hyrule going here, there, and everywhere - except, that is, to Ganondorf. After almost two and a half real time weeks, by the time I had finished all my guides, I was too OP to find any actual challenge in the game. Besides, Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life was coming out, so I moved from Hyrule to the Forgotten Valley without ever beating the big bad.

Underpowered, And Happy To Be

It’s now been almost a year since Tears of the Kingdom launched, and my job has changed quite a lot since then. One of the things I do now is cover events, and both me and the folks from Critical Role will be at Anime NYC in August. As I researched everyone’s work from outside the group in the hopes of sitting down with them at the con, smiling as I recognized characters and titles from their resumes, I realized that I never saw Matthew Mercer’s name in the credits for TOTK because I never actually got to them.

So I began a new save, determined to grind only as much as I needed and finish the story once and for all. I still need the towers, some Shrines, and various armor - but not all of them. I don’t have to collect every single little thing there is in the game; I already did. Now, when I landed in Hyrule for a second time and Pyrrah told me to start heading up to the Wind Temple, I beelined for Rito Village instead of meandering and going almost anywhere else like I did last year. I met Hestu on the way out, but I’m certainly not going to collect as many Korok Seeds as I did before. Love your dance, buddy, but I won’t be seeing it so much this time around.

At the same time as I dove back into Tears of the Kingdom in my free time, I was also covering the most recent Stardew Valley update for work. We’ve got guides on almost everything else - trust me, I made our directory for the game - but what we didn’t have when the update launched was information on how to do the game’s Joja Route. I’ve written more in-depth with my experience in another article, but it flipped the game I’ve known and loved totally on its head. Instead of completing all the Community Center bundles in that game, I was in a race to make as much money as I could, no matter how I had to do it.

Changing How You Play Games Refreshes Those Old Faithful Titles

I’ve been a completionist since I was a kid, consistently pouring through printed game guides, consulting the glossy pages of magazines to ensure I got everything before approaching a game’s final boss. To be the one to write them nowadays feels like a privilege, of course, but it’s not exactly conducive to taking your time with a new title.

Forcing myself to change how I approached both Tears of the Kingdom and Stardew Valley, though, simultaneously made me appreciate them that much more. I love my job, but it’s not always possible to find time to stop and smell the roses in a game when there’s always another article to write, more data to consider, more screenshots to grab, more, more, more. Normally, given my lifelong drive to 100 percent the games I play, that’s perfectly fine by me - it’s why I applied to write for TG in the first place.

Taking off the completionist goggles, though, refreshed my love for games which I worried had grown stale. They’re the first two titles I’m trying this with, but who knows? Maybe I’ll continue enjoying the occasional pause of just playing a game. No achievements to chase, no recordings to set, and no expectations other than that I just simply enjoy myself.

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