Shadow Achievement - TV Tropes (2024)

My score! The goggles do nothing!

"A bonus set is a set with a variety of achievements that do not fit into the base set of a game for various reasons. These may be extremely difficult challenges that go beyond what is welcome, painful grinds that serve no particular purpose beyond getting stronger or collecting everything, a showcase of glitches, or many other kinds of things that wouldn't be considered good achievements for the base set."

• Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty: At one point of the Expansion Pack's main story, V is required to earn the favor of Dogtown's resident fixer, Mr. Hands, by completing any three gigs for him. A minor caveat with this assignment is that only the new gigs added by the expansion count towards this total, which means that the only gig Mr. Hands gives you in the base game, "Two Wrongs Makes Us Right", is discounted. In fact, if you complete "TWMUR" after being tasked with earning Mr. Hands' favor, he will send you a special message justifying why this gig doesn't count. For your trouble, though, the marker will still be cleared just like any other gig.

• Bugsnax: Catching every Bugsnak is required for 100% completion, with the sole exception of the Cappucceetle, due to it being a hidden Superboss that is intentionally made to be extraordinarily frustrating and time-consuming to capture. Scanning it will net an entry in the Bugapedia, but that's it.

• Super Smash Bros. Melee: The Milestone notification "You have all the Trophies!!" only counts 291 out of the game's 293 trophies^note. The excluded trophies were only given out at promotional events, and collecting those as well have their own separate Milestone messages: "You got the Mario and Yoshi trophy! They're pals again!", "You got the Samus Unmasked trophy! Lucky you!", and, if you have both, "You have all Trophies, including Gift Trophies!"

• Genshin Impact awards cosmetic nameplates for its achievements. "Hidden achievements", however, don't award any. These include things like having specific team configurations, fumbling extremely simple tasks, and defeating powerful enemies very fast.

• Cookie Clicker: Several power-ups scale in effectiveness with how many achievements have been unlocked, and there are more than 600 achievements that contribute to this. However, there are 17 achievements that have no effect on them. These are listed separately on the achievements list in their own category, "Shadow Achievements". Five^note are Luck Based Missions, three^note are speedrunning challenges, two^note involve using hacking tools, five^note take a disproportionate amount of grinding or precision, and the last two^note involve specific settings in player customization. Ones not yet unlocked also won't show up as blank spaces like normal achievements do, either; unless you find them, they may as well not exist.

• Animal Well: There are various figurines you can find that will be displayed in The House after you find them. 6 of them you get from speedrunning, 1 of them you get for beating the game without dying, 2 of them are found with the Tamagotchi, 1 for playing a song with the flute, and the rest are found throughout the bunny quest. They're kept track of separately from the achievement list.
• Super Metroid: At the end of the game, as Planet Zebes is being destroyed and Samus has to escape before it's too late, she can take a side path and encounter a Dachora and some Etecoons trapped on the doomed world. She can choose to blow open an escape route for them. This will do almost nothing except add a barely noticeable tiny moving dot of light in the background of the ending sequence to show that your kindness was not in vain. This sequence is known as "saving the animals" in the speedrunning community, where it's become an inside joke. Despite the hidden nature of this act, it's considered canon, as the rescued animals reappear in the next game.

• Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns: The "Act One Mastery" achievement (covering the first section of the expansion) requires completing 18 objectives, but there's 19 on the list. The nineteenth objective, "Sylvari Solidarity", is specifically noted as not counting toward the achievement. Probably for fairness reasons, as the only way to get that one is to play a Sylvari Commander, locking characters of the other four player races out of it, and make a specific choice during the first story.
• Runescape sometimes releases mini-quests to go with its Holiday Events; however, because these events are Temporary Online Content, they don't come with quest points or counts towards overall completion, but do award experience and some cosmetic items.

