The Endless Backlog and Trophy Checklist of Arctic Cress

[Arctic Cress]

There's been quite a few platinum trophies since the last update. Nothing too big (and mostly some stacks or terrible games) but let's go through these anyway.

 

#228 Link-a-Pix Deluxe (PS4)

Same thing as with the Vita version where it only requires a limited number of the puzzles included, which is different from most of the non-POWGI Lightwood Games titles. PS4 version has a better grid to look at which makes it easier as well.

 

#229 No Man's Sky (PS5)

I already had the PS4 stack so I just did this for the TT points for my team in the TrueTrophies score challenge. Took no time at all.

 

#230 My Name is Mayo 2

I will thank Limited Run Games for actually selling a physical copy of Green Lava Studios' three easy platinum games as a joke on April Fools Day last year. I put in an order for it because I thought it was funny. There is actually a bit of a game in here with the last story requiring some platforming skill and a parody of Flappy Bird. Still easy but at least it isn't 100% mindless clicking.

 

#231 Mr. Massagy

The 3rd game in the disc already mentioned above, this game is a parody of dating sim games with ten dating options; except while some of them are actual human women, there's a whole bunch of other options such as a werewolf and the Mayo jar from the above game. The dialogue is pretty great and it's nice to see some of the alternate dialogue by choosing completely ridiculous options at times. My only complaint was that I kept accidentally choosing options while trying to read through the dialogue (as the X button went through dialogue, but it only worked on the text box where the choices were as well) and it led to some endings that I didn't mean to get.

 

#232 Tower of Dragonasia

This game is complete garbage. It plays like a bad flash game from the 90s or something, and is just not fun to play. Luckily they left the developer menu in so you don't have to play it. Did this because my teammate in the TrueTrophies Score Challenge suggested we all do it to win the most trophies for the week special badge this week, which we did manage (but was well over what we actually did need).

 

#233 Crypto by POWGI (Vita)

I haven't done any cryptogram puzzles in quite some time, so this was actually an enjoyable experience for most of it. Then again, I have never heard of "mulligatawny soup" literally ever, and having three letters that were only in that word didn't help matters. That one definitely needed a guide since I was not going to figure it out otherwise.

 

#234 Crypto by POWGI (PS4)

And then I did it again for the same reason as #232 above. woo-hoo!

 

There's a lot to unpack here. Many new games, many updates, and many stacks as I tried to stay in the individual contest at TrueTrophies and failed, but my team made the finals (though it definitely wasn't because of me). However, I finally got some new entries on my rarest trophies list on my profile, which has been filled with Starwhal for who knows how long at this point. No Man's Sky PS5 will also be in the below list despite the platinum because of the DLC. Here's the list:

 

Astro's Playroom (New, +24, 24/46)

Blue Reflection: Second Light (+6, 28/49)

Burnout Paradise: Remastered (+2, 34/95)

Earth Defense Force 2: Invaders from Planet Space (+6, 9/63)

Fantasy Strike (+17, 37/43)

Genshin Impact [PS5] (New, +15, 15/51)

Mahjong Royal Towers [PS4] (New, +9, 9/13)

Mind≒0 (+2, 19/36)

Nexomon: Extinction (+6, 53/57)

No Man's Sky [PS5] (New, +25, 25/28)

Persona 5 Strikers (+14, 39/47)

Pure Chess [PS4] (New, +12, 12/13)

Shin Megami Tensei III Nocturne HD Remaster (+7, 13/37)

Sparkle 2 [Vita] (+3, 13/14)

Tetris Effect (+1, 32/43)

Undead Darlings ~no cure for love~ (New, +15, 15/38)

Edited October 10, 2022 by Arctic Cress

[Arctic Cress]

GTTSC is over and I've gotten my first platinum since the event ended. Though there were a few things I did during that final week to help my team out as much as possible, so let's go through those first.

 

#235 Subnautica (PS4)

#236 Subnautica (PS5)

#237 ARK: Survival Evolved

Interesting to note that the PS4 and PS5 platinum trophies for Subnautica are actually different. I didn't notice until now.

 

Anyway, all three of these are similar so they get one combined write-up. I understand that there is a lot to do in both games and you're supposed to build your way up from basically nothing to get to that point. However, there's just too many games even in this topic that I can't sink the amount of hours needed to finish these games - and I doubt I'll even finish because I'd probably get bored early on, as the Build a Habitat trophy bugged on me in Subnautica so I had to start a new game - and I was just frustrated trying to get that from basically nothing. These aren't the games for me, but I know there are people who enjoy these! Just not my thing.

 

This next platinum, though, is 100% my thing.

 

#238 Persona 5 Strikers

A definite worthy follow-up to the original Persona 5 story, though in the end I thought the overall ending was kind of underwhelming. Was nice to see all the characters again and some of them finally getting a chance to develop, like Haru missed out in the original. Played it mostly on PS5 so there was very little load times and the game ran very smoothly throughout the entire experience. The biggest trophy roadblock for most people will be the bond points grinding, as the story will not get you nearly enough to max out every bond skill. Luckily, there's a statue in the Osaka chapter that you can repeatedly talk to for bond points, so I took some hours to just grind it up there to the 90s, and then request grinding in the postgame finished it off. Other than that, not much of a challenge; the Reaper is significantly downgraded in this game, and if you play as every character the Master Arts trophies will follow pretty quickly.

 

I also finished up Pure Chess on the PS4, as it was on sale and barely anyone takes out the chess engine and finishes it (though you don't actually need it for the rarest trophy in the game, just the tournament one).

 

Pure Chess [PS4] (+1, 13/13)

 

The last week of GTTSC also had me play through a lot of the Minecraft trophies, and while I didn't finish getting them all, I got a large amount of them completed and I might finish off the list at some point. I had the disc version, so the two Battle DLCs were completed with a boosting partner in about a hour. Other than that, not much else, just some other games continuing towards their platinum trophies. ARK's DLC was 'finished' so it doesn't appear here.

