Gotta Catch Them All - Television Tropes & Idioms

A commercial for an auto parts dealer showed a young man biking to the store over and over, each time retrieving a different component to repair a roadside clunker. At the end, he drives to the store to show off the car he's Caught All the necessary replacement parts for.

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In Chrono Crusade, Aion's plan hinges around finding the gifted children known as "Apostles". Chrono and Rosette's nakama attempts to stop him from doing this...but only ends up handing him the last one he needs. Nice Job Breaking It Hero.
Dinosaur King revolves around new dinosaurs appearing in every episode, with the D Team and the Alpha Gang racing to get them. The DS game makes this mandatory, including a Dinosaur Encyclopedia that catalogues the Mesozoic beasties that you obtain, with rewards for getting certain amounts.
This is essentially Dark's main goal in DN Angel—he's stealing all of the magical works of art created by Satoshi's family, the Hikaris—who also created him.
The Dragon Balls in the series of the same name and its sequels.
In Fushigi Yuugi, Miaka, being the Priestess of Suzaku, must gather the seven Celestial warriors in order to summon Suzaku. Cue an Unwanted Harem of men.
The cast of Inu Yasha are searching for the umptynine pieces of the Shikon Jewel, an artifact of incredible power (that, incidentally, will allow the main character To Become Human). The Big Bad wants all the pieces too, so that he can become stronger.
Type C is found in Katekyo Hitman Reborn, after a sudden Genre Shift with the story getting more serious and actually having a plot. It is revealed that in order to become the next Vongola leader, Tsuna must assemble all seven of his Bishonen guardians (Rain, Storm, Thunder, Mist, Sun and Cloud). Tsuna ends up having to do this twice, the second time being after he time travels 10 years into the future.
Subversion in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, where the search for the Plot Coupons, the Jewel Seeds, is pretty much discarded halfway through so that the writers can get to the character development.
- Nanoha's searches for the last few Jewel seeds while with the TSAB mostly take place offscreen. After helping Fate survive retrieving the last six from the ocean, Nanoha fights her with all the Jewel Seeds on the line so that she won't run away, so her earlier efforts weren't completely in vain.
- In Striker S, Scaglietti is trying to collect Relics, but this plot is discarded around the same time Vivio is introduced.
Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch takes an odd spin on this: the main characters are also the items, at least in part.
Naruto has a little bit of this, except it's the villains (Akatsuki) looking for the people (Bijuu).
- Then they somewhat subvert it when they get tailed-beasts 4-7 offscreen. Many feel They Wasted A Perfectly Good Plot.
In Princess Tutu, the titular character searches the town for shards of the Prince's heart, which was shattered when he imprisoned the raven from the story.
Sailor Moon anime does this at least twice. In the first season with the seven Rainbow Crystals, and in the third with the Talismans.
- Don't forget the last season, where the Big Bad wants to take all the Star Seeds that belong to Sailor Senshi. Gotta Catch Them All, indeed.
The first ten or so episodes of Transformers Armada focus on recovering Minicons, a small race of robots with power-boosting abilities. Because of this, the series is sometimes referred to as "Pokeformers."
- There are also the protoforms/stasis pods in Beast Wars and RID, the Cyber Planet Keys in Cybertron, and so on.
Soul Eater starts with the titular character eating the last of 99 evil souls and going for the witch's soul he needs to complete the collection. Of course, since this is the beginning of the series, he screws up and needs to start over from the beginning.
Those Who Hunt Elves spoofs this by scattering the runes of a spell to send the cast Trapped In Another World home. However, the runes are on the bodies of the elf inhabitants, so the cast decides that the logical (huh huh) thing to do is to strip every elf they come across in order to find the runes.
At the beginning of Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle the cast sets out searching for Sakura's 50 bajillion missing feathers of memory, but in the Acid Tokyo Arc, it is revealed that the feather hunt is part of the Big Bad's Xanatos Roulette, and thus pointless. The focus of the plot shifts drastically from there on out.
- The epilogue reveals that they were actually more (personally) important than previously thought- they're not Sakura's memories, but rather soul fragments of the two clones' reincarnations, and the series ends with Syaoran Jr. going off to find the rest to resurrect them.
In the first two arcs of Yu-Gi-Oh, the tournaments required specific numbers of Star Chips (Duelist Kingdom) or puzzle cards (Battle City) to gain entry to the finals.
- A completely different manifestation of the same trope, Yu-Gi-Oh also features the God Card-hunt and eventually the Millenium Item-hunt - this time objects hunted for their power when brought together.
Cardcaptor Sakura first featured the gathering of 52 magical cards that were accidentally scattered across town, and then the transformation of said cards one at a time.
- The latter arc was more about finding a problem each week, the solution to which was to transform one (or, rarely, several) of the cards. Sakura did once transform a few cards randomly, showing that the plots weren't essential, but they made for better viewing (and there was the whole character development thing too).
Harukanaru Toki no Naka de - Hachiyoushou, like Fushigi Yuugi, has collecting the team of pretty boys. Then, in the second half of the series, collecting the Four Seals.

