blue_blur_98 Posted July 30, 2023 Author Share Posted July 30, 2023 (edited) 100% #9 - The Sly Collection mini games (PlayStation 3) Completion difficulty: 1/10 Time taken: 9 minutes, 33 seconds Personal game rating: 5/10 - Middling I just got myself a month of PlayStation Plus Premium earlier today, and tested the PS3 game streaming with Sly Cooper. While I was there, I decided to go for these trophies just for the hell of it, and so I could complete my series collection. The PS3 game streaming was... playable. Tolerable, but far from ideal, and I would not willingly play through an entire game like this, especially since I have a working PS3 on hand. The games looked great, and it was generally pretty responsive to my inputs, but frame rate drops were unfortunately pretty common. It's probably more to do with something on my end, though, and I do think the feature is pretty cool. I might use it to test drive some PS3 games that don't have demos on the PlayStation Store. As for the mini games... they were very mediocre. Definitely would put them below Bentley's Hackpack's mini games, and I don't particularly like that game to begin with. They're just really generic, simple mini games that wouldn't feel out of place in a DVD bonus feature. I suppose they are just little extras in a bigger compilation title, and seeing the PS2 games' environments with more detailed lighting was pretty novel, but that's about it. They're really easy, too; so easy, that I did them in less than ten minutes. Seriously. It's actually my all-time fastest completion, over twenty minutes faster than Sonic the Fighters. It'll probably be my fastest completion forever, because any shorter and I'd be playing outright shovelware. Just pretty uninteresting things all around, but like I said, they were just harmless bonus features at the end of the day. No idea why they felt the need to staple trophies onto them, though. But hey, now I have every unique Sly Cooper trophy in existence! Yep, I'm truly done for real, now. It feels great to have all of these games completed after all of these years. Sly Cooper made me a trophy hunter, so this was a long time coming for sure, I just needed the right opportunity to do these mini games. Even if it ended with a mediocre set of mini games, I am very happy to have this series truly done and dusted... unless you count the seperate PS Vita trophy lists for the collection + Thieves in Time, but please don't because that would be mean. Edited July 31, 2023 by blue_blur_98 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
blue_blur_98 Posted August 1, 2023 Author Share Posted August 1, 2023 Platinum #26 - Gravel (PlayStation 4) Platinum difficulty: 2/10 Time taken: 2 weeks, 2 days/17 hours of gameplay Personal game rating: 5/10 - Middling In the Days of Play 2023 sale, I picked up two games. Lumines Remastered and this, this one being offered up for the low price point of $2.99, with all DLC included to boot. At that price, how could I say no? Well... I got what I paid for, to say the least. This game was fine, but not much more than that. It's an incredibly bland and uninteresting gane, with nothing particularly interesting about it. There's very little unique about it; most of the gameplay elements here are ones that had already been done before, and in some cases, better. If you looked up "uninspired" in the dictionary, you'd get a description of the word and an example of its proper use. But it'd be pretty funny if they just put a photo of this game there instead. That is the biggest flaw with the game by far, but I have some others as well. One of the only truly unique elements of this title is its Smash-Up game mode, which is... awful. Just awful. You have to drive through the panels with tick-marks and avoid the panels with cross-marks. Simple, right? Wrong. The panel locations are completely randomized. This means that your racing line is determined entirely by RNG that you have no control over. It's a seriously baffling game design decision that I just cannot wrap my head around. How the hell did they think that'd be a good idea? The game was also oddly buggy, with my car having a tendency to just get flung into the air for no particular reason, or a particularly irritating one that made my car disappear on uncommon occasions when using the rewind function. This game definitely needed more polish, possibly even a delay in hindsight. That's not to say that the experience is without its pros, though. Graphically, the game looks really nice. With detailed environments, good visual effects, stellar lighting and very-well modeled cars, the game clearly had some good production values, and the visuals more than get the job done. Locations are also quite varied. Forests, caverns, cities, stadiums, deserts, beaches... none of the locales are overused at all, which I appreciate. The game's also got a pretty good amount of content, all things considered. The campaign isn't super long, but there's loads of tracks, and a wide selection of cars. All licensed, too, so you've got your Subarus, Fords, Porsches, Toyotas, Hyundais, what have you. There's plenty here for the car people out there. Easy Platinum, with just a few annoying trophies, and the grind was mercifully short, but this was just a really unremarkable game that I'll probably forget all about by the time next week rolls around. Not bad, but not good either. The very definition of mediocre. At least it was only $3. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
blue_blur_98 Posted August 4, 2023 Author Share Posted August 4, 2023 (edited) Platinum #27 - Ape Escape (PlayStation 4) Platinum difficulty: 2/10 Time taken: 4 days, 13 hours/7 hours of gameplay Personal game rating: 7/10 - Good Okay, now I've used my month of PlayStation Plus Premium to play an actual game. This felt like a very natural choice, since I hear a lot of love for this one. It's often considered to be nothing short of a classic, so this gave me a perfect opportunity to finally play it and see what all the hubbub's been about. I enjoyed it, but had some issues that held the game back for sure. Its control scheme is, to put it lightly, odd. The dual-stick control scheme for gadgets isn't the problem here; I actually find that very novel and innovative, and is easily one of the game's strongest aspects. It's the button mapping that confuses me. Having to jump with R1 felt illegal, and using the d-pad for camera control, while understandable given that there weren't any real alternatives, never felt good to use since you basically have to be at a standstill to rotate the camera at all. My least favorite, though, is the controls for the Water Net. You have to press L3 to dive and R3 to shoot the net. I just don't like the idea of using stick clicks for actions like that. It just does not feel good to have actions assigned to those buttons, especially diving, which you'd wanna do while moving... which you cannot do. L1 was free, and R2 is just a secondary jump button, why couldn't diving be mapped to L1, and shooting the net be mapped to R2? It's just a very unusual control scheme that took a lot of getting used to. I still quite enjoyed the game, though, due to its tight level design, fun locales, cool gadgets and potent dose of PS1 charm. My favorite gadget was easily the Sky Flyer - its versatile nature made it very useful throughout just about every level I was able to use it in. This game is aggressively '90s, and I absolutely love that. This was an enjoyable game to play through, despite its very antiquated nature, and I certainly don't regret playing it. Definitely open to playing the other Ape Escape games sometime down the road. The Platinum was also very fast and very easy. All you really have to do is collect 40 Specter Coins - a pretty easy task that I was able to complete before I even finished the game. Just about everything else comes naturally, and since it's a short game in general, it also means that the Platinum can be wrapped up quite quickly as well. The fact that we can trophy hunt in PS1 games now is just so damn cool. Edited August 4, 2023 by blue_blur_98 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
blue_blur_98 Posted August 10, 2023 Author Share Posted August 10, 2023 (edited) Platinum #28 - Undertale (PlayStation 4) Platinum difficulty: 1/10 Time taken: 4 days, 4 hours/5 hours of gameplay Personal game rating: 9/10 - Excellent Here's this month's second PlayStation Plus Premium Platinum - this time from the Game Catalog. I pondered for a while what I should download from it and play, and this game was what I settled on. I really made the right choice here. I've heard all about how amazing this game is since its initial Steam launch back in 2015, just seeing constant praise for this one in particular - some even calling it one of the greatest games of all time. I wouldn't go as far as to call it a GOAT candidate, but I have been thoroughly enjoying my time with this game and absolutely do not regret downloading it. I get the hype now. This is just a really feel-good game, man. The characters are very likeable, charming, and unique, the writing is very strong, with a lighthearted sense of humor and great comedic timing, and I really like the idea of giving the player direct choice over what happens to the enemies - spare or kill them - it's up to you. The battle system is also very unique, with a skill-based, bullet-hell style twist that lets you dodge enemy attacks in real-time, addng a new layer to these turn-based encounters. The trophy list is really weird, though. Half of the trophies are just completely unmissable, with the other half just requiring you to completely waste get a lot of value out of your time and money at the Dog Shrine. It's just a really oddly-structured list unlike any one I've ever done before. The most baffling decision trophy-wise is the fact that you don't even have to finish the game to get the Platinum. It feels so weird to have a Platinum trophy in a game I haven't even rolled credits on yet. It's just all so weird. It was pretty quick and very easy, though, so that's a nice upside. Despite the early Platinum, I will absolutely be playing the rest of this. There's still more for me to play here, and I can't wait to see what the rest of the game has in store for me. I can definitely recommend this one. Edited August 10, 2023 by blue_blur_98 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
