5/10 Difficulty

[da-Noob123]

I recently reacquired this game and wanted to go for the platinum. Is the guide on PSNP sufficient or is there another one you'd all recommend?

[Terra]

20 hours ago, farradono said:

Difficulty rarely tells you the whole story,  it's made up by a  single person. and can be either underestimated, or overestimated.

In the case of FF13, your real roadblock happens to be the Treasure Hunter trophy, due to some accessories being missable, a large amount of weapons and accessories to collect, and no in-game counter telling you what to miss, all of these three obstacles aren't factored in when deciding the game's difficulty.

This prevented me from getting the platinum. Haven’t gone back to it since

[LucilleRosethorn]

No accessories are missable unless you actively sell some. You get most, if not all, base items from bosses and you can buy most, the high end stuff is obtained on Gran Pulse. Plenty of good spreadsheets are available to keep track of what you have earned, most games you need to watch YouTube videos for collectibles so it’s not any different. 
 

5/10 is highly reasonable and could be a 2/10 as the game isn’t difficult. As long as you understand the battle system then the rest of the game is simple, it’s just RNG which ramps up the time.

Edited April 28, 2023 by LucilleRosethorn

[Spike_Hostile17]

I 100% this game on both xbox 360 and ps3, it's only a grind to get all the accessories. Difficulty-wise, there is zero challenge, it's only about following a guide for the items but the battles and everything else is clearly below average in terms of difficulty. There is no annoying minigames like FF9 jumping rope or FFX chocobo races and lightning evades. Even the big tortoise on Gran Pulse, which are supposed to be the ultimate boss fights, can be cheesed and insta-killed. The difficulty shouldn't take into account collectibles, missables items or grind but more like the skills you need with both your hands and brain, in this game it's close to zero, even 5/10 is very generous imo.

To anyone thinking about going after the plat in 2023, it's still a beautiful game on ps3, i played it last year, i was surprised the cutscenes are that much neat for a 10 years old game. And with all the guides available nowadays, it's very easy to cut to the chase unlike when you played it day 1 back in 2010 without the official Piggyback guide.

[FeelTheCosmos]

2 hours ago, da-Noob123 said:

I recently reacquired this game and wanted to go for the platinum. Is the guide on PSNP sufficient or is there another one you'd all recommend?

I wrote one of the longer guides over on gamefaqs back when they wouldn't let you do html.  I wouldn't suggest reading 150+ pages of straight text these days, but if you want step by step on a specific battle or turtle method, these guides will probably save you a few hours.  We used to index everything, so Ctrl+F is your friend.

 

That said, I'd consider myself pretty familiar with this game, I went through it again in '21 as part of a speed challenge and my play time was 52 hours.  The fastest to 100% is 31 hours on this site, by a known speed runner who I'm sure didn't sleep while they were doing it.  So 30 hours is definitely optimistic, unless y'all know something I don't.

 

TC, I saw you finished this yesterday with a total calendar time of 8 days, so I'm not sure what you were having so much trouble with.  Was there a specific battle that you were failing over and over?  I agree that some of the difficulties on these sites are skewed, with some people thinking it should be an average of the game and others (like me) thinking it should be the difficulty of the single hardest thing.  At least the combat is repeatable in this game, so the same setups will generate the same damage to each enemy, meaning you can look at a YouTube video and copy it with similar results.  Makes getting through quite a bit easier than random outputs like, say, Returnal.  Now that's more like a 7 or 8 to me