Review of Liberation's Platinum

[coolwali]

Hello everyone. Recently, I platinummed the 2012 PS VITA game Assassin’s Creed 3 Liberation.

 

Fun fact: this was my first ever VITA game. I even bought the rare white VITA since that was bundled with the game. 

 

When I was looking through some of my old boxes, I found Liberation’s cartridge and remembered I was around 70% close to platinuming it anyway and already got the game’s multiplayer trophies. So I figured it wouldn’t be too bad to get the remaining and finally complete the game after 10 years, 4 months and 27 days. Over the course of the next 4 hours, I was able to get the remaining trophies but it wasn’t fun.

 

Let’s go over the kinds of trophies in Liberation.

 

The first group are those for completing the story, as well as completing all the optional objectives. There are around 12 of these. I recall these weren’t too bad. The only hard one I recall was the one optional objective that asked you to use tilt controls to guide a ball through a maze under a short amount of time. I remember 2012 me really getting stuck on that mission for a long time lol. Fortunately, I had already done all the story related trophies in 2012.

 

I will complain the names of the story trophies are terrible. They are just generic “complete sequence x” when past and later AC games at least had cool names for these trophies.

 

 

 

The second group of trophies are for collectibles and side missions. There’s around 11 such activities you need to 100%. Usually, they are straightforward if a little dry to complete since these activities aren’t exactly the most bombastic. The game usually does a good job in highlighting where they are on the map.

 

The main problematic one is "Persona Collector - Collect every persona-specific collectible" for a couple reasons. For one, they don't show up on the map. They only show up once you're close to them and wearing the correct persona. Meaning that you effectively need to sweep the entire map thrice.

 

Each Persona has its own set of collectibles. The Assassin Persona requires you to collect Assassin coins by beating up certain smugglers and looting them afterwards. This is the most straightforward collectible. The Lady Persona collects Brooches by charming certain gentlemen in random areas. The challenge here is often getting to said gentlemen as the Lady cannot climb normally. Often requiring looking around for a ladder or something. These are a bit annoying but doable. The last and most annoying are the Voodoo dolls. To get these, you need to find certain individuals while wearing the Slave Persona and pickpocket them.

 

Pickpocketing in Liberation is extremely annoying. To do it, first, you must get close to your target and lock onto them with L. Then begin to swipe up and down on the Rear Touch Pad. If you're too slow or fast or at a wrong angle with your swipes, you can fail the pickpocket and then cannot pickpocket that individual again. Targets can also have 3-4 "things to pickpocket" so  you have to keep the swipe going for a while and any mistake can ruin it.

 

For the collectible, this can be annoying because the last Voodoo doll is especially finicky to pickpocket. I remember 2012 me trying for a long time and failing to get it while getting all the others. And every time you fail, you need to run away for the individual to despawn and then come back to try again.

 

Being charitable to the pickpocketing mechanics, I guess they are more "accurate" to how strenuous and dexterous it would be to pickpocket. But it's still a very annoying collectible. I felt I got lucky when I somehow got it. Every other collectible and side activity was straightforward.

 

The third group of trophies are the 4 or so multiplayer ones. Liberation's multiplayer is basically like this basic mobile game where you send units to different IRL cities on a world map to do tasks. It wasn't very noteworthy. Apparently, 2012 me grinded it to max level and got the trophies for it. Moving on.

 

The fourth and final set of trophies are the "challenges" as I like to call them. They are random tasks you have to do for the trophy that aren't shown or tracked much in the game itself.

 

To be honest, I actually like most of these challenge trophies on paper. They provide an interesting puzzle or look at some of the game's mechanics. Many are unfortunately held back by being padded as hell.

 

Lets look at the few challenge trophies I feel are done well.

 

"What is she doing? - Kill 7 guards on rooftops in the Lady Persona"

 

I like this one because the puzzle here is getting to a rooftop as the Lady since the Lady cannot climb. So this requires you keep an eye out for ramps and ways to get to buildings without climbing. There was 1 I remember and was prepared to use it for the trophy. But I decided to see if there was an easier way. Sadly, The VITA version of Liberation doesn't have as many guides as the PS4 version which has a different set of trophies. So I had to scour a bit deeper. I did find one forum post that said you could use the Assassin HQ for this as it has a ramp that leads to a balcony that counts as a rooftop. I didn't believe it but I tried it and it worked. The hardest part was actually kiting enemies up there since enemies don't tend to respawn and if you kite them too far, they tend to despawn. So I had to basically stay in combat mode with them and slowly walk with them back to the balcony.