 

Astro's Playroom (+9, 33/46)

Class of Heroes 2G (New, +4, 4/36)

Fantasy Strike (+3, 40/43)

Minecraft (New, +81, 81/127)

Minecraft: Set 2 (New, +1, 1/7)

Nexomon: Extinction (+1, 54/57)

[Arctic Cress]

And given where I was in the game at that last post, the next platinum coming only a day later shouldn't be much of a surprise.

 

#239 Astro's Playroom

I like the exploration of the past PlayStation brand and all the peripherals, though some of it is lost on me as my first PlayStation console was the superslim PS2. Regardless, it's still fun except for some frustrating sections where puzzle pieces or artifacts are hiding. The rocket suit can go screw itself as it definitely caused the most deaths out of any section in the game (strangely though the speedrun for it was simple). Had well over 1000 coins left over from all the replaying of stages that had to be done, so the gatcha was no problem there either.

 

Only one other game got a trophy today, and it was a good few hours after the platinum. Still counts, though!

 

Lost Judgment (+1, 7/51)

Edited March 15, 2022 by Arctic Cress
small edit

[Arctic Cress]

A short RPG is the next platinum to be obtained. So short that I waited almost a full week to post it, whoops.

 

#240 Light Fairytale: Episode 1

Saw this JRPG on sale on PSN, its description said it was trying "to bring back the immersion and emotion of 90's era JRPGs on current hardware", so I decided to buy it and see for myself. For what it's worth, it at least got me to play the sequel as well, since I bought it after beating the game! Battle system is a simple turn-based affair with a limit break called Fury. The trophy list is very unique - it instead revolves mostly around a large number of missable side-events that are scattered throughout its extremely short runtime (the main story is about 1.5 hours long without the side-events, but with them you can easily double or even triple that). I did like where the story was headed though, even if it gave me more questions than answers, which is to be expected of an Episode 1 of four episodes planned.

 

Thanks to the above game, I really limited myself to only a few games, but still kept my current trophy streak alive. Though with KYC quite a few games got added, and I finally got past Act 2 in Trails of Cold Steel II.

 

Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout (New, +7, 7/49)

Children of Zodiarcs (New, +9, 9/41)

The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel II (+14, 29/51)

Lost Judgment (+6, 13/51)

Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds Overdrive (+1, 36/37)

Undead Darlings ~no cure for love~ (+1, 16/38)

[Arctic Cress]

They made it much easier, but it's still a UR platinum and I'm very happy to have finished it.

 

#241 Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout

Fall Guys is an interesting game to do a write-up, as I got most of the trophies the first season of the game. The game has changed so much since then, even if the core gameplay loop is the same. The main memory I have if it is playing it with all my friends as we had multiple people rotate in and out of groups as we played (and still play, but much less nowadays). For this platinum, the developers decided to give everyone an easy way to unlock some of the more challenging trophies over the past few weeks, with special modes designed to make both Infallible (5 wins in a row) and Track Star (20 wins in race stages) much easier than the main show. I already got (read: glitched) Infallible last year so I only needed the race wins, of which I only needed 4 total. It's my 2nd rarest platinum on PSNP, slotting itself right in between SSX and Jump Force.

 

The differences from last post are one new game and one updated game. Not much, since I wasn't exactly expecting it to be done this quickly!

 

Children of Zodiarcs (+1, 10/41)

Light Fairytale: Episode 2 (New, +12, 12/24)

[Arctic Cress]

The next game is no surprise given the last update's huge new trophy game

 

#242 Light Fairytale: Episode 2

Yes, it's the same exact image as the first game's platinum. In fact, all of the trophy images are the same.

 

Episode 1 was an interesting game to begin the series, but the game starts to expand a bit in this game where the story takes a slight backseat to a much more involved combat system, with a number of challenging bosses to take care of. Of course, you can grind a bit and make the later bosses more trivial, which I did without really knowing this. I was level 4 when finishing episode 1 and made it all the way to level 12 by the end of this one (levels carry over from the first game if you do the save transfer). Overall, I enjoyed the episode more than the first one, but it was kind of disappointing that there wasn't as many optional events to find. Also, the alternate storyline, unlike the first game, was less than ten minutes long and was mostly unimportant to the overall story. I'll probably buy Episode 3 on release, which based on the release of these two will probably come some time in 2023.

 

I also finished the stack of Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds Overdrive on the PS4. Besides bundling in the DLC and fixing the trophy bugs the Vita version had, it doesn't do much different from the original game.

 

Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds Overdrive (+1, 37/37)

 

After that, not much else as there hasn't been much time since the last update, both in total time and time I actually get to play games.

 

DJMAX Respect (+4, 80/128)

The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel II (+1, 30/51)

Raging Loop (New, +9, 9/31)

[Arctic Cress]

As with the last platinum the next platinum is a game that I started playing in the last update!
 

#243 Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout (Re-release)

 

Wait, not that one.

 

#244 Raging Loop

A very good visual novel that mixes in Mafia/Werewolf game theory with a Japanese mythological background. Having played many mafia games over the years on other websites it was definitely an enjoyable read just for that alone, but it also had a great story for most of the runtime... though I thought the ending was pretty bad compared to the rest of the game. The journey there however was a great ride, especially the Darkness portion. There's a lot of Revelation Mode scenes I still need to see besides the two joke endings that were required for the platinum, and I'll definitely take a look through it before I stop playing the game all together.

 

Been almost a month, finished KYC and the current season of THL but I've been mostly busy at work so there isn't much in the way of actual trophy updates. Did manage to beat both Blue Reflection: Second Light and Yakuza 3 Remastered, and get through the Finale of The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel II (but not the Epilogue yet!)