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A Donald Duck comic by Don Rosa, "Recalled Wreck", has Donald doing this after he finds out that his neighbor (without any bad intention) sold the pieces of his beloved car to the neighbours.
The 99 is initially about Dr. Ramzi's efforts to track down the 99 noor stones, but that goal shifts in the first issue to finding the people who have been bonded to them.

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The villains of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom had been trying to collect all the Shankara Stones, and indeed held all three of them until Indy showed up.
The cursed pieces of eight from the first Pirates Of The Caribbean movie; the nine pieces of eight in the third movie might count too.
- It doesn't count because the whole point of the nine pieces was not to collect them but to let everyone have only one.
The Ghostbusters have to collect all ghosts in New York.
Three Gotta Catch Them All with a twist that made them Gotta Kill Them All:
- Battle Royale counts as a kill all characters.
- In Gremlins, if you didn't collect(=kill) all gremlins, the survivor(s) would make more of themselves.
- Kill Bill is this.
In the Fifth Element you had to get all elements together to save the universe.
In The Nightmare Before Christmas Jack even made a list of everything he had to collect/make to be able to create a good christmas.
In the 2001 remake of Thirteen Ghosts, Cyrus Kriticos has to find thirteen spirits with specific themes in order to power his demonic machine, the Eye of Hell.

