Effortless Achievement

"Click a door 5 times, is THAT all you think an achievement is worth? No no no, I can't just give these merits away for such little effort! A measly five clicks?!"

— The Narrator, The Stanley Parable

Most video games in the modern era have an Achievement System, a series of in-game progression goals that show how much you've achieved in the game and usually accumulate into an overall gamerscore on whatever platform you play games on. These reflect points of progression through the main story, and are often difficult feats to pull off.

However, the programmers often also throw in achievements that can range from just starting the game or doing something in the game you would have done anyways that require nothing but being there. Sometimes these are just jokes put in by the programmers, or just a "thanks" for playing the game by giving you a little boost to your gamerscore without having to do a whole lot.

Achievements that fall under this are intentionally designed just to be gimmies to the player. Often early games with achievements made essentially ALL the achievements fairly easy to get just playing straight through the game (even on easy mode), because they were added last minute by mandate of the game platform after they had finished most of the game (this is especially prevalent in some early Xbox 360 games), and games aimed at younger children have many achievements that are fairly easy to get for older, experienced players. Players who play these kinds of games are often seen as achievement whores, merely looking to boost their gamerscore, giving developers another potential incentive to make their achievements easy.

Although they might seem pointless, such achievements actually serve a purpose - they can provide an easy source of analytics, showing how many players who purchase the game engage with some of its systems, or even start the campaign.^note Steam in particular is well-known for its player culture of buying games en masse during Steam's sale periods, but never actually playing those games. These "start the game" and "do this simple early-game task" achievements thus allow developers and publishers to see how many people bought their games because they actually had interest in them, rather than buying them out of fear of missing out on those games being on sale. Another use-case is piracy analytics, when the achievement outstrips the actual sales of the game. Players can also use these no-effort achievements to determine when they first played a game.

Contrast to That One Achievement or Last Lousy Point. Also contrasts to Press Start to Game Over. A sub-trope of 100% Completion and Gotta Catch 'Em All. Subtrope of Achievement Mockery.

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Examples:

• Achievement Unlocked features achievements for things like playing for a few seconds, moving around or even staying still. The player can have earned well over ten achievements in the first few seconds of gameplay!
• ANNO: Mutationem: One of the earliest achievements that can be earned is reusing the shower at Ann's apartment at least three times. Another achievement is obtained by observing the fighters at Harbor Town's arena for about thirty seconds.
• The incremental game Antimatter Dimensions gives you an achievement per dimension of getting one of that dimensions, and also gives you an achievement for getting your first infinity. There are also achievements for idling for 6 hours and playing for 8 days.
• You literally get an achievement for being born in Assassin's Creed II. The point of the storyline where you see baby Ezio and get the "Birth of an Assassin" achievement is so soon after starting the game that it may as well be an achievement for starting the game. At least there is (a tiny amount of) gameplay for it though. The next game, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, has one which unlocks during the opening cutscene.
• Atelier Sophie: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Book: There is a Trophy for looking at barrels, and there are some barrels outside Sophie's front door. (Barrels are a Running Joke in the Atelier series).
• The Xbox 360 version of Avatar: The Last Airbender – The Burning Earth is best known for probably quickest 1000 achievement points in any game: there's only 5 achievements total, all of which involve performing sufficiently high combos, and you can get all of them in the first or second fight by spamming your ranged attack on the enemies without getting hit.
• In Bear & Breakfast, there are achievements for doing simple tasks such as waking up to start the game.
• The Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth+ has the "Mr. Resetter" achievement, which is gotten by resetting 7 times in a row. This can be gotten in a matter of seconds by holding the R key, and the unlock associated with it (a chance for half-soul hearts to replace red hearts) is fairly helpful. The console versions, lacking the reset button, instead give the achievement after losing 10 runs in a row. This is not difficult, either.
• Many of CAVE's Xbox 360 ports will give you an achievement for starting a game.
• In Chicory: A Colorful Tale, most of the achievements are acquired by clearing mandatory story beats such as picking up the Brush and meeting Chicory herself.
• One of Cinders's trophies is obtained by making your first choice of the game and another by attending the Grand Ball which you are required to do no matter which path you take.
• In the idler/incrementer game Cookie Clicker, you get achievements for making 1 cookie; purchasing the first one of any building; popping 1 wrinkler; and clicking 1 golden cookie. Having one of each building also nets an achievement, but given the initial cost of the more powerful buildings, that one takes a while to get.
• CROSS×BEATS REV. has an achievement, called "mission" in-game, for playing your first song, as well as missions for playing most songs for the first time each, and missions for playing charts of x level or higher (with the lowest-difficulty mission requiring you to clear a chart rated level 10 (out of 99)). New players can expect to get three or more individual mission clear notifications—along with their in-game partner shouting "MISSION CLEAR!" until it's drilled into their heads—at the end of their first song, especially if they're coming from similar rhythm games and decide to start with some of the more difficult songs.
• The Idle Dating Sim Crush Crush gives you an achievement every time you unlock a hobby, a job level, or a new relationship level with a girl. Given how easy it is to achieve the first several relationship levels with Cassie, the girl automatically unlocked at the start of the game, and how getting these levels automatically unlocks at least seven hobbies, you'll probably get more than ten achievements in your first five minutes of playing.
• Cube Colossus: Three, two of them being outside-of-the-game button clicking.
  • Open the credits menu with the button.
  • Click the More Games button.
  • Start the game, because that automatically provides AMU-01, the starting ship, which is an achievement. It's gotten even if the player immediately quits the first level without doing anything.
• Dark Souls II gives you an achievement called "This is Dark Souls" the first time you die, which is slightly Achievement Mockery. It's much harder to NOT get this Achievement. There's also an achievement for completing character creation... and having used up all of their generosity in the first five minutes of this game.
• Dawn of War II gives you an achievement for customising an army using the army painter, which can be done in seconds.
• Deadpool gives you not one, but two achievements for merely moving Deadpool off the couch in the beginning of the opening stage (lampshaded by their names "The first one's free!" and "The second one is also free..."), with the Merc With the Mouth promptly reacting to their popups. It then proceeds to provide you an in-game count towards the next achievement (playing with all of Deadpool's stuff in his apartment), and pops an achievement for doing one of the actions (making pancakes). Essentially, you get four pretty easy achievements before you even reach the tutorial.
• Subverted in Double Dragon Neon: while just starting the game gets you an achievement, it's only worth 1 GS, something which most people who collect gamerscore hate due to it making their score no longer divisible by 5: to even it out, you need to beat the game to get another achievement worth 19 GS. The game makes a point to make fun of this by naming the initial 1 GS achievement "Skullmageddon's Curse" with the description "Nyahahahaha! Now finish what you have started!".
• Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard, being fairly satirical in nature, has a few of these that are naturally lampshaded. There's a 5-point achievement for pausing the game, a 15-point achievement for starting a game for the first time, and then a 60-point achievement for watching the credits. For reference, beating the final boss is only a 50-point achievement.
• The Epic Battle Fantasy series has some, such as Adventure Story's "The Credits":
  Check out the credits page and maybe visit some links.
• Epic Coaster: Some achievements are earned for very simple things, like starting the game, viewing the instructions, or jumping at minimal force.
• Overlapping with Achievement Mockery, the first Eryi's Action achievement that the vast majority of Steam players will get is "Metal Dished", which they get from getting killed by one of the falling washtubs at the very start of the game. While Eryi is still in her house.
• Fallout: New Vegas has "Ain't That a Kick in the Head", earned for going through character creation.
• 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand has one for dying on easy, called Not Bulletproof. It gives zero points.
• Final Fantasy:
  • The PC version of Final Fantasy V awards the “Customer Appreciation” achievement by simply starting up the game.
  • The SNES version of Final Fantasy VI awards an achievement for watching the opening demo fully. It gives zero points.
  • The PC version of Final Fantasy VIII has achievements for collecting Guardian Forces. Most of them range from non-trivial to truly challenging, but you can get the achievements for getting Shiva and Quetzalcoatl, your starting GFs, without entering combat.
  • Similarly, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers awards the "Crystal Bearer's Arrival" medal for getting to the game's title screen, which just entails playing through the prologue.
• Get Off My Lawn (2014): The first two achievements you're likely to get are for checking the game's credits and killing one alien.
• The first achievement in Goodbye Volcano High is "Singer Songwriter", which is earned from playing through the game's first song, regardless of how well the player performs.
• The "Living Your Car Life" trophy from Gran Turismo 7 requires you to open the first GT Café menu book which the menu books itself became part of the main career. And you get this before even you start a race!
• In a bit of a contrast to the rest of the game's achievements (which are notoriously hard to get for the most part), Grand Theft Auto IV gives you one gimmie for merely sitting through the opening cinematic.
• In Growing Up, there are achievements for simply completing the five life stages: Baby, Preschool, Elementary, Middle School, and High School.
• The "No Deductible" achievement is gained early in Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire for not crashing Captain Kiel's airship. The entire airship trip is a cutscene, so it's not like you had the slightest chance of crashing.
• Highway Blossoms, as a Linear Visual Novel, does not have any truly difficult achievements, but there's an achievement for starting the game and another few can be gained just by accessing the options menu.
• In I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, there are achievements for reaching mandatory plot beats such as surviving your first year on Vertumna and seeing the Heliopause crash-land on the planet.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: All Star Battle: The "We'll train your arse off!" achievement is earned by winning a single-player battle for the first time.
• JumpJet Rex has the achievement "Backlogasaurus" for starting the game for the first time.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • Kingdom Hearts HD I.5 ReMIX:
    • "Card Master Riku" in Kingdom Hearts: Re:Chain of Memories which is given by collecting every card in the Reverse/Rebirth campaign. Compared to "Card Master Sora", which requires beating both campaigns, watching a nearly 3-hour-long Compilation Movie and viewing said movie’s extras to even be obtainable to start, "Card Master Riku" requires no effort at all, since you can’t buy cards (or even edit your deck) in Reverse/Rebirth, you’ll have most of them already at the start, and it’s impossible not to collect the rest of them, which mainly consist of Enemy cards (which all come from beating the bosses) and World Cards (which you need to progress anyways).
    • The previously mentioned Compilation Movie version of Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days has 6 trophies that are rewarded just from watching the movie and reading Roxas's Diary and the Secret Reports. The Kingdom Hearts HD II.5 ReMIX film version of Kingdom Hearts coded also has trophies simply by watching the cutscenes and reading the character entries. However, these only apply to the PlayStation 3 version; the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions don't have the trophies.
  • Kingdom Hearts III: The "A New Journey" achievement is obtained just by letting the first cutscene play.
• There's a trophy in Kingdom of Loathing that requires neither time nor effort, called "Your Log Saw Something That Night." All you have to do is carve the name Laura Palmer into your quest log.
• Later Alligator has the achievement "Got The Time?" for looking at your watch for the first time, which you can do as soon as you start the game.
• Mamorukun Curse gives the player a trophy just for entering the main menu. In the Japanese version, it's even a silver trophy to boot.
