Dopamine is more and more of a topic coming up in today’s video gaming. Companies, big and small, AAA and Indie, are trying to find ways they can make the player feel good. This can come by way of getting some flashy cosmetic, achieving a milestone or benchmark of some kind, or even in simply delivering a replayable, thorough journey that reaches its end.

For me, personally, satisfaction through gaming generally tends to come when I achieve closure of some kind. But, I am a unique human being with my own set of experiences to share. Today, I aim to showcase my ten most satisfying moments in gaming. Some of them will be highly specific, some of them will be more general. All of them are personal and subjective. Let’s begin.

10. Beating Fume Knight for the first time

Fume Knight’s difficulty over the years has aged somewhat poorly, but for a time, Fume Knight was the indisputable hardest boss in all of Dark Souls 2. Even to this day, this is heavily reflected in game stats that From Software is kind enough to make public. Over 93% of all deaths that have ever come from a boss fight in the history of Dark Souls 2 have come fighting this man. Considering he wasn’t even in the game when it first launched, that’s pretty wild!

Anyway, I was no different from the many who tried and failed at this fight. It was on my docket for a week at one point, going in and out probably north of 25 times before finally slaying the big man.

Boy is it an intense rush of dopamine and adrenaline when finally overcoming a roadblock like that!

9. Finishing “The List” in Predecessor

This was a longer, grindier achievement for sure. “The List” refers to a selection of ten characters that players have to fully master in order to properly “100%” Predecessor. For reference, it usually takes anywhere from 75-100 matches per character to fully max them out, and each match lasts anywhere from about 20-40 minutes. Unsurprisingly, filling out my own personal list took north of a thousand hours.

8. Completing the Der Eisendrache Easter Egg with friends

Kind of like Fume Knight, only this treacherous, tense, at times frustrating journey was embarked upon with friends. My friend group and I started hacking away at this boss fight and associated easter egg the moment it came out. We tried again and again several times, and one of us even fully gave up out of frustration with the challenge. About a year after it released, we finally just barely got it done to rousing, satisfied, as well as perfectly profane triumph.

7. Finishing the Dead by Daylight Platinum Trophy

A little bit of dynamic whiplash certainly exists on this list, going from personal, to team then back again to a personal achievement. But this was another really grindy, tedious and at times difficult grind with one ultimate award waiting at the end of it. Dead by Daylight‘s Platinum trophy journey may be among one of the fairest Platinum journeys out there, with the right combination of tests of skill, random collect-a-thon type tests all the way to obscure challenges.

6. Finishing the SMT 3 Nocturne Platinum Trophy

This was basically Dead by Daylight, only with way, way, way more macro-gaming and doing things in very specifically planned intervals. This Platinum specifically rewarded clever players, or severely punished people who couldn’t think outside the box if you prefer to view it that way. It requires six full playthroughs of the game, and with one playthrough already taking up quite a long time, it would be very easy for players to feel turned away due to getting burned out.

Of course, the aspect of this trophy that rewarded clever players, is that you don’t actually have to truly do six ‘full’ playthroughs of the game. I’ll go ahead and keep that “secret” hidden away, perhaps for another day, but even if you cut as many corners as humanly possible, this is still an extremely tedious Platinum trophy. It also does not hold the player’s hand whatsoever in terms of helping them figure out what to do. So, whether you take shortcuts or not, there is simply no truly ‘cheesing’ this Platinum trophy. It is a journey, through in and through out.

5. Finishing the Chalice Dungeons

I embarked on this journey with a close friend of mine, Jeremy Stinson, in doing this. Jeremy and I share in common the capability to obsess over and properly analyze, sometimes a bit much at that, any video game we play. No stone goes unturned if we care to hunt rocks, per se. As such, we actually managed to complete the Chalice Dungeons in a matter of three days, each day with about several hours spent on them. While that may not sound like much, even compared to my other satisfying moments on this list, it was the sheer depth and breadth of how Chalice Dungeons can be in Bloodborne that made overcoming them very satisfying. They were extremely grindy, somewhat monotonous and, at times, even brutally challenging. We finished the Chalice Dungeons and obtained our Platinum trophy for the game in the process. To give an idea, while I may be an achievement hunter at times, Jeremy never gives a care in the world towards them. We did these Chalice Dungeons back in 2020, a bit before Covid, but still approximately six years ago at the time of writing this quiz. Jeremy just two weeks ago earned his second Platinum trophy, but before then, it hadn’t been since these Chalice Dungeons where Jeremy actually felt inspired enough by a game to go for the Platinum.

As such, through pure personal symbolism, this is an appropriate place for this achievement.

4. Finishing the Persona 4 Platinum Trophy

Hoo boy, this was a journey. This is kind of like if SMT 3 didn’t let the player take shortcuts en route to the Platinum, instead opting to just cram all six playthroughs worth of content into the one playthrough. This Platinum is without remote question the most tedious to earn in all of Atlus’ offerings. I had to whip out a spreadsheet and start paying attention to the dumbest details anyone else would overlook without a care, like really specific dialogue lines along with micromanaging months and months (in-game) of play. This Platinum was ridiculous, but so too was the satisfaction of ‘accidentally’ earning it in the end. I remember thinking I still had just a little more to do, but earning the Platinum earlier than expected was almost an overload of dopamine… and relief.

3. The GUMS 6 Smash Bros Tournament

Funny thing is, almost none of us even did particularly well at this tournament. But, just getting us here was a pretty extreme journey, both physically and mentally, and hilariously enough, mainly for me. Everyone in the picture shown above was part of a carpool, and I was both the driver and de-facto ‘captain’ of our entire experience. I was responsible for driving all over New England to get everyone, spending tedious amounts of time preparing everyone for the tournament itself ahead of time, and managed to get everyone to and from the tournament in one day without any (serious!) problems. I will probably take this experience with me to my grave, perhaps even more-so than anything else on today’s list.

This was also the day I discovered that, yes, there is indeed a reason why companies, specifically Five Hour Energy, discourage overuse of their products…

2. Finally Platinumming Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age

The absolute grindiest Platinum I have ever done, and hopefully ever do. The level of extra this game asks of the player is to a comically extreme extent. There is random side stuff anywhere, a frankly ridiculous sequence of hidden mechanics the player will have to learn, and there’s even a fair bit of luck involved.

On paper, this Platinum almost certainly requires less sheer gametime to acquire than most multiplayer games. However, this is a single player game exclusively. It’s like trying to compare a dog’s age in human years and dog years. Sure, you could probably Platinum this in 2-300 hours or so (I did it in roughly 215) but that’s going to end up feeling like the equivalent of 2-3,000 hours of a multiplayer grind. You are the only one conducting the train. It all starts and ends with you, there aren’t any pro players out there who can do anything for you.

If I ever find a Platinum I come to appreciate more than this, I shudder to envision what the experience along the way would be like.

1. Soloing Fangbreaker Island in Neverwinter

This one was sort of like the insurmountable feel of a Fume Knight, meshed with the feel of tedium imposed by the Chalice Dungeons, then topped off with a cherry-sized bit of Persona 4‘s extreme attention to detail. As well, it will never, ever again be done by any other Neverwinter player due to how much game mechanics have changed since I did this run. At the time of completing Neverwinter‘s Fangbreaker Island alone, I became just the third player in the game’s at the time five year history to do it, and nobody has done it since I did in 2019, as it is nowadays truly, completely impossible.

My only one, nagging regret is that I didn’t check my sound output before starting the run! As such, though the game volume is fine, you will not hear a word of dialogue from me during the entire three hour run. But the victory over Drufi in the very end was louder than any words I could possibly have hoped to muster.