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In Douglas Adams' Life, the Universe, and Everything, the third book in the Hitchhiker's Trilogy, it's the villains who are collecting the pieces of the Wikkit Gate, and our heroes are trying to stop them (or, some of them are. The rest would rather get a drink and have a lie down).
In Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files, the Knights of the Cross have, over the centuries, collected some of the demon-possessed coins of the Order of the Blackened Denarii, but cannot finally defeat the Denarians until they get them all. This was a major plot point in Small Favor.
In each volume of Jack Chalker's The Four Lords of the Diamond, one of the Assassin's alter egos must find and either kill or subvert the Lord of the particular Diamond world to which he is assigned, as well as investigating his particular piece of the overall puzzle.
Louise Cooper's Indigo series involves an immortal protagonist who is destined to walk the earth until she has banished the seven demons which she accidentally loosed upon the world.
Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising.
- In the individual book of that title, the protagonist must find the six Signs of the Light.
- Over the course of the series, each book involves finding at least one artifact or set of artifacts (the grail (split between Over Sea, Under Stone and Greenwitch), the Signs, the harp (The Grey King), and the crystal sword (Silver on the Tree)).
In Coraline the title character has to find the souls of the taken children and her parents before she is allowed to go back to her own world.
- Ummm... no. Rescuing their souls was just something that she decided to do in addition to getting out of there.
  - Did she not make a wager with the Other Mother that she could find them, which was the condition of her release? Or is there a book/movie split here?
Lyndon Hardy uses a variant of this trope in Master of Five Magics, in that his protagonist learns the use of his world's five known types of magic over the course of the novel, and needs to use all five in combination to win in the end. The sequel, Secret of the Sixth Magic, inverts this scenario by requiring its protagonist to fail at all five magics, before catching on that a sixth form actually exists.
Garth Nix's Keys to the Kingdom combines at least two forms of this; in each book, the protagonist must find one of the seven separated parts of the Will of the Architect (each of which is a character in its own right) and one of the seven Keys.
Author Matthew Reilly is overly fond of this trope... To the extent that his latest piece of alliterative schmutz Six Sacred Stones ends with a mid-plot cliffhanger where the badass Hero has not caught them all with his bionic arm and we simply must buy another (as yet unreleased) hardcover for the resolution. Wall Banger.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the sixth Harry Potter book, made it clear that the final book would revolve at least in part around a Gotta Catch Them All scenario, using Voldemort's remaining Horcruxes. (However, this isn't quite on the scale of most of the other examples of this trope, largely because there's only one book to deal with it, not a television series of indeterminate length.)
- Deathly Hallows, however, subverts the trope by having Harry collect all three of the MacGuffins from DUMBLEDORE's failed childhood quest by sheer accident in the course of collecting the Plot Coupons for HIS OWN quest. Of course, he then discards them anyways after he's done with his quest.
The Deltora Quest books, unusually, differentiated their Plot Coupons from each other and gave them individual powers. The topaz, for instance, could clear and sharpen the mind, but its effectiveness depended on the phase of the moon; it could also be used to see into the spirit world. The emerald darkened at danger, the amethyst paled in the presence of poison, the opal could be used to see the future, and so forth.
- The later two series of the books had different takes. The second series had the heroes searching for the pieces to a magical flute (which only held real power when it was whole), and the third series had them searching for the Four Sisters who were draining the life from the land (making it more 'Gotta Kill Them All').
Subverted in the Twelve Treasures Trilogy - The plot of each novel involves restoring one of the stolen Treasures of the magical kingdom, and (obviously) there are Twelve Treasures, but only three of them have actually been stolen (that the readers know of; a different noble house keeps each one, and no one will admit to having lost one, so things get a bit murky).

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100 Deeds For Eddie McDowd, a show that was Too Good To Last on Nickelodeon. The titular character, a juvenile delinquent, was turned into a dog and needed to do 100 good deeds in order to regain his human form.
Ezekiel Stone, the main character of Fox's short-lived 1998 series Brimstone, is released from Hell by the Devil to use his police skills to track down and retrieve 113 damned souls who escaped the afterlife back to Earth. Short life meant he got nowhere NEAR his goal.
Ditto with Jeremy Piven's Cupid, who was supposed to unite 100 couples. The show only ran 15 episodes, and some of them didn't add any couples to his tally.
The six pieces of the Key to Time in Doctor Who.
- Subverted in 'Last of the Time Lords' where Martha talks about having to travel around the world to collect the four hidden pieces to a gun that could kill the Master and prevent him from regenerating. When the Master catches her and reveals that he knows her plan, she laughs at him and says, "You really believed that?" Turns out the whole thing was a bluff and her actual plan was something else altogether.
- The titular Keys of Marinus.
The premise of Friday The 13th The Series is that Micki and Ryan must recover all of the cursed antiques purchased from their uncle's store.
In My Nameis Earl, the titular character must fix all the things he's ever done wrong in order to clear his karma.
In the first ever Chinese Tokusatsu Armor Hero they have to seal 52 monsters into 52 cards,in 52 episodes. It's quite a clean show like that.
Power Rangers has had a few "Find the five Ranger-color-coded somethings" plots.
- The fifteenth season, Power Rangers Operation Overdrive, was entirely based around the hunt for five magic jewels.
In the children's TV series T.Bag, every season was centered around the protagonist collecting items to complete a set, to prevent T.Bag from gaining more power.
In the Sci-Fi show "The Lost Room," characters are, for various reasons, seeking artifacts known as Objects, which originated in a 1960s motel room and are endowed with curious properties (for instance, one Object is a watch which can boil an egg placed inside the band).
The main plot point of Reaper is that the lead has to catch escaped souls from Hell, similar to Brimstone mentioned above.
The twelve Cosmo Capsules in Chousei Kantai Sazer X. When united, the twelve of them grant one wish. So naturally everyone is after them. Each episode even keeps a tally on who has what Capsules.
WMAC Masters, a short-lived show that was a strange cross between Professional Wrestling, American Gladiators, and Power Rangers, featured this as its central mechanic. Winning a competition allowed one of the competitors to take his opponent's "symbol" (a medallion with a symbol engraved that relates to the character's nickname), and once one of the competitors got the symbols of each of the others, he could challenge for the championship.
Warehouse13 is a show, similar to The Lost Room above, where objects have special powers for one reason or another (for example, a gun invented by Nikola Tesla is shoots energy bursts that knock people unconscious), and the Warehouse is trying to collect them.