• The Binding of Isaac: There is no official achievement for getting 100% Completion on all three save files, but as of Afterbirth+ doing that will display 3,000,000% completion written across the files. Repentance changed this to ∞% instead, with a gorgeous bit of artwork.◊
• Noita: Separate from the game's Steam achievements or achievement pillar system, there are permanent cosmetics you can get by stretching the game to its absolute limit.
  • The true ending requires you to obtain 33 Orbs of Knowledge and complete the work at the mountain altar, but it's possible to get up to three more by opening Great Chests at literal one-in-a-hundred-million odds. Completing the game with 33 Orbs will give you a gold chain for all future runs, and 34 or more will add a red jewel to the chain.
  • Possibly the single most complicated and chaotic trial in the entire game involves the Sun Seed. To make a very long story short, you need to use four elemental stones to give birth to a new Sun. There's also a fifth stone, the Kakkakikkare, which can be used to corrupt it into a Dark Sun. Creating the Sun in such a way that in birth it consumes the Moon, and the Dark Sun in such a way that it consumes a second Moon down in the depths of hell in the same run, will make a crown appear over your character in all subsequent runs.
• Risk of Rain 2: The "Alternate Game Modes" section features Eclipse Mode, a mode that gets harder for each time you beat it as a given character. Eclipse has 8 levels, and beating Eclipse 8 as every character awards you with a golden badge shown over your difficulty meter. There is no formal achievement or unlockable for beating Eclipse mode at any level.

• Bug Fables: One of the Superbosses, TANGYBUG, only appears in extremely specific circ*mstances. Defeating it will only put a Tangy Berry trophy on a shelf in Team Snakemouth's house. Nothing about this fight is foreshadowed, hinted at, or meant to be taken seriously at all, as it stemmed from an inside joke in the game's official Discord server. The characters don't even react to what just happened. Unlike the other two Superbosses that award trophies, Team Maki and Team Slacker, it's not even needed to complete the Bestiary; in fact, it can't be scanned into the Bestiary at all.
• Pokémon:
  • Pokémon Red and Blue: Capturing all 150 Pokémon and completing the Pokédex awards you with a Diploma. The 151st, Mew, is not counted among them, due to being exclusive to either an event or a glitch. If you get Mew anyway, the Pokédex will expand one slot down to save its entry in addition to the "proper" completed Pokédex.
  • Pokémon Sun and Moon: The National Pokédex was permanently retired starting in this entry, but unlike subsequent games, Pokémon that aren't in the regional Alola Dex can still be obtained and used as perfectly ordinary Pokémon. However, when viewing their details, their Pokédex number is blank, and they're excluded from Pokédex completion and the Shiny Charm that comes with it. Encountering one of them also means you can (...er, MEANT you COULD) search for them on the GTS from that point forward.

• Story of Seasons games have an in-game Farm Degree, which boosts with daily activities and major achievements, but the rank of it has no bearing on the progress of the game and generally doesn't unlock anything progressively. Often all it amounts to is letters from the local Farm Appreciation Society that acknowledges your change in rank, and changes in title on the player card. Harvest Moon: A New Beginning unlocks the ability to make two more furniture sets, and versions of the older starting clothing from the prior game can be unlocked in Story of Seasons: Trio of Towns when one rank is made, but these aren't necessary to playing the game.
• Story of Seasons (2014) gives various trophies for in-game achievements, including playing for ten and thirty years in game.

• Red Dead Redemption 2: The "Zoologist" achievement requires you to "study" every animal in the game while the "Skin Deep" achievement requires that you kill/skin them all. Mercifully, neither includes the eight animals unique to Guarma, which you only visit once and cannot return to, making them Permanently Missable Content if you don't get them. Studying each of these animals is recognized by the Compendium, however.

• Neopets: Achievements are awarded in the form of avatars that can be used on the message boards, and there is an ongoing high score table for who can collect the most. Two, however, have a note when you select them that they do not count towards your total because the criteria for both involve spending real money. The Goggles avatar is awarded for buying something from the NC Mall microtransaction shop, and the Space Faerie Premium avatar is available while you have an active Neopets Premium membership.
• Retro Achievements normally disallows setting particularly unfair or esoteric achievements. However, it does allow creating "subsets" for those who want to try their hand at them anyway for categories such as extreme speedrunning challenges (such as "Beat Super Mario Bros. in under five minutes") or exploring glitches. Progress towards "mastering" a given game does not take these into account.