blue_blur_98 Posted August 11, 2023 Author Share Posted August 11, 2023 Platinum #29 - Sonic Forces (PlayStation 4) + All Sonic Forces: Episode Shadow DLC trophies Platinum difficulty: 5/10 Time taken: 3 years, 5 months/32 hours of gameplay Personal game rating: 6.5/10 - Okay The guy who named his PSN account after Sonic has obtained another Platinum trophy in a Sonic game. Huge news! Stop the presses! No, but seriously, this has been one of my longest-standing backlog games and I really needed to get back in there and do it once and for all. It's been there since I redeemed it for free on PlayStation Plus back in March of 2020. It's been sitting there incomplete for three goddamn years. That's the reason it's been sitting there for so long; because I never had my own PS Plus subscription for very long, which led to me getting very limited chances to return to this game for the remaining trophies. But with me purchasing a month of PS Plus Premium not too long ago, and me having my own PlayStation 4 console to play on instead of having to share both play time and storage with others, I finally got a prime opportunity to finish this one up. This is, believe it or not, one of the harder Sonic games to Platinum. Beating it is no sweat, but 100% completion expects a ton from you and it can take quite a while to get done. The most infamous trophy is undoubtedly Ring King - 100,000 Rings is a lot, especially when you can only carry a maximum of 999 Rings at any given time. Therefore, the strategy here involves playing a stage that's particularly Ring-dense - such as the Avatar's Prison Hall or Imperial Tower stages, or the tag team Arsenal Pyramid stage - choosing a Wispon that lets you get those Rings without much hassle, and playing your stage of choice... ad nauseam. It gets very tedious, very quickly, and you will have to play a 999 Ring-granting stage somewhere in the ballpark of 100 times! That is truly insane, and I'm glad they didn't try doing a trophy like this again in Sonic Frontiers. We're not out of the woods just yet - Our Rings Are Your Rings caused its fair share of trouble, too. Silver Moon Rings must be collected within a short time-frame, which can make them very hard to get your mitts on. The Moto Bugs on the water slides in Aqua Road are really easy to ram into, and since there are some right next to the Rings you need to get. You will get bumped off course and have to restart at least once, if not several times, which is very frustrating. The hellish pinball contraption they put the Rings at in Casino Forest was a colossal pain in the ass to get down, and required many restarts from me. The hardest by far was Up for Any Challenge, which requires you to complete every single Challenge Mission in the game. Most of them are pretty simple, but the time trials are hair-tearingly difficult at times. Chemical Plant in 1:10 is ridiculously strict, as were the EX Stages with their damn-near half-minute requirements. Network Terminal in 1:30 also gave me huge trouble, easily the hardest Modern Sonic time mission, but Metropolitan Highway in 1:40 was no slouch either, mainly due to its side-scrolling segments. Defeating the final boss was also deceptively difficult. Its 4:30 time limit looks generous, but it is actually very strict. Missed any hits in Classic Sonic's phase? Missed a couple of White Wisp capsules in the tag team phase? Might as well restart, because you're going to fall short of that time for sure. I had to use a very specific Avatar + Wispon combo to do it at all, but at least I got to make him look like Joker from Persona 5, which was fun. This was a surprisingly tough one; a bit above Sonic Generations if you ask me. But it was all very doable, and I felt pretty accomplished when I saw that Platinum unlock. It's an Ultra Rare, too, so if you want a doable UR Platinum, try out Sonic Forces. I have gotten a third UR, knocked out a long-standing backlog title, am now within inches of my 30th Platinum (which will likely be Dreams) and got one step closer to my dream of collecting every Sonic Platinum trophy. I did good today, huh? 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
blue_blur_98 Posted August 27, 2023 Author Share Posted August 27, 2023 Platinum #30 - Dreams (PlayStation 4) + All Ancient Dangers: A Bat's Tale DLC trophies Platinum difficulty: 3/10 Time taken: 2 years, 7 months/62 hours of gameplay Personal game rating: 9.5/10 - Excellent This one was a long time coming. Both in the figurative sense, since it's been on my trophy hunting backlog since 2021... and in a literal sense, because it took a really long time. This is an extremely grindy Platinum, one that will eat a massive amount of your time should you choose to go for it. That mainly has to do with the grind for Blowin' Up!, which takes absolutely forever to obtain. It requires you to reach Level 30, which really doesn't sound that bad at first when you see people with level counts in the several hundreds... but no, it is 100% "that bad". Expect to spend hours and hours and hours grinding your way to Level 30 with the very slow EXP gain in place here. Playing the Mm-created game Ancient Dangers: A Bat's Tale was my method of choice for level grinding, so safe to say, I am unfathomably sick of Ancient Dangers. On average, it took six full runs of this creation to level up once. I would not be surprised if my playthroughs for that game is in the hundreds at this point. When I started the grind, my Indreams.me profile stated I had 20 or so hours of gameplay logged. When I got the Platinum, that number had ballooned to 62 hours. That's roughly 35-40 hours of grinding for one trophy. Absolutely unreal. But hey, at least I got the third-fastest time on the Ancient Dangers speedrun leaderboard on PSN. No, really. You can go there on Indreams.me and I'll be up there. I am not lying just to sound like a badass. Other than that, there were three more rather tedious trophies: Potter, Making Some Noise and Puppeteer. These all required you to do one action for around an hour and a half each; very, very dull, as you could probably imagine. At least with Puppeteer, it was very slightly better because I had direct control over a character and could just mess around. With the others, I just had to spend a ton of time just waving my DualShock 4 around while pressing one button, browsing the internet on my tablet so I don't die of boredom. Those two genuinely made my wrists hurt after a while, which wasn't fun. Just really dumb trophies all round. Outside of those four problematic ones, though? Yeah, this was really easy. Most of them are earned by doing easy Imp Quests and progressing in Art's Dream, with just a few Prize Bubbles to grab and that's about it. Even the DLC trophies, earned in the aforementioned Ancient Dangers, were no sweat with the help of a guide. This is not a hard Platinum at all. Abhorrently grindy, but really easy. Even with the severity of the grind here, my opinion of this game has not diminished. Dreams is an absolute marvel, an incredible achievement on Media Molecule's part that inspires feelings of wonder and awe that few other games have been able to manage. The things people have been able to make here have consistently left me impressed, both at the immense power of the creation tools on offer here and at the talent of the Dreams community. Absolutely one of my favorite games of the PlayStation 4 generation, which was the primary reason I chose to dedicate the Platinum #30 milestone to this game. There were other reasons, too; it's very rare, only slightly more common than LittleBigPlanet 3 (which is my rarest Platinum currently), it takes a lot of dedication to earn, making it a pretty impressive one to have, and because the game's live-service support is set to end in a few days, so I wanted to get it done before that date. Y'know, just in case. This game holds a very special place in my heart, and I am delighted to be able to dedicate this milestone to it. And now that I've mentioned it... 30 Platinum trophies! Woo-hoo! And to think there was a point where I thought I'd never even get one... how naïve I was. I am very proud of my accomplishments so far, and I look forward to a bright future filled with excellent games and fun trophies. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
blue_blur_98 Posted August 30, 2023 Author Share Posted August 30, 2023 100% #10 - The Pedestrian (PlayStation 4) Completion difficulty: 2/10 Time taken: 1 week, 1 day/4 hours of gameplay Personal game rating: 6/10 - Okay My final game I played from this month of PlayStation Plus Premium, and unfortuntately, it was easily my least favorite of the ones I played. It's a real shame, because I really wanted to like it more than I did in the end, but there were some big issues preventing me from pushing this past "just fine", at least in my book. My main problem is that the game just does not do a particularly good job making its mechanics clear or easy to understand. It basically just throws a new mechanic at you and says "good luck, champ!" They could have at least put, like, a little illustration showing you the fundamentals of how it works so you actually know what you're doing, but instead, they just give you a new tool and expect you to just figure it out on your own. It would have been much better if the game gave you a new tool, showed you how it worked, and then let you figure out the puzzles themselves on your own. As it is, this lack of explanation resulted in plenty of frustrating trial-and-error that could have been avoided. This appears as early as the introduction, where there's absolutely no indication that doors and ladders aren't useable unless they're close enough to the door or ladder you have it connected to, which isn't obvious at all and is something that I would have liked to be told about directly. This really just gets worse as the game continues and its mechanics get less intuitive. For instance, there's a late-game area that requires you to paint the panels green. How are you supposed to figure out that green panels don't have their contents reset when something is disconnected from it? You're just expected to figure out something that specific on your own, which just isn't very fun. The worst example of this is at the very end of the game. To put it in a way that avoids spoiling you, there's a puzzle where you have to push a crate into a corner, which spawns a box in a completely different location, which you then have to place in a random spot on the map in order to continue. None of this is indicated to you in any way, and it doesn't give you any idea where to go to get the box, or where exactly you're supposed to place it. You're just supposed to intrinsically know all of this esoteric nonsense, and that's just not great game design in general. A good puzzle should make me feel like a genius, not make me think "How the hell did they expect anyone to figure that out without a guide?" It's a shame, because the concept of this game is so creative and cool, and the developers were clearly very passionate about this game, so it sucks that it had to fall victim to some poor design choices that could have easily been remedied. This game got a lot of praise when it came out, and while I'm glad other people seemed to enjoy it so much, I just can't say I agree with all of the hype here. At least thid brought me to my 40th completed game overall, and my 10th non-Platinum 100%. That's cool. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jonesey46 Posted August 30, 2023 Share Posted August 30, 2023 5 hours ago, blue_blur_98 said: 100% #10 - The Pedestrian (PlayStation 4) Completion difficulty: 2/10 Time taken: 1 week, 1 day/4 hours of gameplay Personal game rating: 6/10 - Okay My final game I played from this month of PlayStation Plus Premium, and unfortuntately, it was easily my least favorite of the ones I played. It's a real shame, because I really wanted to like it more than I did in the end, but there were some big issues preventing me from pushing this past "just fine", at least in my book. My main problem is that the game just does not do a particularly good job making its mechanics clear or easy to understand. It basically just throws a new mechanic at you and says "good luck, champ!" They could have at least put, like, a little illustration showing you the fundamentals of how it works so you actually know what you're doing, but instead, they just give you a new tool and expect you to just figure it out on your own. It would have been much better if the game gave you a new tool, showed you how it worked, and then let you figure out the puzzles themselves on your own. As it is, this lack of explanation resulted in plenty of frustrating trial-and-error that could have been avoided. This appears as early as the introduction, where there's absolutely no indication that doors and ladders aren't useable unless they're close enough to the door or ladder you have it connected to, which isn't obvious at all and is something that I would have liked to be told about directly. This really just gets worse as the game continues and its mechanics get less intuitive. For instance, there's a late-game area that requires you to paint the panels green. How are you supposed to figure out that green panels don't have their contents reset when something is disconnected from it? You're just expected to figure out something that specific on your own, which just isn't very fun. The worst example of this is at the very end of the game. To put it in a way that avoids spoiling you, there's a puzzle where you have to push a crate into a corner, which spawns a box in a completely different location, which you then have to place in a random spot on the map in order to continue. None of this is indicated to you in any way, and it doesn't give you any idea where to go to get the box, or where exactly you're supposed to place it. You're just supposed to intrinsically know all of this esoteric nonsense, and that's just not great game design in general. A good puzzle should make me feel like a genius, not make me think "How the hell did they expect anyone to figure that out without a guide?" It's a shame, because the concept of this game is so creative and cool, and the developers were clearly very passionate about this game, so it sucks that it had to fall victim to some poor design choices that could have easily been remedied. This game got a lot of praise when it came out, and while I'm glad other people seemed to enjoy it so much, I just can't say I agree with all of the hype here. At least thid brought me to my 40th completed game overall, and my 10th non-Platinum 100%. That's cool. Interesting review. I played this game this year too and I actually thought it was great. I'm not sure if I just gelled with the puzzles well or whatever but I actually found the puzzle design to be very clever and intuitive. The way it forced me to constantly think outside of the box without being astronomically difficult to figure out, I really liked. The spoilery part you mentioned really blew me away. It's funny how two perspectives of one thing can be so different. Good write up anyway! 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
blue_blur_98 Posted September 26, 2023 Author Share Posted September 26, 2023 Platinum #31 - PAC-MAN Museum+ (PlayStation 4) Platinum difficulty: 7/10 Time taken: 2 months, 5 days/57 hours of gameplay Personal game rating: 8.5/10 - Very Good Oh boy. This Platinum was an absolute doozy. I sort of expect most retro collections like this to be quick, easy, relatively painless Platinums. I guess that the other retro collection I did the trophies in, Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection, must have clouded my view or something, because the difficulty here hit me like a bus speeding at me from the shadows. Which is to say, I wasn't expecting it at all and it really humbled me. This is my hardest Platinum yet, and it was not even remotely quick, nowhere near easy, and the exact opposite of painless. It was really painful, actually. I still have splinters from it. They hurt. The game itself is great; a solid collection of old PAC-MAN games, wrapped in a charming customizable arcade presentation. What makes it so hard are those in-game missions. Most games have at least one mission that's ranges between annoying, or tedious, or stupid, or just excruciatingly hard. Several of the arcade games have missions for reaching round 15 in a single game. This is a ridiculously tall order, as these games get harder and harder with each round due to things such as the power-up time decreasing. PAC-MAN, Super PAC-MAN, Pac & Pal and Pac-Mania were all excruciatingly hard to get far in. And that's with me using pause-saves to make these tasks even remotely feasible. Easily some of the most unpleasant missions in the game. Pac 'n Roll Remix is hard in general, but it has a particularly cruel mission where you have to clear 25 stages in one game session. 25 is the game's entire stage count. You have to play through the entire game in one sitting. That's just cruel; why is this a thing? Who hurt them? There are also some really silly missions like the one for clearing 50 rounds in PAC-MAN Arrangement '05... a game that has roughly 30 rounds. So you just have to play through two thirds of the game again to complete one mission. Yeah, thanks. Or the mission in PAC-MAN Championship Edition that requires you to make sparks fly for a full second... 100 times. Why is this a mission? It's not hard or fun, it's just a waste of five minutes. And then there's the grind. Dear lord. Firstly, there's the grind to 7,650 total coins for Hoarder. To be fair, it sounds a lot worse than it actually is; once you know that PAC Motos just absolutely showers you in coins, you can cut it down to just a few hours. Playing the first stage of PAC Motos hundreds of times over is really tedious, though, so it's not entirely off the hook. Inserting 1,000 coins into cabinets to unlock Regular and Valued Customer was also mind-numbing, since I just had to completely waste loads of my hard-earned coins and then use the game restart option in the system menu to use up all 99 coins one by one. It was extremely tedious, and I had to do it before I finished up the missions, because it needs to subtract from your coin count to track the trophy - something the Golden Pass prevents the game from doing. It might genuinely be possible to screw yourself out of this trophy forever. Great design, guys. Decoration Collector also earned my ire. The Vending Machine only stocks eight items per day, so you're just stuck with either checking in for a few specific items each day in real-time, or fiddling with your console's date and time settings. I did the latter, because there's no way in hell I was dragging this out for potentially more than an extra month. Either way, it's entirely RNG-dependent. Yaaaaay... But the worst by far is the absolutely excruciating grind for PAC-MAN 256. Getting 10 power-ups to Level 8 is not a reasonable ask, and takes thousands upon thousands of coins to get done, coins which the game barely gives you any of. So you just have to keep going, continually dying to the game's RNG-dependent BS enemy placement and maze design, completing unfun RNG-dependent tasks so you can get small handfuls of RNG-dependent coin drops. It's a randomized slog. A grind in a game where almost every aspect is completely random and out of your control. It ate up 20 hours of what'd otherwise be a 30-40 hour game - nearly half of my Platinum run was disproportionately spent on this one, unfun game. It is truly miserable, and I never wanna go through something like that. I do not like PAC-MAN 256. One of the collection's lowlights for sure, though not as bad as Pac-in-Time... god, that one is atrocious. This game's trophies pushed my skills, patience and sanity to their absolute limit. It is easily my most arduous Platinum trophy yet, probably my hardest, and up there as one of my grindiest. It takes absolutely forever to do, and requires a high level of skill and luck if you want to perservere. I can't really recommend this Platinum to most people; only go for this one if you're looking for something really hard and long, or if you're an absolute Pac-Maniac who lves this series to death. But I can recommend playing this for sure. It's a delightful collection, featuring mostly good games, a great arcade customization feature that adds loads of charm and personality to the package, and a ton of reverence for this long-running series. I hadn't paid much attention to this series before save for a few key titles, but now that I've gotten a good sampling of it, I can say I'm a fan and would definitely be interested in playing more PAC-MAN games. ...After a long break, of course. I have been playing a lot of PAC-MAN recently. 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blue_blur_98 Posted October 19, 2023 Author Share Posted October 19, 2023 Platinum #32 - Super Stardust Portable (PlayStation 4) Platinum difficulty: 2/10 (With rewind) Time taken: 2 days, 12 hours/2 hours of gameplay Personal game rating: 7/10 - Good I seriously doubt that "Portable" claim you're making there, game. I was sitting in front of my TV with a controller in my hand the whole time. Don't you lie to me like that... Jokes aside, this was a very easy one, though I will clarify that it's only easy if you abuse the everloving hell out of the rewind feature. If played in real-time, this probably would have been a nightmare to pull off. Surviving for seven minutes in endless mode without losing a life would have been hellish to deal with, as would surviving long enough to detonate ten nukes (which was around ten or so minutes, I think.) Late Boomer was a major pain in the ass with rewind, so it'd probably be tortrous without the feature. But with the flow of time under my control, this was a cakewalk. It only took two hours of gameplay to get it done, effortlessly making this my fastest Platinum to date in terms of gameplay hours, though I did Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection slightly faster in real-time due to me playing this in shorter bursts. It's also my most common, at 67.02%. This is probably my cheesiest Platinum yet, but hey, this is still one from an actual game that required some slight effort to earn. The game itself was quite enjoyable, though there's not much here to keep you occupied. It's just some nice, simple, arcadey fun, which is always nice to have on any platform. Controls were about as responsive as a twin-stick shooter on the PSP could hope to be (though you can only shoot in eight directions, which is just not as smooth as 360° rotation), the visuals look decently clean on an HD TV, the gameplay is fast-paced and satisfying, and the weapons are fun to use. Not much meat on its bones, but it didn't need to be this huge game anyway. This was a fun and laid-back (for the most part) mini-Platinum. This title comes recommended to any arcade game fan. This also got me to trophy level 300, a huge milestone that I'm glad to have reached. I'm in the silver club now... ironically thanks to my least impressive Platinum yet. Funny how things work, huh? I will now be primarily focusing on getting MediEvil done before Halloween. Might be a tight squeeze... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