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In Red vs. Blue: Reconstruction, the Meta takes this approach to collecting equipment and AIs. According to Agent Washington, assembling all the AIs together will make it unstoppable...well, more unstoppable.

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Johnny Cash's song "One Piece at a Time" is about a man who builds a Cadillac in this manner.

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After he was murdered and dismembered by his evil brother Set, Isis searched for and reassembled the pieces of her husband Osiris's body, again proving this trope is Older Than Dirt. (No, technically she didn't Catch Them All, but that's a deficiency the couple just had to learn to live with.)

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The 1976 Dungeons And Dragons supplement, Eldritch Wizardry, introduced The Rod of Seven Parts, a "greater artifact" that was, as the name suggests, broken into its components. The description of the item explicitly states that the Rod will never be found whole; while each of the components is powerful in and of itself, combining them brings out entirely new abilities. Thus, you Gotta Catch Them All. Years later, the publishers produced an adventure module that used the Rod as its central MacGuffin.
- Eldritch Wizardry also introduced other artifact "sets", such as the Orbs of Dragon-Kind.

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The Trope Namer is a U.S. advertising slogan for Pokémon, which had both the titular creatures and the Gym Badges.
- Dropped from the anime because Ash never got his act together and wasn't, as he so proudly liked to boast he would, catching them all.
- He wouldn't know what to do with most of them if he did "catch them all".
- The slogan has been dropped altogether from the game boxes, probably because there are 493 Pokémon (plus many extra forms) and thus catching them all would be difficult. This is particularly apparent in Diamond and Pearl, which put a greater emphasis on just seeing all the Pokémon.
  - The number alone is no big deal compared to the fact that you can't actually catch them all without multiple games.
  - Even worse is that several (Arceus, Mew, etc) aren't even gettable with all the games: they're only available at events or by hacking, and you can't catch them all, at least IN AMERICA!.
  - Not really a problem now, since the fourth generation remove language barriers and a global trade station, so you can just trade for a Japanese Celebi. Still impossible in the third generation.
- Note that this slogan is an American creation. Pokémon in Japan doesn't have this slogan. And for good reason: in the anime, it's clearly treated as immoral (and even world-endangering) to capture certain Pokémon.
  - This caused problems in the Dubbing of the Pokemon Movies. E.g. In Pokemon 2000, Misty says "Pokemon are not something to collect!"
  - It originally had a very similar one though: Pokémon GET da ze! (I'll get Pokémon!)
  - Well, in the Pokemon Special manga, Crystal succeeds in capturing every single non-legendary Pokemon from Kanto, Johto, and Hoenn.
In Diablo II:
- The player may collect various armor sets; if you get all the pieces you usually get a special bonus.
- In Act II, the hero must collect the pieces of the Horadric Staff, then combine them in the Horadric Cube.
- In Act III, the hero must collect various relics, then combine them in the Horadric Cube to open the entrance to the Durance of Hate.
In The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion you can get a sidequest in which you have to collect a glowing plant called nirnroot.
Fallout 3, coming from a franchise that has avoided this collection chase, snuck one in as The Nuka-Cola Challenge to hunt down Nuka-Cola Quantums. To be fair, it's not required to catch them all, as the prize is a schematic that makes Nuka-Cola Quantum into a powerful weapon, and unlike most of this trope's instances the player is given a lead to large stashes by the quest-giver.
- Fallout 3 also has the "Optional Artifacts" in the form of the 20 Vault Boy Bobbleheads scattered around the Wasteland. Funnily enough, there aren't any at Vault-Tec Headquarters.
- Fallout 2 did it first with finding the 10 issues of Cat's Paw magazine as a sidequest.
Most games in the Final Fantasy series feature some form of this, either in the main quest or as part of one of the subquests.
- Final Fantasy VI features an odd take on this trope. After Kefka turns the entire planet into a ruinous wasteland, the second half of the game revolves heavily around finding and ~~collecting~~ reuniting the scattered members of the old party to face him.
  - You don't need to find all the characters to finish the game though.
In Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, the main quest was to collect the 5 titular stones. Never mind that you fail to collect 4 out of the 5 stones, and still manage to win because Humanity Is Superior.
- Also in a Sailor Moon-based SNES game called Sailor Moon:Another Story, a whole chapter is spent hunting down four MacGuffins.
Glider PRO: "There are 6 stars in the house. Get every star to win."