 

Apex Legends [PS5] (New, +7, 7/12)

Blue Reflection: Second Light (+9, 37/49)

Hades (New, +8, 8/50)

Hyperdimension Neptunia: Producing Perfection (+1, 16/39)

The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel II (+4, 34/51)

Onechanbara Z2: Chaos (New, +6, 6/44)

Song of Memories (+5, 18/37)

Yakuza 3 Remastered (+7, 28/50)

[Arctic Cress]

Another PQube localized visual novel, but one of much worse quality from them.

 

#245 Song of Memories

The story in the game is good. It tends to be on the long side, though, and has a number of routes that seem unnecessary to the main plot of the game. Still, it was enjoyable for a good portion of the game length. The platinum requires you to make every choice at every opportunity, so there's a lot of dialogue to go through. The localization does its best to ruin the story, though. It's clear the localizers never tested the game to see if their translation worked because a lot of the problems would easily have been found and fixed if they took some time to do so. Considering I just played Raging Loop, another visual novel that PQube localized the same year, and it had none of these problems, it's strange that this game has this many problems in it.
 

Other than that game, not much else, as it took over 40 hours to read through the game and most of it was over the last few weeks!

 

Hades (+3, 11/50)

The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel II (+3, 37/51)

Lost Judgment (+2, 15/56)

Mahjong Royal Towers [PS4] (+1, 10/13)

Severed (+4, 12/25)

[Arctic Cress]

One of the many Vita PS+ titles given out during its many years on the service, and a surprisingly good title overall!

 

#246 Severed

Severed is a short action adventure/dungeon crawler hybrid which uses slashes on the touch screen as your attacks. The game features three dungeons to explore with various secrets and other puzzles to unlock as you go through each. The only hard part of the game was finding all the mementos - the battle leading towards the second memento is the hardest in the game, and the third memento's puzzle is very strange and I doubt I would have figured it out without a guide. The highlight of the game is the combat system, where you deal damage by swiping the enemy on the touch screen - damage done is dependent on how long the slash was. You can also repeatedly slash back and forth on an enemy to keep dealing damage repeatedly. Enemies will of course have certain weak points that are the only place that is vulnerable and/or have armor that will need to be cleared with a power attack. Except for the one battle I mentioned above, I was pretty impressed with the system and was surprised how well it worked with the Vita's touch screen.

 

Finished the Epilogue in The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel II... and did not much else besides playing the game above. Maybe I'll get back to trophy hunting when THL starts up again?

 

Girls und Panzer: Dream Tank Match (+1, 24/37)

Hades (+4, 15/50)

The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel II (+1, 38/51)

Lost Judgment (+6, 21/56)

The MISSING: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories (+1, 6/20)

Shenmue III (+1, 7/64)

Streets of Rage 4 (+1, 22/46)

Edited May 22, 2022 by Arctic Cress

[Arctic Cress]

One of the two games I have been focusing on lately, and a great story as well!

 

#247 Blue Reflection: Second Light

A much needed improvement over the original game in the story and character development, however the game quickly becomes extremely easy and I do not think a single boss really challenged me after the first area (and in NG+, Hard mode stopped being challenging about halfway through the game). Which was a problem with the first game, too, and it doesn't help that they locked hard difficulty behind beating the game the first time. A shame because the battle system has a lot of neat ideas and good depth to it. On a positive note, the gameplay loop does a good job of fleshing out the character of every party member and support member in the game, so that you really do get attached to these characters after a while. Plus, there's even more events in NG+ and you probably won't get all the characters to talent level 10 in a fresh run, so at the time I hadn't seen all of these! It's great to see a conclusion to all the individual storylines by seeing a final event in their dungeons. For some reason, the true ending isn't needed for the platinum, but I plan to get it later anyways.

 

THL started so I began playing a few games to win my first fixture! Just barely won thanks to a few last hour trophies from Bugsnax.

 

Adventures of MANA (New, +1, 1/37)

Bugsnax (New, +3, 3/31)

Burnout Paradise: Remastered (+5, 39/95)

Children of Zodiarcs (+1, 11/41)

Doki Doki LIterature Club! [PS5] (New, +15, 15/19)

Lost Judgment (+1, 22/56)

[Arctic Cress]

One stack and one easy platinum, but still enjoyable!

 

#248 Ganbare: Super Strikers (PS4)

Runs much better than the Vita version and you can even fast forward through the other team's turns. Very easy to just run one person up to the goal and super shot it in, though, just like I did in the Vita run through.

 

#249 Nexoria: Dungeon Rogue Heroes

A short roguelike dungeon game where you create a party of various classes and explore five floors of a dungeon. Saw it on PSN for sale, so I decided to pick it up. It's pretty average and I got through most of my first run because the Curse spell is ridiculously overpowered. You have to beat the game three times to get the last kill needed for the platinum, so I did another run after the one above to hopefully find a mimic, which I did. Then I just reloaded that run after beating the last boss of its run to fight the last boss of the game. Assassin tanked pretty much everything while invisible, Fire Mage set everyone on fire, Explosion Mage poisoned everything and the Healer healed. Sadly a lot of the classes are pretty useless, but it happens!

 

Also finished Mahjong Royal Towers [PS4] which is my 100th 100% of games without a platinum. Not a very exciting title, but it's an interesting milestone nonetheless.

 

Mahjong Royal Towers [PS4] (+3, 13/13)

 

Along with Nexoria is a bunch of games being played for THL points, though I managed to lose both of the next two fixtures after winning the first one. Hopefully my luck changes as we continue through the season.

 

Adventures of MANA (+3, 4/37)

Apex Legends [PS5] (+1, 8/12)

Bugsnax (+1, 4/31)

Burnout Paradise: Remastered (+1, 40/95)

Doki Doki Literature Club Plus! [PS5] (+2, 17/19)

Marvel's Spider-Man (New, +3, 3/74)

VA-11 Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action [PS4] (New, +6, 6/34)

[Arctic Cress]

Took a while to line up the milestone platinum, but here it is!

