Golem25's Trinket Cave

Golem25 · September 4, 2020

On 04/09/2020 at 10:44 AM, Raveniteh said:

Which Yakuza 3 version are you playing? PS3 or PS4? One way or another congratulations on Ultimate Challenger, those trophies are no easy feat at all. I remember struggling with it for several hours as well.

PS3, I never did buy a PS4 - only borrowed it from my brother to play 0 for a bit before going abroad. Yes, I am massively behind on the series but at least it gave me the time to sink hundreds of hours into each of the five PS3 games (including Kenzan!).

Still bought every single PS4 game brand new (steelbook/CE where possible) and they're still all shrink-wrapped apart from 0. Gotta support the series no matter what, although I am doubting whether I will bother with a brand new copy of Like a Dragon considering that, at this rate, I will only play it in 2045. Even later if they localize Ishin before then and give me a Dead Souls remaster.

Edited September 29, 2020 by Golem25

Raveniteh · September 4, 2020

I was also late to the series, played it only when 0 was released but fell in love with it. I am envious you played Kenzan, I still want localization for both Kenzan and Ishin. Never played those.

I am quite looking forward for Like a Dragon, hope CE is released in my country as well. I love Yakuza CE's as they contain some great items like drinking glasses and such.

Golem25 · September 8, 2020

Update 12

Platinum #68 - Assassin's Creed Black Flag (+DLC)

Prizes, Plunder, and Adventure! - Win Every Trophy.

276,243 Owners - 15,152 Achievers for a percentage of 5.49% (average completion; 37.41%)

Enjoyment; 1/10

Difficulty; 2/10

Trophies; 2/10 (bad B/S/G distribution, slightly improved tiles, no interesting requirements)

State of Transcendence upon finishing my AC backlog quest; Transcendence/10

In the last two updates in this thread (ACB here, and ACR here), I painted myself as a wretched creature that is intellectually inferior to even the dumbest of donkeys; where these fine animals tend to stub their hoofs sometimes, there is a saying that purports they never hurt themselves on the same rock twice. Golem25, on the other hand, had his younger brother add an Assassin's Creed game to his profile not once, not twice, not thrice, but four times! These incidents happened from 2011 through to 2014, at which point I finally got smart and put my profile under lock and key; my younger brother never bothered to get a profile of his own up until that point, so he just dumped his AssCreed titles on mine (thankfully, he never played any other games outside of my library). Every time he'd promise to try and get as close to the Plat as possible, but in reality he never bothered.

I had to clean up 114 Trophies (including DLC) across those three games, and this morning the third leg of this hellish voyage ended for me; I swept up the final eight Black Flag Trophies between 2 and 3 AM (in order to further populate my Trophies-by-Time graphs) to 100% what I hope will be my last ever Assassin's Creed game. I do suppose this was a good way to bid the series a not-so-fond farewell, as Black Flag seems to be its highest-rated entry - perhaps second only to Assassin's Creed II.

Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag thrusts the player in the role of an unnamed 'researcher' who is digging into the history of the West Indies (nowadays more commonly known as the Caribbean) at the behest of Abstergo Entertainment; secretly, the player actually ends up helping the Assassins, a one-dimensional death cult hell-bent on 'liberating' the world from the cartoonishly evil Templars, who use Abstergo as a front in their efforts to 'enslave' the world. The previous entries in the series came with a smattering of stupid end-of-the-world nonsense and cyber-Gods gobbledygook, which Black Flag sadly didn't entirely do away. Unfortunately, the painfully unfunny Shaun and Rebecca, sidekicks in the previous games, do make an appearance, and the idiocy really ramps up towards the end of the game. Despite the infantile narrative involving the modern day continuously popping up whenever the player exits the game, 95% of the actual gameplay is set in a simulation of the eighteenth century, with the player assuming the role of Edward Kenway, a chap who turns pirate and magically runs into a load of prominent real world individuals like Blackbeard and Calico Jack - pretty much the same thing that happened to Ezio in Brotherhood and Revelations.

Despite the opportunity to provide a compelling piracy storyline, the whole thing devolves into a chase for a macguffin. Wouldn't you know it, it's just another Assassin's Creed! I will say this; the game is improved over Brotherhood and Revelations, which were effectively copy+past efforts of II. My mind was blown the first time Kenway jumped over a fence as if he was doing the 100 m hurdles at the Olympics; Ezio would have hopped onto it like a duck with brain damage before jumping off again. However, beneath this veneer, it is still very much the same gameplay loop, just with some boating thrown in alongside a much nicer setting (some of the islands on the map were gorgeous, especially compared to the filth of Rome and Istanbul's 50 shades of brown).

My playthrough was aided by the save file my brother worked out of; where he had left Brotherhood and especially Revelations in a state of utter non-completion, he had cleaned up quite a bit of the side content in Black Flag - perhaps an indication that it was a lot better than its predecessors? I never once had to touch a fortress (King Of The Castle), only needed a handful of locations for Cartographer, just one tavern for Bar Fly, just one stone for Vault Raider, and a handful of Naval Contracts for Sea Legs. He did, however, leave quite a bit of work in terms of 100% sync for the story, which meant that I had to replay about sixty percent of all missions across the game's 13 sequences. As a result, I got far from the full picture on the narrative, but I feel confident in saying that I probably didn't miss much of interest, given the standard of the bits I did (have to) play.

Upgrading Kenway's ship, the Jackdaw, took a lot of time and grinding to get Destroyer while Cannon Fodder necessitated a whole load of replays of memory 2 of sequence 3 to recruit 15 pirates at a time on the way to 500 total. Somehow, my brother had gotten the infamously temperamental Sharing Is Caring back in the day, so that was one headache less for me. 'Twas the least he could do, as I once again had to sit through a horrible multiplayer experience; where ACB was awful and required grinding to level 50, Revelations only required level 20. Black Flag took a look at the mercy that Ubisoft had afforded to players in Revelations, spat on it, and then set the level requirement for its own Platinum to 55! In the end, I eclipsed that level and prestiged as I hung around for a few hours more to help some fellow boosters reach their own milestones after I had gotten mine. The good news was that most of the grind could be done solo in a mode called Wolfpack, but as it turned out, I might have just cut things a little too close.

Why? Due to my now defunct 65-Trophies-a-month quota, I had left All Rounder until September 1st. I popped it no trouble that early morning, but at some point later in the day, the servers went offline. And they haven't come back online since (it's the 8th now and Ubisoft is blaming players who inquire for having faulty internet connections). I pray for everyone's sake that the servers will soon return to operational status, but as it stands, I am the last ever achiever of All Rounder! Deary me. Had I waited a day, or even a few hours, longer, I might have been locked out of Platinum and 100% indefinitely.

'Platinum and 100%?' I hear you say, 'Sounds like there's DLC'. Yes, my good sir/ma'am, like Brotherhood before it, Black Flag has ten DLC Trophies; 4 in a superfluous multiplayer character pack, and 6 in a singleplayer experience called Freedom Cry, focused on Kenway's bland first mate Adéwalé. I completed this latter expansion from start to 95% of the way to the end yesterday, giving me a fresh and complete storyline, and I have to say; it was complete shit, proving that playing an AssCreed game from start to finish really doesn't improve the experience, at least to me (I appreciate and respect that the series has a lot of fans). It's more of the same puddle-deep parkour, stealth, fighting, and sailing, plus a handful of pathetic scripted 'random' events focused on liberating slaves. It took me back to Liberation on the Vita, I do have to wonder why Ubisoft is so obsessed with slavery, honestly.

Anyhow, I had left three base game Trophies to clean up during my increasingly common middle-of-the-night Platinum bouts, as well as 5 of the Freedom Cry Trophies. I had set myself up on 499 slaves liberated, so once the clock ticked past 2:00 AM, I dragged a final slave to a 'safe spot' (a secluded alcove filled with rugged strangers in the jungle - am I really doing these slaves a favour?) to tick me to 500 for Seeds of Independence. Then I immediately started the final of the nine memories included in this overpriced expansion (10 Euro, but I kept as much of that pricetag away from Ubi as possible by buying the DLC in the Turkish PSN store), completed the two optional objectives for their respective Trophies, and finished the mission with 100% sync. Because I had 100%ed the rest on Monday, this meant that His Full Attention popped. I then dropped out of Freedom Cry into the main menu, booted up the base game's singleplayer and finished the final optional objective in a memory in sequence 3 - which I left unfinished on purpose for its ease the first time around - to unlock By The Book for full 100% sync across the whole storyline.

That left just one Trophy in my way of the Platinum, and as I had done for Brotherhood with Spring Cleaning, I had kept one with a title appropriate to my efforts in cleaning up these games locked; FTFY, short for Fixed That For You. A nod to my younger brother, and the incredible slog he had put me through in adding these four Assassin's Creed games to my profile. I am done. I am relieved. I am satisfied. And I am gloating, because here's a screenshot;

I also sent it to my younger brother, with a note to 'clean up your own trash next time'. And what did he say? 'Huh, what do you mean?' 'Oh, Platinum, who cares'. Way to deny me my moment of glory, dude - he forgot all about these games, and couldn't care less ??

Roadmap & Statistics update;

So, uh, no more Assassin's Creed. 114 Trophies have come and gone, so what now? Well, the rest of the month won't be a black hole for me in terms of Trophy hunting, as I have my new goal of getting to 449 unearneds. As elaborated upon in previous updates, I have earmarked 199 further Trophies to take me there once I finish F1 Race Stars DLC, Saints Row The Third DLC, and a final Yakuza 3 Trophy. So those are the next orders of business. If anyone is interested, these are the number of targeted unearneds for each of the games in my backlog. They are not based on Trophies to Platinum, but rather on the Trophies I think are achievable to me. Stuff like XCOM is bloody impossible from a difficulty standpoint, whereas titles like WipEout and Resistance now have unobtainable multiplayer Trophies;

Spoiler

Motorstorm Pacific Rift - 27

Resistance 2 – 10

Infamous – 7

Far Cry 2 – 11

FIFA 09 – 6

Borderlands – 10

F1 2010 – 8

Vanquish – 2

Renegade Ops – 3

LEGO Star Wars – 16

Sleeping Dogs – 9

Modnation Racers Road Trip – 4 (need a second Vita and copy of game)

XCOM – 1

Dishonored – 20

PASBR – 2 (one each for PS3 and Vita)

GTA IV – 14

WipEout HD/Fury – 1

Walking Dead – 8

Pro Evo Soccer 14 – 19

Red Dead Redemption – 6

LittleBigPlanet – 14

Yakuza 3 – 1

Bolded titles are ones I currently have physical/digital access to. Thankfully, the others can be picked up cheaply as physical discs. There are a lot of games on there that I really don't want to revisit, honestly, but what can I do, right? I've ordered a cheap copy of Borderlands GOTY edition with DLC on the disc because I refuse to give Randy Pitchford more money than I already have in the past, so that's likely the next game I will tackle besides F1 Race Stars and Saints Row The Third. I might just go for Borderlands before SR3, even; I've got a bit of hope that I can actually exceed my predictions and get 15+ Trophies from the DLC rather than the ten I noted down. Or maybe even closer to 20; this will depend on how awful the Underground Domes are, heard very bad things about those.