Guild Wars. Hoo boy. There are 1,319 skills including 293 elite skills, 26 heroes, and 33 charmable animals to add to your Zaishen Menagerie. Aside from the elite skills, it's all just for fun and/or Hundred Percent Completion; the elite skills contribute to four maxed titles toward the thirty required (and thirty-eight available, so you don't technically Gotta Catch Them All, and in fact can't) for the game's ultimate Bragging Rights Reward: the God Walking Amongst Mere Mortals title.
Half Life 2 Episode 2 had the optional quest to get every single Antlion Grub. Doing so got you nothing but an achievement, albeit an achievement hardly anyone has got.
The Ham-Chat words in Hamtaro Ham Hams Unite and {{Hamtaro]] Ham Ham Heartbreak.
The Harvest Moon games have a Gotta Catch Them All aspect in Magical Melody (music notes) and Harvest Moon DS (harvest sprites).
In The Journeyman Project III: Legacy of Time:
- The player must collect each of the three pieces of the legacy, one from each time period / location in the game.
- Collecting the piece held by the Shangri-La monastery requires that the player unlock a staircase in a particular chamber. This involves locating each of the six Buddha statues around the monastery, giving each something it requires in order to get the object that will unlock a corresponding section of the staircase.
Kakurenbo Battle Monster Tactics has 125 types of monsters to defeat, each with their own type of pawprint (called a Montac) and a skill to learn if the defeated monster has enough power. (Some monsters give up the same skills though.)
In King's Bounty, in order to find the scepter that was the game's ultimate goal, one had to find the pieces of the map detailing its location. As a Shout Out, its successor series, Heroes of Might & Magic, has generally allowed you to similarly gather pieces of a map to find some special building or artifact, although it's now a Side Quest, rather than the game's central plot.
Koala Lumpur: Journey to the Edge. The player has to locate four pieces of a sacred scroll, each of them concealed in a different "world" within the game. The gameplay of each world is completely unrelated to the others and except for the first one, can be played in any order as the player chooses. It sort of smacks of a committee of writers who couldn't get along and were separated for their own good.
The Legend Of Zelda series always have some of sort: 8 pieces of the Triforce, 6 medallions, 8 instruments, 3 jewels, 4 masks... the apparent only exception is Zelda II: The Adventures of Link, in which the hero has to put 6 jewels on statues, but the principle is the same...
- Twilight Princess is a particularly egregious offender: In the main plot alone, you have 3 fused shadows, then 3 mirror shards, then you have to kill 20 monsters in one village, then find 6 owl statues covering sigils. This isn't even counting all the Fetch Quest efforts that are standard to the series—Poes, Golden Bugs, Heart Pieces, etc.
  - Eh, Twilight Princess isn't really any different than the other games in the series, except for that it splits up the required collectibles into two groups rather than just one. The 20 masks, however, in Majora's Mask, while not all plot-required, are still the main focus of the game if you want Hundred Percent Completion with the best ending.
- Also, in The Minish Cap, you have Kinstones, which each matching pair having a different effect (unlocking secret paths, removing barriers, making special items available, etc.)
- And let's not forget The Wind Waker, which has the Nintendo Gallery. You have to take pictures of pretty much every character, enemy, and boss- all 133 -in the game. Well, here's your Picto Box. Have fun!
The seven (or six, or five, or fourteen, or...) Chaos Emeralds from Sonic The Hedgehog. Often optional extras hidden in Bonus Stages that are still required to get the Good Ending or the final boss (except when they aren't due to being vital Plot Coupons)
- And in Shadow The Hedgehog, while the Emeralds weren't compulsory, to get the Last Boss you needed to get all 10 endings, each of which Shadow had all 6 Emeralds in whether you collected them or not.
  - Then there were the Team Chaotix levels in Sonic Heroes, which often focused on collecting some sort of random item. Most non-neutral missions in Shadow The Hedgehog also focused on some sort of collection, ranging from sucking up 20 bombs to collecting 400 rings to destroying all thirty-five Artificial Chaos.
Rareware seems to be in love with this trope, managing to shoehorn huge numbers of things you need to collect into practically every game.
- To the point where it's lampshaded hilariously in the beginning of Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts 'n Bolts.
  "Now then. In line with Banjo Tradition, your challenge will consist of collecting as many pointless items as possible."
Mass Effect: you collect bits of a coordinate, more coordinates that tell you how to use what you find when you get to the first coordinates, and somebody who can understand the whole thing. A checklist of planets, each with a beginning, middle and end, and each with their own miniature scenario which you must resolve as part of your Big Quest.
The Megaman Battle Network series does this. In each of the 6 games in the series, you battle with battle chips. Each game has a couple of hundred to find by either defeating enemies quickly or simply picking them up. Collecting them all usually allows you to fight a Bonus Boss.