 

#250 Marvel's Spider-Man

A nice milestone platinum! Similar to #150 I picked a game that referenced some of my hobbies outside of video games. I haven't followed the comic in many years now, but I did read many superhero comics when I was a kid, and Spider-Man was always my favorite. It was definitely a treat to play through, and even though I liked it a lot now, I feel that I would have liked the game even more back then. The platinum itself was simple, and you'll get almost all the trophies on the way to completing the story, getting 100% in all districts, and unlocking all the suits. Despite being an open-world game the game doesn't overstay its welcome and takes about 30 hours to finish. (My in-game clock said 38 hours, but I did leave it on for long periods of time without playing.) I will do the DLC at a later date.

 

Against my better judgment, I decided to have the new TrueTrophies event pull trophies from my entire collection, which led to an avalanche of new games being added to my account. My completion percentage took a 2.3% hit even with 20+ new games being added; it just shows how many games are on my account in the first place. Here's the very large update:

 

Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout (+1, 8/49)

Black Clover: Quartet Knights (New, +2, 2/47)

Cinders (New, +2, 2/21)

Corpse Party (New, +5, 5/51)

Death end re;Quest (New, +7, 7/39)

Disc Jam (New, +7, 7/12)

Dynasty Warriors 7 (New, +20, 20/50)

Everything (New, +7, 7/35)

Faery: Legends of Avalon (New, +2, 2/12)

Genshin Impact [PS5] (+4, 19/51)

Hakuoki: Stories of the Shinsengumi (New, +13, 13/35)

Hyperdimension Neptunia: Producing Perfection (+1, 17/39)

Jak and Dexter: The Precursor Legacy (New, +14, 14/39)

Labyrinth Life (New, +3, 3/46)

Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk (New, +4, 4/58)

Lollipop Chainsaw (New, +8, 8/51)

Murdered: Soul Suspect (New, +14, 14/49)

Resonance of Fate (+1, 8/49)

Revenant Dogma (+3, 13/31)

Samurai Warriors 5 (New, +4, 4/56)

Steam Tactics (New, +14, 14/19)

Summon Night 6: Lost Borders (New, +3, 3/52)

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge (New, +19, 19/31)

Trinity: Souls of Zill O'll (+2, 5/42)

VA-11 Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action [PS4] (+25, 31/34)

Warriors All-Stars (New, +5, 5/38)

Warriors Orochi 4 (New, +13, 13/53)

Where the Water Tastes Like Wine (New, +8, 8/38)

Wild Arms (New, +4, 4/38)

Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner HD (New, +8, 8/25)

Edited July 23, 2022 by Arctic Cress

[Arctic Cress]

A short visual novel to start the Warboats cleanup.

 

#251 Cinders

Cinders is a visual novel that takes a different approach on the Cinderella story, with the protagonist being a much more interesting character than the girl in the original fairy tale. Based on the choices made, she can have various endings that can range from taking over her stepmother's noble house to being thrown in the royal dungeon, dying an early death. There are many variations to each ending as well, and the platinum requires every single variation to be found. It's a very short VN though - clocks in at around 2 hours for a first play through and you can auto-skip any seen dialogue after, and there is a lot of shared dialogue as most of the events in-game are the same despite the different ending scenes. I enjoyed it enough, but wish there was a little more variation between the routes.

 

Also finished up Disc Jam, the remaining trophies did not take much time to finish.

 

Disc Jam (+5, 12/12)

 

More games were started for Warboats, but it's time to start finishing them off, so hopefully more updates come a little more frequently to this topic soon.

 

Adventures of MANA (+9, 13/37)

Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout (+9, 17/49)

AVICII Invector (New, +5, 5/25)

Black Clover: Quartet Knights (+1, 3/47)

Everything (+1, 8/35)

Horizon Chase Turbo (New, +10, 10/49)

Lollipop Chainsaw (+1, 9/51)

Murdered: Soul Suspect (+2, 16/49)

One Piece: Burning Blood (New, +10, 10/50)

Party Golf (New, +6, 6/58)

Rogue Galaxy (New, +4, 4/35)

Scarlet Nexus (New, +10, 10/53)

Sly 2: Band of Thieves (+2, 20/36)

Steam Tactics (+1, 15/19)

Utawarerumono: ZAN (New, +4, 4/36)

Warriors Orochi 4 (+1, 14/53)

Wild ARMs (+1, 5/38)

Yumeutsutsu Re:Master (New, +1, 1/25)

[Arctic Cress]

Warboats is completely over now, and here's the first platinum after it!

 

#252 Steam Tactics (Vita)

A very basic strategy RPG with an almost non-existent storyline. It was a good time waster for around six hours - there's forty story missions that take place in an 8x6 grid and you have anywhere from 2 to 4 characters on your side (depending on how far into the story you are) to defeat the 3 to 6 enemy ships in the grid. As long as you replay story missions on higher difficulties for better rewards and constantly upgrade your ships and weapons, it's an easy ride to the end. Most of the ships and weapons I used were the third tier when I finished the final battle. There's no miscellaneous trophies either - all the trophies will be unlocked through the story or through upgrading your items.

 

Also finished a small visual novel, fault: milestone one. Why did I buy a collector's edition of a visual novel that took me two hours to read all the text? Who knows!