I'll clear my mind on how to proceed, will schedule a 1 AM session to finish F1 Race Stars next Tuesday but will hopefully finish the Substories in Yakuza 3 before then. Borderlands should be in soon, and SR3 is good to go at any time. The next Platinum might be a ways out still, as I really don't feel like redoing all the Shards in Infamous quite yet, whilst I need to buy Vanquish, Pro Evo, and LEGO Star Wars first before going for those Plats. I think Vanquish will take priority for me, I got filtered hard by the final two Tactical Challenges back in the day but I'm keen to give them another crack. Odds are I'll just get filtered again.

Edited September 15, 2020 by Golem25

Eagle · September 9, 2020

I've been seeing your posts for a while in the Most Recent Platinum thread, and I thought: "Hey, why not see their checklist?" I must say, you do have some interesting plats. Heck, I didn't even know there was FIFA for Vita (and yes, I'm a fellow football fan).

Lucky you to have gotten that trophy for Black Flag right before the servers closed, even if it ends up just being temporary (although, knowing that support for PS3 games is next to none these days, probably not). It's also interesting to see the other side of the spectrum when it comes to games, since I'm a big AC fan (you could probably tell from my profile picture). I always like reading about people that have different opinions from mine, even if, naturally, there tends to be disagreement.

Good luck with your next trophies, although I don't know if that's really necessary considering the current events.

Edited July 4, 2021 by Eagle

Golem25 · September 9, 2020

6 hours ago, BRKs_Eagle said:

I've been seeing your posts for a while in the Recent Platinum thread, and I thought "Hey, why not see the thread?" I must say, you do have some interesting plats. Heck, I didn't even know there was FIFA for Vita (and yes, I'm a fellow football fan).

Lucky you to have gotten that trophy for Black Flag right before the servers closed, even if it ends up just being temporary (although, knowing that support for PS3 games is next to none these days, probably not). It's also curious to see the other side of the spectrum when it comes to games, since I'm a big AC fan (I know, unbelievable, right?), so I always like reading about people that have contrary opinions to mine, even if, naturally, there tends to be disagreement.

Good luck with your next trophies, although I don't know if that's really necessary considering the current events.

Obrigado, always happy to see that my writings have been of some use to others. Also reminds me that I need to get more Brazilian football shirts, I have only one (Gremio, 1993 home).

I've helped the others in the AC multiplayer Boosting Discord spam Ubisoft's customer service, and they've finally acknowledged that the issue might actually be on their side (previously they had blamed each individual player for faulty internet settings). It's nice to have my name enshrined as the latest player to have earned a specific Trophy, but only in a very twisted way; I am crossing my fingers for the servers to come back ASAP, because this scenario is exactly (to a damn T) why I made the cleanup of the multiplayer across my three AC games my priority upon getting back my PS3 on August 1st. It's such a shame too for this to have happened to Black Flag of all games; Brotherhood is dead as a doorknob, and Revelations has a few matches played every evening, but Black Flag was surprisingly active!

I do appreciate that the series has its fans, and I certainly respect that; I can understand why the games can be compelling, even if they are absolutely not my cup of tea. Although perhaps my perception has been skewed by having faced the prospect of forced cleanup for over eight years. Good to converse about it all the same, as the Assassin's Creed titles are by no means objectively bad (but then no game is).

Copanele · September 10, 2020

On 9/8/2020 at 1:55 PM, Golem25 said:

Quote at the undying love for the stabby series

I think it's the third time I read your AC text (plus the rants from that group) and I have to say it's one of my favorite pieces of text written on this site even more so because I love that series yet I so agree with your vision.

Not much to say other than congrats and thanks for making me laugh with that perfect AC4 review. Your brother deserves a beer/bottle of wine/his favorite beverage for that endeavor.

Golem25 · September 15, 2020

Update 13

Platinum #69 - inFamous

inFamous Platinum Trophy - Collect all other inFamous trophies.

859,446 Owners - 97,112 Achievers for a percentage of 11.30% (average completion; 40.28%)

Enjoyment; 8/10

Difficulty; 5/10

Trophies; 2/10 (only four tiles for 50 Trophies, unimaginative requirements)

Frustration at impossible to find Blast Shards; 2/350

Ten birthdays have come, ten birthdays have gone, and my profile has finally been bolstered with the Platinum Trophy of the original inFamous, Sucker Punch's first game on the PS3 and the starting point for a series that would spawn two/three sequels (depends on how you view First Light) and one/two spin-offs (again, depends on First Light).

I bought the game on my high school lunch break on release day, May 29th 2009, which nearly cost me a detention by coming late to math class as the first store I went to refused to sell the game. Apparently, Sony had messed up something regarding the localization as English wasn't included on the disc and they were sending their shipment back. As my break was only twenty minutes long and I had already biked my way into town, I had to bolt to another store which sold the game with stickers saying 'Download English through PSN' before making a mad dash back to school. Makes me wonder why I didn't bother just waiting for the second lunch break or until after school. Funny how these memories stay with you through games, which is one of the reasons why I write these updates; to one day look back and relive the experiences these titles gave me.

Anyhow, who cares what I did when I was 16 outside of inFamous? The game was exciting new foray for its developers, who had spent the entire lifespan of the PS2 working on the Sly Cooper series and, uh, Rocket: Robot on Wheels before that. Famously contrasted with Prototype, an Activision IP launched a month after inFamous that also concerned itself with superheroes but with a much edgier veneer. At least, in my mind; I was firmly in the inFamous camp of the argument. In this Sony first party title you play as a gruff bald chap called Cole MacGrath, a bike messenger in the incredibly grey Empire City who finds himself at the centre of a huge crater after attempting to deliver a package with a mysterious exploding do-hickey inside. Escaping the blast site, our hero realizes that he can absorb electricity, which sets him on a journey of becoming a parkouring, electricity-shooting super hero in a city locked down in the aftermath of the explosion.

Gameplay-wise, Cole is an agile lad with a good sprint and terrific climbing skills; navigating the city is smooth sailing and rather enjoyable in how you can flow your movements from sprinting to climbing to jumping. The real unique selling point here though is the presence of Cole's electric super powers; initially, he can only shoot small bolts and blow people off rooftops with a shockwave of sorts, but as you progress through the story you unlock new powers and upgrades that seriously up your offensive and defensive powers. You also learn how to slow your falls with 'thrusters' and become able to quickly accelerate yourself on power cables and rail lines which really makes exploring the city a treat.

However, the story is not entirely linear; inFamous gives you the choice to play as a hero or a villain, with everything you do weighing into a karma score that determines what kind of upgrades you unlock. Good guys get powers that don't harm bystanders and such, bad guys get insanely destructive powers that kill all in their way. Sadly, the biggest boosts in karma score come through hilariously straightforward scripted events; do I share food packages with starving townspeople or do I kill a bunch to scare them away and keep the food to myself? You don't need more than a peanut rattling around in your cranium to figure out what the naughty and nice options are here, so any sense of nuance you could possibly have had is lost. Heck, everything is even colour-coded for your convenience; good guy choice is blue, bad guy choice is red.

Now, depending on your karma score Cole's and the city's looks evolve alongside your powers; if you're playing a good guy, Empire City becomes cleaner, the weather gets better, and citizens help you fight baddies. But if you go down the route to villainy, the city gets dirtier, the sky a sinister reddish orange, and citizens fight you instead - and Cole himself will look pale with oil streaks running across his skin. While I appreciate how reactive the game world is, this again is an incredibly binary and obvious matter; the game really blasts your heroism/crimes in your face. I remember inFamous 2 being slightly better in this regard, but really not by much. And playing an anti-hero or some such is not an option; if you ain't saintly or Dick Dastardly himself, you will be locked out of the strongest upgrades.

But, besides these grievances, I really like inFamous - even 11 years after it came out. Some games age like milk but this one has really held up in terms of its gameplay even with the binarity between good and evil. The three islands that make up the city are nicely distinct and feel thought out, even if they all suffer from an incredible lack of colour; I always advocate for games not to take New York City as inspiration for their worlds because the end result is always a dreary grey mess, and inFamous sadly fell for that trap (the New Orleans-inspired New Marais from IF2 was a delight in comparison). But past its looks, the streets flow well and quick routes from one landmark to the next are cleverly laid out with power lines. The story and side missions (which can be a little repetitive) also do a good job of showcasing most nooks and crannies of Empire City.

As far as Trophies go, inFamous is a stereotypical 'early' game. Having come out in 2009, it suffers from repetitive tiles (only four; one for each type of Trophy, with only one Gold included in this list) and all fifty Trophies are tied to unimaginative requirements; kill X enemies with Y power, collect X of Y, make X choice at Y point in the story. A few of the Bronzes that involve kills are really badly thought out, with Casey Jones standing out in particular; you are asked to kill 25 enemies while riding a train, but you'll be lucky to get ten to fifteen of those on a regular playthrough with very little opportunity to grind out more if you've completed the 'El Train' sidemissions. I will also echo the sentiments of many that have come before me in that the main collectibles of the game, the Blast Shards that give you more capacity to store electricity for your attacks, are an insane pain; there are 350 of them across the entire city, but there is no way of tracking them beyond hitting L3 to make nearby ones show up on your minimap. However, they only show up within a short range, both horizontally and vertically, meaning that Shards that have been positioned high above the ground will not necessarily show up even if you are spamming L3 right underneath them. Hundreds if not thousands of the game's owners have been stumped by a handful of missing Blast Shards and I was one of them - to the point where I ended up combing through the three islands with map in hand, ticking them off one by one in search of the final two Shards I did not get in 2009 for Rockhound.