 

I still like this trophy because it provides a nice puzzle and once you "solve it", it's not a huge ask to get 7 guards to get where you were. If the guards didn't despawn so quickly, I'd have no complaints.

 

 

Others like "Predator - Kill an enemy from a tree, with the blowpipe, while using eagle vision", "Machete - Kill 5 guards in 15 seconds using only the Sugarcane Machete (without using the Chain Kill)" and "Swamp Queen - Tree Run for 10 branches without touching the ground" are fine as ways to teach the players about mechanics of the game and aren't too tedious to do.

 

I will highlight "Human Shields-Block 10 firing lines with a human shield" as this was one 2012 me missed and I had to grind in 2023. The way this works is that if you're in a fight with 6+ enemies and are engaging with 2 enemies at a time, 4 will move back and form a firing line and attempt to shoot you. You can then press X when this happens to use an enemy as a human shield which kills them.

 

10 are a bit too much. I'd knock it down to 5-7. Aside from this, this trophy isn't too bad. I never got it previously because there was no reason or opportunity to. You have to work a bit to get more than 5 enemies to engage with you. And it's often faster to quickly mow through enemies than set up for a firing line.

 

However, some challenge trophies were a chore to get.

 

"Deadly Haystack - Kill 50 enemies from haystacks using the Blowpipe". I like the mechanic of being able to use a blowpipe while hiding but 50 is just way too much. You have to spend quite a while grinding for this.

 

 

 

"Charming - Charm 50 NPC's". In all the main story and side missions, there are only around 15 or so opportunities at most to naturally charm NPCs. I managed to get the remaining 35 or so by finding a charmable NPC on a straight road, charming them and running down the road for about a minute where they'd despawn right in front of my eyes. Then running all the way back up the road to where they'd respawn and repeat. Poor guy got an entire marathon's worth of exercise simping for Aveline.

 

"Thief - Pickpocket 5000 écu". I already explained how tedious and cumbersome pickpocketing is in Liberation. This trophy wasn't fun. Most NPCs only have around 5-30 coins. So successfully pickpocketing all 3 items from an NPC only gives around 90 coins at most. So it was off running in between crowds for what felt like half an hour pickpocketing.

 

Funnily, this trophy would actually fit much better in Assassin's Creed 2. In that game, pickpocketing is much more streamlined and fun. Just hold X as you walk through crowds and you'll automatically pickpocket any NPC that walks near you. It would be far faster and less tedious to get this trophy in AC2 as it's something you can casually do as you play the game. In Liberation's case, I feel 1000 is still way too much but it shouldn't have been more than that. 5000 is just absurd.

 

 

Arguably the most tedious was "Climber - Climb 8848 meters". By the time I had fully beaten the game and gotten every other trophy, I had managed around 5000 metres by the in-game stats page. I had to spent around 2 hours climbing the tall building in New Orelans over and over again, getting 40 metres a pop. When I was around 8000 metres there, I accidentally fell off to my death. And Since the game hadn't autosaved as I had been remaining in one place the whole time, I was reset back to around 6000 metres. This time, I did it more safely. I found that if you run up a fence, Aveline won't climb it and fall back down but it counts as 1 metre climbed. Repeat for around 1.5 hours while watching Mother's Basement's videos and I got the platinum. If I recall correctly, Mt Everest is around 8848 metres so the game literally asks you climb Mt Everest for a bronze trophy lol.

 

Overall, I would not recommend platinumming the VITA version of this game. If you have to platinum Liberation for whatever reason, do the PS4 version instead. It removes many of the more tedious trophies and patches some of the bugs and issues.

 

As for the game itself, I already wrote a review of the Switch port back in 2021 and how it was different from the VITA version:

https://mieckfram.blogspot.com/2021/09/assassins-creed-3-liberation-best-ac.html

 

 

 

 

I'll quickly summarize my thoughts: Liberation is decent but isn't a great game. It inherits all of the flaws of AC3. All of its positives are stuff AC3 generally did better. What new features it has like the Persona System are more tedious than fun as they subdivide AC3's gameplay. The VITA specific features are gimmicks at best and annoying at worst. The story feels like it's missing chapters.

 

Like, if you enjoy Liberation's gameplay, you'd already enjoy them in the far more fleshed out AC3.