Mass Monster-Slaughter Sidequest

Translation for the Funetik Aksent-impaired: "I want you to kill six snow moose."

"I do hate when games do this. Ask me to kill something new, but don't ask me to kill five of something when I had to kill a dozen of them to get here to get the quest to kill five. It's just... rude."

— Shamus Young, Shamus Plays The Lord of the Rings Online: Part 3

Sidequests are intended to give the player a break from the main quest, Level Grinding, or both. This is especially common in MMORPGs to give the player an alternative to simple, mindless grinding. So what better way to do that than give them a quest that... is simple, mindless grinding?

A Monster Slaughter Sidequest is a quest to kill a certain number of a given monster or monsters. Why any monsters of these types didn't count as kills before the quest is rarely addressed, but this is sometimes addressed by tasking the player to kill a type of enemy that will only be encountered after the quest is issued, such as a type that's only found in an area you enter after meeting the quest-giver or which outright doesn't spawn until the quest is triggered. How the quest giver knows how many you've killed (or why they care) also tends to go unexplained, but sometimes you may be also be required to bring back some kind of trophy of your kill to prove that you did the deed.

Despite the name, this does not necessarily have to be a Sidequest. This may be required for the progression of the main game itself. This type of quest is often a type of Fake Longevity.

This quest can be combined with 20 Bear Asses, either as part of the same quest or occurring in the same game. These are sometimes also called "Pokémon Missions": Gotta Catch Them All!

Compare Assassination Sidequest, a type of sidequest that requires you to kill a specific target stealthily.

Supertrope to Rat Stomp, one of the most common starting quests of this type in Western RPGs.

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Examples:

Action Adventure

• Assassin's Creed III: Early in the game, you have a mission where you have to hunt a set number of animals. This is done to teach you about the different hunting skills.
• In Astalon: Tears of the Earth, to reach the boss of the Cyclops Den and get the Prince's Crown, you first have to kill all 35 of the cyclopes in the area.

• Dark Cloud: You have the option of gaining Dran as an ally. You can even use him on the main map above ground!... provided you slay 999 monsters on every single floor of every single dungeon you've played through including the Demon Shaft (Which has 100 floors by itself). The only exception are the boss floors, but add in the fact that the game has floors where only certain characters can be used as well as the fact that some of those characters are not exactly balanced, and you have a task that is in the most humble of terms virtually impossible or just not worth it. There's also the fact that your weapons are breakable, you are prone to thirst and some of the floors take advantage of that fact by causing you to be thirsty.
• Grand Theft Auto: The Rampage side-missions require you to kill a set number of mooks with a particular weapon in a period of time.
• The Legend of Zelda Oracle of Seasons: An old man encountered in a cave near the Gnarled Root Dungeon tasks Link with killing four unique gold-colored enemies, for reasons he doesn't bother explaining. Once Link hunts down the enemies, he's rewarded with the Red Ring, a magical item that doubles his damage output.
• ZanZarah: The Hidden Portal: The Pixie hunting is this, except you don't have to slaughter Pixies, just catch them (which is all the same, since they are gone forever afterwards).