I had 5 other Trophies including Plat left over besides the two I just named, with these stragglers involving further kill conditions, finishing the game on Hard, and doing all 21 stunts for Stunt Master. Because the stunts are most easily done as a hero on an Easy playthrough, I started up a fresh save file when I dusted off the game this month. As with the Shards, the stunts are difficult to track and some of them are very heavily luck-based, but I managed to get them knocked out within a day. I was honestly surprised by how tough Easy difficulty was, and had an even worse time while finishing my Hard playthrough which had been started all those years back. Most guides made mention of the final boss being really difficulty to beat, but that last fight ended up being the easiest part of my Hard run, actually. It bagged me Hard Finish and, in true Golem25-fashion, I popped Rockhound this morning after 1 AM to add my 69th (no jokes please) Platinum to the collection.

Would I recommend inFamous to anyone reading this in 2020 and beyond? Absolutely, it still holds up, but for the love of God, keep guides for both the Stunts and Shards handy; it will save you a decade of this game sitting in your backlog. It did for me; 4,126 days it took me to Platinum inFamous, or eleven years, three months, and sixteen days if you prefer to read it that way.

Roadmap & Statistics update;

We are down to 610 unearned Trophies now, but that is hardly down to the seven pops I got out of inFamous to finish it; rather, me ploughing through the DLC for Borderlands and F1 Race Stars has contributed most unlocks to my recent progress. I unlocked the final of the fifteen DLC Trophies for the latter this morning, right after having finished inFamous after 1 AM to further populate my Trophies by Time graph.

For Borderlands, I started and finished the God-awful Mad Moxxi's Underdome Riot on Monday, while yesterday I started and finished the rather charming Zombie Island of Dr. Ned - I also started and finished the story of Claptraps New Robot Revolution but unfortunately the meat of that DLC is in an insane grind for useless collectibles that don't even do anything. I'm grinding as we speak (this post is me taking a break from the dull-as-dirt farming) and expect to finish up today still if the RNG Gods shine their light on me. Because I won't have another Platinum update for a while (although I said that last week and now here we are with inFamous) I might just do a 100% update around Borderlands as the four DLC packs make for a beefy whole that I feel like writing about. We'll see, but first I need to get through that awful grind and clean up the Knoxx campaign; I'm leaving the Trophy associated with that pack for last, as it's called Completionist, perfect as my final ever Borderlands Trophy!

If/when I get done with Borderlands, I will move on to another DLC-stricken game I was dreading; Dishonored. I will have to force myself through two connected story-based expansions, but won't ever get 100% as there is also an inane challenge-based pack included. I will pop the more doable Trophies in that expansion, but I've prety much given up on 100% given that you have to gold star all these lame challenges.

Updates on my leaderboard challenges;

97,035th in the world overall (up from 98,536 - target; top 100,000)
1,372th domestically overall (up from 1,405, target; top 1,250)
129th for Vita domestically (up from 131, target; top 100)

Huh, how the Hell did I go up for Vita? I haven't played a single game on it since halfway through July! Must be dang dirty cheater getting thrown off the leaderboard, that's a nice surprise. My deficit to the #100 ranked domestic Vita guy is still 8,025 points.

I've also adjusted the domestic overall goal to 1,250 (down from 1,000) for now as it will take me plenty of time to escape the 1,300 range. Average rarity is further improved, now at 37,18. I suspect I will eventually break sub 37 with the degree to which I am cleaning up all these rare DLC Trophies. I'm also grinding my skills for my next ultra rare Plat - Vanquish. I think Dishonored will be my last trick for September (which is looking like it will enter my top 5 of most productive months ever) with the rest of the month dedicated to going through the remaining Yakuza 3 substories for the penultimate Gold Trophy in that game. Then, onto Vanquish and more DLC in October.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

On 10/09/2020 at 7:36 PM, Copanele said:

I think it's the third time I read your AC text (plus the rants from that group) and I have to say it's one of my favorite pieces of text written on this site even more so because I love that series yet I so agree with your vision.

Not much to say other than congrats and thanks for making me laugh with that perfect AC4 review. Your brother deserves a beer/bottle of wine/his favorite beverage for that endeavor.

I'm glad it has brought you some `joy - it's very easy to disagree and argue, but I find that the AC fans on PSNP have all been very amicable despite my regularly scheduled hate posts! I suppose, in hindsight and with the benefit of years of reflection on the Ezio titles and Black Flag , these games' strengths and flaws have be become rather apparent.

I'll be sure to smash a bottle of his choice over his head next time I see him - thanks for the suggestion ?

Edited September 15, 2020 by Golem25

Golem25 · September 28, 2020

Update 14.1

We're going to do something a little different today; so far this thread has only kept track of new Platinums (14 since starting the thread), but today I want to dedicate an update to two rather painful games I've 100%ed this month. Should updates be allowed without a Plat being involved? It's my thread, and we're playing by my rules, so yes, it's allowed?

100% Title #69 - Borderlands

Zombie Island of Dr. Ned - Mad Moxxi's Underdome Riot - The Secret Armory of General Knoxx - Claptrap's New Robot Revolution

One note before I start my usual bitter drivel; I am a huge fan of how Gearbox colour-coded the Trophies for these DLC packs; it's just a shame that they changed the design philosophy halfway through by adding white to the black and a pack's respective colour for the tiles. I think the first two definitely look better - and more original - than the latter two. The shaping mirrors the base game tiles, as you can see from the Platinum image which I've added on the top.

When I bought Borderlands way back on release day in October 2009 (I remember not being able to play it right away because my grandfather, bless his soul, wanted company while taking my cousins to the petting zoo), no one knew that its Trophy list would be expanded no fewer than four times over the course of the next 12 months.

The Zombie Island of Doctor Ned, represented by the orange tile, launched just over a month later in November 2009.

Mad Moxxi's Underdome Riot, represented by the yellow tile, launched in January 2010.

The Secret Armory of General Knoxx, represented by the red tile, was released on February 25th, 2010.

And finally, Claptrap's New Robot Revolution, represented by the blue tile, closed out proceedings in September 2010.

I bought Knoxx on release date, as it was the first expansion that, to me, warranted its pricetag (which was quite pricey at like 8 Euro) - Ned was a seemingly short zombie-themed romp through a swamp and Moxxi looked like a generic arena mode, whereas Knoxx introduced a new vehicle and a big region as well as an increase to the level cap; I really enjoyed it but never quite finished all of the sidequests. I also bought Claptrap's Revolution on release, but it just didn't grab me and I never returned to it after an hour of play with nothing popped.

That left me with 29 unearned DLC Trophies, which is such a big number that it naturally attracted my attention this past month as I turned my eye towards clearing backlogged Trophies on my way to having 'just' 448 unearneds. Initially I figured I'd focus on the eleven unearned Trophies from the two packs I owned, but then I learnt that a GOTY version of the game was available with all DLC included on the disc. A few GBP later and it dropped in my letterbox.

I'm a firm believer of getting through the worst parts of a game, or really anything, first before doing the nicer bits. Heck, I always eat my meals by starting with the veg and ending with the meat (or whatever else is tastiest)! So, I figured I'd pick up Moxxi first as it was a seemingly cheaply-made arena/horde mode. And my God, it was probably the worst DLC I had ever played up until that point! Three arenas full of recycled assets, which throw about 1200 enemies each at you in 20 rounds that each consist of 5 waves. To 100% the DLC, you need to get through 375 waves total, which requires you to mow down over 4000 enemies. And all of them are also recycled from the base game - no new types or attacks or patterns, nope, just the same meat you had shot through a hundred times before.

What's worse is that the DLC is wonky on a technical level; because you kill so many enemies, the bodies pile up to the point where there is too much loaded in and the game becomes prone to crashing. As such, the recommended tactic was to bring a weapon that kills enemies without leaving bodies behind which meant that you either need an effective explosive or corrosive type gun. My relief was immeasurable when I logged in for the first time since 2010 to learn that I had the latter type, meaning that I could just melt my way through everything. That being said, each of the three arenas needs to be completed and they all take about 2 hours each if you use overpowered gear and a level trick, so I spent six hours on a single day getting this garbage DLC to 100%. You get the first Bronze for completing the smaller versions of each arena, then one Trophy for each of the three big versions and then finally Big Tournament once you beat all three. And I had zero crashes, proving that my luck isn't always poor.

I then moved on to Ned's Zombie Island, which was short but highly enjoyable - apart from the grindy Braaaaaaaaaaaaains! Trophy. But my God, that did not prepare me for the grind in Claptrap's Robot Revolution; that DLC has four awful collectible Trophies tied to rare drops. Each enemy has a five percent chance of dropping one of the items you need, and those types you need the most of also tend to be the rarest in that pool. I must have lost like twenty hours grinding it all out.

Once Claptrap was locked up I went back to Knoxx one last time, to complete the final sidequest I was missing for Completionist - continuing my tradition of leaving an aptly named Trophy for my last unlock on a given game. Overall, Knoxx and Ned were pretty good fun, as was Claptrap after a while, but the insane collectibles and Moxxi as a whole completely ruined my experience. I am so glad to have the game 100%ed, because I am never touching this series again - it's fun enough, but the sadism behind these Trophies has completely demotivated me. And Moxxi is genuinely the worst DLC I had ever played.

100% Title #70 - Dishonored

Dunwall City Trials - The Knife of Dunwall - The Brigmore Witches

At least, Moxxi was the worst DLC I had ever played UNTIL I TRIED DUNWALL CITY TRIALS. REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Okay, deep breaths. You can get through this.

Like Borderlands, Dishonored had gotten multiple expansions after its initial release (launched October 12th 2012, I got a cheap used copy on October 31st of that same year) which I never bothered to touch - in fact, I had sold my disc at a break even price point once I Platted it. The first DLC was a badly received trial/challenge mode while the latter two were story-based packs that, as it turned out, were setting the stage for the sequel.

Also like Borderlands, I decided to only go for the Trophies I thought I could get with little effort. I tracked down a used copy of the GOTY version, which has all three DLCs on disc, for just 1.60 GBP and cracked on with the twenty Trophies in the two narrative-driven packs - The Knife of Dunwall and The Brigmore Witches. In both, you play as assassin ringleader Daud (a pivotal character from the base game) as he pursues a mystery based on just a single name; Delilah.

I was impressed with both Knife and Witches, to be fair; both featured three levels with lots of different approaches to completing your objectives, perhaps on par with some of the levels found in the base game. Yes, there was a bit of recycling of assets (the third level of Knife and the first of Witches are basically copy+pastes of base game environments) but you got a lot of bang - and fun - for your buck here! I do have to say that Knife was disfigured by the presence of Billie Lurk, a character that felt forced in and didn't deserve the praise she was given (oh, she's so good, oh, she's so strong - but none of that was earned). My favourite levels were the second of Knife and the first of Witches.

