Sharing some general tips on getting the platinum

[realHiromi]

This is by far my favorite trophy list in the series. Unlike 6 which is way too easy or some previous titles which require over 100 hours, this one is just in the sweet spot in terms of trophies. It's a little challenging here and there, but it's totally doable. I feel rewarded and satisfied by completing the list. The English version is actually my second run, so I decided to beat it as quick as possible. I clocked in 41.5 hours in the end. There are definitely some idling time and some time wasted, so I think 40 hours is a good estimate if you skip all cut-scenes, and you know what you are doing.

As always this game deserves a dedicated wiki. I've been following this one [https://dswiipspwikips3.jp/yakuza-kiwami2/](Japanese) which explains every detail of the game with loads of images and videos. I'm just going to jot down some strategies I developed, and hopefully I can help someone.

 

Step 1

Finish the main story on easy difficulty. If this is you first playthrough, you should watch the cut-scenes. If you trigger a sub-story, finish the first step. Some are just a brief conversation and a fight, then you are done. Ignore those require multiple steps and focus on the main campaign, since nothing is missable. If a street boss appears, go beat him. There are 9 street bosses in each city, fighting 5 sets of each type of street encounter (thugs, delinquents, yakuza) will trigger one, so 3 for each type. The next one won't appear until you beat the current one, so do this asap. You can track your progress by going back to phone messages, but I found it easier to write down a note. And of course, pick up any sparkling collectible on your way.

 

Step 2

Finish the Majima story.

 

Step 3

Finish all sub-stories except those tied to the Cabaret Club the Amon fights. Do this first because some places are locked until you finish a relevant sub-story, and you can recruit Cabaret Club hostesses and Majima construction workers along the way. You should have enough money to donate to the orphanage at this point.

 

Step 4

Finish Cabaret Club mini game. I found this mini game very enjoyable. You develop close relationship with pretty girls, while earning tons of money in minutes, how could someone dislike that. Divide your hostesses into two groups, one with the bests including the diamond, platinums, some gold, and the other one with mostly gold, silver, and even bronze at the beginning. If the elites are exhausted, play a lower ranked championship with the backups. Customize platinum members so that they have 3 characteristics maxed out and 1 being mediocre. You probably need to play some extra rounds after beating the last rival club to meet the 300 customers requirement. Sub-stories related to Cabaret Club will be done at this point, and you should have way more than enough money in this game. 

 

Step 5

[Grind] Finish all bouncer missions. Grab the "cheat" weapons first. There are some weapons with infinite durability in this game, the most useful ones are Photon Blade RG (aka lightsaber) and Dragon SP (pistol). They are available at Yamagami Works, and they should be very affordable at this point. With these two equipped, most bouncer missions are a breeze, you can watch Youtube/Netflix/etc while doing these, since there are A LOT missions. 26 x 3 difficulties = 78 missions. The most challenging ones are the Amon flights, or the last 9 missions. The most annoying part of fighting them is when they are protected by a shield. Luckily you can still deal damage with the lightsaber, but the heat action won't, so just keep attacking. The normal difficulty of the last mission will probably take a couple tries. Personally I found Sango more threatening than Jiro, because you have auto-guard against bullets by now, but Sango's rocket launcher can kill you instantly. Deal with Kazuya as quick as possible, then stick to Sango so he won't have a chance to fire a rocket, finish the fight with Jiro. The next two difficulties are actually easier, because you have the Wargod Amulet now. You can basically stay in boost mode all the time and use heat actions as much as you want.

 

Step 6

Time to fight the Amons in sub-stories. You are quite familiar with them now so these fights shouldn't be a problem. All sub-stories checked.

 

Step 7

Collectible Marathon. You should have most locker keys at this point, pick up those in the corners. Also pick up all cheat items laying on the ground. I also finished all street bosses, all drinks, and all restaurants at this point. Be careful with mysterious drinks, a couple of them actually deal a lot of damage. Buy medications that can empty your stomach and sober you up while eating at all restaurants. Again, money shouldn't be a problem at all.

 

Step 8

Take on Haruka and satisfy her seemingly endless needs. You can also save the all-restaurant run after this step, since you need to visit quite a few with Haruka. For mini games, try to complete all their requirements other than what Haruka asked. Gambling games are pretty easy with the help of cheat items, though personally I found Poker is a little tricky. You can't just use the item and win, the opponents will fold instantly so you won't earn many points. Use the item at proper timings.