 

fault: milestone one (New, +9, 9/9)

 

I completed the last board in Warboats, which consisted of more new games, but also some updates to some games I had long since abandoned. Here's the list:

 

Adam's Venture: Origins (New, +11, 11/15)

AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Inititative (New, +9, 9/49)

AVICII Invector (+12, 17/25)

Broken Age (+1, 8/45)

The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story (New, +1, 1/28)

Dragon Quest Heroes: The World Tree's Woe and the Blight Below (+7, 22/50)

Final Fantasy XIII-2 (+1, 10/32)

Kawaii Deathu Desu (New, +1, 1/49)

Langrisser I & II (+3, 4/42)

One Piece: Burning Blood (+2, 12/50)

The Order: 1886 (New, +3, 3/22)

Party Golf (+4, 10/58)

RiME (New, +4, 4/32)

Shady Part of Me (New, +1, 1/16)

Yumeutsutsu Re:Master (+9, 10/25)

Zero Escape: The Nonary Games (New, +1, 1/38)

[Arctic Cress]

I missed getting this platinum during the GTTSC earlier this year, but I've managed to finish it up now.

 

#253 Fantasy Strike

A free-to-play fighter that is trying to be more simplistic in its controls, but ends up just making mockery of itself due to how many times it can crash. It's like a joke that this game was put on any storefront with how badly it performs. It could be a decent fighter otherwise, I got pretty decent with Rook after having to play him for so long in survival and online matches. Either way, I deleted it and will move on.

 

It's only been a few days since the platinum above, so all I've done was the additional work in getting the final monthly target medal on TrueTrophies. Fifteen open world trophies, though I kind of cheesed part of it with Genshin autopops ?. At least I managed to beat Burnout Paradise Remastered, as I never played the original game!

 

Burnout Paradise Remastered (+11, 51/95)

Genshin Impact [PS4] (+4, 19/50)

Party Golf (+2, 12/58)

[Arctic Cress]

Somehow, I forgot to update this for the last platinum I got. Not that it's much of an accomplishment.

 

#254 Adam's Venture: Origins

 

I paid $0.19 for this game and I still feel like I got ripped off. Though I will say that some of the puzzles in the game are very well made, and that gives it a slight positive. The stealth and minecart sections are both annoying, and there's no combat at all so the game just feels like a worse version of Tomb Raider or Uncharted. There are also a bunch of Christian references throughout, with some puzzles revolving around certain Bible passages. Also, Adam is an annoying protagonist overall and makes a lot of stupid jokes throughout the game. I do wonder why the developer stopped making these games though, as this is the last game they made before switching completely to VR game production, and they were clearly setting up to make another game based on the ending.

 

#255 Yumeutsutsu Re:Master

 

I wasn't originally going to buy this game, but the chance of one of the last Vita physical titles was an interesting sell. Mainly because some of the games have some very disturbing themes from this developer, mainly in the bad endings. Only one of them really annoyed me enough, and it's a good thing too because the rest of this visual novel has some pretty good storylines, with some interesting tidbits of how the game industry works scattered throughout - as the characters in the game are making their own visual novel remake throughout the entire storyline. The game's title is even a pun on remastering a game.

 

I did the Alphabet Challenge over at TrueTrophies and did it with 26 different games, one game per letter. So this update is pretty big and does have some other games other than just the games I played over the Warboats boards.

 

Adventures of MANA (+17, 30/37)

AVICII Invector (+3, 20/25)

Black Clover: Quartet Knights (+6, 9/47)

Burnout Paradise Remastered (+7, 58/95)

The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story (+11, 12/28)

Corpse Party (+2, 7/51)

Death end re;Quest (+1, 8/39)

Dragon Quest Heroes: The World Tree's Woe and the Blight Below (+1, 23/50)

Dynasty Warriors 7 (+1, 21/50)

Everything (+6, 14/35)

Genshin Impact [PS5] (+4, 23/61)

Kawaii Deathu Desu (+12, 13/49)

Labyrinth Life (+1, 4/46)

Murdered: Soul Suspect (+2, 18/49)

One Piece: Burning Blood (+1, 13/50)

Onechanbara Z2: Chaos (+6, 12/44)

Party Golf (+1, 13/58)

RiME (+1, 5/32)

Samurai Warriors 5 (+1, 5/56)

Shady Part of Me (+1, 2/16)

Shining Resonance Refrain (+1, 15/48)

Summon Night 6: Lost Borders (+2, 5/52)

Utawarerumono: ZAN (+2, 6/36)

Warriors Orochi 4 (+1, 15/53)

Where the Water Tastes Like Wine (+1, 9/38)

Wild ARMs (+1, 6/38)

Yakuza 3 Remastered (+1, 29/50)

Zero Escape: The Nonary Games (+1, 2/38)

[Arctic Cress]

Two platinum trophies in this update - one being a stack and another being a recent release in 2022!

 

#256 Nexoria: Dungeon Rogue Heroes (PS4)

 

#257 The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story (PS4)

Another live action mystery game directed by the main writer of 428: Shibuya Scramble is definitely a game that is right up my alley, though it took a while for me to play it since its release back in May. TrueTrophies' Warboats' trophy selection threw its first trophy on one of my boards, so I fired at that spot (a miss) and continued the game after the event ended. The mystery story is top-notch and spans a number of eras in Japan, focusing on the Shijima family throughout its six chapters. The game portion is basically making as many hypotheses as possible in a grid based on the clues and dialogue you collect through the story. As you might expect, some of these hypotheses can be ridiculous or nonsensical based on other evidence or just reality in general. Then you present your deductions - but there's no way to actually fail this portion (you get a grade on the deduction, but it's irrelevant for anything besides a single S rank trophy), as the 'detective' will simply think 'no, that's not right' and let you pick another choice. Overall, I really enjoyed the game, but the gameplay really needed some better mechanics. Would be interesting if we see another game from this developer in the future, as this is their first release.

 

Most of the updates below are from my fixtures in THL (along with the above platinum trophies) as I've won my first two matches and I am currently in my 3rd match.

