Fun Grind or Chore Simulator? Every Major Gaming Franchise Ranked by How Badly They Want You to Suffer for 100%

There is a very specific kind of person who sees that little completion percentage in the corner of a game's menu and immediately feels it pulling at something deep inside their brain. Maybe that's you. Maybe you've lost weekends, relationships, and at least two pairs of good headphones to the pursuit of that sweet, sweet 100%. No judgment here — we're all in this together.

But not all completionism is created equal. Some franchises genuinely respect your time and reward your dedication with content that feels earned. Others treat you like a lab rat in a Skinner box, dangling meaningless collectibles and time-gated nonsense until you either crack or accept that you are, in fact, a chore simulator's primary demographic. We ranked them. You're welcome.

S-Tier: The Ones That Make You WANT to Do Everything

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt deserves to be at the top of this list and it knows it. CD Projekt Red built a game where side quests routinely outperform the main story, where every question mark on the map hides something actually worth discovering, and where the Gwent card collection is a full-blown addiction that nobody warned you about. Hunting down every Witcher contract doesn't feel like homework — it feels like the point. That's the S-Tier difference.

Hollow Knight earns its spot by making exploration feel like genuine discovery rather than obligation. Finding hidden rooms, bosses, and lore fragments in Hallownest rewards curiosity in a way that feels almost spiritual. Team Cherry didn't scatter collectibles across a checklist — they built a world where completionism is just what happens when you're having too much fun to stop.

A-Tier: Rewarding With Only Occasional Therapy Bills

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild sits comfortably here. Tracking down all 900 Korok seeds is, objectively, a cry for help — and the game literally mocks you for doing it (look up the reward, we won't spoil it). But shrines, memories, and side quests? Genuinely satisfying. Nintendo knew exactly what they were doing, giving you one absurd collectible as a joke while the rest of the game rewards exploration beautifully.

Elden Ring belongs in A-Tier because FromSoftware's brand of completionism is built on pure, uncut mystery. You're not following a checklist — you're piecing together a puzzle that the game refuses to explain to you. Finding an NPC questline's conclusion after 80 hours of wandering feels like solving a cold case. It respects your intelligence even when it's absolutely destroying your health bar.

B-Tier: Fine, But You're Going to Need a Wiki

Pokémon has lived in B-Tier for decades and honestly, it's comfortable there. "Gotta Catch 'Em All" is one of the most iconic marketing slogans in gaming history and also a mild form of psychological warfare. The core loop is genuinely fun. The version exclusives, the timed events, the mythical Pokémon locked behind GameStop distributions that ended in 2009 — that's where things get complicated. The series oscillates between charming and exhausting depending on the generation, and modern entries have done little to fix the formula.

Assassin's Creed (Origins through Valhalla era) earns a B because Ubisoft clearly did the math and decided that quantity was a personality. These games are enormous. The maps are stuffed. Some of it is great! A lot of it is "collect the feathers but make it Norse mythology." It's not malicious — it's just a little soulless.

C-Tier: The Grind Is Real and It Is Not Fun

Destiny 2 has built an entire identity around FOMO completionism and seasonal content that literally disappears from the game. You are not completing a game — you are managing a subscription to anxiety. The gunplay is incredible. The lore is genuinely fascinating. The design philosophy around completion, however, is built specifically to make you feel behind, always, forever. That's not a grind. That's a lifestyle trap.

Dragon Age: Inquisition has great bones buried under a mountain of war table operations and Hinterlands fetch quests that felt like punishment for caring about the world. The completionist path in this game is less "epic RPG journey" and more "I have now spoken to everyone in this village about their missing chickens."

D-Tier: Please. Stop. Let Me Go.

Sonic the Hedgehog (3D era) deserves acknowledgment for turning "find all the Chaos Emeralds" from a fun bonus into a recurring trauma. The treasure hunting stages in Sonic Adventure 2 are the gaming equivalent of being asked to find your keys in a house that's on fire and also the keys keep moving. The emerald radar exists. It does not help. It never helped.

WWE 2K (most years) puts completionism behind a curtain of grinding MyCareer, MyFaction, and Universe mode simultaneously, as if the developers looked at the human lifespan and decided it was too long. Unlocking legends requires either real money or approximately your entire autumn.

The Verdict

The best completionist design trusts that players will love what's there enough to seek it out. The worst treats completion as a retention metric dressed up as content. There's a real difference between a game that makes you want to find everything and a game that makes you feel guilty for not doing so — and players are getting better at spotting it.

So next time you open a game and see that 0% staring back at you, ask yourself: does this franchise deserve your obsession? Some of them genuinely do. Others are just hoping you haven't noticed the checklist is 400 items long and none of them matter. Choose wisely. Your weekends are finite.