blue_blur_98 Posted October 28, 2023 Author Share Posted October 28, 2023 Platinum #33 - MediEvil (PlayStation 4) Platinum difficulty: 4/10 Time taken: 1 week, 1 day/21 hours of gameplay Personal game rating: 6/10 - Okay I decided to do things a bit differently this year and go for a seasonal Platinum. Halloween was around the corner and I could play this for free with my PS Plus subscription, so it seemed like a perfect thing to do to get festive for the Halloween season. After all, this is a beloved cult classic; it's a safe bet that I'd enjoy this, right? ...Sort of? It's weird, I'm really conflicted on this one. Let's start with the good. The spooky vibe of the game is on-point and executed perfectly. You're travelling through graveyards, haunted mansions and ghostly pirate ships, fending off zombies, imps and skeletons, with a live-orchestral score that evokes that spooky feel very effectively. They really managed to make this feel like a playable Tim Burton film; if that was their goal, they absolutely nailed it. The moment-to-moment gameplay is also a lot of fun. While the combat is hardly deep or mechanically rich, hacking and slashing away at the hordes of undead creatures is doubtlessly satisfying and really carries the gameplay here. There were also some fun bits of platforming and puzzle-solving at points, which helped keep the game fresh. However, this game is full of gameplay issues and flaws that severely hampered the experience. The controls and camera feel very dated. Sir Dan handles in a bit of a clunky way, hardly as smooth as you'd want him to be. I also had issues getting the Daring Dash to work consistently. Very often, despite me running beforehand, he'd just put the shield up as normal with no speed boost. This was, at best, annoying, and at worst, got me killed on several occasions; this made navigating the Pools of the Ancient Dead in particular a lot more frustrating. These control issues are something I was able to get used to. The camera, on the other hand, remained a massive headache from start to finish. I often times had it lock to a fixed angle at just about the worst possible times for it to do that, and even when it was freely controllable, it frequently got stuck on random objects, making it a royal pain in the ass to see what I was even doing. If I was playing the original PS1 version, I'd be more likely to partially excuse these issues because it's a PS1 title; it's just par for the course on that platform. What I played, however, was the 2019 remake, that should iron these issues out in theory... but it didn't. Remake or not, a game released in 2019 should not feel this old. They needed to do a better job modernizing this game for the remake. There were also some levels I really couldn't stand here. The Asylum Grounds was a major lowlight with its labyrinthine hedge maze design and terrible puzzles (especially that damn clown puzzle), but The Time Device was also a pain to deal with due to its randomized nature. The absolute lack of checkpoints was also a pain in the ass, sending me back to the beginning of a stage I could have very well spent thirty minutes on. It seriously gave me bad Jak II flashbacks. The Lost Souls side quest you have to do in the post game was also a very tedious slog, taking me through a bunch of levels I already played, performing menial tasks just to say I did it. The reward, however - a fully playable version of the original MediEvil game on PS1 - is absolutely awesome and was 100% worth the boring road towards it. Lastly, I encountered some noticeable performance issues. It was quite common to see the frame rate drop below 30 FPS in various places, with some levels such as Scarecrow Fields dropping so low that I could have sworn it got down to single-digit frame rates at some points. This wouldn't be a great issue to have in any game, but especially not a Sony-published PS4 game. Did this thing just not get the time or budget it needed or something? It sure feels like it. Despite my disappointment with the remake's failure to make this game feel less dated, and the issues I had with the game or level design in certain places, I came out the other end of MediEvil with a generally positive outlook. If you go in expecting a 25-year-old game that still feels like a 25-year-old game in everything but visuals, you'll probably have a good time here. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
blue_blur_98 Posted November 3, 2023 Author Share Posted November 3, 2023 Platinum #34 - Tekken 7 (PlayStation 4) Platinum difficulty: 2/10 Time taken: 5 days, 1 hour/9 hours of gameplay Personal game rating: 8.5/10 - Very Good I kept hearing that this one was really easy. "Surely it isn't", I said to myself. "Fighting games usually have really hard Platinums, it can't be that easy!" It was that easy. In fact, this is one of my easiest Platinums yet, which suprised even me. The online was the hardest part; the matchmaking for online tournaments doesn't really take your skill rating into account, so you're almost certainly getting matched up with people that will crush you effortlessly. Had to boost that one. Other than that, though, it's nothing too bad. You only have to play ten and win three matches online; you don't have to get a ton of characters to the highest rank like in Street Fighter IV or anything like that. After that was a playthrough of the story, which was really easy and short, some Character Episodes on top of that, and the Special Episode fight against Akuma. I watched a guide before attempting it so I knew what to do right away, and combined with playing on easy mode, that let me take him out on my first attempt. Then there was the Treasure Battle grind. This was pretty tedious, but thankfully was over with in a mercifully short amount of time. The mode is... okay, I guess. Nothing to write home about, but I didn't dislike it, I guess. After that, all I had to do was defeat Akuma in a special battle in arcade mode, and some combat-related miscellaneous trophies that I could easily do in training mode. The only miscellaneous trophies worth talking about are I'll Kick Your Butt to Hell and Back, which took a few attempts to get down, and No Pain, No Gain, which was a truly unneccesary grind, though you can make it go by a bit quicker by using Law. Other than these, though? The entire list was really easy. I've basically never played Tekken before now (save for a bit of this game a few years ago, and a bit of Tekken 2 from the Classics Catalog), and I was still able to do this without even trying that hard. Literally anyone can get this Platinum, and it's a Platinum I can recommend to everyone with even a passing interest in fighting games. It's great to finally have a Platinum in a fighting game that's actually good; great, even! I'm still more of a Street Fighter guy personally, but this was a very fun and accessible fighting game that I can tell had very high production values. This is just a very high-quality title, and I'd definitely be down to get the Platinum trophies in the other Tekken games sometime down the line, because this was very enjoyable. Very pleased with the experience of Platinuming this game. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
blue_blur_98 Posted November 5, 2023 Author Share Posted November 5, 2023 (edited) Platinum #35 - Sonic Superstars (PlayStation 4) Platinum difficulty: 5/10 Time taken: 2 weeks, 4 days/23 hours of gameplay Personal game rating: 7.5/10 - Good I got the Platinum trophy in the latest Sonic game. This is the part where you pretend to be surprised. I severely underestimated this game. When the trophies went live a few days before launch, I looked at the list and assumed that it'd be a total breeze - just two playthroughs and a grind, how bad could it be? It turns out that I was very wrong on this. This is not an easy Platinum at all; not ludicrously difficult or anything, but it's a relatively hard one, and was a lot harder than I was expecting. The trophy list does a really good job at looking easy to anyone who hasn't played the game, because it doesn't technically ask you to do anything the game itself isn't already pushing you towards anyway. It's the game itself that's hard - Superstars does not pull its punches whatsoever, and as a result, I'd say this is one of the hardest Sonic games in years. Beating the game isn't too bad until you get to the final boss of Egg Fortress Zone, which is brutal and will give anyone trouble. The second campaign picks up right where that left off, featuring much more treacherous stages teeming with traps, enemies and pitfalls guaranteed to keep your Ring count in the single digits. Its own final boss is even worse, subjecting you to a checkpointless two-phase behemoth with difficult attack phases, minimal damage opportunities, one-hit KOs (even if you have Rings) and no mercy. It then piles on a Last Story segment (when's the last time a Sonic game had that?) featuring a third brutal end boss. This one is especially grating due to its random nature; Tails and Knuckles are supposed to show up and give you extra Rings so you can keep going, but the times they show up are completely random, so I often times found myself dying and having to restart because Tails or Knuckles would either not appear at all, or appear at very poor times that'd cause me to miss out on the Rings they're supposed to give me... it is a very frustrating boss, let me tell you. Don't think we're done just yet; Gold Enemy Hunter is a deceptively simple, yet still absolutely infuriating trophy to get your hands on. It just requires you to destroy every applicable Act's Golden Badnik. Simple, right? Just your bog-standard collectible hunt? Nope, there's a catch; these practically require no-death runs in order to count, because dying after you defeat the Badnik un-collects it and it will not count unless you replay the stage, re-collect it, and finish the rest of the stage without dying this time. Yes, this includes the often times hard and long boss fights. Got through the entirety of Egg Fortress 2, with the shiny bastard in hand, and died to the brutally difficult boss fight at the end? Sorry, bucko, start over and try again. This one restriction turns this from a laid-back scavenger hunt to a brutal difficulty spike that makes the process of earning this trophy a stressful, annoying, difficult pain in the ass. It's just not a fair punishment, and turns what should be an easy game of "grab the random hidden junk" into what I could see being a genuine Platinum killer for many players. Absolutely the hardest trophy here, but ACT "Fruit" Aficionado is a strong contender. All you have to do is get 600 Rings in an Act Fruit stage. Again, simple in theory, excruciating in execution. Getting 600 Rings requires you to pop just about every balloon and light up every casino chip in the stage - there is very little room for error and it will take you several attempts. You know how demoralizing it is to get your ass kicked by the fun little bonus stage? It's not fun! Surprisingly, the grind was actually a total breeze and was no issue at all. Ring King and Medal Maestro in particular I didn't even have to grind out manually; they just popped naturally during my path to the Platinum. The enemy grinding was a tad annoying, especially with Tails, but even that got done in less than an hour, so it really wasn't too bad at all. Ironically, this is the exact opposite of how I though this Platinum would turn out; I thought it'd be an easy Platinum with a tedious grind, but it actually ended up being a somewhat hard Platinum with almost no grinding to speak of. Funny how that worked out. Despite my frustrations with some trophies, I overall enjoyed Sonic Superstars quite a bit. It's not a massive, innovative step forward like Sonic Frontiers was, but the visuals are vibrant and detailed, the level design is fun and well thought out, the controls and physics are just about exactly the way you'd want them to be, and it's got some new mechanics and ideas, such as the Emerald Powers, that keep the moment-to-moment gameplay fresh. I did have some issues with it - mainly the long-winded boss encounters that definitely could have used some trimming down, and some slight performance hiccups and frame rate drops on PS4 - but I still enjoyed my time with this title and hope they iterate on Superstars' foundation for future 2D Sonic titles. Not my favorite Sonic game, but a solid entry nonetheless that I can easily recommend to others. Maybe think twice about attempting this Platinum, though. Edited November 5, 2023 by blue_blur_98 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