Eastern RPG

• Afterimage: The "Activation" sidequest from Levine requires you to defeat a bunch of ghosts from the Town of the Exiled to gather souls for the orb artifact he gave you.
• In Final Fantasy X, the Monster Arena gives you a quest to capture 10 of each unique monster in each area. Doing so unlocks the ultimate superboss at the arena, but the player is also rewarded along the way as they reach milestones in the collection such as capturing every monster in each individual area/dungeon or every monster of the same species.
• In Final Fantasy XII you can only complete the Clan Primer by killing a certain number of every single enemy in the game. For each enemy, you get some additional information when you reach this number.
  • A better example would be the chain mechanic by which players must kill a certain number of an enemy type to increase the chances of better drops. One example is a rare mark (Bombshell) and it drops the Yagyu Darkblades needed to deal with the ultimate boss Yiazmat, but it's pretty much not going to drop them until you get a high enough chain.
• Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII takes this to its logical extreme. Most Canvas of Souls quests require a set number of items to complete, most being items dropped by monsters, and many soul-saving sidequests require specific, simple tasks. However, two quest givers require you kill an entire species, and one person asks that you kill every single monster in the world. The reason for the latter is the real kicker: when there's only one of a certain species of monster left, the game treats it like a boss for good reason.
• Similarly in Rogue Galaxy, you have to kill a certain number of almost every enemy to get a particular achievement/prize/what have you.
• One of the troubles you can take on at the Trouble Center in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is "Roust These Cads!", in which you are expected to fight all the enemies in the Boggly Woods for a reward of 20 coins (plus drops and Star Points).
  • However by the time you get this quest you can have the First-Attack Badge (if you attack a monster in the overworld that would no longer give experience, it dies without entering a battle) and even the Bump-Attack Badge (kills enemies if you even TOUCH a monster that would no longer give experience, it dies). This also one of the earliest areas so it's possible to complete this mission by just walking down the path.
• If you want to progress through the plot of Agarest Senki 2, you'll need to do this trope.
• Atelier Iris 3 has one of these as one of the last sidequests available.
• Villager Irina's quests in Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia consist of this. The first one has you kill thirty crows, of which you usually can't find more than five or six in any given screen. The others, which give tougher enemies to kill, have smaller numbers.
• The Ecology Quests in Romancing SaGa, you have to kill all the monsters that preys on the monster population you are trying to boost. (Kill birds to increase fish population, kill bugs to raise plant population, etc)
• Etrian Odyssey IV: Legends of the Titan: One late game quest in the game involve killing a bunch of foes in a particular dungeon. The problem is that only the monster that's currently being asked for counts - you can't get ahead by killing a bunch of a different monster for later. And if the monster in question isn't spawning via the Random Number God, you're in for a long slog, even if you can easily dispatch all of the monsters in question.
• This is a common job board sidequest in Tales of Xillia 2.
• Monster Hunter often gave these as subquests during large monster hunts. These could be justified as killing the juniors of an Alpha's pack or killing the monster's food supply to discourage or delay another one from showing up.
• Xenoblade Chronicles X has numerous missions where your team is requested to clear the indigens out of certain areas. The explanation is generally that the wild animals are interfering with resource-gathering or are hostile and powerful enough to kill field workers and need to be culled. This is carried over from the original, in which nearly every new area comes with a handful of eradication quests.
• One of two kinds of Side Quests available in the Neptunia series, the other being to collect 20 Bear Asses.

Freeware Games

• Progress Quest has multiple quests along the lines of "Eradictate the Elves", "Murder the Pink Elephants" and "Neutralize the Motorbike Goblins". In a case of Gameplay and Story Integration, you will actually tend to encounter the target enemy more often when taking on these types of quest.

Massively Multiplayer Online Game

• The most common quest bar none in La Tale. Annoyingly, quests to kill X Monster A always comes before the 20 Bear Asses quest for Monster A. That is, after you've sold the Shop Fodder you're supposed to collect.
• Extremely common in Grand Fantasia as a sidequest.
• Kingdom of Loathing: the Bounty Hunter exists to give out quests of this type. He offers three quests every day, all of which are "go kill X of this monster." Somewhat of a parody, since giving out these quests is literally his job despite it being pointless, but it's still tedious. See 20 Bear Asses for more...much more.
• Runescape players who slay enough chompy birds with a special luring technique will be rewarded with fancy hats.
  • The entire Slayer skill is this trope; players visit a Slayer Master who tells them to kill x number of y creatures.
• MapleStory. Either you're committing genocide on the order of hundreds of creatures a quest, or you're collecting random drops at the same rate.
  • One line of quests orders you to kill 999 of a rather powerful mook for the sole purpose of proving your strength. And if you don't finish this quest, you are blocked off from the rest of the area by a mandatory Door to Before. And then you have to kill 999 of the next mook, and the next... By the way, these mooks in question are monks in a temple.
• World of Warcraft: Guaranteed to take up large amounts of your game experience.
  • The most famous questgiver for such missions is the Ernest Hemingway analogue Hemet Nesingwary, who would instruct players to slaughter dozens of animals for sport in Stranglethorn Vale, Nagrand, and Scholazar Basin. In Wrath of the Lich King, a questline was added in which the player aids a rival organization, "Druids for the Humane and Ethical Treatment of Animals"...who would instruct players to slaughter dozens of hunters as revenge.
  • Cataclysm added the quests "Once More With Eeling" and "Do the World a Favor", where you take it upon yourself to kill specific animals simply because they're gross you don't like them. Driving the parody home, the in-game quest checklist lists progress with the phrases "7/10 Disgusting Eels Justifiably Slain" and "4/12 Mangy Hyenas Eradicated" respectively.
  • Then there is "Proving Your Strength" from the Darkmoon Faire, which requires you to collect 250 trophies, though you can kill whatever you like for them.