The Mega Man Zero series until the fourth game also does this, with the cyber-elf computer programs. These little critters are collected all over the place, powered up, and used to give Zero useful bonuses. The games inhibit the latter feature, though, by lowering Zero's rank with each use.
In the first Metroid Prime, you have to collect all the artifacts to gain access to the impact site.
- Used similarly in Metroid Prime 2: Echoes.
Myst likes to do this, especially in the first one: in this Gotta Catch Them All scenario, you have to find almost all of the blue and red pages for the brothers' books. I say almost because completing either brother's book with the final page results in the player being trapped in that brother's book for eternity.
- As if that wasn't enough, Myst III: Exile has you traversing three ages in order to find mantras that the villain has tampered with. This scenario is, however, a truncated version of this trope, as there are only three mantras that you need to find - Along with a fourth mantra that helps you solve a certain puzzle at the end and is hidden in the text of one of the character's journals.
- Myst V: End of Ages requires you to collect and deliver four Bahro slates. Subverted in that the delivery, not the finding, is the hard part.
- Uru: To D'ni sends you off to Catch coordinates, by tagging little floating markers that only appear when you get close enough.
Virtually all the Nancy Drew video games require Nancy to track down missing pieces — gears, dolls, crystals, mirrors, whatever — for some sort of mechanism. The Last Train To Blue Moon Canyon interlaces three collect-em-all subplots.
At the most primitive end of this trope in this medium, Pac-man can be classified as a Gotta Eat Them All game.
In Skies Of Arcadia, you do this with both the Moon Crystals (the 5 you actually can get are promptly stolen from you when The Dragon ambushes and destroys your base; you do not get them back) and optionally with crew members.
Sly Cooper did this with the first game collecting pieces of his family's how to be a great thief guide, the second collecting the remains of the first games Big Bad, and the third game revolved around collecting party members for a big heist at the end of the game.
Spyro The Dragon games ALWAYS have a Gotta Catch Them All. In the first it was "free the trapped dragons," in Year of the Dragon it was "find the dragon eggs," in Enter the Dragonfly it was, well, "catch all the dragonflies," and in A Hero's Tail you needed to destroy Dark Gems, find Light Gems, AND find Dragon Eggs.
Star Wars:Knights of the Old Republic had the player going on a quest from the Jedi Council to find all the pieces of a corrupt star map.
- It is later revealed that the player previously found the maps as a Sith Lord, but had had his brain wiped clean and was converted by the council.
- KOTOR II also has this, except you're "catching" Jedi Masters. Light side, you're gathering them at the Dantooine Enclave. Dark side, you're killing them where they stand.
The Suikoden series of games does this with the 108 Stars of Destiny — party members and usually-helpful NPCs for your castle.
Thief: The Dark Project: you must find each of the four elemental talismans to unlock the wards on the Haunted Cathedral. In Dark Project this involves two quests, while in the Gold version each talisman has its own quest.
Ultima Underworld II required the Avatar to collect a blackrock gem from each of eight different worlds.
Unreal 2's Tosc-unlocking thing. You hop around all but two missions (the first and the defense one) gathering pieces of the artifact. Then it turns out that it alters the most harmless sentient creatures in the game into killing machines with black hole guns, so what you just spent the entire game doing turned out to be a really bad idea.
World Of Warcraft, like many MMORPGs, has a ton of these. The page quote from Narain Soothfancy actually lampshades one of the earliest examples of a mandatory Catch 'Em All quest chain that requires visiting every raid dungeon that existed in the game at the time, sometimes more than once. (Fortunately, only one player per realm actually had to complete the quests to advance the story.) More recently, the Achievement system has been added specifically to encourage this behavior, although it's completely optional from a gameplay perspective. Collectibles include pets, mounts, tabards, crafting recipes, faction reputation, revealing the world map, completing quests, and of course, achievements themselves.
Okami had the 100 Stray Beads. They were optional, and couldn't be used until you beat the game at least once (the final bead was a prize for defeating the final boss). Getting them all is completely worth it, as the resulting String of Beads makes you invincible, ten times more powerful, and lets you use the Celestial Brush without needing to worry about ink.
Dragon Ball Z: Attack Of The Saiyans of all games has this as well: you're tasked into using Tien's Mafuuba/Evil Containment Wave on every single non-boss enemy in the game in exchange for various items. Never mind the fact that the reason the attack is never used on anything later in the story is because it kills off the user, while in the game all it does is cost him a chunk of his HP which is easily gained back between turns later in the game.