blue_blur_98 Posted November 11, 2023 Author Share Posted November 11, 2023 Platinum #36 - I.Q.: Intelligent Qube (PlayStation 4) Platinum difficulty: 3/10 Time taken: 2 days, 1 hour/3 hours of gameplay (Estimate) Personal game rating: 6/10 - Okay My last game from this month of PS Plus, and... I have once again ended a subscription with a puzzle game I'm not too fond of. Yeah, we're back here again. Just gone completely full circle. There were a lot of things I did enjoy in this title. I'm totally on board with the visuals and atmosphere here; it's a bit foreboding, honestly, but it has a heavy heaping of that early 3D-era charm that I have a big soft spot for. There are better-looking PS1 games for sure, but I really liked the unique vibe that Intelligent Qube had. The music is also exceptionally well-done. It's got an orchestral sound to it that's honestly rather unfitting for this particular game, but it's outstanding stuff. It sounds like it was pulled straight from a movie, and honestly helped motivate me through the more maddening parts. I'd often be struggling with a puzzle, then hear this triumphant music in the background and tell myself to buckle down and get it done. I do like the mechanics here. They're simple to understand and have consistent rules that make the game easy to play. At first it's quite fun, with enjoyable mechanics that actually made me have to consider just what was the best way to solve these puzzles. I enjoyed the game considerably less by the time the late-game came around due to the extreme difficuly spike around Stage 6 or so. I basically couldn't get through these puzzles without losing half my floor, and when I'm not only being tasked with getting one Perfect on each stage, but also have to contend with the front wall getting closer and closer as you progress, leading to me being put into unwinnable scenarios, I got pretty frustrated with this game before long. The final stage was the absolute worst, because you can't see where your cube capture spots are and just have to memorize them on the spot. Cool, just take away something I was relying on for the whole game! Thanks a lot! I also wasn't a fan of the randomized puzzles in this game, which made it harder to progress because I couldn't learn from my mistakes now that the puzzle I have to do is completely different. It's just not a great game design choice in general, and added some artificial difficulty to an already hard game. At least the Platinum isn't too cruel. Just beat the game and get one Perfect on each stage; nothing too wild. It's also my new fastest Platinum by a few minutes, so that's... something, I suppose? 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
blue_blur_98 Posted November 28, 2023 Author Share Posted November 28, 2023 (edited) Platinum #37 - Rez Infinite (PlayStation 4) Platinum difficulty: 5/10 Time taken: 2 years, 7 months/17 hours of gameplay (Estimate) Personal game rating: 8.5/10 - Very Good You remember Play at Home, right? That promotion Sony held back at the peak of the pandemic where we got all of those free games? This was one of them, lumped into a batch where most of the games were PlayStation VR titles, or at least had VR modes. This one's in the "has a VR mode" camp, so I downloaded it since... y'know, I could play it. I didn't do much of that at first, though, since I sort of bounced off of this game initially and didn't return to it for years after the fact. The only explanation that makes sense is that I got frustrated at the difficulty or something, so just gave up. I regret doing that in hindsight, because when I gave this game a second chance, I ended up loving it. It is a very unique game, a musical rail shooter unlike anything I've ever played. I adore this game's aesthetic. The wireframey computer world, the low-poly characters, the sick techno beats... I don't think you could make a game as aggressively 2000s as this, even if you tried. It's a total product of its time, but simultaneously one that has aged surprisingly well. This is, in essence, a 22-year-old SEGA Dreamcast/PlayStation 2 game, yet a resolution/frame rate boost and some smoother textures is all this game needs to shine, even on PS4. Just goes to show that unique art styles just age better than realism, at least when it comes to video games. Area X was even better, with its gorgeous particle effects, huge enemies and characters moving around the screen, and beautiful music. Seriously, Area X's soundtrack is absolutely incredible; easily my favorite songs in the entire package. The shooting gameplay was also very fun. While I wasn't a fan of the complete lack of checkpoints here, requiring a complete restart if you die, the gameplay was simple, yet satisfying. A unique style, great music and satisfying gameplay is really all I need in a game. The trophies kind of drag, though. I get that this game is short, and that multiple playthroughs should have been expected, but you have to play this game a bare minimum of eight times over for these trophies. Score Attack was fine - pretty fun, actually, since going for high scores fundamentally changes the way you play this game, so it felt like a fresh new challenge. I cannot say the same for Direct Assault... god, what a chore. It's literally the exact same thing six times in a row. The color of the background changes, sure, but other than that? Same enemies, same patterns, same bosses, same music, same everything. It just requires you to needlessly offload six more playthroughs for one trophy. It's not fun, it's blatant padding. At least I could cheese this with the Infinite Overdrive setting. Watched some nice videos while grinding this out. Power Breaker was hardly any better; you only need five Score Attack completions for the high score trophy, so this one just expects you to farm out 25 more completions until the game lets you go. It's not fun, it's not a challenge, it's just a slog of going through the same stages over and over 'til you hear "ding!" and move on to the next thing. I hate how padded-out this Platinum was. This could have been way more satisfying if damn near half of it wasn't a repetitive grind. It made a sub-20-hour Platinum feel like it took forever. How do you manage that? Some trophies were pretty tough, such as the 95% shot-down rate trophy (thanks in part to Area 5, which sucks because that level's like half an hour long) and the Boss Rush high score (clearing it's the hard part, not the score), but aside from those, it's very doable. You should definitely play Rez Infinite, since it kicks all kinds of ass (and it's free on PS Plus Extra, I believe), but I can't recommend the Platinum unless you're prepared to grind for a good chunk of this game's Platinum runtime. Edited November 28, 2023 by blue_blur_98 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
blue_blur_98 Posted December 4, 2023 Author Share Posted December 4, 2023 100% #11 - Woodle Tree Adventures Deluxe (PlayStation 4) Completion difficulty: 1/10 Time taken: 2 days, 2 hours/2 hours of gameplay Personal game rating: 5/10 - Middling Behold. The Citizen Kane of video games. I'm joking. This game isn't very good; it's very bog-standard and generic, very easy and stops (not ends, stops) in, like, an hour. It's not a good game, but I really don't want to be too harsh on it. I only paid 49 cents for it, so I can't be too mad, and it was made by one guy, so I'll let it slide even if it's just about the single most mediocre game I've ever played. The reason I played this (other than it costing so little money that it might as well have been free) is because I played the demo on Steam a long, long time ago. I was really into downloading any free software on Steam that interested me even a little but at that time, and this game's demo was one of them. So seeing that the game went on sale for so little, I decided to give the full game a whirl. I have to admit, walking through that first level was actually pretty nostalgic and took me back to that exact point in time again. So there's that, I guess. I hear that there's a second Woodle Tree game, so if they ever decide to put that game on sale for less than a dollar, I might check it out and see if they did anything to improve the experience there. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Super_Mep Posted December 6, 2023 Share Posted December 6, 2023 On 12/4/2023 at 1:51 PM, blue_blur_98 said: 100% #11 - Woodle Tree Adventures Deluxe (PlayStation 4) Completion difficulty: 1/10 Time taken: 2 days, 2 hours/2 hours of gameplay Personal game rating: 5/10 - Middling Behold. The Citizen Kane of video games. I'm joking. This game isn't very good; it's very bog-standard and generic, very easy and stops (not ends, stops) in, like, an hour. It's not a good game, but I really don't want to be too harsh on it. I only paid 49 cents for it, so I can't be too mad, and it was made by one guy, so I'll let it slide even if it's just about the single most mediocre game I've ever played. The reason I played this (other than it costing so little money that it might as well have been free) is because I played the demo on Steam a long, long time ago. I was really into downloading any free software on Steam that interested me even a little but at that time, and this game's demo was one of them. So seeing that the game went on sale for so little, I decided to give the full game a whirl. I have to admit, walking through that first level was actually pretty nostalgic and took me back to that exact point in time again. So there's that, I guess. I hear that there's a second Woodle Tree game, so if they ever decide to put that game on sale for less than a dollar, I might check it out and see if they did anything to improve the experience there. But you got the "Deluxe" edition. It had to be epic? 