It looks like a Cosmetic Award, it's awarded like a Cosmetic Award, it gives points like a Cosmetic Award, except it is not cosmetic, it actually does something to affect gameplay.
Usually such achievements do not influence gameplay immediately, but instead unlock content for later use.
See also Bragging Rights Reward, And Your Reward Is Clothes.
Examples:
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Action Adventure
- Konami Man, Twin Bee and Vic Viper in Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin are gotten as rewards from beating the game on Hard difficulty with a level cap of 1, 25 and 50, respectively: their description only reads "5000 points", but each of them also gives a permanent 50 point bonus to STR, INT and LCK, respectively.
- In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, most of the masks you can acquire as Child Link don't do anything but change some NPC's dialogue when you talk to them (unless it's someone you need to sell the mask to in order to continue the sidequest). The most notable exceptions are the last two masks, the Bunny Hood and the Mask of Truth. The latter allows you to talk to Gossip Stones, while the former prevents Stalchildren from attacking you at night in Hyrule Field (which is convenient, since the person you need to sell it to happens to wander around the field). The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask expands the masks into a central game mechanic, and the Bunny Hood becomes even more useful since it gains a speed boost.
Alternate Reality Game
- Ingress Medals used to simply be Cosmetic Awards, until the Cap Raiser update that raised the level cap from 8 to 16. Those new levels are Double Unlocks: You need to not only earn the required AP for the target level, but also earn x medals of one particular tier or higher and y medals of another.
Eastern RPG
- In I Miss the Sunrise, merits will grant slight bonuses to the Personal and Battle Trust (which affect damage and accuracy) of all allies, including ones not recruited yet.
- Star Ocean series:
- Battle Trophies in Star Ocean: Till the End of Time appear to be for show, but acquiring enough of them unlocks various costume changes for the player characters, as well as the harder difficulty settings (Universe and 4D) and a special "manual" battle option that lets you perform attacks where your character is positioned instead of having them automatically move to a predetermined distance from the enemy, allowing you to use your moves quicker and in new ways but making it much easier to miss with them.
- Taken one step farther in Star Ocean: The Last Hope, where acquiring enough of a character's battle trophies is required to increase that character's level cap from 200 to 255.
- Super Mario RPG has the Quartz Charm, a piece of equipment that you get for beating the superboss, Culex. Its description doesn't mention anything specific, other than it's apparently shiny. It also doesn't seem to give any stat boost when equipped to a character. However, what it does do is give you a strength and defense up boost when starting the battle, even though it doesn't play the boosting animation when you do, making it a very useful piece of equipment against enemies who can't debuff characters.
Endless Running Game
- While many characters in Crossy Road are purely cosmetic, a few are not: many characters also change how the playing field looks, and characters such as Pac-Man and Psy add new gameplay mechanics, which are often tracked separately.
Fighting Game
- Gotcha Force features palette swaps of various borgs. Being toys and all, different colors give different stats. Gold and Silver borgs in particular.
First Person Shooter
- Borderlands 2 has a laundry list of minor challenges of the "kill 10/100/1000 enemies with a pistol" variety that look like purely cosmetic achievements, but unlock "badass points" that can be cashed in for small bonuses that apply to all your characters.
- When Team Fortress 2 first released alternative weapons, the only way to get them was to complete various achievements for the class in question to unlock them (you can still do so, but since the items now Randomly Drop and you can now trade, craft, or just buy them it's somewhat redundant).
- Some of the hats Team Fortress 2 is known for used to be part of sets with other items, which when completed gave you stat boosts. The trope was subverted when these boosts were removed and the hats were nerfed to be truly cosmetic-only.
Hack and Slash
- The Sword of Etheria:
- The Cockscomb item increases the player's tension gauge by 10%, allowing the player to build their tension meter faster.
- Hero's Clothes, Teacher's Clothes and Belmont Costume changes Fiel, Almira and Leon's Deadly Attacks to Fire (Fiel), Ice (Almira) and Lightning (Leon) respectively.
- Juju's high school uniforms change her Deadly Attack properties to Shining Element, Galumn's Koruku and Koguro suits cause his attacks to deal 1.5x and 2.0x the damage to enemies and Vitis's Bartender outfit allows him to reflect damage if he guards.
