#5 — Masters Of Unlocking

When the Xbox 360 hit shelves in late 2005, it didn’t just bring more powerful hardware, HD visuals, one of the all-time best controller revisions, and a console that would define what it meant to be an all-in-one entertainment system. No, Microsoft had another trick up its sleeve, and by expanding on the simple user profiles introduced with Xbox Live on the original console, we got an all-new way to compare our gaming credentials with friends and rivals alike: the achievement system. We’d seen systems like this on a per-game level in the past, with in-game accolades appearing in a variety of games stretching all the way back to the Nineties, but those accomplishments were tied to just those individual games, and typically not something you could easily share or compare with others. It’s a concept we would see quite a lot in later PS2-era JRPGs — since preowned aisles tended to…