There was an incredibly novel and interesting Trophy in the mix here; Enough Coin To Disappear. It tasks you with finishing Witches with no fewer than 10,000 coins in your inventory. But the entire DLC only has 10,720ish coins to be found, so you'd have to pick all three levels clean. However, Witches allows you to import a save file from Knife with all your inventory and skills carried over, and as you can collect another 10,000ish in Knife, you can make do quite well with doing a run through both DLCs, carefully collecting coin without it getting too frustrating, to meet the Trophy's requirements. I ended up having a lot of fun with it, and am proud of this Ultra Rare DLC Trophy - and there aren't many of those due to the weighted average that PSNProfiles assigns to DLC.

But as I was playing through Knife and Witches, and slowly relearning and picking up skills almost eight years after Platting the base game, I started getting an itch; I once had 100% in this game, it wasn't fair for it to be taken away from me, I should fight to get it back. So, slowly, I became accustomed to the idea that I should also do the Dunwall City Trials DLC. And ooooh boy, that was a herculean task; after all, where Knife and Witches were great, Trials was a cynical cash grab that was pretty much 100% recycled content from the base game frankenstein'd into ten challenges. Some were beefier than others (Train Runner, for instance, is a 30 second one-and-done mode while modes like Burglar will force a lot of replays) and six of them even unlocked a harder version of themselves once you scored two stars on the 'medium' difficulty.

No fewer than five of Trials' ten Trophies are ultra rare, betraying the fact that the DLC is both awful and hard. Time Management and Headhunter are both already a 7 or 8 out of 10 on a difficulty scale, but Daredevil, By My Hand Alone, and Void Star are considered 9 or even 10 out of 10 for how skill-reliant and RNG/luck-dependent they are.

Daredevil gave me the most trouble. Feel free to check out this video guide for a good impression of it, but to explain it as simple as possible, you have to pull off six specific jumps during one round of the mode Bonfires. However, for this you are completely at the mercy of the order in which the mode's checkpoints spawn, which have to line up perfectly; if one or two are out of sequence, your chances are shot. And all the while you need to maneuver throughout the level without mistake, because there's an unforgiving timer breathing down your neck. I think I lost twelve hours on bad spawns and my own mistakes before the planets finally aligned.

There is some disagreement in the community over whether Daredevil or By My Hand Alone is harder/worse, but for me the latter only took an hour or two; in the DLC's murder-focused Back Alley Brawl mode, you need to go through twelve waves of enemies while killing every single one of them (for a total of 52). However, the game randomly spawns opponents of different factions, who are often content to go after one another rather than after the player. If just one enemy is killed by someone other than you, you're going to have to reset - and it becomes especially hard in the last three rounds when Tallboys spawn as enemies - guys on stilts who happily one shot anyone not in their faction. Perhaps I just got lucky, but after two hours I managed to get through the twelve wave with 52 kills, at which point By My Hand Alone popped. Looking at the numbers, it's the rarest in the DLC; 2.47% versus Daredevil's 2.56% and Void Star's 2.52%.

Talking about Void Star, this absolute devil of a Trophy took me another eight hours or so over the weekend to master; it requires you to perfect all sixteen challenges in the DLC (10 regular and 6 'hard'), which was rather torturous due to the strict scoring mechanics for all of them. Sure, some modes like Train Runner and Bonfires (regular) I had already scored three stars on while pursuing the Trophies tied to them (Assassin Vs. Machine and Daredevil, respectively) but I still had the harder modes to contend with. Burglar was a huge pain, and so was chain kill, where some others were more doable - I simply triggered the glitch for the harder version of Bonfires to despawn the assassins and stroll to victory. Another glitch made Assassin's Run much easier by allowing you to essentially skip the final room.

This morning I popped Void Star as my last Trophy, and my God, it feels good to be at 100% again. Seriously, I didn't expect to ever be able to do this; the harder Trophies sounded insurmountable, but I went from 'nope, won't touch Trials' to 'Fine, I will do the easier five Trophies in the DLC' to 'I will not give in, Arkane is giving

me my 100% back'. For realsies, just check out this quote from my previous update;

Quote

I will move on to another DLC-stricken game I was dreading; Dishonored. I will have to force myself through two connected story-based expansions, but won't ever get 100% as there is also an inane challenge-based pack included. I will pop the more doable Trophies in that expansion, but I've prety much given up on 100% given that you have to gold star all these lame challenges.

Moral of the story; DON'T EVER GIVE UP, DON'T EVER GIVE IN. If you haven't ever played Dishonored but fancy doing so, please try it on a blank or throwaway account; you do not want to put up with Dunwall City Trials.

Roadmap & Statistics update;

It's been rewarding though, really; my average rarity is down to 36.93% and my tally of Ultra Rares has gone from 83 to 89 thanks to Dishonored's DLC. And it also put me over the threshold to make September 2020 my most productive month ever in the eleven+ year history of my account; I've nabbed 127 Trophies this month to beat July 2012 (where I popped 123). There's a huge peak in my monthly activity now though, so I will have to buckle up and make sure that October won't be too big a decrease.

On that note, I have some grand plans;

Thirty DLC Trophies in Saint's Row The Third
Twenty-five or so Trophies in Motorstorm Pacific Rift, my only D-ranked game
Twenty DLC Trophies for Mafia II, once I get a cheap copy of the game
Vanquish Platinum (I'm sweating like a hooker in Church)
Eight Walking Dead DLC Trophies
Nine Sleeping Dogs DLC Trophies
Two Playstation All-Stars Battle Royale Trophies
Beating Amon in Yakuza 3
And much, much more

I am now on 574 unearneds, with 448 being my goal (to ensure that, even if I add a new game to my list, I will never go over 500 unearneds again). I initially earmarked 222 Trophies I considered doable across my unfinished games, and I'm happy to say that, thanks to going above and beyond for Borderlands and Dishonored, I am now 20 Trphies ahead of schedule. No doubt I will not manage to get every single Trophy I originally planned to, but this is a brilliant headstart, and between Saints Row, Motorstorm, and Mafia I should be able to dip into the 400s before long (those three games represent 75 Trophies at the least, enough to get to 499).

I'm also planning out my next Plat milestone at #75 (69 Plats currently), and I'm increasingly confident it will be Modnation Racers Road Trip to commemorate what will be my new rarest Trophy and my love for the Vita. Will have to buy and try a second Vita for it though (damn ad hoc Trophies), so will require some smooth-talking at CEX. But that won't happen until I can pop five Plats in the meantime - which demands a lot of effort given how few are left in my backlog. Lego Star Wars III and Pro Evo Soccer are shoe-ins, but that leaves me with another three to go. Vanquish I will grind and grind, but even if I get that I still need two more from the intimidating list of LBP/Red Dead/GTA IV - and I won't pop Yakuza 3 until April next year. It's likely I will need to involve my LEGO and Madden Vita titles before 75, but the timeframe depends on how quick I can burn through Trophies down to 448.

Updates on my leaderboard challenges;

95,921th in the world overall (up from 97,035 - target; top 100,000)
1,360th domestically overall (up from 1,372, target; top 1,250)
131th domestically for Vita (no change, target; top 100)

Fine progress on the first two tabs, but worrying stagnation for the third and most important target. My deficit to the #100-ranked guy was 8,025 points and has now grown to 8400. I guarantee that if Ratalaika games, of which I have never played one, weren't a thing, I'd already be in that top 100 by a comfortable margin. Dammit! Even without LEGO games (of which I have three) I'd still be there. But, rules are rules, so no more whining on my part; once the great cleanup is done, I am going all in on Vita again. Although, odds are that by then I will be well engrossed by the PS5, but I will not abandon my dear handheld, no way.

Next update to this thread will either be early to mid October (provided I Plat Vanquish, for which I will need serious skill and luck) or much later in the month (to discuss the status of my cleanup efforts and to cry about Vanquish).

Edited September 28, 2020 by Golem25

AJ_Radio · September 30, 2020

Damn a LOT of effort were put into these posts. I tip my hat to you @Golem25.

Edited September 30, 2020 by Spaz

Golem25 · October 17, 2020

Update 14

Platinum #70 - LittleBigPlanet

100% Complete - Earn all LittleBigPlanet trophies to unlock this platinum trophy

936,429 Owners - 29,508 Achievers for a percentage of 3.15% (average completion; 24.94%)

Enjoyment; 3/10

Difficulty; 5/10

Trophies; 3/10 (unique tiles, but a lot of needless multiplayer stuff)

Hate of bunkers; 10/10

I did mention in the last two updates that it would be a while until I added another Plat to the list, and I wished for number 70 to be the much coveted 100% for Vanquish. Now, I haven't quite gotten there yet (120 and counting attempts at the final Tactical Challenge), but I do have a different Ultra Rare Plat to boast about today!

To reiterate ,it has been over a month and 145 Trophies since my previous Platinum, but here we finally are after eight games of cleaned up DLC for 100% plus almost 40 Trophies in Motorstorm Pacific Rift; Platinum 70 has been unlocked, and it is another PS3 Plat cleaned right out of the backlog after having been there for well over a decade. LittleBigPlanet was one of two games I got bundled in with my console in November 2008, and the only one I have been able to Plat (the other game in the bundle being Motorstorm Pacific Rift, which had its online 86'ed after just four years).

I suppose the series doesn't really require an introduction; LittleBigPlanet was all about sidescrolling platforming and the creation of your own levels from the very start, back in '08 when this game came out. Developers Media Molecule have since gone on to create other quirky and creativity-focused games like Tearaway and Dreams, but LBP remains their most well-known IP. I know the game and the series have a lot of fans, but I wasn't massively into it back in '08 and upon returning for the Plat in 2020 I still kind of wish I had never taken it out of the wrapping but instead sold it on (and same for Motorstorm really).

The story mode is a very quick romp that you can get through in an hour or three (wildly skill-dependent, admittedly) with a narrative that, much like many levels you see online, has been thrown together based on level of quirkiness rather than anything compelling. No voice acting, just literal cardboard cutouts that command your little Sackboy or Sackgirl to keep going - very little substance indeed; the protagonist is mute and has no involvement in the story besides mindlessly following orders (because there is of course no other way to progress) and sometimes having their facial expression changed with the D-pad. I appreciate that this isn't a story-driven game in the slightest, but something a little more meaty would have been nice. Even for a young child, the story doesn't hold a lot of replayability.