• Mario Party DS has the Beginner Badge, which is given to a file upon starting and serves as the default badge. Its description indeed affirms that it's just for beginning your game:
  Welcome to Mario Party DS! This is the badge given to every new player.
• Both Mega Man 9 and Mega Man 10 have the achievement "Defeat a Boss using only the Mega Buster". You'll earn this one naturally, as you only have the Mega Buster before beating your first Robot Master.
• Metal Gear: The Compilation Re-release adds an achievement system with the first achievement earned by starting a new game.
• The Neptunia games are generally easy on handing out trophies early on, though you will have to work for the later ones. The second game will give you three by the time you've passed the Hopeless Boss Fight at the start, while the third has one you get for starting a new file that wonders how many game reviewers will make it this far.
  • The spinoffs Hyperdimension Neptunia U: Action Unleashed and Hyperdevotion Noire take this to an extreme. In the former, literally half the trophy list is achievable in less than an hour if you are aware of the trophy requirements beforehand (and even if you don't, getting at least 10 trophies by accident shouldn't be difficult at all). In the latter, one can easily gain a whopping 10 trophies in 15-30 minutes, with the first two being gained for starting the game and watching the opening cutscenes, respectively.
  • Literally every game in the Neptunia series has a trophy for starting the game. It's practically series tradition at this point.
• 100% Orange Juice! has an achievement for attempting to start a game with fewer than 10 cards in your deck.
• PAYDAY 2 has quite a few.
  • "I Want To Get Away", released alongside new jump animations, is earned simply by jumping for the first time. You even get a mask for your trouble.
  • "Nobody cared who I was...": You get this achievement for masking up for the first time, which you have to do in order to start a heist.
  • "F In Chemistry": Really easy to get for first time players, given you may not know Bain's audio cues, as all you have to do is blow up the meth lab on the Rats or Cook Off jobs. The achievement even has a man on fire in the image.
• PAYDAY 3 features a couple: "No One Cared Who I Was...", earned by masking up for the first time, and "Arts and Crafts", earned by customising a mask.
• There are achievements for starting Potion Permit for the first time and brewing your first potion, the latter which is done during the tutorial.
• In Quilts & Cats of Calico, there are achievements for completing the tutorial, petting a cat, and clearing all the Acts in Story Mode.
• Replicanti Incremental: "Get started", an achievement unlocked for purchasing one Replicanti Multiplier, that can be afforded as soon as you begin the game.
• Rock Band:
  • Creating your character/your band at the beginning of the game will pop an achievement.
  • There's an achievement for calibrating, which is pretty important to do.
  • Rock Band 3 had two relatively effortless achievements merely for connecting the game to an online account at the game's website and to Facebook; however, you have to get BOTH to even out your gamerscore to be divisible by 5. This frustrated gamers who did one but didn't want to do the other and their OCD kicked in...
• The Simpsons Game famously gave you an achievement for merely starting the game. The achievement was "Worst. Achievement. Ever."
• Slime Rancher: The game gives you an achievement for having a tabby slime headbutt you, something that they do very frequently. The achievement is simply called "Boop!"
• Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus has "Sucker Punched!" ("Enter the world of Sly Cooper!") from The Sly Collection. You just need to boot up the game to receive this bronze trophy.
• The Stanley Parable:
  • Subverted with an achievement that reads "Click on door 430 five times". Once completed, the Lemony Narrator berates the player for doing it for the achievement and then makes them jump through all kinds of hoops in order to make the player put some sort of effort into unlocking it.
  • There is also an achievement for closing and restarting the game, as well as for enabling a switch in the game options menu. (The latter is called simply "Achievement" and the switch is named "Enable achievements".)
  • The achievement "Go Outside" is a literal Effortless Achievement. You get it by quitting the game and then not playing it for 5 years.
• Street Fighter IV has one achievement for watching two computer players fight each other, with the idea being that 'you never know what you might learn from them'.
• Super Mario RPG has Legend of the Seven Stars, which unlocks upon watching the opening demo movie. Naturally, it only gives 1 Retro Point.
  • The achievement for defeating Bowser is also incredibly effortless, as it is almost impossible to lose this fight.
• The Super Smash Bros. series starting from Brawl onward uses a system where achievements are listed on a grid; receiving one achievement will reveal the requirements for surrounding ones. To start you off and get some of those goals revealed quickly, a few achievements will always be things you're bound to do anyway. The system originated in Kirby Air Ride, another game by Masahiro Sakurai, with him also utilizing it in Kid Icarus: Uprising.
• Team Fortress 2 has an achievement for simply building up an Übercharge during the pre-round setup time in modes like Payload and Attack/Defend while playing as Medic. Which is something that Medics should be doing anyway, and the increased Übercharge build rate during setup time means it takes only about ten seconds of healing.