 

Black Clover: Quartet Knights (+1, 10/47)

Genshin Impact [PS5] (+1, 24/61)

Kawaii Deathu Desu (+9, 22/49)
Musynx [PS4] (+1, 25/27)

One Piece: Burning Blood (+10, 23/50)

Party Golf (+16, 29/58)

Sly 2: Band of Thieves (+1, 21/36)

Utawarerumono: ZAN (+2, 8/36)

[Arctic Cress]

A few stacks before the newest platinum in my collection - the platinum count is now 261.

 

#258 MUSYNX (PS4)

 

#259 VA-11 HALL-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action (PS4)

 

#260 Doki Doki Literature Club Plus! (PS5)

 

#261 The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel II

A very fun title and much better than Cold Steel I. Platinum is the standard Trails trophies, with all character notes, enemy descriptions, fish, master quartz, etc. And of course choosing everyone in the designated scene in the Finale. Most of my nightmare playthrough was Laura using her S-Craft and Emma blasting everything with Claiomh Solarion. None of the battles were that challenging on a NG+. I've already said I won't be moving on to Cold Steel III until I've played Zero and Azure, though I did skip Trails in the Sky the 3rd because it wasn't released yet when I started Cold Steel I, so it might be best to play that one instead.

 

Along with the above platinum trophies, I've made some good progress on recovering my completion from what TrueTrophies Warboats PvP did to it, getting back above 72.6% at this point. Still a long way from the 75% it was at previously, but it's trending in the right direction.

 

Adventures of MANA (+5, 35/37)

Black Clover: Quartet Knights (+8, 18/47)

Genshin Impact [PS4] (+6, 25/69)

Genshin Impact [PS5] (+1, 25/70)

Kawaii Deathu Desu (+18, 40/49)

Party Golf (+2, 31/58)

Spirit Hunter: NG (New, +9, 9/26)

The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe [PS5] (New, +7, 7/12)

Utawarerumono: ZAN (+26, 34/36)

Edited October 3, 2022 by Arctic Cress

[Arctic Cress]

Quick turnaround from the last platinum only a few days ago, to grab this one as well.

 

#262 Kawaii Deathu Desu

This beat-em-up has monster and undead idols beating up on their crazed fans to gather souls. At least, that's what happens when you play it; there's no story or anything to tell me if I'm correct or not. The game itself is very short, you can probably unlock and clear all of the stages just by using all your souls to level up the character you start with, and finish in about two or three hours. However, the platinum requires 11,000 kills from each of the first six characters (the other three characters were a later addition, and have no trophies attached), as well as getting all of them to level 9 (which will take longer than getting the required 66,000 kills needed). There is a method using the cloud save to get the trophies faster but it only saves a few hours in total, so I didn't bother and just played it normally. In the end, it took about twelve hours and a lot of hammering the L1 and R1 buttons; a good time waster between other games.

 

I only played one other game between the two platinums, so a short update overall.

 

Genshin Impact [PS5] (+2, 27/70)

[Arctic Cress]

Another platinum from a game that had just a few trophies left.

 

#263 Utawarerumono: ZAN

The last of the English Utawarerumono releases on PSN, ZAN takes the Mask of Deception storyline, replaces the strategy RPG battles with a musou ripoff that plays like Senran Kagura, while stripping all of the slice of life cutscenes from the original game (taking the 30 hour storyline to about five hours). As such, it's not very good and you can easily break the game with Atuy and her lightning attack. There isn't much else to say about this game; the platinum just has you beat all levels on normal and hard, as well as complete all the Free Missions.

 

Again, not much in the way of other updates, just doing enough to keep pace in TrueTrophies' Leap Frog event.

 

Burnout Paradise Remastered (+3, 61/95)

One Piece: Burning Blood (+1, 24/50)

[Arctic Cress]

Been over a month going through TrueTrophies' Leap Frog which is having me hold back platinum trophies for a bit, this one was common enough so I just grabbed it.

 

#264 Crazy Chicken Remake (PS5)

I originally started this for another TrueTrophies thing with the monthly targets, as it was classified as a FPS (it isn't, it's more of an arcade shooter) but it counted for that. Now, I used its platinum to get through today's Leap Frog target. There's not much to speak of in it - there's only a single level, so it's not really anything special. The trophies are basic and just require a good high score.

 

Also got a 100% in Pac-Man 256, which is another arcade title with a lot of grindy trophies. Took a while to get the last two of them.

 

Pac-Man 256 (+2, 10/10)

 

The long period between platinum trophies gives a ton of updates, including finishing the story mode of eight games - a great increase in completion percentage thanks to the many gold trophies collected.

 

AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative (+21, 30/49)

Black Clover: Quartet Knights (+1, 19/47)

Burnout Paradise Remastered (+26, 87/95)

Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony (+3, 29/41)

Deemo Reborn (+1, 43/46)

DJMAX Respect (+2, 82/128)

Dragon Quest Heroes: The World Tree's Woe and the Blight Below (+7, 30/50)

Everything (+18, 32/35)

Genshin Impact [PS4] (+8, 33/69)

Genshin Impact [PS5] (+8, 33/70)

Ghost of Tsushima (+8, 61/77)

Granblue Fantasy: Versus (+9, 24/50)

I am Setsuna (+4, 32/50)

One Piece: Burning Blood (+1, 25/50)

Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 (+2, 12/19)

Party Golf (+6, 37/58)

Persona 4 Arena (+3, 38/51)

Persona 4 Golden (+1, 40/50)

Puyo Puyo Champions (+6, 39/45)

Samurai Warriors 4 (+2, 30/54)

School Girl/Zombie Hunter (+13, 33/41)

Shady Part of Me (+2, 4/16)

Spirit Hunter: NG (+15, 24/26)

The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe (+3, 10/12)

Superliminal (New, +5, 5/24)

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge (+1, 20/31)

Yakuza 3 Remastered (+1, 30/50)

[Arctic Cress]

Didn't take long to need another platinum for TT Leap Frog, so here's the next one.