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Keychain Of Creation chronicles the story of a group of heroes searching for the five ~~Keyblades~~ Keys of Creation, powerful weapons which can open any lock or unseal any can, in order to keep them out of the wrong hands. About two hundred comics later, they still only have the one they started with.
The titular game of Alien Dice involves scattering a number of "dice" over a planet and capturing the animals they bond to. It's supposed to be a deconstruction of the Mons genre if you couldn't guess.
Professor Dr. of the B Movie Comic just fell to the urge.

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Danny Phantom's "Reality Trip" episode, requiring Danny, Tucker, and Sam to find and retrieve three gems within a set time limit and return them to Monster Clown Freakshow. As a side note, the opening theme song implies a need for the titular character to catch all the ghosts in the show ("Gonna catch 'em all, 'cause he's Danny Phantom".)
A ton of old G.I. Joe episodes involved Cobra's attempts to Catch Them All, perhaps the best-known being their collection of historical military leaders' DNA to create Serpentor.
Jackie Chan Adventures seemed to feature a new set of these for each season. First came the twelve talismans, then the eight demon portals, then twelve animals that had gained the powers of their respective talisman, and so on.
- Lampshaded in the first episode of the fourth season, in which the different masks were discovered. While one character discovers that there are 9 masks, another mentions "Let me guess. The masks were scattered to the 'four corners of the globe, right?'".
The premise of Lilo And Stitch The Series (a Recycled The Series of the Disney movie Lilo and Stitch) is that everyone has to find the other 625 experiments (Stitch's "Cousins") lost throughout Hawaii. As of the finale movie 'Leroy and Stitch', this has been completed, up to and including Leroy, who is unofficially Experiment 629
The crew of the Wraith in The Pirates of Dark Water were supposed to collect 13 treasures. The show only lasted long enough for them to get 8, in part because the eighth took the entire (truncated) second season to find.
The Thirteen Ghosts of Scooby Doo had those meddling kids (well, four of them: Daphne, Shaggy, Scooby, and Scrappy) plus mentor Vincent Van Ghoul and the supposedly loveable young rascal Flim-Flam trying to recapture 13 ghosts that had escaped from "The Chest of Demons".
In Transformers Animated the All-Spark shatters into umpty-nine pieces each which affects Future-Detroit's technology as well as the giant robots in different ways. The cast has to find them.
- They're probably not going to find all of them, considering that some have been bringing Transformers to life from machinery, and stuck in there pretty damn well.
The Shen Gong Wu from Xiaolin Showdown.