Idle Game
- Anti-Idle: The Game's achievements each raise your Progress Bar reward multiplier additively by a slight amount.
- Cell to Singularity: Evolution Never Ends: Claiming an earned achievement grants a fairly large amount of Entropy and Idea. The last achievement of a line grants one Darwinium.
- The achievement system in Cookie Clicker initially comes off as being a mere Bragging Rights Reward. However, unlocking achievementsnote also increases one's "Milk" percentage, and the Kitten upgrades (helpers, workers, and engineers) increase one's CpS based on the amount of Milk the player has. Additionally, there are a series of upgrades you can get, courtesy of the Bingo Center / Research Facility, and that is only available if you have the Elder achievement.
- FE000000: Every achievement gives a small reward that multiplies all generators, chroma buildup speed, power gain speed, and galaxy effect buildup speed. You can turn them off if you somehow think that ruins the game.
- The Perfect Tower: Achievements raise the amount of orange resources you gain by 1%. You can put a black resource to an achievement to raise that to 2%, and if there's five in a row, 4%.
- All of Realm Grinder's Secret Trophies unlock an upgrade, whose usefulness ranges from rather weak to very useful. Regular Trophies themselves don't do anything, but how many you have unlocked influences several upgrades.
- Replicanti Incremental: A few achievements grant small rewards like more replicanti upon restarting or greater Replicanti Galaxy effect.
- The Tower - Idle Tower Defense:
- Tower and Background themes also permanently increase your overall Coin Multiplier.
- Relics provide permanent passive bonuses aside from being items that can be showcased on the player's Profile card.
- In Unnamed Space Idle, every achievement earned provides a varying amount of A.I. points, which can be spent in a special shop for various forms of automation, a number of quality-of-life features, and consumable items like time-skips, while the amount of A.I. points gained provides various bonuses after reaching specific milestones. A large majority of the achievements also provide bonuses relating to their associated gameplay mechanic, which while individually being rather small are all multiplicative with each-other, and thus provide increasingly stronger boosts the more you unlock.
- Zombidle's achievements boost damage or increase skulls gained by a very small percentage. Death Medals are obtained for obtaining ever-greater amounts of orbs, hugely increasing damage, skulls or amount of orbs dropped.
Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game
- Granblue Fantasy: Trophies / Titles earned from completing in-game achievements reward the player with extra Crystals, though there are ones that provide additional benefits:
- The only way to unlock Ranko Kanzaki and/or Kirari is to call their summon numerous times, completing achievements related to this task give summon copies and items that allow the player to proceed to the next step in unlocking them.
- The "Conqueror of Eternals" is a trophy that provides a stat boost to the Eternals when the title is equipped.
- A set of Coop-Quest trophies provide a Class Distinction, which are used for forging Class Champion Weapons.
- Kingdom of Loathing's Brass Bowling Trophy Trophy
trophy is earned by picking up a brass bowling trophy in the Strange Leaflet Quest. Which trophy appears in that quest is random, and once you buy the bowling trophy, it won't ever appear there again, which makes the game a tiny bit easier, as the other four possible trophies all let you earn some free stat experience by saying the right magic word.
- Some of the badges in Pirate101 serve as flags that signal for a reward ranging from a companion to become available in the crown shop, a housing item, or a pet.
- Some achievements in Star Wars: The Old Republic award small amounts of Cartel Coins (currency otherwise bought only with real money). Maxing companion affection or reaching level 50 with a human character awards small stat bonuses to all characters.
- Vindictus's achievement titles grant stat boosts whether they have been equipped or not. It might be worth going around and kicking 100 gnolls to death, if it will give you +1 STR.
- In World of Tanks, there are "Battle Hero" achievements for excellent performance in a battle (killing at least 6 tanks, dealing very large amounts of damage, assisting in killing tanks through damage or spotting, etc). While these are purely cosmetic if you win, earning such an achievement in a loss results in a "Courageous Resistance" bonus that effectively gives you a winning payout.