🤣 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Don_Chipotle Posted December 6, 2023 Share Posted December 6, 2023 On 11/27/2023 at 7:34 PM, blue_blur_98 said: Platinum #37 - Rez Infinite (PlayStation 4) Platinum difficulty: 5/10 Time taken: 2 years, 7 months/17 hours of gameplay (Estimate) Personal game rating: 8.5/10 - Very Good You remember Play at Home, right? That promotion Sony held back at the peak of the pandemic where we got all of those free games? This was one of them, lumped into a batch where most of the games were PlayStation VR titles, or at least had VR modes. This one's in the "has a VR mode" camp, so I downloaded it since... y'know, I could play it. I didn't do much of that at first, though, since I sort of bounced off of this game initially and didn't return to it for years after the fact. The only explanation that makes sense is that I got frustrated at the difficulty or something, so just gave up. I regret doing that in hindsight, because when I gave this game a second chance, I ended up loving it. It is a very unique game, a musical rail shooter unlike anything I've ever played. I adore this game's aesthetic. The wireframey computer world, the low-poly characters, the sick techno beats... I don't think you could make a game as aggressively 2000s as this, even if you tried. It's a total product of its time, but simultaneously one that has aged surprisingly well. This is, in essence, a 22-year-old SEGA Dreamcast/PlayStation 2 game, yet a resolution/frame rate boost and some smoother textures is all this game needs to shine, even on PS4. Just goes to show that unique art styles just age better than realism, at least when it comes to video games. Area X was even better, with its gorgeous particle effects, huge enemies and characters moving around the screen, and beautiful music. Seriously, Area X's soundtrack is absolutely incredible; easily my favorite songs in the entire package. The shooting gameplay was also very fun. While I wasn't a fan of the complete lack of checkpoints here, requiring a complete restart if you die, the gameplay was simple, yet satisfying. A unique style, great music and satisfying gameplay is really all I need in a game. The trophies kind of drag, though. I get that this game is short, and that multiple playthroughs should have been expected, but you have to play this game a bare minimum of eight times over for these trophies. Score Attack was fine - pretty fun, actually, since going for high scores fundamentally changes the way you play this game, so it felt like a fresh new challenge. I cannot say the same for Direct Assault... god, what a chore. It's literally the exact same thing six times in a row. The color of the background changes, sure, but other than that? Same enemies, same patterns, same bosses, same music, same everything. It just requires you to needlessly offload six more playthroughs for one trophy. It's not fun, it's blatant padding. At least I could cheese this with the Infinite Overdrive setting. Watched some nice videos while grinding this out. Power Breaker was hardly any better; you only need five Score Attack completions for the high score trophy, so this one just expects you to farm out 25 more completions until the game lets you go. It's not fun, it's not a challenge, it's just a slog of going through the same stages over and over 'til you hear "ding!" and move on to the next thing. I hate how padded-out this Platinum was. This could have been way more satisfying if damn near half of it wasn't a repetitive grind. It made a sub-20-hour Platinum feel like it took forever. How do you manage that? Some trophies were pretty tough, such as the 95% shot-down rate trophy (thanks in part to Area 5, which sucks because that level's like half an hour long) and the Boss Rush high score (clearing it's the hard part, not the score), but aside from those, it's very doable. You should definitely play Rez Infinite, since it kicks all kinds of ass (and it's free on PS Plus Extra, I believe), but I can't recommend the Platinum unless you're prepared to grind for a good chunk of this game's Platinum runtime. im gonna be honest with you, im not good at shooter games like r-type and this kind of games, average user can achieve the platium of this game? Keep the great job! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
blue_blur_98 Posted December 8, 2023 Author Share Posted December 8, 2023 Platinum #38 - Arcade Game Series: Dig Dug (PlayStation 4) Platinum difficulty: 5/10 (With save-scumming) Time taken: 5 days, 23 hours/6 hours of gameplay (Estimate) Personal game rating: 6/10 - Okay A good example of a "why the hell not" pickup from the recent PSN End of Year sale. A bundle of three games in the Arcade Game Series (which is how they brought these to PS4 instead of just... making a Namco Museum game), consisting of PAC-MAN, Dig Dug and Galaga was discounted to around $4 or so, which I thought was a pretty good deal, so I threw it into my cart alongside a few other titles. Dig Dug is my least favorite of these three, so I did it first. I thought this'd be a breezy, short Platinum to have a good time with and help fill a slot I could use to set up my 40th Platinum to be what I want it to be. It was not... it was absolutely not. Not extremely difficult or anything, but far from easy and one that caused a lot of frustration and annoyance. Thankfully, you can exploit the pause-save with a handy-dandy USB drive, but that only makes it feasible, not easy, per se. The worst ones by far are the trophies that require you to reach ludicrously high rounds. Round 19 is where you want to be at the very minimum, since there are trophies tied to collecting every type of fruit and vegetable, one of which being the pineapple in Round 18 and 19. On the way, this is when you get Centurion (defeat 100 enemies in a single credit). That will pop before Round 19, but getting there is an arduous and difficult process that will take you many, many attempts per round. It is not a fun grind, let me tell you. At least you can use Round Select for the fruits and vegetables, instead of slogging through another nineteen rounds. Rambler (dig 1,000 spaces in a single credit) was a pretty bad one too, though not as bad as Centurion since you can definitely get it before Round 10. It's still an annoying grind though, since you just have to constantly wander around the stage digging as much dirt as you can. Enemies are also particularly lethal if you play this way, since they have loads more room to catch you (which will happen). I hate trophies that require you to play in some stupid, hyper-specific way that doesn't mesh wel, with the game's underlying mechanics. Dig (dig through all of the dirt in one round) is similarly annoying, even with the maximum starting lives setting, since you well and truly have to get every single speck of diggable dirt. The enemies (especially the Fygars, god I hate those things) make this a total pain, since they love to hunt you down when there's not much dirt, but you have to keep at least two of them alive or else you clear the round before you can get rid of the rest of the dirt. It's such a cumbersome and unfun trophy, and I hate it when trophy lists do this. Nobody in their right mind would play the game like this, and it's not a fun way to play in its own right; it's frustrating and tedious. Lastly, 4 Enemies was one last middle finger from the game. I had to do this one several times, because the enemy RNG was often not in my favor amd had at least one of the foes I needed to dispatch wander off before I could line up the rock to fall on them. It's a shame that these trophies are so maddeningly annoying. I have always really enjoyed this game ever since I was a kid, so I was excited to Platinum this game that I've known basically since the very start of my gaming career. Unfortunately, the trophies themselves just weren't very fun, and I cannot recommend this Platinum due to the high levels of annoyance and all of the cumbersome trophies that make you play the game in these downright asinine ways. I'll do the other AGS games sometime down the road, but not anytime soon, especially if they have similar trophy lists. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
blue_blur_98 Posted December 16, 2023 Author Share Posted December 16, 2023 Platinum #39 - Crash Bandicoot (PlayStation 4) + All Crash Bandicoot: Lost Treasures DLC trophies Platinum difficulty: 8/10 Time taken: 4 years, 9 months/20 hours of gameplay (Estimate) Personal game rating: 6/10 - Okay Wow, this was strenuous. This game is known for being particularly hard, especially compared to 2 and Warped, but this was honestly harder than I was expecting. Beating the game isn't that bad - challenging, sure, but nothing the average player can't handle. The side content is when things get real spicy, and accounts for the vast majority of the difficulty here. And be side content, I mean Time Trials. God, I hated these. I appreciate the intent of adding Relics into the remakes of 1 and 2, since they didn't have those on PS1, but for this first game at least, this addition doesn't improve the game at all. This game just doesn't gel well with a time attack mode that forces you to rush levels that aren't built to be played like that. Crash 1 really isn't meant to be rushed like this at all. The level design in this game rewards patience above brute force, with various obstacles you have to wait for until they line up or become safe to pass through, so making me do Time Trials where I have to forego that and speed through levels that are designed specifically against that playstyle is just outright bad game design. These were not fun at all, thanks to the requirement for Gold Relics as opposed to just getting a Relic at all in every level (which is hard enough, since all checkpoints are removed), and the times required for those Gold Relics being outright insane. So many of them were just the Platinum Relic time, but with ten seconds or less added to it so it's very slightly more feasible. How is that fair? Requiring me to be slightly-less-perfect ain't much better than just requiring me to be perfect anyway. Generator Room, The Lab, Road to Nowhere, The High Road, The Lost City, and Stormy Ascent were some of the ones I just could not stand to speedrun. A total lowlight all around. ...Oh yeah. Stormy Ascent. What a horror show of a level this is. Cut from the original PS1 game because it was too hard, and I can absolutely understand Naughty Dog's reasoning on this. It is a hellish, four-minute-long gauntlet of fast-moving platforms, screwed-up patterns that are ludicrously hard to nail, and a layout that's hell-bent on taking as many of your lives as humanly possible. It is a nightmare to even get the Clear Gem on, but one other trophy requires you to get a Gold Relic here. The Gold time is actually really generous here (you have almost five minutes to complete the level, and the difference between Gold and Platinum is over a full minute), it's clearing the stage in one life that's a problem. Checkpointless Stormy Ascent is beyond all reason, and dying at one of the last two obstacles just to be subjected to starting the whole hell show over is the worst feeling in the world. I managed to perservere, but still, this was awful. At least the Gem and Relic here let me skip getting the Gold Relic in Sunset Vista (which is almost as long as Stormy Ascent and I'm sure is just as frustrating to do deathless), and the Gem in the labyrinthine, backtracking-obsessed nightmare that is Cortex Power. Honestly, the Time Trials turned everything else into a total joke. The Colored Gems were a total pain in the ass to get thanks to their deathless requirement and the dick move of having them in the hardest levels in the game, but other than that, the Gems were no trouble at all once I got my hands on the Colored Gems needed for the alternate routes, and the miscellaneous trophies were also no sweat. This Platinum was a nightmare, easily my hardest so far, but I felt very accomplished to have gotten it done. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Super_Mep Posted December 18, 2023 Share Posted December 18, 2023 @blue_blur_98 I recently finally got crash 2 done. I'd done Warped forever ago but 2 eluded me due to the time trials. I really want to complete 1 but I just don't know if I have it in me. I commend your efforts!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
