100% / Grind is meaningless

[danpp]

I did my first run with the intention of getting all the gems, keys, and specific achievements so that I could then focus on the run of beating the game without dying, but the achievement of getting 100% took away all the desire to keep playing.

That's because someone had the following (brilliant) ideas:

1 - 100% is only achievable if you complete the entire "gallery" of the game (songs, character icons, world, etc.);
2 - These items are not unlockable, you need to buy chests that drop them;
3 - Chests can be purchased using resources acquired during stages;
4 - There are two types of chests and their contents are random, with the possibility of dropping a type of currency (and consequently not dropping any gallery items that we need) and that are useless at this point in the game.

With all the resources I farmed during my first run (I cleared each stage collecting practically everything) I didn't come close to unlocking half of the items needed to complete the gallery (because of the damn chests that only drop coins).

I spent the last 2 hours farming in a single stage and I'll still need at least another 1 or 2 hours to farm enough to be sure that I'll unlock everything I have left.

The game is cool, but it makes no sense to put this type of system that forces a meaningless grind into this type of game.

[Kao Nocturatzu]

Yeah.... the 100% criteria doesn't really make a lot of sense....
- You collect keys by beating bonus stages, but...the keys don't unlock anything.
- You collect one purple gem per world (which I suspect are the "DK Coin" equivalent) Fair enough as even DKC Returns didn't have DK coins for some reason, but despite being called "Currency", they don't do anything.
- You collect all the NIKO tokens but....they again don't do anything. there are no lives in this game even but the game makes a big deal of collecting them all as it keeps track of which ones you've already gotten.
- The "Shop" is just a couple of gacha chests and a confusing "Bring an animal buddy to the stage" but most stages are designed around the animal buddy when you get them and aside from doing some double jumps here and there, and the Frog jumping way higher, I can't think of a reason you'd want to bring them to a stage in particular. they don't "take a hit for you" either and you can't even use them in arbitrary parts of the stages.

The game is overall charming, very aesthetically pleasing and the cues it took from DKC Returns feels absolutely on point, but the 100% criteria....honestly feels unfinished. Like there's still more to the game and we're playing an unfinished version of it. I mean it's nice to have all these things, and David Wise knocked it out of the park with the music once again, but aside from "for the sake of collecting them all" there just isn't an incentive to do so, no reward, no "100% ending", no cool aesthetics, no "secret world" or "secret levels", nothing.... which is a real shame. Thinking back to what DKC2 and DKC Returns did if you 100% them.