- In World of Warcraft, the achievement-gained mounts can qualify as this in previous versions of the game, as it means you don't have to buy a fast mount if you haven't already, and the +310% speed ones mean you don't have to buy the last flying rank. Now however all mounts move at whatever speed you have learned and flying mounts do not actually fly if you haven't learned the skill. The guild achievements also provide numerous perks, such as +EXP items to give to alts, or groupwide buff items. None of them are necessary to maximize your abilities in combat, but they can save time on many types of grinding.
- In World of Warships, however, "Battle Hero" achievements aren't just cosmetic. Each achievement you can earn by performing the appropriate task in battle will also award you with a set of the appropriate signal flag(s), which you can then hoist onto your ship to provide specific bonuses for that ship for one round. Did you manage to stay afloat after sinking another ship via ramming? That "Die Hard" achievement just rewarded you with a flag that boosts the ramming damage you deal by 50% and reduces the ramming damage you take in return by 20%. Did you suffer a magazine detonation? Here's your "Detonation" achievement, and a flag that eliminates the possibility of that happening again for one match. Did your ship's secondary batteries land a killing shot on an enemy ship after having they have dealt at least 40% of that ship's HP in damage? Here's a "Close-Quarters Expert" achievement, and a flag that boosts the range of your secondaries.
Multiplayer Online Battle Arena
- Bloodline Champions has achievements that give Blood Coins, the main in-game resource, that can be later used to unlock characters. Grinding the easiest ones is usually recommended for new players.
- League of Legends:
- There are alternate champion models that can be unlocked for real cash. While having no impact on gameplay (except for a certain Annie skin that makes the "stun ready" particle hard to see), when you are on a team with zero skinned characters and the enemy team has three or four, you assume you will lose.
- There's also the −1 damage to Leona's Sunlight spell that all skins with sunglasses provide.
Platform Game
- Collecting the seven Jewels, one in each normal Sumeragi level, in Azure Striker Gunvolt and giving them to Joule will have her create the Handmade Necklace. It provides no benefits once equipped and in fact it disables the very handy Prevasion mechanic, making it come off as just a very nice Easter Egg. In reality, however, it's the key to unlocking the True Ending, as the necklace saves Gunvolt's life by slowing down the bullet that was shot into his heart by Asimov and keeping him from dying right away. This gives the dying Joule time to use her own power and save his life while powering him up.
- LittleBigPlanet has collectible stickers, which need to be pasted on cardboard objects in the levels to activate events. Although mostly it's for more cosmetics, as player made levels often don't use stickers to activate shortcuts often, and many of the good ones don't include stickers at all, but developer made levels are the only ones that have new cosmetics.
- Collecting Marks Of The Gods in Outland mainly unlocks some concept art for the game, but they also give you the ability to cling to walls longer, mark all treasure urns on your map and double the strength of your melee attacks if you collect enough of them.
- A Robot Named Fight! unlocks a new item for later runs when the player completes one of the achievements.
- Getting A Ranks in all of a character's missions in Sonic Adventure 2 unlocks their alternate costume for multiplayer mode. All of these slightly change the way the character plays, trading their three "tiers" of specials for one consistent one:
- Sonic's lets him use Sonic Wind every 20 Rings.
- Shadow's gives him a 5-second Chaos Control every 20 Rings.
- Tails' has no specials at all, but dramatically raises his movement speed.
- Eggman's lets him use Power Laser every 10 Rings.
- Knuckles' lets him use Thunder Arrow every 20 Rings.
- Rouge's gives her a 5-second Charm Ray every 20 Rings.
Puzzle Game
- Part Time UFO: While some of the costumes obtained are indeed cosmetic, others have a gameplay effect attached to it. For example: the Ninja Wear speeds up your character, while the Parasol and Frills makes carrying heavy objects easier.
- Puyo Puyo!! 20th Anniversary, in standard Puyo Puyo fashion, lets you purchase alternate voice packs and designs for the characters. They happen to come with different Puyo player AI, potentially affecting gameplay if you fight an alternate character design or one that happens to use the voice pack as a CPU player.
