Too many people seem too focused on getting 100%/Platinum though, and I feel like that's almost always going to end up in a kind of exploration grind, or just having achievements for playing the game.

The best achievements imo is when you do something random and get an achievement for it, then youll be able to see how many other players managed the same.

But dodging 100 random lightning bolts is fun!!

Achievements (for me, at least) are just a reason to spend more time with a game that I enjoy. In most cases, I have trouble enjoying a game if I don't have goals to work towards (either game-imposed or self-imposed). If I finish the main part of the game, and am not tired of it yet, achievements give me goals that I can follow if I want to keep playing.

Definitely agree that there's too many games that have achievements that are just in no way worth the time and aren't even fun as an auxiliary goal, though. The best ones are the ones that get you to do things you otherwise wouldn't (e.g. playing a non-standard playthrough of the game). The lazy ones ('Kill X enemies, Earn Y dollars') are just busywork or earned 'automatically' while doing other things and add nothing.

Action games, for the most part, have well-thought achievements, TBH. If designed well, they can nudge you towards the intended way to play the game and by the time you're done, you will have mastered the gameplay or got really close.

In Hi-Fi Rush, for example, some achievements encourage you to parry, parry counter, air juggle… etc.

Trophies can be very fun when they incentivize the player to interact with the game in ways that you normally don’t do during a regular play through.

Most games have trophies designed by some corporate drone and consist of a handful of trophies giving for completing the storyline and the rest for token actions that you’ll inevitably do while playing. They fucking suck!

Ratchet and Clank did it right back in the day before trophies with their Skill Point system. Little fun challenges that you wouldn’t normally do. Gave you points to unlock some skins and cheats.

Is that really so much to ask for… yeah I already know the answer.

Yeah I agree with this. Most achievements just don't have the fun or inquisitive nature they should and are pretty much meaningless.

After someone on Lemmy recommended Dwarf Eats Mountain (it's okay), I checked out the idle game genre for the first time.

On one extreme, Magic Archery was completed in under an hour and all seven achievements were earned during normal gameplay.

But most other idle games, ho boy. They tend to have several hundred achievements, many of which would take literal weeks if not months to achieve, and often require resetting the game back to the start dozens of times due to prestige mechanics that are necessary for late-game progression.