blue_blur_98 Posted December 21, 2023 Author Share Posted December 21, 2023 (edited) Platinum #40 - Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back (PlayStation 4) Platinum difficulty: 6/10 Time taken: 4 years, 9 months/15 hours of gameplay (Estimate) Personal game rating: 9/10 - Excellent Second milestone this year, the big four-zero! This time around, I chose to give the honor to this '90s gem. It may seem odd to others that I chose Crash 2 specifically for a milestone - it doesn't have the difficulty of Crash 1, and it's right in the middle of the trilogy. So why make it a milestone? Well, it's for very personal reasons. Crash Bandicoot 2 was the very first video game I ever played, since my mom gave me her hand-me-down PS1 disc alongside my first PlayStation 2 one fateful Christmas. It was love at first sight; this was unlike anything I've ever experienced. I watched plenty of cartoons just like any other kid, yet I never saw this orange... thing (I was a fetus at the time so I didn't know what the hell a bandicoot was and thought he was a rat) on TV. But it was so cool! It was just like a cartoon, but I could control what happened on my own and move around the environments freely! That's where my lifelong love of video games, and my undying enjoyment of the Crash Bandicoot series and the platforming genre in general began. It's probably the most important game in my gaming career, and holds a very, very special place in my heart, so this trip down memory lane was a natural choice for a milestone Platinum. ...Oh, yeah. Right. Trophies. Sorry, kinda forgot about that. Nostalgia's one hell of a drug... This plat was kind of weird. In some respects it was much easier and more forgiving than CB1, but honestly a bit harder in some respects. The Gems, for instance, weren't that bad, all things considered. Colored Gems thankfully don't require deathless runs of the hardest levels in the whole game, and are instead cleverly hidden as secrets throughout the game. This is an infinitely better way to handle this, and one I always found very fun. They get pretty creative with it, too. Can you beat the first level without breaking any boxes? Try finding a fake wall to discover a shiny secret! Hey, those frozen Nitro crates look pretty suspect... why not take a risk and jump on them? All very neat secrets, though they can be a tad cryptic at times (seriously, how was anyone that's not innately familliar with this game supposed to figure out that secret exit in Diggin' It?). Colored Gems usually take you to bonus routes instead of hiding extra crates, so you can often times get the box Gem on your first runthrough of most stages. Not a fan of all the backtracking, though. It's especially bad in the last two Warp Rooms, where most levels expect you to retrace your steps constantly. Especially when you have to backtrack through a goddamn Death Route... Cold Hard Crash can piss off. Seriously. The Time Trials, though, I felt were harder here. Crash 2 is also not particularly meant to be rushed. Not as bad as Crash 1 in that regard, and they do give you the Speed Shoes here, which can help in most normal stages, but the Gold times here were even more strict. Nearly every level had that "Gold and Platinum times are basically the same" issue that I hate so much, so these Relics expect the world from you. There were a few easy levels, such as Hang Eight (which I even bagged a Platinum Relic in), but most levels required many attempts. This time around, the chase and riding levels, which may have well been free Platinum Relics in Crash 1, were some of the hardest and most annoying here. The chase levels were irritating because the use of the Speed Shoes makes you go so fast that you have very little time to react to what's ahead, so there was many a time that I crashed into a time-wasting land mine or perished at the hands of a pitfall or electric fence. The riding levels were honestly worse; you have a dash ability, but due to its odd momentum and the cooldown period, it was a hindrance that made these things absolute hell to speedrun, because you have to use it all the time. Especially Totally Bear. Janky dash mechanic + obnoxious level layout + can't see a damn thing = an absolutely torturous Relic to get your hands on. Hate that one. Other Relics I hated were Hangin' Out, Piston it Away, Cold Hard Crash, Ruination and Spaced Out. All of these are such a pain in the ass to run. Overall, though, this was a considerably easier Platinum to earn than Crash 1's. I was able to get this knocked out in four days, even with my original circa 2019 save file MIA, since I just enjoy this game more, and since I know it like the back of my hand after all these years. Despite the frustrating moments, this was still an absolute blast to revisit and is probably my favorite Platinum this year. Playing these levels again, grabbing the secrets I'm so innately familliar with, witnessing these sights and sounds lovingly recreated yet still just as I remember them... it all just brought me so much joy. I love this game with all my heart - even Time Trials can't change that. This plat took me right back to that time when I was a kid, playing this game with my sister, as we tried to get any Gems we could just so we could see Crash do his funny little dance. I remember my mom telling me that I could get a special Gem by going through Turtle Woods without breaking any crates. When I did that and got the Blue Gem, it blew my damn mind! This plat was such a great experience, because even when it frustrated or annoyed me, this game always brings back so many happy memories that I'll always cherish. Thanks, Crash 2, for being the best introduction into gaming I could have possibly gotten. And thanks for the great call, mom. Edited December 21, 2023 by blue_blur_98 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
blue_blur_98 Posted December 25, 2023 Author Share Posted December 25, 2023 (edited) Platinum #41 - Crash Bandicoot: Warped (PlayStation 4) Platinum difficulty: 4/10 Time taken: 4 years, 9 months/10 hours of gameplay (Estimate) Personal game rating: 7.5/10 - Good Welp, that's it for the N. Sane Trilogy. That title really sums the experience up - this was N. Sane. High highs, low lows, high levels of challenge, fun and frustration at equal frequency - this trilogy took me for a hell of a ride and pushed me to my limit, but I don't regret it at all. I really enjoy these games, and getting a chance to discover all of their secrets and get 100% completion in all of them was a great experience, despite all of the frustration I experienced. If you're looking for hard, but fun plats, these are a great option. Crash 3 was a lot easier than the prior two games, though not without its challenge. The Time Trials here were the easiest by far, though still pretty annoying. They really go easy on you with the platforming levels here. They're fairly forgiving to begin with, but the Gold times are all very generous - there were times where I screwed up in really obvious ways and could clearly see where I could have improved, yet still managed to get a Gold Relic on that stage. These platforming levels were actually a lot of fun to do Time Trials on for once, since A - they're not expecting me to beat borderline unrealistic times for the bare minumum Relic type I need, B - because the level design is actually built to be rushed to a certain extent and C - the super powers that Crash gets with every defeated boss tips the scale even further in your favor, since you can use them to take insane shortcuts. I'm quite fond of the ol' slide then double jump then Death Tornado spin glide trick. The place where these falter, however, along with the game itself in my opinion, is in the vehicle levels. This is my biggest problem with Warped - there's too many of these damn things and they don't really improve the game at all. Most of them are pretty annoying, too, with the jet ski and motorbike levels being the lowlights in my eyes. They could have replaced all of these with more platforming levels and maybe a few animal ride levels and I don't think anyone would shed a tear. Their Time Trials were also a lot harder than the platforming levels', with stricter times across the board, and the control issues here didn't help at all. One of these levels, Road Crash, has the single most unforgiving margin between Gold and Platinum in the entire trilogy - you get just three seconds of leeway before you get hit with the Sapphire stick. What's even the point of having a Gold Relic if the time difference is that strict? Just make me go for a Platinum Relic at that point. There were some annoyances outside of these (such as the "leave some crates unbroken until you reach the Green Gem path and then go backwards to break the other crates that spawned there and then go back to the crate you weren't supposed to break but you're supposed to break now" chicanery in Gone Tomorrow), but most of my gripes are centered around these vehicle levels. It's a shame, because if these weren't so prevalent, this'd probably be my favorite game in the trilogy. The platforming levels have the best level design in all three games, with balanced challenge and more complex platforming scenarios, the super powers add an extra layer of excitement to the experience, and the combination time travel/world tour theming is the most creative of the whole trilogy... but those vehicle levels really drag it down. I still enjoy this game, but Crash 2 still reigns supreme for me due to having the right balance between platforming and some alternate styles every so often. Still, though, I enjoyed revisiting this trilogy and remake, and I'm very glad to have obtained all the trophies in my first PS4 game. Edited January 1 by blue_blur_98 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
blue_blur_98 Posted January 1 Author Share Posted January 1 (edited) Year in Review: 2023 Another year is drawing to a close, so it's time for me to look back on my year of trophy hunting and give some honors (or dishonors) to the games I amassed my collection of digital bling in. 2023 is my greatest year of trophy hunting so far - while I didn't quite double my Platinum count like in 2022, I earned my highest total amount of Platinum trophies in one year so far at 18 Platinums. I also got my hands on many more non-Platinum 100% games, solidifying them as a valued part of my trophy hunting regimen. I also got two milestone Platinums this year, which I'm likely not going to manage again anytime soon, got my first RPG and first (real) fighting game Platinums, and topped my personal hardest Platinum not once, but twice. It's been a hell of a year! Before we get into crowning specific games, let's look at some general facts and statistics at a glance. I played 31 trophy-supported games this year, 21 of which were new to my profile, and 26 of which I completed. PlayStation 4 titles accounted for a majority of my played games this year, with 24 games played on this platform. I earned 632 trophies this year, 18 of which were Platinum trophies. I ascended 44 trophy levels this year, starting at Level 269 and ending at Level 313. My average Platinum rarity this year was 21.99%. 