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''Bionicle"
- First has the heroes gathering Great Kanohi Masks.
- Then Krana, similar to masks but alive.
- Then the heroes found out that the little village elders were collecting loads and loads of scary worm things called Kraata.
- Then Or rather earlier Great Kanoka Disks.
- Then after everything above but before everything else on this list a bunch of heroes turned mutant hunchbacks, were trying to save every surviving monster in the city after an attack of spider monsters
- And then, The heroes were given a big list of things to do including collecting several ancient artifacts
- Last time we saw this in bionicle the heroes were trying to collect some magical keystones to open a big magical door.
- Also worth noting is Onu-metru a city that consists of a huge underground museum where a sample of everything is kept quite obsessive folks aren't they.
The "plot" of Adventurers! revolved around finding the Elemental Relics. Unfortunately, these were the relics of the modern elements: Hydrogen, Helium, Lithium, and all the other elements in the periodic table. The progress on this quest was generally kept in the background.
Real Life example: One of the great mathematical accomplishments of the 20th century is the classification of all the finite, simple groups. Fits this trope because beyond the well-behaved, predictable cyclic groups of prime order, alternating groups, and classical Lie groups are the three exceptional Lie groups and the twenty-six so-called sporadic groups which do not readily fit into any category.
Real Life again: the attempt to "catch" all 94 naturally occurring chemical elements. Finally achieved with plutonium in 1941. But, rather like the Pokémon creators, science now gives us the possibility that element 121 may also occur in tiny amounts in nature.
- However, even discovering this element's existence would either shove a pipe up the rear end of, or totally revolutionize modern chemistry, depending on your point of view.
- Whether something exists "in nature" is a matter of definition; many elements have long since decayed away on the Earth and only exist in stars or in very small amounts created by natural nuclear reactions. If you count stars, there may be other elements discovered in nature. Plutonium that has survived from the origin of the Earth rather than been formed since then was not discovered until 1971 (the half-life of the longest lived version is just barely long enough that a few atoms survive today).
Yet another Real Life example: Participants in the Human Genome Project spent years sequencing the DNA of all 46 human chromosomes. Continued efforts to actually determine the functions of ~30,000 human genes, now that we know what their code looks like, will keep geneticists Catching Them All for the forseeable future.
Lab/Treasure/Land maps, Talisman pieces, collectable plushies... Petsites are full of these, and they always have a final goal, that's it, some sort of status for the users that collect these, since it's impossible to have all the pets at once.
The Holders Series are an odd subversion. The idea is apparently for the Seeker to "Catch" one or two of them to prevent them from ever being brought together, which will result in The End Of The World As We Know It. Then again, it also says that not bringing them together will result in something which may or may not be just as horrible ...
The TV Tropes Wiki itself is a Gotta Catch Em All of tropes and archetypes from both fiction and nonfictional sources, whose success will have an unknown significant meaning for the universe!

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