When I was encroaching my 100th Platinum Trophy, I thought to myself that this milestone Trophy deserves to be one that I will feel proud of and well-represented by. This point in my life occurred just weeks before the launch of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Anyone who knows me will know my love for the franchise. This would be perfect, I thought.
There were a fair few games that released before Sept. 1, one of which being Madden 16. Yes, I play Madden. I focused on this game as much as I could. The online Trophies for Madden are always the hardest ones to earn on their lists, and I never dreamed I would get through them on my first shot; but I did. So, in light of that, I let the game sit with one remaining Trophy so that Madden 16 didn’t become my 100th Platinum. I hated waiting, because up until that point I had just popped a Platinum and walked away without a thought outside of that fact, as can be seen from my trophy profile.
Looking back on it, I’m over the moon that I waited.
I played a bunch of other games alongside MGS V, but I didn’t finish any of those Trophy lists until I completed the list I wanted to have as my milestone. While this may not be important to some, I have taken great pride in my Trophy figures, and having an MGS game as such a milestone still brightens my day. In fact, the Platinum called “Legend” also shares two more points of interest for me: In hours, it was my longest Platinum, and it was my first Platinum on my MGS V PS4.
Something changed at that point for me, though. I didn’t see Trophies like I had before Legend.
I went back and phished through my entire list, checking out the games that had gotten me here in the first place. I saw a great deal of good and memorable times on that list: Killzone 3 with my friends; Final Fantasy X for hours on end; all the MGS games excluding Guns of the Patriots; Motorstorm RC in its small-time glory; and the original InFamous, my first-ever Platinum; to name a few. These all represented me in some way that made me proud to look back on them.
What killed me, though, was the amount of Platinums that I hated to my core. I remembered how relieving it was to hear that final Trophy pop, indicating I would never have to play those god-awful games again. There were games like Megamind, Jurassic: The Hunted, Wonderbook: Book of Spells, Up, Heavy Fire: Afghanistan, Battleship, NASCAR Unleashed, Green Lantern: Rise of the Manhunters, and Terminator Salvation. Regarding the latter, I remembered two friends playing through Terminator once while snockered, and they enjoyed the hilarity of how terrible it was while I had to play through it twice, because I misread a Trophy guide. That one burned; and these games, no matter how much I hated them represented me now–though I never stooped low enough to play Hannah Montana: The Movie.
There were also incomplete lists for games I played for the sake of Trophies. These games were either so bad or so boring that even I couldn’t get through them. To name a few, there were games like Turbo: Super Stunt Squad, King Fu Panda 2, Smart As, Midway Arcade Origins, and Tekken Tag Tournament HD, all sitting in my list with either a miniscule Trophy percentage or one frustrating Trophy short of completion. I had a friend who loved, and still loves, Tekken games, and he kept telling me during this time how easy those games were to play. I couldn’t command the control scheme well, so the harder Trophies became so stigmatized by my frustration that I gave up on the franchise as a whole after that.
I recalled how much time those frustrating games had taken to complete and, without being able to fight it, I compared that to how many incomplete lists of Trophies I had for games I loved. I had wasted so much time on bad games for the sake of these rewards that I had ultimately missed out on finishing a great deal of games that reflected me more as a person and as a gamer. I have yet to earn any Platinum Trophies in any title in the Tales of series, and I live and breathe for those games. I also wanted to get both Catherine and Bayonetta’s Platinums done, because those were two surprising games I never thought I’d like. There’s Gun of the Patriots, of course. Then there are games like Ni No Kuni that I haven’t even started yet, lost in the world of bad Trophy lists and game backlog.
After all the time I spent on both good and bad games, I see the Trophy list as more than a bunch of digital, intangible rewards. That entire list is a representation of what I have done as a cognitive gamer. Like life, memories don’t become milestones until they hold some sort of significance. I remember plenty of isolated thoughts from when I was young, including when I played random games as a child below ten. I played plenty of games before then, too; but I didn’t begin to have this representation, which the entire world can look at and judge me over, until the PlayStation 3 introduced Trophies.
Now, looking back at that track record, I want to change how I come across as a gamer. I want to play the games I enjoy and I want to earn those Platinums so they can represent me rather than me represent the reward itself. I’m going to go back and earn those Platinums on games that, for far too long, have gone neglected. This is me trying to fix the wrongs of my angsty gaming youth.
Here’s looking at you, Guns of the Patriots.