 

#265 Spirit Hunter: NG

The sequel to Death Mark, Spirit Hunter: NG tells a similar story, with the main character being cursed by a spirit and the exorcism of other spirits to finally remove the curse. I found NG to be a bit worse than Death Mark overall, though, due to its extremely small maps compared to its predecessor. You could probably fit the entirety of the first three chapters' maps in the school from the first game, which for an adventure game like this seems somewhat of a lack of content. The Vita version, which I played, also suffers from text going off the text box in many places, most commonly in the notes between chapters and in some of the crisis choices, so Aksys clearly did not test this version at all since both problems are very obvious. However, the game does a lot better with the characters compared to the first game. Most of the characters in Death Mark would only stay around for a chapter or two and then disappear - the main cast of NG sticks around throughout the whole game and there are a few character endings depending on your dialogue options.

 

Grabbed a trophy in quite a few games while working on the November targets on TT, so there's a few updates since last platinum.

 

Black Clover: Quartet Knights (+1, 20/47)

Ghost of Tsushima (+1, 62/77)

Granblue Fantasy: Versus (+1, 25/50)

Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 (+1, 13/19)

Samurai Warriors 4 (+3, 33/54)

[Arctic Cress]

A huge increase in platinum trophies thanks to TrueTrophies Leap Frog. Let's go through (almost) all of them.

 

#266 Yumeutstutsu Re:After

This is a fandisc sequel to #255 Yumeutsutsu Re:Master above. However, I haven't actually read it yet, so I'll update this writeup once I do.

 

#267 Adventures of MANA

I have only beaten one Mana game before this one, and it was Children of Mana back on the DS (and it wasn't very good). This game was much shorter and a lot more fun to play, and with the better translation it was pretty clear on what to do despite the limited dialogue. Since the game was initially a mobile phone game, it made heavy use of the touch screen (you could use the face buttons if you wished) and I had no problem using the touch controls to attack and use magic spells in battle. Getting to level 99 by repeatedly killing elephants in the final dungeon actually wasn't that bad, the real annoying part of the platinum was getting one of each item in the game, some of which are rare drops from certain enemies. Since you can't leave the final dungeon once entered, I had to load up a save file prior to doing so and farmed the rest of the items needed, except one which is, of course, in the final dungeon itself (I had the all armor, weapons, helms, and shields in the first run).

 

#268 Fifty Words by POWGI (Vita)

Another word search game by POWGI where you have a huge grid filled with fifty words around a certain theme. It's very easy to get all the trophies without finishing everything, but I took the time to complete all the puzzles in the game. Other than that, there's not much else to say about this one.

 

#269 Breeder Homegrown: Director's Cut

I played through this and got all the trophies and I'm still not really sure what happened in this game. It's a horror adventure game, sure, but events seem disjointed and out of place and there's plenty of hallucinations going on so I mostly just got confused as to what the actual plot is. I really don't recommend it unless you want the quick platinum trophy.

 

#270 Tic-Tac-Letters by POWGI

"A Strange Game" according to the platinum trophy, Tic-Tac-Letters has you filling in multiple grids with 2 letters, making every row and column different and not repeating the same letter three times in a row. It's definitely pretty challenging as the game progresses. Again, being a POWGI title there's not much to say about this one either.

 

#271 Fifty Words by POWGI (PS4)

Thanks Leap Frog. I tried a bunch of other titles for today's trophy but my two accounts couldn't find each other in Puyo Puyo, my Party Golf save erased itself, and I couldn't get the cars into the stadium in Burnout Paradise, so I popped this instead.

 

On the non-platinum side, I joined a boosting session for Super Bomberman R Online, and finished it up. Good thing too, since the servers close tomorrow. Thanks to Letenko for organizing the quick boosting session.

 

Super Bomberman R Online (+6, 10/10)

 

As for other trophies, it's mostly working towards the end of the November targets over on TT. Just in time for the December targets (and 12 Days of Christmas).

 

Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 (+2, 15/19)

Puyo Puyo Champions (+3, 42/45)

Samurai Warriors 4 (+12, 45/54)

SOMA (New, +1, 1/10)

Team Sonic Racing (+4, 38/52)

Tiny Tina's Wonderlands (New, +8, 8/47)

Tokyo Jungle (+2, 7/13)

[Arctic Cress]

Looking at the above list it was pretty easy to figure out which one was the next platinum. And it's even a UR one, which means I've doubled my UR platinum count this year.

 

#272 Puyo Puyo Champions

I believe this game came out between the two Puyo Puyo Tetris titles to very little announcement. It basically has the two Puyo rulesets from Puyo Puyo 2 and Puyo Puyo Fever... and that's it, there's no story or additional modes here (though they added some challenge modes in a title update later). Luckily, adjusting the settings makes it easy to grab all clears, counterattack kills, and popped puyos so the entire list is pretty simple to finish, despite the UR rarity on PSNP. The only annoyance is probably the 200 online matches (100 in free play and 100 ranked), which I did with my alt playing on PS4 and my main on the PS5. Servers are pretty dead so there was no one else online.

 

There are no other updates, since the last platinum was just yesterday. Maybe next time!

[Arctic Cress]

Slacking off on my posts here, there's been ten platinum trophies since the last update.

 

#273 Everything

Well, now that I've completed Everything, I guess that means that's it, right?
In all seriousness, Everything is a trip through all kinds of objects from the subatomic level all the way up to the galactic level. There are well over a thousand objects to descend or ascend into throughout the game - I found at least 51% of the items and was around 700 total items collected. The platinum only requires a small amount of total items in different categories for certain trophies, while having you perform a bunch of other actions (such as generating thoughts, transforming, and dancing) throughout the game for the rest of them. The game also includes 66 audio tapes from philosopher Alan Watts, which can be interesting when compared to the game itself (and all 66 are required for the platinum). In the end, I had to let the game autoplay itself to generate more thoughts to collect the last trophy. Not really interested in finding the items that I do not have either. At least I can still laugh every time Wario64 makes the joke when this game is on sale.

