[Gaming] A Need for Achievement Progress Feedback

In my attempt to finish out the final achievements in Final Fantasy XIII over Memorial Day weekend, I ran into a frustrating predicament. One of the last achievements is to handle all accessories and weapons in the game, requiring an obscene amount of money (and hence time) to upgrade. I worked most of the day finishing out upgrading all the items, selling off the items as I created to get more money back in order to keep upgrading. After triple checking lists on the wiki to make sure I had crafted all the items, I headed to the robot in Oerba to get my achievement. To my horror, instead of the achievement, the robot said "there are still items out there you've yet to acquire." Argh.



After turning the 360 off in anger, I came back a few hours later to see if I could figure out where things had gone awry and salvage the situation. No dice. Final Fantasy XIII has absolutely no indicator of progression for this arduous achievement. I also recently ran into the same issue with achievement farming in Red Dead Redemption, specifically the one for exploring all locations on the map. I thought I had explored all the areas, but I was mistaken. The big difference between these two games: Red Dead Redemption has exhaustive statistics, including how many areas in each of the 3 major territories you've explored out of the total. In other words, with an online map of areas in Red Dead Redemption I was able to narrow down the locations I still needed to find in a matter of 30 minutes in order to get my achievement.

Square Enix should take a note from Red Dead Redemption's notion of statistics to make it easier on gamers who wish to get the most out of their games. There is already a lot of bad press on Final Fantasy XIII, and I appeared to be one of the rare few that truly enjoyed the game. I hate to walk away from the game on a low note.