- The Witness: Completing the Challenge nets the player the final hexagonal puzzle for the projection room, which unlocks a 58-minute lecture on batteries, Shakespeare, rewards, and the concept of awe. Over a video of a solar eclipse. Which is part of an environmental puzzle. (As it happens, this lecture is Jonathan Blow's favourite of all time.) And you thought the cloud in Braid was bad... (To be fair, the puzzle in Braid required about two hours compared to the lecture in this game, and there was nothing in Braid to keep you occupied while waiting.
Real Time Strategy
- A very subtle example is found in the World in Conflict multiplayer mode. As you ramp up your scores, you will soon receive a Rank Up or ten. While your fancy online rank insignia are useless in hard gameplay terms, they give you an unexpected but significant "soft" bonus in the extremely teamwork-oriented online mode of the game: on public servers, random players are much more inclined to follow a Colonel or General's orders, giving your side a higher degree of coordination and team play which translates into a significant advantage over a largely disorganized opponent.
Shoot Em Up
- Enigmata requires you to spend points to unlock higher-tier shops. You earn these points by completing achievements.
- Earning any achievement in the XBLA port of Ikaruga unlocks a special mode in the XBLA port of Radiant Silvergun (if you have it) that is the same game but with the scoring mechanics of Ikaruga.
Simulation Game
- In FreeSpace completing secondary objectives and such not only awards you with points and medals, but also sometimes gives bonus ships.
- Completing secondary and bonus objectives sometimes give some sort of advantage in the following mission (for example, the ship you are ordered to escort might start with less damage).
- Each ship in FTL: Faster Than Light has a set of three achievements unique to it. Completing two of these three achievements unlocks a new layout of that ship, which usually feature new initial weapon loadouts, crew rosters, and floor plans.
Stealth Based Game
- Metal Gear:
- The Brown Facepaint and Green Facepaint in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, one of which can be "awarded" based on a question you answer at the beginning of the game, have the secondary (and unmentioned) ability of giving you unlimited O2 and Grip.
- Obtaining the Assassin Emblem in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots earns you the Assassin's Costume, which unlike the other costumes in the game, automatically makes non-PMCs friendly toward you. It is well worth finding.
Survival Horror
- Resident Evil 4: Beating the game once gives you a Cosmetic Award of new outfits for your characters. Beating the game a second time gives you an additional outfit for each character, but this time your charge Ashley's new costume is a suit of armor that makes her immune to everything, from bullets to explosions, and even to enemies trying to kidnap her.
- Silent Hill: Origins has unlockable costumes. While most of them are purely cosmetic, the "Sprinter" outfit gives you infinite Stamina, letting you run for as long as you want without getting tired.
Third Person Shooter
- In Ratchet: Deadlocked, the final cheat, Ninja Ratchet, not only gives Ratchet a neat ninja costume but also increases his power and speed a bit.
Turn-Based Strategy
- Accessories in Fire Emblem Fates mostly act as a way to go into battle in silly outfits, but some increase damage dealt or reduce damage taken in My Castle battles. Others seem to have no effect, but actually raise the odds of their wearer manning certain facilities. The Chef's Hat, for example, makes the wearer more likely to appear in the Mess Hall, making it useful for certain characters and something to avoid for certain others.
Western RPG
- In Fallout: New Vegas, there are challenges a player can do which are usually skill or weapon-based (kill enemies X times with a particular weapon, use a certain item x times, etc.). When these challenges are completed, you'll actually get XP and sometimes minor perks. Most of the PS3 / Xbox 360 / Steam achievements are tied to either the above challenges or major quests, so when you hear that bleep, you're probably getting a big pile of Experience Points, too.
- The first two Mass Effect games feature a selection of Achievements (and later Trophies) with immediate and potent effects, such as increased XP-gain, boosted powers, access to new abilities, or any number of other benefits.
Other Sites
- Kongregate 's main feature is an API that allows you get achievements for pre-existing flash games. Achievements are regularly selected for challenges that, if completed, give you a card for Kongai, the site's iconic CCG.
- After they merged with GameStop, this was intensified— now a random achievement each day gives you points for the customer loyalty program.
- Achievement Unlocked: Visit Unabridged Version
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