• An early Xbox 360 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game was notorious for being able to get all 1000 achievement points for merely playing through all the levels, even on easy mode, a fairly easy task for most gamers.
• The Xbox arcade port of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Arcade Game gives you a zero point achivement for falling into an open sewer hole a few times.
• Terraria has an achievement for chopping down a tree. This is one of the first possible things to do when playing the game, as the player starts with an axe and there is almost always a tree right next to them. There is another achievement for making a Workbench, which can easily be crafted with the wood from felling just one tree, no questions asked, granting two achievements back-to-back in the first minute of gameplay.
• Uncharted: Drake's Fortune: The remastered version has a Trophy for exploring camera mode. This requires you to press "Down" on the +Control Pad. You also have to Read the Freaking Manual to know that camera mode exists, so it's a rare trophy.
• Under Night In-Birth has an achievement for loading up the game on the first time.
• The PS4 and PlayStation Vita versions of Undertale is mostly just taking the piss when it comes to its trophies, aside from a few fairly standard "reach <this specific area>" trophies. A few of them are literally just joke trophies acquired by picking up your first four items, and the rest is just donating gold to the Dog Shrine, up to 350g, which isn't even remotely difficult, it's just a matter of knowing where the shrine is in the first place. You can get a platinum without even finishing the game. Considering Toby Fox outright worded the the announcement of trophy support as an apology, Sony mandates trophy support on both systems, and achievements clash with one of the game's themes, it makes sense that he'd go out of his way to not only poke fun at the system, but also rob trophy hunters of any sense of achievement.
• Void Stranger features only a single Steam achievement that is obtained by starting the game. In fact, it's presented less like an achievement and more like an inventory key item: the achievement is called "Pendant" and its descrption reads, "An important wedding gift". Notably, if you run out of lives and refuse to continue, causing the game to close by itself and you to start all over, Steam takes this achievement away until you start a new run.
• Webbed has the achievement "Cast-on" for weaving your first web, which is one of the first things you'll do in the game.
• Welcome Back To 2007 Part II, an obscure shovelware Steam game with 100 achievements despite how relatively short the game is. You can get achievements by starting the game, compiling its shaders, clicking play, clicking statistics, clicking something in the game's credits, clicking an icon on the main menu, setting the game's language (two for this), taking a screenshot, and all that's before any real gameplay!
• World's Dawn gives you one for completing the opening scenes of the first day, and another for talking to everyone in town. You also get another for just finishing your first spring season (and considering it's basically impossible to die in this game, you could wake up and go right back to sleep all month with no real ill effects other than that you're not actually making progress).
• World of Warcraft has many achievements that become this over time due to new content being released. Beating Icecrown Citadel on Heroic at the time it was released was impressive... now everyone can do it. Some achievements prevent this by being no longer obtainable later on though, but these generally also no longer give achievement points either.
• In XCOM: Enemy Unknown, there are achievements for: launching a satellite, building a laboratory, building a workshop, completing any research project, building any item, and shooting down a UFO. But the ultimate example is completing the tutorial, which basically does itself for you.
• The Puzzle Game Zup, its many sequels, and its sister series Qop were created by Quiet River with the main intent of giving people thousands of these, shaped like letters and symbols, to decorate Steam Profiles with. There are also a handful of Easter Eggs with oodles of associated achievements. In most of the games you can earn every last achievement in less than half an hour.
• The Arcade Archives series of games released on the PS4 all have the same trophy list. 7 bronzes for poking around the menu and 2 golds for reaching the top score on the local leaderboard and then uploading that score online. While a few of the games are hard enough to make the two golds not so effortless, the 7 bronzes are always incredibly easy and achievable in less than a minute. Unfortunately, from Starforce onwards, the ports have abandoned the old format in favor of a mere 6 trophies that are all related to high scores and submitting them.
• Some games with PlayStation Cross Save that have separate trophy lists for each console the game was released on (such as Sound Shapes) also transfer trophy unlocked data with the save, allowing one to get every single trophy on one console in a matter of seconds, provided you got them legitimately on a different console at least once.
• A number of "achievement spam" games on Steam are chock full of achievements (usually numbering in the hundreds or thousands) and pour them on the player just for having the game open, with icons that are entire alphabets or long series of numbers so that the achievement collectors can arrange them to spell messages on their profile. Actual gameplay is optional.

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Achievement Unlocked: Visit Unabridged Version

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