In my first playthrough, I was stuck on winning 3 matches in Virtual-on for quite a while. I've never played this type of game, and the 3rd yellow robot was really a headache. In the end, I found the first selection Temjin the best choice. I had to learn the use of weapons, and got used to the clumsy controls. There is a legit learning curve.

 

Step 9

Finish Clan Creator. You can do this after completing all sub-stories, but I love Haruka more than big muscular dudes, so here it is. If you haven't, play unlocked coliseum matches to collect Majima construction workers. Make sure to include two rocket launchers in the team. They may not be SR-ranked, but they play an important role. As for the skills, the most important one is probably Ukyo the bridge guard, the one can repair equipment. Others like Soutaro (speed up) Chushu Riki (attack and defense up), Masahiro (invulnerable)  are pretty useful. Side quests are not required for trophies, but they are the best way to grind some XP if you are struggling. For the 200,000 points trophy, strive for S rank on every stage in the last main story mission.

 

Step 10

Reach S rank in coliseum and the last battle will be unlocked. 

 

Step 11

Now to the mini games. I will just mention what I perceive as a little tricky or challenging.

Shogi:

Download any free Shogi app on your phone/tablet, select the highest difficulty, rotate your device upside down. Go first in the game, do exactly what your opponent do in the app. You got it.

[Grind] Batting center:

For the batting center sub-story, you need to grind enough points to get the serene bat in order to beat the guy. But this is nowhere close to the required 3000 points. The battle skill item costs 1000 points and the action skill action costs 2000 points. I think this requirement is the most unbalanced portion of the game, they should be halved. Anyway, the best way to grind is challenge course expert 1 or 2 with normal bat. Challenge course is more forgivable than homerun course, and patterns of expert 1 and 2 are fixed.

Golf:

Since the patterns are fixed, follow a guide video will do.

Darts:

After obtaining the expert dart, beat the expert opponent with 3x180/high tons. Then do 301 with 3x50, 2x50 + 51 to quickly grind winnings.

Milky Nose:

This would take a couple attempts. While balancing output, make sure to keep an eye on the gauge. In the highest difficulty the margin is pretty small. Vending machines selling rich tea are conveniently placed nearby, 3 of those will fill your pee meter to the max.

Mahjong:

The elephant in the room. Due to its random nature, there is no way to get definitively "better". Learn the basic rules and be patient, you will simply get lucky hands by keep playing. Use the peerless tiles on the most difficult matches. Do all 3 matches in Kamurocho by yourself, beat the medium table in Soutenbori, and use the tiles on the rest. Be sure to make a save before entering tournaments, or you will have to play the previous two matches again. I'm by no meanings a good Mahjong player, but I did have exposure to the game when I was younger. If you are really desperate, do a second easy playthrough immediately after the first one to collect more tiles. The last item on the checklist is probably ron/tsumo 30 times. At this stage it doesn't matter how many points you can earn, simply focus on making it tenpai asap.

 

Step 12:
Finally, play the game on legend difficulty. Feel free the pay ridiculous amount of cash to skip ahead a couple times, and enjoy abusing your lightsaber and pistol. Then the platinum is yours.

 

I must have missed something/made mistakes, feel free to provide any feedback.

[A1r4l3x]

nice, good i find this, thanks

[AmaimonHD]

Thanks for posting these tips, i'm planning to play this in the next few months. I'll definitely look at this again when I start it ?

[Katt]

I would like to add something in Step 2:

save the game before enter the Grand. After a couple fights and a long cinematic, the game will kick you out to the title screen and you will lose everything.

[Wagszilla]

Unless you want to spend 1+ hour on the Poker game for Haruka’s Request due to RNG nonsense, save all 4 of your Royal Joker Cards. 
 

Get a solid hand aka a face card Pair and then use the RJC. This will bump you up to a 3 of a kind which in most cases is unbeatable and you can raise and win 250-350 chips if you do it right.

I did CP stuff ahead of time and wasted all but 1 card. 
 

Don’t be dumb like me.

[Patrickosan]

Okay, I've got a question regarding platinum in Kiwami 2. How it is compared to Kiwami 1? Are there annoying parts like doing 950+ on Karaoke for Haruka or that god damn highway chase on Legend difficulty? Those sections were seriously bad programmed... Aparat from that I managed with everything else without too much trouble. Even Jo Amon wasn't that bad with items from Climax battles. And belive it or not, I did the rotation on pool on the first try, the trick with the piece of paper was spot on. 