Thankfully the level creator and online modes are the main attraction of LBP, but I frankly couldn't have cared less; I just wanted these Trophies out of the way. Thanks to some Heart-for-Heart levels I had thrown up in the summer of 2019 I got two related Trophies the moment I booted up the game the game, plus another one (Create) once I reaccepted the EULA. A nice enough start, but I still had to wade through 120+ one second levels online to get Share while also having about half of the single player left to finish. Highlight of the journey was when I got three near-instant pops on multiplayer Tropies thanks to a friendly Russian member of this site being the most charitable booster ever.

The final - and biggest - challenge was Play, which really made you feel this game's limitations as you were forced to beat the game's dozens of levels without dying once (although thankfully not in a row!). In my opinion, the physics and controls are too floaty to precisely control Sackboy in the harder levels, and the infamous Bunker level was every bit as painful as people said it would be; the ridiculous wheel section near the end probably cost me an hour or two alone. Check it out here on Youtube (timestamped for convenience). Once I cleared the Bunker it was smooth sailing; I left one easy level to survive and set my alarm for three in the morning to game my 'Trophies by time' stat to pop the Gold, and then went to a queued online level that gave you every single collectible in the game for Booty Master and a nice 300 point Platinum.

Roadmap & Statistics update;

Now with that out of the way, I will take a break from LBP this weekend and continue my attempts to beat the final Tactical Challenge in Vanquish; from Monday onward I'll give cleaning up LBP' DLCs a try. 22 Trophies between two packs means that there is plenty more work to be done, but at least the base game is finished. Finally. Now for the statistical bits.

Since Platting inFamous my tally of Ultra Rares has gone from 83 to 98; no mean feat even if I do say so myself. Very Rares are now at 340, which is also pretty good considering my total Trophy pool is only 4,725 (of which I have now unlocked 4,255). This is reflected in my average rarity, which is down to 36.54%; it was at 37.88% before I started my clean up in the first week of August, which just goes to show how quickly one can drag that number down when applying a bit of effort. I think it's my proudest statistic out of all of them, as it speaks to the difficulty and quality of my humble little list.

Of course, getting my number of unearneds down and my completion percentage up was a bigger motivator behind my cleaning up - and both figures have shaped up nicely. I'm now on 470 unearneds - down from 764(!!!) - and 88.96% complete (up from 82.88%). I have no stated target for the latter, but I did note wanting to reach 449 unearneds to make sure I never go over 500 again even when adding a new game to my list. That number is now clearly within striking distance, and honestly, I'm going to drive it down as far as I can - certainly into the 300s. In update 12 I posted a list of games I was going to clean up along with conservative estimations of the number of Trophies I could milk out of each title; a few had every available Trophy listed, while other, harder games only had their more do-able Trophies picked out - I wanted to go for quantity over quality and just bang out as much as I could as quickly and easily as possible. But of course, my OCD got the better of me to the point where for every game with an estimate that sat below the number of possible Trophies, I've gone well above and beyond what I had set out to do;

Borderlands (estimation; 10 /// reality; 20)
Dishonored (estimation; 20 /// reality; 30)
Motorstorm Pacific Rift (estimation; 27 /// reality; 34)
LittleBigPlanet (estimation; 14 /// reality; 21)

For LittleBigPlanet, I have another 22 DLC Trophies to go. For Motorstorm, another four easily achievable ones (plus three if I can get a second controller) - the rest is unobtainable or simply too hard.

I've also 100%ed F1 Race Stars, Saints Row The Third, Playstation All Stars Battle Royale (both on PS3 and Vita), The Walking Dead, and Sleeping Dogs in the space between my inFamous and LBP Plats, but none of those games posed any challenge; just a matter of buying DLC from the Turkey store for pennies on the Euro. These Trophies, while decidedly easier, contributed just as much to my completion percentage. And, of course, to my leaderboard positions, which got an extra boost from the changes to PSN levelling. Let's see where I'm at now;

88,328th in the world overall (up from 95,921 - target; top 100,000)
1,259th domestically overall (up from 1,360, target; top 1,250)
133rd domestically for Vita (down from 131, target; top 100)

It's clear that the increased points for Platinums did wonders for my ranking, because there is no other explanation for shooting up over 7,000 spots on the worldwide leaderboard / 100 spots on the domestic leaderboard with only 100+ Trophies added the past month. Frustratingly enough, my forced pause from the Vita sees me slide even further away from a coveted spot in the top 100 domestically . With the PS5 arriving on my doorstep in a matter of weeks from now, I really have to start planning out how to work more Vita Trophies into the mix. My gap to the #100 ranked guy was 8,400 but is now 9,210.... becoming insurmountable with how small the selection of remaining Vita games outwith Rata titles is.

Next update to the thread? Hopefully soon, I want that bloody Vanquish Plat and I am not giving up on it. I've put too much time in and I've come too far! Most of the DLC doesn't warrant updates (Borderlands and Dishonored were exceptions due to how insane their second and first expansions were, respectively), but I will be plugging away at it anyway. A LBP 100%? Sounds too good to miss out on. I expect returns to Resistance 2 and Mafia II to be the next legs of the journey once LBP is finished.

Edited October 17, 2020 by Golem25

Golem25 · November 6, 2020

Update 15

Platinum #71 - Vanquish (original PS3 version)

Platinum - Earn all available trophies in VANQUISH.

190,173 Owners - 4,446 Achievers for a percentage of 2.34% (average completion; 28.66%)

Enjoyment; 8/10

Difficulty; 9/10

Trophies; 7/10 (unique, minimalistic tiles, some interesting requirements)

Fear of the word 'Bogey'; 10/10

What is the hardest Platinum in my collection? Normally, I would answer with WipEout 2047 or Yakuza 5 (#@$% you, coliseum with Akiyama). But, from today onward, I might have to add a third title to my list of answers; Vanquish.

Indeed, the third person shooter from the capable hands of Shinji Mikami and Japanese studio Platinum Games that released in 2010 to an appreciative audience of hardcore shooter fans and decent praise from critics. Despite this being long past the early days of the Trophy system, where getting the Platinum was often insanely hard (at least, that's how I experienced many games from '08 and '09), Vanquish posed a serious challenge to even the most hardened of players.

For the story, which stretches across about eight hours and has you fight your way across an O'Neill cylinder-inspired space station crawling with Russian robots to stop a laser from levelling New York City, you are required to complete a full playthrough without a single death (can be done by quitting out to the menu) and a full playthrough on the second hardest difficulty (the hardest, named God Hard as a wink to Mikami's brawler game God Hand, is close to impossible for mortal beings). However, the real challenge comes from the aptly named Tactical Challenges; the first five of these unlock as you push through the story, while the sixth and final Challenge opens up once you clear the others. They aren't the most inspired fare, you face waves of the same enemies you slaughtered in the same areas you went through in the story.

But then there is a problem, and that problem lies with Tactical Challenge #6; now, the AI in Vanquish is exceedingly brutal and the waves are really rather tough, but the final Challenge throws every form of mercy overboard and overwhelms you from the start. It has become notorious, in fact, for how it has kept many people from ever bagging the Platinum. Sure, getting to 49 out of 51 Trophies is doable, but I firmly believe that the number of people who got filtered by the Gold Trophy awarded for besting Challenge #6 - Tactical Challenger - is in the thousands if not well over ten thousand. After all, on PSNP alone Vanquish has close to 200,000 owners.

Linked here is a video of one brave soul fighting his way to the Gold, just to give an indication of how frantic things can get. And even then, it's harder than it looks - trust me on that notion.

Back in 2010, I bought the game on release because I believed in Mikami's promise of a tough but earnest shooter that would challenge players. I got exactly what I expected and never regretted the purchase at full price, even if the storyline will 'only' take eight or so hours, but I never did get to beat the final Challenge. I fought to 49 out of 51 over the course of about three weeks, got my ass kicked hard by the Challenges, and then shelved the game. I simply wasn't good enough, the double Bogey fight on Hard in the story already took me like 150 tries on its own, so I needed much more to hope to best the final Challenge.

But this morning, I took down both Bogeys - which are slightly creepy Russian men in nimble, flying suits - to finish Challenge 6. I could barely believe that I was seeing the results screen, and that the *ding* sound came out of my speakers, and that a second then followed for the Platinum. Just over ten years since starting Vanquish and just under ten years since shelving it, I had gotten 100%. All 51 Trophies, done and dusted. And these final two are, naturally, Ultra Rare - putting me over 100 UR's in my collection!

What a feeling, and what a game! While short and lacking in variety, the story of Vanquish is still highly enjoyable (I played through it to break up the Challenge grind) and I can wholeheartedly recommend it to everyone except completionists. If you're in the latter group, I recommend playing it on a spare account so as to avoid the need to go through the Challenges. The gameplay is still just as fun as when it released and the boss battles hold up really, really well a decade on from release. PS3 copies are dirt cheap and a remastered version for PS4 was released earlier this year in conjunction with a similar touch up of Bayonetta, the Platinum game that received way more attention and even spawned sequels - something that Vanquish never did get.

But no time for tears in this thread; I can only profess my appreciation for the skill and passion that Platinum put into this game, and plug my ears to keep the excess of dopamine produced by my brain from dripping out. What a bloody hard feat to pull off this one was, damn! But the time invested was worth it, because I now get to lord it over everyone else ?

Roadmap & Statistics update;

On today's episode of 'Relatively meaningless numbers', we are once again taking a look at my statistics and leaderboard ranks. Which, admittedly, haven't moved much due to how few Trophies (36) I've gotten in the interlude between the Vanquish Plat and the LittleBigPlanet Plat which spawned the previous update. Let's take a look at the ranking first;

87,756th in the world overall (up from 88,328th, target; top 100,000)
1,261th domestically overall (up from 1259th, target; top 1,250)
137th domestically for Vita (down from 133rd, target; top 100)

Good to see a big jump globally, but the needle has ticked the wrong way for the other two - a negligible drop for domestic overall and another big slide for Vita domestic. Sure, only four spots in the latter regard, but those hurt when you're talking about the top 100. I was 9,210 behind the #100 ranked guy, and that gap is now 9,450. However, I did pick up three new Vita games, meaning that I now have six Plats plus Octodad to burn through once I find space and time.

In terms of my stats, more positive movement; average rarity of 36.34% down from 36.54% last month and 37.88% at the start of August. Average completion has ticked over the 90% mark and overall completion is now at 89.73% - I can taste that coveted 90, very keen to get there. In pure numbers I've actually crossed it already (4,291 Trophies out of a possible 4,725 = 90.81%) but PSNP weighs completion per points meaning that Golds are worth six times the completion percentage that Bronzes are (and Plats aren't counted at all, I believe).