• Ace Online has monster hunting sidequests in their own folder (with some overlap with 20 Bear Asses).
• This one's also common in AdventureQuest Worlds, though AE does try to make the quests fit the general storyline of a quest chain.
• Killing X amount of monsters with a specific technique in order to unlock certain skills or get achievements is as close as Vindictus gets to the trope — the main quests mainly have you focusing on clearing dungeons and instances, which pretty much entails killing everything.
• The bulk of Quest Content in TERA for quests consists of slaughtering various numbers of Monster X, and sometimes Monster Y and Z as well. Also slips into 20 Bear Asses (Though the game tends to be merciful on the numbers and drops). As well, the game allows you to do repeatable missions to kill Monster X after turning in the original quest.
• Dungeons & Dragons Online works similarly to Vindictus in that the main focus of quests is clearing out dungeon instances instead of "kill X amount of monsters then return to me," though there are some situations that qualify:
  • There's the Slayer bonus, which gives you XP for killing X amount of enemies in a wilderness instance.
  • Certain dungeon quests, such as Butcher's Path, will also have you killing X amount of monsters as one of your objectives on the quest, either as a main objective, or as an optional objective for extra XP.
  • This gets Lampshaded in the quest "Frame Work" where the sidequests are:
    • Slay some minotaurs - 10 total
    • Slay more minotaurs - 10 total
    • Slay some more minotaurs (still 10 total, although they stop listing that)
    • Slay even more minotaurs
    • Slay, you guessed it, more minotaurs
    • Keep slaying minotaurs
    • The slaughter of minotaurs must go on
    • Don't stop killing minotaurs now
    • Finish what you started with the minotaurs
    • Kill something other than a minotaur for a change
  • Exterminator quests in the Monster Manual reward you with information and useful items and sometimes for killing huge numbers of the same type of monster. A variation in that these quests count total progress over every character on that server.
• This and 20 Bear Asses are the most common mission types in Wizard101.
• Perfect World is no exception from this. Features these that are repeatable within a certain level range. May even overlap with other (side/)quests ie. killing a criteria mob will tick one kill to all currently active quests requiring a kill count of that mob.
• Although later content tends to move away from this, these still crop up in City of Heroes. They're usually in older story arcs, and dressed as your character beating a lead out of them on the whereabouts of a certain villain or plot. Generally speaking, the improvement is that newer content now longer sends the character to defeat ten enemies far too strong for him in a distant zone far too dangerous for him. The classic example from the older game was being sent to defeat Circle of Thorns enemies in the twisted and deadly Perez Park. The Numina Task force featured 16 (later 15 then 14 as Galaxy City and Dark Astoria were removed from the game) of these in a row, using an artifact to search for a missing hero.
• In Champions Online, this pops up a couple times in Canada - you're given 3 separate missions requiring taking down 150 enemies of a given faction - Justiciar gives Terror Halt (150 Hunter-Patriots), and both Douglas McKenzie and Mark Derringer give missions to take out 150 Viper Agents (Snake Harmer and Make Snakes Moan).
• To the letter in Star Wars: The Old Republic: most quests are not about killing masses of quest enemies, but they generally have a bonus quest attached to them that unlocks once you kill one of the associated monsters. (Sometimes this swings back to normal objectives: one common chain of bonus quests is Kill Enemies -> Sabotage Doodads -> Kill and Loot a Heroic Enemy -> Turn In Item)
• A frequent quest option in Elsword, usually as an infinitely-repeatable quest for EXP grinding.
• The infamous "Trials of the Magians" quests in Final Fantasy XI are this. If you're making an elemental weapon the number of monsters killed per trial tend to number in the 100-300 range. For non-elemental weapons however could be looking at 700 kills for just a single trial. On top of that many trials also had additional requirements such as every kill requiring to be done using a certain Weapon Skill or kills requiring the correct elemental conditions such as the correct elemental day or weather. All targets also must be strong enough to grant experience points, which made some trials harder than others due to enemy availability at certain level ranges.
• Final Fantasy XIV is pretty light on those in general, with the early class quests to kill 3 enemies each of 3 types probably demanding the most in the whole game. However, some of the dynamic FATE events spawn dozens of enemies to kill.
  • One mission in Camp Drybone plays it for tragedy: A woman tasks you with killing a number of the wild dogs that roam the area, but the quest doesn't end after you report to her; you're prompted to speak to another man who gives you the full story: her fiancé (his brother) was slain by a pack of those dogs, and siccing adventurers on the local population is her way of getting revenge and working through her grief.
  • Replace the sidequest part with an entire area and you get Eureka. For all intent and purposes the modus operandi for the area is to kill specific monsters until a Notorious Monster appears. The slaughter part of this trope still holds true even for the vitiated aether farming, since you'll still have to grind a massive amount of monsters to get enough aether for frosted crystals.
• Evil Islands: Early on, there's a quest that involves killing 7 goblins as a punishment for their intrusions.