 

#274 Burnout Paradise: Remastered

I never played the original Burnout Paradise so this was completely new for me - and I enjoyed it a lot, actually! Each of the various events are very fun to mess around in, though they did get a bit repetitive going up to the Burnout license. Similarly, the showtime and time road rules are nice challenges but there are so many roads that I only did enough for each trophy's requirement. I think my favorite part of the game was when I was just starting and going through yellow gates and billboards for the first time. The trophy list in general is very lacking compared to what's actually in the game, since there's no requirement to smash all the yellow gates or billboards, get the Burnout Elite license, or complete all the road routes or anything like that. Thanks to Berendsapje for the boost of all the 2-player multiplayer trophies. I'll have to do the 8-player one at some point.

 

#275 What Remains of Edith Finch [PS5]

The PS4 release had no platinum trophy, so it was nice to be able to get one in this release! I even managed to catch two rabbits in two sweeps which I didn't do in my original PS4 run (did it in a replay of the chapter). The added trophies were no problem to finish off, and the cannery episode is still the best one. (It did load my PS4 save when I opened the game, but I opted for a full replay of the game instead.)

 

#276 Crazy Chicken Jump 'n' Run Traps and Treasures

An old budget 2D platformer that's been remade from a game released back in 2005, this has you control a chicken through various forest and ruins levels to find a magical amulet. To get all the trophies and unlock the bonus levels, you need to collect all coins and artifacts hidden in the game, plus defeat all enemies. I did manage to collect all the items and defeat every enemy in around three hours. Still had a few problems, like this one artifact that seemed slightly out of reach (somehow jumping while punching worked). There's a second game that's been released on the Switch but not on PS4/PS5, but based on this one I probably won't buy it.

 

#277 Crazy Chicken Kart 2

Here's another in the same series above, this is a simple kart racer. There's only eight tracks and two championships so there isn't much to be done here - the only reason the platinum takes a while is that you need to play 100 races and lose at least 50 of them. Kind of dumb, but I finished it and it's done.

 

#278 Unpacking [PS4]

An indie game where you unpack boxes with items over a person's life, from a child in 1997 and progressing through the many years of their life. It is interesting to see which items keep coming back every move, like the pig plushie which appears in all of the levels. My only complaint is how inflexible the game can get with placing certain items - there were multiple times where I completely disagreed with where the game wanted me to put some items. The platinum requires doing a few extra tasks in each year such as flushing all the toilets to unlock stickers on the menu screen, each one corresponding to a certain trophy. It's not a very in-depth game, but it was a good four hours of content, and that was good enough for me.

 

#279 Unpacking [PS5]

yep

 

#280 (and trophy #15,000) The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe

This milestone kind of snuck up on me as I was at 14,991 trophies before I noticed I was close to it, but I still managed to line up a trophy of a great game. I had played The Stanley Parable many years ago on PC and enjoyed it then, but never finished getting some of the achievements in it. Being more interested in PSN trophies means when I bought it here I would get all the ones I didn't get on PC, such as the 4:22 speedrun and 'playing' the game for an entire Tuesday. I'm also very impressed with all that Ultra Deluxe brings to an already great game, by doubling the amount of endings (thanks to the bucket), revamping the games ending, and even implementing the 8 room from the demo in a clever way. One of my favorite games from this year.

 

#281 Return of the Obra Dinn

Return of the Obra Dinn is another indie title made by Lucas Pope after Papers, Please. I always liked Papers, Please so I thought I would also enjoy this title as well. And for a while, I think it was very interesting progressing through the mystery and finding out the certain fates of the crew members onboard. However, as the game progressed, I found many things to be annoying; mainly the inability to look at a specific death scene whenever possible (and when loading it up, the audio plays while moving in the scene, which is incredibly distracting). Also to note is the minimalist art style makes it very hard to see certain death scenes or pinpoint a cause of death - I had many people with the wrong cause of death for a good amount of time because I just couldn't see what the game wanted me to. Finally, I'll admit that I brute forced a bunch of the puzzles as some of the hints were really obtuse - I looked at the ways you were 'supposed' to figure out everyone without guessing and there was no way I was figuring some of these out, especially coupled with the art style. I did find the game to be interesting enough throughout, but in the end I was somewhat disappointed overall. I do recommend playing it at least once though - maybe at a steep discount though.

 

#282 Hakuoki: Stories of the Shinsengumi

This is the PS3 release of the Hakuoki series, and is still the only English release of various side stories that make up around half of the trophy list. These side stories are only around five to six hours in total, so it's not completely worth checking out if you have played the game on another platform (like I did with the two Vita versions). Otherwise, I had played the Vita versions, so the actual main story portion was just a recap for me and I mostly skipped through it. Still not a fan of the protagonist.

 

There's still a lot of unlocked trophies too, as I was working on the 2 TrueTrophies events and the December targets. Burnout Paradise remains down here as well until I get the DLC fully completed.

 

Burnout Paradise: Remastered (+5, 92/95)

Children of Zodiarcs (+5, 16/41)

Darkest Dungeon (New, +2, 2/63)

Mind≒0 (+1, 20/36)

Nexomon: Extinction (+1, 55/57)

Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 (+1, 16/19)
Phantom Breaker: Omnia (New, +6, 6/61)

Party Golf (+1, 38/58)

School Girl/Zombie Hunter (+2, 35/41)

Tetris Effect (+1, 33/43)

Tiny Tina's Wonderlands (+4, 12/47)

Wild ARMs (+1, 7/38)