Tuesday’s Trope: Collection Sidequest

[Tuesday's Trope is a weekly department highlighting an amusing video game trope from TVTropes. Aggrogate is not affiliated with TVTropes.org in any way. All trope examples come from TVTropes and are shared via the Creative Commons license.]

It's not enough to save the world. You have to collect tons of crap while you do it. Gems, coins, medals, weird shiny things. They're everywhere. It might not be vital to your mission, but if you bring in enough odds and ends you'll probably get a nice reward. This is one of the most common kinds of sidequests in video games: the Collection Sidequest.

There are X number of doodad in the world. The more you collect, the more items you get. When you collect all X, you get a really sweet reward and bragging rights (or sometimes just bragging rights). It's necessary for a 100% run of the game, and it sends you out to the farthest reaches of the world.

Examples of Collection Sidequests include:

• Mini-Medals in most of the Dragon Quest games.
• Golden Skulltula tokens in The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time.
• Dalmatian puppies in the first Kingdom Hearts game, 99 in all. (the two parents are already home at the start of the game to account for all 101). You also find the puppies in sets of three, meaning there are really only 33 chests that contain them.
• The thirteen Stellazio coins in Final Fantasy IX.
• In Okami, you can collect 100 Stray Beads throughout the course of the game. Collecting them all gives you the game's Infinity Plus One Accessory, but it's really really hard. This makes them an utterly worthless collectible for at least the first time you play, and probably several subsequent playthroughs, as well.
• In Grand Theft Auto, you collect packages of what's assumed to be Spank, the drug du jour of Liberty City. Each 10 packages (of 100) grants you an additional weapon at your safehouse.
• The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion has this in form of a Nirnroot (a semi-rare plant only found near or in bodies of water) sidequest which has you collect 100 of these, and if you're really bored, it's definitely possible to collect every single piece of playable armor and weapons in the game, just for showing them off... to yourself.
• Metal Gear Solid 2 had dog tags, which you got by holding up enemy soldiers and which serve no in-game purpose at all.
• Psychonauts has a bunch of these, including Mental Cobwebs, Emotional Baggage, and even a literal Scavenger Hunt. Due to the game's otherwise-unique nature, the game was dinged by a few review sources for having stooped to this.
• Assassins Creed. Hope you like hunting down hundreds of flags and dozens of Knights Templar for no appreciable reward.
• Anachronox had a few of these. Taking pictures of little nonentities that appear in obscure places for extremely short times with long times between appearances, and collecting TACOs. TACOs are given a long in-game explanation that amounts to something much like beanie babies, where someone noticed something was popular, created them, people started collecting them madly, then the market collapsed and nobody wanted them anymore, which now makes them rare. They are a small box with a rotating radar dish on top, and "TACO" on the side. TACO stands for Totally Arbitrary Collectible Object.