Now I've got two problems; time and games available. I want to bring the number of unearneds down further. My first stated goal was 448, which I've passed nicely. I know I can squeeze down in the 300's easily, and have decided the next milestone will be 381. Why another seemingly random number? Well, when I started the cleanup in August, I was on 764 unearneds. 381 is half minus one of that number, meaning that by then I will have unlocked more than half of what I was missing! But here's where my two problems come in.

I will be really busy this month and my games are running out. That is to say, the remaining locked Trophies are divided across increasingly hard games. Thought Vanquish was tough? I've got grinds for games like GTA IV and Far Cry 2 that scare me more, and then there is the matter of tough games like XCOM and F1 2010. So, really, my path to 381 looks to rely on a trio of games that are relatively easy still and represent a lot of Trophies, but none of which I have access to at the moment;

LEGO Star Wars III - 16 unearned
Pro Evolution Soccer 2014 - 19 unearneds
Mafia II - 20 unearneds

Pro Evo requires PS Plus renewal, the other two need to be sent over from home (and my brother over there cannot find LSW for that matter....). I think I will bite the bullet for Pro Evo next Friday and resubscribe so I can attempt to get rid of those 19 over the weekend, and I will probably boot up F1 2010 to get rid of about 8 of the easier Trophies in there. Won't get me below 400 yet, but goes a ways anyhow.

And then the calendar will come to November 17th, and my PS5 (Physical Chad Edition) will arrive. And I'm not selling it. I've been naughty and, for the first time in my life, placed some bets. On the US election, and thanks to some good odds and my political science degree (finally useful for something), I've made out with a healthy chunk of cash - more than enough to cover both the console and a bunch of games. I'm also never betting again, it's awful. How the Hell do people do it for fun?!

Getting the PS4 will open the door to me finishing Yakuza 0, which represents another 31 unearneds. I will also get the Nathan Drake Collection at some point again to try and squeeze out a few of the DLC Trophies. But here's where the issues of time and games come in again; I will be getting Yakuza Like a Dragon and I'm keen to jump into that. If the PS5 still allows for blank accounting, I might stick that on a dummy account until I get the Plat, so that my unearneds don't tick up - and they will, because the YLAD list has 71(!) Trophies to it.

We'll see how things develop but, clearly, there is a lot to look forward to one way or another.

Heather342 · November 6, 2020

Huge congratulations on your Vanquish plat! ???

Grotz99 · November 6, 2020

Watched that video and that does look crazy, seems like you need to know all the enemy patterns and have a little luck. Congratz on beating that!

I ended up also pre ordering Yakuza Like a Dragon, mostly for the steel case since I have Kiwami 2 steel case, 3-5 remaster collection-day 1 edition and Yakuza 6 steel case. After beating Yakuza 0, I kinda went all in on them. I usually wait for games to go on sale, but I've already started the collection...such a great series. I decided to get the PS4 copy since I can still do an upgrade on PS5 whenever I get that later.

Edited November 6, 2020 by Grotz99

Golem25 · November 19, 2020

Update 16

Platinum #72 - Pro Evolution Soccer 2014 (EU)

Ultimate Player - Perfect Collection

70,170 Owners - 3,652 Achievers for a percentage of 5.20% (average completion; 11.27%)

Enjoyment; 4/10

Difficulty; 3/10

Trophies; 3/10 (copy+pasted names and tiles, unimaginative requirements)

Desire to ever play another football game on PS; 1/10

Right, that's another unfinished title over and done with it.

I like to think of myself as someone who sees things through the bitter end no matter what, but there were two games in my collection that I never got the Platinum for out of sheer boredom. One of them is Farming Simulator for the Vita, and I probably don't need to explain quite why it's soul-crushingly dull. The other is, or rather, was Pro Evolution Soccer 2014.

When it comes to football games, Pro Evo is the red-headed stepchild to the straight-A student that is FIFA. On paper at least, because EA's titles sell a multitude of copies compared to the Pro Evo games on an annual basis despite neither being stellar products. Still, while the normies and dudebros flock to FIFA, a niche audience prefers Konami's offerings which are claimed to have a greater degree of depth to their gameplay. As a young teen I tried and gave up on FIFA after a few installments as it was about as deep as a puddle (I prefer Football Manager on PC), but Pro Evo I never bothered with.

At least, until the PS Plus offerings for May 2014 were announced. I was an active subscriber at the time and PES14 was the free game of the month. Now I didn't always play the free games depending on genre and Trophy list, but as this one didn't have a single online Trophy involved, I decided to jump in.

About ten hours later, and I was completely sick of it. Not only is the gameplay as unengaging as FIFA, but the game notably lacks real world licenses, meaning that more often than not you see make-belief teams rather than actual real sides. This is especially painful for the English Premier League, which replaces teams like Norwich City with 'Norfolk City'. While the Platinum is only 25 to 30 hours of grinding out matches, I simply couldn't take anymore and put the game on the shelf, to be picked up once more at an indeterminate point in the future. That point came some six years later, as I have been burning through my back catalogue and really wanted to knock the 19 unearned Trophies left off the list. A quick resub to PS Plus (I could not for the life of me find a copy in the used game stores in town) meant I was back in business.

Aaaaaand another 15 hours of gameplay later (not in one stretch, that would have absolutely destroyed my psyche), and the Plat was mine. I'm not even sure what to write for this entry anymore, because the game is that unremarkable. Its modes are that uninspired, that bog standard. And the Trophies themselves are all copy+pasted, tiles and names included. Win the cup in Europe, then win it in Asia, then in South America. Become the best player in Europe, then in Asia, then in South America. You get the idea.

Clearly the rest of the world shared my sentiments to a degree, because PES14 has a lovely low average completion percentage (11.27) and its Plat hangs just outside the margin for being Ultra Rare (5.21% of players have unlocked it at the time of writing). It's a short list with a fair few Silvers and Golds so certainly rewarding, but never before has gameplay felt like such a chore. Until I start Farming Simulator back up again, anyway.

Roadmap & Statistics update;

Pro Evo yielded 19 new Trophies with the least rare one being First Win: Master League at 'just' 29.65% rarity, but I also popped another seven Trophies after unlocking the Plat - three in FIFA 09 and four in WipEout HD. Included in that latter game is the infamous and coveted Beat Zico, considered to be one of the Holy Grail Trophies of the PS3 era. It's my seventh-most rarest Trophy as of right now, and something I'm quite proud of. Thanks to all these valuable Trophies, I sank my average rarity to 36.13% and my overall completion rate to 90.62% - the first time I've ever manage to pass the 90 percent mark. It also quite handily gave me a lift in the leaderboards;

86,031th in the world overall (up from 87,756th, target; top 100,000)
1,261th domestically overall (no change from 1261th, target; top 1,250)
135th domestically for Vita (up from 137rd, target; top 100)

Yeah, that's odd - I went up for Vita despite having not gained any new Trophies on my dear handheld, must have been the result of two cheaters being caught. Bless the CRT folk. My points gap to the #100th ranked guy is now 9,345, down from 9,450. And the good news is that the gap will close sooner rather than later, as my subscription to PS Plus (for just a month) allowed me to check what games I had gotten for free way back when. Included is LEGO Harry Potter Years 5 to 7, which I am playing through right now as my next Platinum. I hope to have it done within a week if not sooner, which is going to net me 1,350 points. I'm keeping my Vita in flight mode and will only sync once I get the Plat to see how badly this game has messed up my average rarity.

As for my Playstation 5, I got cold feet. I kept staring at my unearneds (407) and decided I simply couldn't stand starting the new generation with so many Trophies still left to clean. It arrived on my doorstep at 11:15 this morning, and by 11:45 my friend had picked it up for RRP. He's so happy with it, bless him. That leaves me with my PS3 and Vita, and honestly, I don't think getting to the 200s is out of reach in terms of unearneds, but for now I'm still gunning for 381 - reaching that number will mean that I've gotten rid of over half of my unearneds since the start of August. To do so, I've got the following lined up;

LEGO Star Wars III - 16 unearned
Mafia II - 20 unearneds
WipEout HD (8 to 10 doable unearneds)
FIFA 09 (5 or so doable unearneds)
F1 2010 (20 or so doable unearneds)

F1 2010 is new in this list but represents 27 unearned Trophies including a rather terrible grind for the online (which is thankfully still up and running, if completely deserted). I really want to get to level 25 at least which I hear isn't too bad, but the grind for 50 I'm not even going to attempt unless I get a second PS3 to self-boost. To be fair, maybe I need to have a look at CEX this week to see how cheap they are, but I likely won't bother. Especially since I will also have to (temporarily) buy a second Playstation Vita to do the ad hoc Trophies for Modnation Racers Road Trip to get that Plat.

I'm also keeping my eye on my Trophies per month - I've gotten 127 two months in a row now and I want to go for a third, but will need no fewer than 46 of them even after Platting LEGO Harry Potter. Might be worth popping in another Vita title to get there while chipping away at the unearned PS3 Trophies, and I've the following list of handheld titles to choose from;

Stein;s Gate
Gal Gun; Double Peace
Madden NFL 13
LEGO Marvel Super Heroes; Universe in Peril
LEGO Jurassic World
New Little King's Story
Octodad Dadliest Catch

If I finish that entire list I would be on the doorstep of the Dutch Vita top 100. I also want to get Spy Hunter, which is a cheap and easy but rare Plat, and I might add another LEGO game to further pad my points. I've still got a few digital recommendations to go through as well, plus a bunch of Golds and a Plat for Farming Simulator and a few less points in F1 2011. Alas, we'll see how things develop.

AJ_Radio · November 19, 2020

I kept hearing people over the years say Challenge #6 in Vanquish was what made them give up on the platinum. So I did some quick number check and it turns out there were around 5000 - 6000+ people with 49 out of 51 trophies in Vanquish, with only the Tactical Challenger trophy left. It was roughly a 4: 6 ratio of people who had the platinum trophy versus the people who were stuck on that Tactical Challenger trophy, but had all other trophies obtained. The trophy guide on this website started by saying "one trophy to rule them all", and I can't think of a more deserving trophy than Tactical Challenger in Vanquish.

Golem25 · December 4, 2020

Update 17

Platinum #73 - LEGO Harry Potter: Years 5-7 (Vita)

All Finished! - Acquire all trophies.