 

So, are there similar "bullshits" like that in Kiwami 2 or is it more straight forward without some annoying difficulty spikes in pointless activities? 

[ZenaxPure]

6 hours ago, Patrickosan said:

Okay, I've got a question regarding platinum in Kiwami 2. How it is compared to Kiwami 1? Are there annoying parts like doing 950+ on Karaoke for Haruka or that god damn highway chase on Legend difficulty?

 

Nothing as challenging as those in Kiwami 2. Karaoke is back but much easier imo, I got most on my first try. No on rails shooting section in this game at all, legend difficulty is a complete cake walk assuming you max out your skills and get the infinite durability weapons before starting NG+.

 

The only bad part of 100% completion in Kiwami 2 is the bouncer missions. Sort of a replacement for climax battles there are 20 something of them, decent challenge but nothing crazy. However, each one has 3 difficulty levels and there are 20 something of them and you have to do all difficulties. So you have to do 70 something battles total. It's a pretty long grind even if you're using infinite durability weapons. Took me like a day and a half of playing to get through them all.

 

That is it though, trophy list is very easy compared to the first game.

[bobthecrazydog]

On 18/10/2020 at 9:44 PM, Patrickosan said:

Okay, I've got a question regarding platinum in Kiwami 2. How it is compared to Kiwami 1? Are there annoying parts like doing 950+ on Karaoke for Haruka or that god damn highway chase on Legend difficulty? Those sections were seriously bad programmed... Aparat from that I managed with everything else without too much trouble. Even Jo Amon wasn't that bad with items from Climax battles. And belive it or not, I did the rotation on pool on the first try, the trick with the piece of paper was spot on. 

 

So, are there similar "bullshits" like that in Kiwami 2 or is it more straight forward without some annoying difficulty spikes in pointless activities? 

 

I agree with @ZenaxPure. It's definitely easier than the first Kiwami. 

 

The mini-games are mostly pretty easy, though some are a bit grindy. For example Mahjongg takes a while but you can use cheat items a few times to help out, and you'll spend a while in the batting cages grinding for points. The golf bingo challenge for Haruka took me a few attempts and the karaoke one took about 4 or 5 attempts - it's easier than Kiwami though as you only need 90 which you need for completion in each song anyway. Haruka's other challenges are piss easy, mostly buying her food to stuff her face with. 

 

The bouncer missions you can cheese as you can take whatever weapons and gear you want. You can even take loads of sacrifice stones if you want to avoid dying completely.

 

Generally, I found that by the time I had completed the side missions and stuff like cabaret club (which were all enjoyable to me and didn't feel grindy) I had done like 95% of the game already. Just mix it up so you don't have like all of clan creator or all of the bouncer missions at the end. I have a few more to do to finish and it does get a bit boring after a while.

[XxIsa-GxX]

On 18/10/2020 at 11:44 PM, Patrickosan said:

Okay, I've got a question regarding platinum in Kiwami 2. How it is compared to Kiwami 1? Are there annoying parts like doing 950+ on Karaoke for Haruka or that god damn highway chase on Legend difficulty? Those sections were seriously bad programmed... Aparat from that I managed with everything else without too much trouble. Even Jo Amon wasn't that bad with items from Climax battles. And belive it or not, I did the rotation on pool on the first try, the trick with the piece of paper was spot on. 

 

So, are there similar "bullshits" like that in Kiwami 2 or is it more straight forward without some annoying difficulty spikes in pointless activities? 

It's pretty straight forward in general but Haruka's Poker request might be irritating since you have to collect 1000 chips in a single game. I suggest getting 4-5 Royal Cards (2 of them are obtained from the locker keys, 1 of them you need to reach SSS Rank with Haruka, and the other 2 are hidden in the cities across (1 being at the near of Acupuncturist, right near of the door (inside the building) in Sotenbori and the other one is at the east of the Beam, where you take the stairs in Kamurocho) and then attempting the request. Unlike Kiwami, the requests are in random order so you can go out to Sotenbori and then to Kamurocho for having different request than before.

[ZenaxPure]

On 10/20/2020 at 5:48 AM, bobthecrazydog said:

The golf bingo challenge for Haruka took me a few attempts

You know what, I totally blocked this out of my mind. Golf bingo took me a few hours, was pretty annoying. Not as bad as any of the annoying stuff from the first game though of course, but still worth pointing out.

Edited October 27, 2020 by ZenaxPure