4 of my Platinums this year were Ultra Rare, and 8 of them were below 10%. A total of 9 genres appeared in my 2023 played games. Platforming was the most common. My most active month was August, with 5 Platinums earned. Runner-ups are November and December with 4 Platinums each. My average Platinum difficulty was 4/10, based off of the numbers I personally assigned to them in this thread. Alright, now it's time for the fun part. Let's give out some accolades! Or are they awards? Titles? ...Whatever. Easiest Platinum Based off of the difficulty rating I, personally, gave it in this thread. Undertale | Platinum difficulty: 1/10 The indie role-playing classic was responsible for my easiest Platinum trophy of 2023. All you need to do is progress to a certain point, backtrack a bit, spend a specific amount of gold in a specific hidden area, and the Platinum is yours. In fact, you don't even have to see any of the game's endings - you just have to get kind of close. With it being a short game to begin with, this is no issue at all. This is practically a free Platinum, and one I only had to put the absolute bare miniumum of effort into in order to earn this plat. What an odd trophy list... Runner-up | Tekken 7 - Platinum difficulty: 2/10 Hardest Platinum Crash Bandicoot | Platinum difficulty: 8/10 Hey, look, it's the Dark Souls of platf-- *shot* The classic game that made everyone surprisingly enraged in 2017 made me unsurprisingly enraged in 2023. Crash 1 is not at all an easy game to fully complete. The levels are just difficult in general, made worse by the deathless requirement of the Colored Gems, the Time Trials in levels that are not built to be rushed at all. These all resulted in my hardest Platinum, both of 2023 and of all time. Expect tight platforming, extreme challenge and copious amounts of frustration if you attempt this one. Runner-up | PAC-MAN Museum+ - Platinum difficulty: 7/10 Shortest Platinum Based off of the completion time on my profile. I.Q.: Intelligent Qube | Platinum in 2 days, 1 hour My shortest Platinum both of 2023 and in general, this PS1 puzzler can be wrapped up very quickly. With rewind on your side, even the normally high difficulty of this title didn't stop me from finishing it in a flash. Runner up | Super Stardust Portable - 2 days, 12 hours Longest Platinum Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy | Platinums in 4 years, 9 months I earned one trophy in each game on the same day, so these all have the same plat times. I initially put these off as "never-ever" Platinums, because I thought they'd just be too hard for me to do. They were definitely hard, but well within my skill level. They're difficult, but satisfying and (mostly) fun trophy lists I can recommend to anyone who's interested in the games themselves. Runner-up - Sonic Forces - Platinum in 3 years, 5 months Shortest 100% The Sly Collection mini games | Completed in 9 minutes, 33 seconds Not much to say here. I used PS Plus cloud streaming to clean up my last unearned Sly Cooper trophies, which were in these truly unremarkable mini games. These were so easy and quick that I got these all done in less than ten minutes. In fact, I spent more time unlocking these games than I did actually playing them. Runner-up | Omega Strikers - Completed in 2 days, 33 minutes Longest 100% Toybox Turbos | Completed in 5 years, 9 months My first completion this year. This was at the absolute bottom of my trophy list for a very long time since I popped one trophy in 2017, remaining unplayed for years. It's not a long or hard game, I just never got around to it. It's a really fun game, not gruesomely hard to complete, and is pretty creative, too. Some tough challenges and a brief grind, but other than those, nothing too taxing. Too bad the console versions aren't being sold anymore for some odd reason. Runner-up | Sonic Adventure - 4 years, 7 months Most Common Platinum Based off of the PSNProfiles rarity statistic the Platinum has at the time of writing. Super Stardust Portable | Common - 65.87% These PS1 and PSP classic games just don't have difficult Platinum trophies, do they? The other Super Stardust games are considered generally taxing complete, but with rewind in your hands, this is no sweat to get done. There's not a lot of content here (it's, like, a three-hour Platinum at best), so it's no surprise that this is such a common Platinum. Runner-up | I.Q.: Intelligent Qube - Common - 50.27% Rarest Platinum Dreams | Ultra Rare - 1.80% My milestone 30th Platinum was also my rarest this year. I can tell you straight away why that is; it's the Level 30 grind. Despite the low difficulty of this Platinum, it takes so long that barely anyone has it, and the grind really is strenuous. I can't blame people for not going for this one - the grind took almost 60 hours alone, going by my PlayStation Wrap-Up stats at least. Runner-up | Rez Infinite - Ultra Rare - 3.03% Most Prevalent Publisher Sony Interactive Entertainment | 7 games completed Once again, first-party software made up the majority of my trophy hunting this year. With classic PS1 and PSP games like Ape Escape, Super Stardust Portable and I.Q.: Intelligent Qube dispensing very easy Platinums, my last unique trophies in the Sly Cooper series coming from Bentley's Hackpack and the collection's mini games, the unholy Dreams grind accounting for my 30th Platinum, and MediEvil giving me some janky spooks this Halloween, most of my games played this year were at least published by Sony. Runner-up | SEGA - 4 games completed Most Prevalent Developer Sonic Team | 4 games completed The in-house developer of Sonic games developed most of the games I completed this year. Leading development on the '90s classics Sonic CD and Sonic Adventure and the more recent Sonic Forces, while also co-developing this year's release of Sonic Superstars alongside Arzest, it's only natural that this'd happen given my most prevalent series this year. Speaking of which... Runner-up | Vicarious Visions - 3 games completed Most Prevalent Series Sonic the Hedgehog | 4 games completed Bet you saw this one coming. Games featuring SEGA's true blue mascot made up the most of my trophy hunting regimen in 2023. I started with the PlayStation 3 100% completions Sonic CD and Sonic Adventure, going on to snatch Platinums in long-standing backlog title Sonic Forces, and the brand-new release that I very much underestimated, Sonic Superstars. I spent more time than any other series leaping high into the air, collecting oodles of Rings, and rolling around at the speed of sound. Runner-up | Crash Bandicoot - 3 games completed Now for the ones you've all been waiting for... Least Favorite Platinum of 2023 Gravel I'll keep this as brief as I can; I do not like Gravel. Nor do I hate it, even. It is the very definition of mediocre. It is not terrible, nor is it good. It's functional enough, and looks pretty good, but that's it. It's pretty boring all around, as it really overstays what little welcome it has within just a couple of hours of gameplay. Outside of just one game mode, there's nothing in terms of new, fresh ideas here. It is truly just a bog-standard game. I was so sick of it by the end because all of the game's content is basically the exact same. If it wasn't such a simple, easy and short Platinum, I would probably have thrown in the towel before I even reached hour 3. Not to mention the bugs and odd issues I ran into here; rewinding has a random chance of just making your car disappear, the physics engine often threw me up spinning wildly into the air for no good reason, and when I was boosting the online (big shocker that nobody's playing this dull game online), my entire PlayStation 4 console crashed and we had to start a new lobby. Even my PS4 didn't want to play this anymore, and I think that says it all. Runner-up | Arcade Game Series: Dig Dug - Ludicrously annoying trophy requirements and constant, frustrating save reloads Favorite Platinum of 2023 Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back I adore the Crash Bandicoot series. It's been there since the very beginning of my gaming career, and I've stuck with it ever since. From playing Crash 2 on my PS2 with my mom and sister as a very young child, to trying out more of the series in the 2000s in 2010s, this silly little orange dude and his games introduced me to a lot of what I personally enjoy in games - from my favorite genre to my love of 100% completion. In fact, Crash Bandicoot 2 was the very first game I ever played, my mom giving me a copy alongside my first PlayStation 2. It is for this reason that I chose it as my 40th Platinum milestone. It's an incredibly special and important game to me, so it made sense. The Platinum was actually really fun, since I know the game like the back of my hand after all these years and could access every secret thanks to my memorization of the game. Leaping through these levels I've always enjoyed, going for these clever secrets, and collecting loads of Gems were so much fun and a highlight of my year in gaming. Even the crazy tight Time Trial requirements couldn't prevent this from being my favorite Platinum of 2023, and one of my favorite Platinums in general. Thanks for all the great memories, Crash. Runner-up | Tekken 7 - An easy, relatively no-nonsense Platinum in a fun, high-quality and highly polished fighting game That's a wrap! Overall, 2023 was a crazy year, both in general and for trophy hunting. This'll be my last post in a forum thread in 2023, closing the book on my most successful year of trophy hunting yet. I've got big plans for 2024, including a goal of reaching 60 Platinum trophies by year-end, trying out tons of new games I've never played before, and finally completing long-standing backlog titles like inFAMOUS. 2024 is also likely when I'm gonna buckle down and complete my long-time personal trophy hunting white whale - the elusively difficult Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed. I know I can do it and I'm going to do it. I would like to give a big shout-out to everyone that's stopped by to comment or react in this thread or on my status updates when I complete new games. I really do appreciate the support! I hope you all have a safe, healthy, and most of all Happy New Year. Let's all make 2024 a kickass year! Edited January 1 by blue_blur_98 Formatting touch-ups, added images, fixed a typo 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
blue_blur_98 Posted January 8 Author Share Posted January 8 Platinum #42 - Klonoa Phantasy Reverie Series (PlayStation 4) Platinum difficulty: 2/10 Time taken: 5 days, 20 hours/13 hours of gameplay Personal game rating: 9.5/10 - Excellent Kicking off 2024 with a real gem. This is my first Platinum of the year, and I started with one of my most enjoyable in recent years. These games are fantastic and I highly recommend playing them if you have even the slightest affinity towards 2D platformers. The level design is incredibly well thought out, the characters and setting are very endearing, the music is impeccable, and the stories are surprisingly investing and emotional. I had already played Door to Phantomile on my PS3 before, so being able to play it with recreated graphics was a great experience. Before I picked this up, though, I had never played Klonoa 2: Lunatea's Veil before. I had heard most people claim it was even better than the original, and I have to say I agree with that sentiment. Klonoa 2 is a brilliant game that improves on the first title in every concievable way, with more intricate level design and significantly more varied gameplay. Genuinely one of my top 10 favorite 2D platformers of all time. As for the trophies, they were no sweat at all. Just beat the games, collect all of the Phantomile residents and Momett Dolls, and beat a few bonus stages. While the bonus stages are quite difficult, they're not unfair at all and I actually appreciated the challenge. The collectibles are mostly in plain sight and not that hard to grab (and even if they are tricky to get, you still keep anything you collect if you lose a life afterwards), and the games themselves aren't excessively taxing to beat in of themselves, so this was a cakewalk. It served as a really nice breather plat after the high difficulty of the Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy Platinum trophies I finished off last year with. Seriously, though, if you haven't played these games, do so as soon as you get the chance. They are 100% as good as everyone says. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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