32,097 Owners - 11,129 Achievers for a percentage of 34.69% (average completion; 43.08%)

Enjoyment; 7/10

Difficulty; 1/10

Trophies; 6/10 (tiles are nice enough, some interesting requirements)

Appreciation for Deluminators; 1/10

A double update? Yes! A double update! Because it's my thread, so I get to make the rules here! ?

Having had a PS5 pre-ordered since September, I figured I'd get PS Plus a week before release to snap up Bugsnax. However, one look at my still-present backlog quickly changed my mind regarding the new console, and I sold it on to a friend (at no markup from what I paid for it). This did leave me in a pickle though; I'm on another silly streak of X Trophies per month for as long as I can keep up, and considering that X = 127 currently, I needed quick and easy Trophies to pad my numbers alongside the tough and longwinded backlog Trophies I'm unlocking at a snail's pace.

A quick glance at my Plus-affected download list revealed that I had LEGO Harry Potter; Years 5-7 from way back when - which came as a complete surprise to me - so why not knock this game out of the way while I still had my subscription, right?

This was a decision I didn't end up regretting, as HP 5-7 was decent fun with some good, quick unlocks that didn't affect my rarity rating too badly. Bear in mind that this is the Vita version rather than the game found on PS3 and PS4, and as such, is just another upscaled port of a 3DS game. Just like all other LEGO titles on Vita. While I'm grateful to have anything to play at all on this beautiful handheld, it's just so typical of how it was treated by third parties - but really, can you blame them when the Vita was sunk by Sony's own lackadaisical attitude?

Featuring about fourteen levels from across three books/four movies, LEGO Harry Potter: Years 5-7 charts the grimdark half of the saga with the titular character and chums training for and facing off against a pale guy without a nose and his eclectic band of Saturday morning cartoon villains. This being the first LEGO title on Vita, it is still level- rather than challenge-based, and I had some good fun ploughing through the 14 or so included in the game. The formula used by the series is well known, you swap characters with different abilities in and out to fight opponents and solve puzzles, and you are required to replay each character to uncover every single collectible.

The list is pretty standard fare for a LEGO game but has a 'duel' mode tacked on wherein you need to beat every single playable character by casting spells back and forth. It has very little depth, but with how quickly you could progress I still actually enjoyed it. Very little challenge overall, obviously, but at very few points did it become grating. Usually when my patience did get tested, it was because of the Deluminator mechanic, which forces you to snuff out one lamp to turn on one across the level - this was pretty pointless and seemed to mostly serve as padding. It was later copy+pasted in the LEGO Chima game, also on Vita, which goes to show these titles were made on a budget.

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Platinum #74 - LEGO Jurassic World (Vita)

Life, uh... finds a way - Complete all other Trophies

8,636 Owners - 4,417 Achievers for a percentage of 51.15% (average completion; 63.08%)

Enjoyment; 8/10

Difficulty; 1/10

Trophies; 8/10 (unique yet uniform tiles, great names, some fun requirements)

Stud Multiplier abuse; 10/10

I had way more fun with LEGO Jurassic World than I did with HP, but it seriously ruined my rarity percentage; I was at 36.02 (so close to 35.XX!) and am now back at 36.31. The curse of easy Plats, man.

But do I regret playing this game? Nope, not really; it was too much fun and I really like the Trophies included - which all have nicely unique tiles and names that are essentially just quotes from the movies, making for some beautiful throwbacks. Now do remember that this game is still just an upscaled 3DS port, but the development team at TT Fusion clearly got better at making these titles (they pumped out close to a dozen across just half a decade) because Jurassic World is much better than HP from a technical standpoint. A much better and bigger hub, mechanics that work much more fluently, better graphics, nicer-looking cutscenes (admittedly ripped from the PS3/PS4 versions, but running at a better pace), and levels that seem to have been designed with a lot more care. They really pushed the envelop despite the budget- and platform restrictions they were faced with.

I'm especially pleased with those levels, actually. You get 36, 9 for each of the four movies included (Jurassic Park, The Lost World, Jurassic Park III, and Jurassic World), and they are all bite-sized, never outstaying their welcome - perfect for a handheld. Compare that to Harry Potter, where the levels seemed to drag you from one scene and location to the next. It really is night and day, and shows that Harry Potter was the developers' first stab at the LEGO formula on 'modern' handhelds; Jurassic Park, by comparison, was their tenth title, and made me realize that the Potter game really is the weakest of the bunch that I have played so far. Of course, the formula remained largely the same; each level requires two playthroughs - one with movie-appropriate characters and one with the entire collection that you've unlocked up until that point - to fully explore and get all three collectibles contained within.

Besides those levels (which include some genuinely fantastic on-rails stages), the game also features a dinosaur customizer and two 'paddocks' where you can play as said reptiles. Not too interesting to me beyond the five or so related Trophies, but I imagine kids would have gone wild for these features! The references and easter eggs are layered on thick as well, including a nice little moment with Dennis Nedry and his can of shaving foam.

I paid ten GBP for LEGO Jurassic World and honestly, that was well-spent money. Definitely recommend picking this one up if you can find it for a good price.

Roadmap & Statistics update;

So the main pain from adding two LEGO Vita titles with high completion percentages is their impact on my own statistic, which just so happens to be the most important number on the site to me. I could offset the 0.16 or so increase from Harry Potter with rare backlog Trophies from Pro Evo Soccer, but Jurassic Park on its own added 0.33 to my average rarity - and that is with two Ultra Rare Trophies for F1 2010 coming in on the same day that I synced up JW. I will take another massive hit once I start Steins;Gate, but thankfully that's the last high completion game in my possession currently. My nonsensical adherence to 127 Trophies per month simply forces me to play games like Jurassic World to reach my quota, because I have no time to spare what with the backlog Trophies (which are there for a reason, because they are awfully hard).

I do have some good news on that front; I've just one (admittedly insanely grindy online) Trophy left for F1 2010, which is posed to become my second-rarest Plat. I'm hoping to find the time to plunk 25 or so hours into it in the week commencing the 14th, and am planning to borrow a second PS3 to self-boost for this purpose. I've also started up the DLC for Mafia II which will add another 20 decently rare Trophies, but it sadly includes one insanely grindy Ultra Rare Bronze (and you know how uncommon Ultra Rare DLC Trophies are due to PSNP's weighted calculation) that I will try to knock out with rubberbanding over the course of a few nights.

I've also gathered up the courage to try out Dead Rising 2 again and tackle the Logbook Entries and Zombie Genocider requirements. I'm hoping either this game or F1 2010 will be my 75th Plat milestone, leaning towards Dead Rising because the tile for the F1 Plat is the bloody Codemasters logo (not that the DR one is a lot more original....). I'm also rebuying LEGO Star Wars III on PS3, Spy Hunter on Vita, and whatever else I find in CEX today. Oh, and I'm a decent way into gold-medalling the WipEout HD campaign on the highest difficulty level; if I can pull that off all the way, it will be my second-rarest Trophy, rarer still than the F1 Plat. Nice.

Now for my leaderboard goals;

81,125 in the world overall (up from 86,031th, target; top 100,000)
1,196th domestically overall (up from 1261th, target; top 1,250)
131st domestically for Vita (up from 135th, target; top 100)

Good progress on all fronts, with the overall domestic target now comfortably reached. I should really readjust the overall world target as well, 75,000 sounds nice if quite out of reach. And adding Jurassic World booted me up a few spaces on the domestic Vita leaderboard, with the addendum that I am now also in the top 10,000 Vita players worldwide (9,981st). With Steins:Gate coming up as 76th/77th Platinum, I expect further good progress to be made there. Still, the road will be long and arduous; I am still 7,020 points behind the #100th ranked player, which equates to about 5-and-a-half Platinums. It's frustrating constantly playing catch-up, because everyone around me on that leaderboard relies almost solely on Rata-esque Platinums.

Also, I busted through my unearned goal; I had set 381 as a target, seeing as I started on 764 on August 1st - reaching this target meant more than halving the initial number. I'm proud to report that I am now sitting pretty on 371 with a completion rate of 91.65! I am becoming increasingly convinced that hitting the 200s is not only possible, but even increasingly realistic if I can keep up my dedication levels. Honestly, getting there would be a monumental achievement and something to be really proud of - so let's see how far I can get!

Edited December 4, 2020 by Golem25

Golem25 · December 12, 2020

Platinum #75 - Dead Rising 2 (PS3)

DR2 Trophy Master - You have acquired all the trophies in Dead Rising 2.

240,517 Owners - 5,036 Achievers for a percentage of 2.09% (average completion; 14.51%)

Enjoyment; 8/10

Difficulty; 8/10

Trophies; 7/10 (includes the iconic Zombie Genocider and a cheeky title, but otherwise heavily reliant on collectibles)

Obsession with generic mall music currently; 10/10

Wew lads, can you believe it? I actually managed to clean up Dead Rising 2, just over ten years after first biting into this game. I didn't expect I'd ever get this done, what with the co-op Trophies and having to mow my way through 72,000 zombies - but now here we are.

Released to critical and commercial success in September 2010, Dead Rising 2 was the Canadian-developed sequel to the Xbox 360-exclusive Dead Rising. With the original game being developed by a group of headstrong Japanese veterans (among them the later-infamous Keiji Inafune), its dismal performance in Japan prompted Capcom to outsource development of the second game to a Western developer called Blue Castle Games - who back then were mostly known for their The BIGS baseball titles.

Despite the grunt work now taking place in Vancouver, the original creators oversaw development and kept a tight leash on the Canadian studio that would later be rechristened Capcom Vancouver. The result was a game that still retained the quirks of its predecessor, but took a couple of bold steps forward; online co-op was added with the entirity of the game available to be played through alongside a friend, while an online multiplayer mode that pitted four players against one another in nine different zombie-slaying minigames made for a nice distraction from the main story.

A story which, I found, was quite compelling; you play as Motocross veteran Chuck Greene (who resembles a young Clint Eastwood struck by facial paralysis), a young father forced into a gameshow centered around killing zombies (yes, the online mode - I thought that made for nifty synergy) to provide for his daughter Katey, who after being bitten by her zombified mother requires drug injections every 12 hours to avoid turning. Following a gameshow win in Fortune City, a casino- and mall-megaplex built to replace a destroyed Las Vegas, Chuck is faced with a zombie outbreak that he is being framed for - prompting him to set out on a race against the clock to prove his innocence, discover the identity of the true culprit, and collect enough medicine to keep his daught un-undead.