Platform Game

• Some of the missions in Shadow the Hedgehog were of this variety: kill all aliens, soldiers, etc.
  • Also, the Extra Missions for Team Dark in Sonic Heroes have you blowing up a couple hundred Mecha-Mooks.

Real Time Strategy

• A number of Achievements for Sins of a Solar Empire require you to destroy so many of a certain unit type in a single match. The 1000 Pirates and 2500 strikecraft ones are particularly tedious.

Roguelike

• Candies 'n Curses: Hector, an NPC occasionally encountered in treasure rooms, will give you the task of killing a specific ghost several times. Sometimes it must be killed hundreds of times. These quests can be completed over several playthroughs.

Simulation Game

• Some of the quests offered by Clint, Demetrius, Lewis, and the Wizard on the town bulletin board in Stardew Valley are requests for the player to delve into the mines and kill a number of a certain creature (such as slimes, rock crabs, ghosts, etc.).

Western RPG

• Bug Fables has three sidequests which require you to defeat a specific number of enemies. Unlike most examples of the trope, however, the number of enemies defeated before taking the sidequest also count for completion, meaning that you can complete these sidequests as soon as you start them if you had a lot of run-ins with these kinds of enemies.
  • For Ven's sidequest, you are required to defeat 20 bandit-type enemies (Thieves, Bandits and Burglars) as a revenge for them mutilating his fiancée. As a reward, you are given the Freeze Resistance medal.
  • For Alex's sidequest, you are required to kill 10 Water Striders as a revenge for one of them taking out his eye. The reward is a Lore Book.
  • For Takkun's sidequest, you must defeat 50 various kinds of Seedling-type enemies to help him with his research. For a reward, he gives you the Seedling Affinity medal which doubles the chance of encountering the Golden Seedlings.
• The Elder Scrolls series includes these frequently. Often crosses over with 20 Bear Asses, as you aren't simply killing the monsters, but collecting their Organ Drops for the quest giver.
• Gothic often finds some rather creative justifications for this type of missions.
• Fallout: New Vegas has kill challenges, which tally your kills of certain categories and awards you special perks if you kill enough - kill enough bugs and you get the Bug Stomper perk, and so on. It also has the "Lord Death", "Lord Death of Murder Mountain" and "Apocalypse Ain't Got Nothing On Me" challenges, which requires you to kill, well, anything you can find. And requiring 200, 700 and 1000 kills respectively. In other words , you need to kill 1900 opponents to fill your death quota.
• Fallout 4: Many side quests boil down to "Go to Location X and kill all of the Ghouls/Super Mutants/Raiders in it."
• In Mass Effect, there's an overly long sidequest that involves you wiping out what pretty much amounts to a geth army. While there is no specific number you have to kill, you have to wipe them out on four different worlds. This will take at least an hour, probably double that if you explore each planet looking for stuff.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King tallies not only how many enemies you kill but if you properly execute the controls while doing it. It determines your mission rating. Luckily there's plenty of sites that list a manual cheat code to make all your mission ratings Perfect.
• Shows up in Might and Magic from time to time:
  • VI requires you to clear a Demon Outpost as a quest to gain admission to the Oracle. Mind you, Demons are endgame monsters, and this task takes the place in the first half of it.
  • The first thing in VII you have to do once you get an access to the mainland is to clean your new possession, Castle Harmondale, out of goblins. There are other quests to clear some other places such as Haunted House for Cavalier promotion.
  • VIII requires you either kill all Dragons in Garrote Gorge, or do the same to the Dragonhunters. More like Genocide Sidequest.
• The first Baldur's Gate game has a quest to kill Ankhegs, which are giant, acid-spitting burrowing insects. Unusually for this trope, the quest-giver is in the exact same area as the target is, so completing it requires minimal trekking around- there are probably a few Ankhegs just outside of your sight radius when you talk to her to get the quest.
• Your Bizarre Adventure:
  • The very first story quest has Boungiorno task you with killing five security guards.
  • Dracula's side quest involves killing three of his zombie henchmen (who have started lashing out against him).
• OMORI: A sidequest has an NPC tasking you to kill up to 100 rabbit enemies, also giving you an achievement. Later on, a similar sidequest is given, involving you in killing 100 Squizzards for an achievement and clams.

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