You can give it grief for not being super original and the whole 'infected daughter' angle providing cheap emotional resonance, but I really enjoyed the story. You get to mess around in a brightly coloured and finely detailed sandbox full of stores and casinos freshly overrun by zombies, with a few survivors here and there to be rescued. However, you aren't just on a timer for story purposes; no, the clock is an actual gameplay element as all missions and events occur at certain times, with the player forced to pick and choose (or properly plan) what to complete. Don't reach a story mission in time? Wuh-woh, the truth is forever lost and you have mere hours left before the military firebombs yer buttocks. Had to skip some survivors to reach the story? Yeah, those poor folk are dead next time you pass by their location.

It makes for a real challenge - and for a proper pain. I hate timed segments in video games, and Dead Rising is basically that for its entire duration - the clock never stops counting, you never stop running. What I badly wanted and missed was an infinity mode of sorts, where you would just have total freedom to mess around without having to worry about the story or Katey's injections. And to be fair, you could ignore the story, but you'd get firebombed after time runs out - making all that free roam fun seem for naught.

As far as Trophies go, Dead Rising 2 (and its predecessor) has two iconic titles on its list; Z-Genocider 2: Genocide Harder and Zombie Genocide Master. The former started out as a fun challenge in the first game; it was set in a town with a population of 53,594 and you got an Xbox achievement for killing that exact number of zombies (meaning you basically eradicated the entire place). Valve referenced this with an achievement of their own in Left 4 Dead, asking you to kill 53,595 (going one better) - and Blue Castle upped the ante again by requiring 53,596 fo Dead Rising 2. Getting to that number means basically ignoring all the story missions and spending five hours grinding out kills by driving a SUV in circles around the sandbox' outdoor area, but those Canadian sadists figured the time you were given was way too generous for such a lowly number. So, they also require you to kill 72,000 zombies for Zombie Genocide Master - and to unlock that you either have to be the best driver ever or combine the laps around the strip with actually doing the story missions to unlock 'Overtime' - an epilogue that grants you a few more precious minutes.

Zombie Genocide Master is obviously the biggest roadblock towards Platinum, but the rest of the list is quite cruel in a different way. Those who dislike collect-a-thons beware, because you have to get kills with all weapons, make all combo weapons, eat all types of food, mix all types of drinks, wear all articles of clothing, spray a series of specific posters, and visit every single store in the game. Damn, son. I do love running around like a mindless ape doing all that (for real, I like it, especially in such a detailed world), but I fiercely disliked having to do the co-op Trophy that required you to finish all main story missions with a co-op partner. With a mix of randoms and boosting, I thankfully managed earlier today, meaning that I got to finish the list with a Trophy title that I doubt would ever be accepted into a game in 2020; Chuck Greene: Cross Dresser?. Yup, it requires you to wear all clothing items (including those for girls and women). Put the developers inbetween two slices of bread and you'd have a bigot sandwich.

Overall, a Platinum that is both challenging due to the Genocide Trophies and quite long-winded due to all the collectibles and having to sit through painful co-op experiences - but I am still quite proud to own it and do not regret starting the game way back when. For years I thought I would never manage to actually unlock the Platinum, but after my adventures over the past month attaining much harder Plats (Vanquish says hello), I got inspired and accomplished it. So inspired, in fact, that I timed this one to be my 75th Plat milestone. Never give up on your dreams, kids. Do give up on Dead Rising as a franchise though, because 3 was mediocre and XBONE exclusive, and Dead Rising 4 is barely functional - Capcom Vancouver was shut down in 2018, joining the increasingly impressive horde of zombie development studios.

Bonus anecdote;

Spoiler

I remember buying the game and the cashier being dubious about my age - I was only 17 and a half at the time and told him I forgot my ID. The two soccer moms in line behind me overheard and started joking 'oh, he does look so mature' 'yeah, he is definitely of age' and the guy let me walk out with my copy. Funny how you remember such, admittedly trivial, experiences even a decade later, huh?

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Platinum #76 - Steins;Gate (PS Vita, European Version)

Sky Clad Observer - Unlocked all trophies.

9,059 Owners - 3,796 Achievers for a percentage of 41.90% (average completion; 53.59%)

Enjoyment; 7/10

Difficulty; 1/10

Trophies; 7/10 (Excellent CG used for tiles, great Platinum tile, hilarious names - unlock requirements sorta dull)

Comprehension of metaphysics; 1.048596/10

This was an interesting one, a surprise find in a used game store for just fifteen Britbucks. I'd never paid the Steins;Gate series much heed, and this was the first time I had ever seen this game in the flesh on store shelves. That's pretty rare for me when it comes to Vita games, so naturally I snapped it up right away - I'd be a fool not to.

I'm going to have to be quite succint about this game, because it's a story heavy visual novel that, more so than √Letter, benefits from players going in completely unaware. Expect a complete mindfuck and heavy sci-fi themes with quite endearing character artwork and a story with lots of endings and ever so slightly more gameplay than you'd expect from the genre. Of course, there is no difficulty involved at all with a visual novel, so I once again challenged myself to speedrun the Plat, as I had done with √ Letter. It didn't quite work out as I had to quite after a few hours, but overall I was still happy to get it done across two nights - and I had enjoyed the store at a leisurely pace previously on a dummy account.

Is Steins;Gate worth picking up? If you like - or even just tolerate - visual novels, then absolutely. You get a really nice Trophy tile for the Plat too, people who played the game will recognize it.

Roadmap & Statistics update;

A bit of a mixed bag in terms of the statistics; Dead Rising 2 and Steins;Gate display a beautiful duality in that the one takes dozens of hours and is really rather hard, whilst the other can be wrapped up in fewer hours than a player has fingers on a single hand (unless you only have like two or three digits, in which case, wut). The larger issue is that Steins:gate accounted for 42 uncommon Trophies while Dead Rising 2 yielded only 13 UR/very rare/rare pops, meaning that my average rarity took another hit - I'm on 36.34% now, up from 36.05%, and that's even after chipping in ten rare Mafia II DLC Trophies.

With the title Mafia II being mentioned, we get to the roadmap; I need the infamously grindy Explorer Trophy plus most of the Joe's Adventures DLC to reclaim my 100% back for that game, and doing so will leave me on 112 Trophies popped in December. My target is still 127 (for the fourth month running), so I will need 15 more. One unfinished game I have been dreading more than anything else is the awful, boring Farming Simulator on Vita which will net me eight mostly Gold Trophies, but that leaves me with another seven needed. I will either scrape those out of WipeOut HD's Fury expansion, LEGO Star Wars III (still need to rebuy it), or New Little King's Story on Vita, which I really need to make a start on. Or hey, maybe I'll find a rare Vita gem when I go to CeX later today?

In terms of the leaderboards, the ridiculous onslaught of Vita Trophies from LEGO games and Steins;Gate has seen me move in the right direction;

78,617th in the world overall (up from 81,125th, target; top 100,000)
1,173 domestically overall (up from 1,196th, target; top 1,250)
121st domestically for Vita (up from 131st, target; top 100)

Yeah boy, that's what we like to see! The third goal is the most important one to me and to see such progression is rather encouraging after a long and slow descent over the past months due to my PS3 clean-up activities. I am now 5,745 leaderboard points behind the #100 ranked guy, and I have achieved that without Rata spam! Still, I need four-and-a-half more games to catch up and that is in the event that no one else spams like a dozen Rata lists to overtake me. Currently I have the following Vita games to get me to the top 100;

- LEGO Marvel Super Heroes; Universe in Peri

- Madden NFL 13

- New Little King's Story

- Farming Simulator (795 points left over)

- F1 2011 (510 points left over)

That's enough to get me there, but I still want to go above and beyond so I will get a little game called Spy Hunter next week and I'm also keeping an eye out for Danganronpa Ultra Despair Girls. Those two and the LEGO game will pull my average rarity up slightly, but the others will easily counter balance their effects, so I shouldn't see too much damage as a result of my pursuit of the top 100.

And as for my Unearneds? We're at 346 now! Way past my inital goal of 448, and decently far from my second goal of 381. Farming Simulator and F1 2011 will yield twelve Trophies in total, Mafia II will contribute another 8, and Lego Star Wars III represents another 16. Those are all sort of easy save for F1, but will get me to 310, and with 15 achievable Trophies left in WipEout HD + Fury, I have a shot at getting into the upper 200's in January! Thats incredibly exciting to me and I can't wait to see that number crop up, but it will take dedication and determination if I want to get through Farming Simulator and a bit of skill for F1 2011.

Oh, and I need to grind another 15 hours or so to get the final Gold and Platinum for F1 2010 on PS3 - that will be my third-rarest Trophy overall. I was expecting it to be my second-rarest, but the online grind is just too much to get through at the moment and with a patch rollback I managed to pop WipEout's Elite Campaign Legend as my 4,500th Trophy Milestone yesterday. Once I find a second Vita though, I will Plat Modnation Racers Road Trip via ad hoc to get my first sub 1 percent Trophy, but then I've been saying that for almost ten years now.... anyhow, away with me, I have unearneds to clean up the rest of the month!

Edited December 12, 2020 by Golem25

Golem25 · February 1, 2021

Update 19

And now, for something a little different; in the past I've usually done one update per Platinum, but I'd like to experiment with one post per month instead - partly inspired by my continuing quest to plateau my 'Trophies per month' statistic. As such, I will post the Platinum 'snapshots' in the update posts here and link to the reviews I wrote for each of them in the 'Latest Platinum' thread. This will hopefully make the Trinket Cave a little easier to skim through while still providing depth where desired by readers. As such, let's dive in;

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Platinum #77 - New Little King's Story

Kingiest King EVER - You fulfilled ALL accomplishments in the kingdom!

35,298 Owners - 2,871 Achievers for a percentage of 8.13% (average completion; 53.59%)

Enjoyment; 7/10

Difficulty; 2/10

Trophies; 5/10 (only four tiles, unimaginative requirements, but a decent theme)

Romantic interests among female characters; 8/10

Review found here

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Platinum #78 - Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas

Platinum - Get all other Trophies

2,351 Owners - 638 Achievers for a percentage of 27.14% (average completion; 38.85%)

Enjoyment; 7/10

Difficulty; 2/10

Trophies; 5/10 (only four tiles, not much intrigue in the list, names so-so, but good tracking)

Zelda "inspiration"; 10/10

Review found here

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Platinum #79 - Adventures of Mana

The Hero of Mana - Obtain all trophies.

10,013 Owners - 2,637 Achievers for a percentage of 26.30% (average completion; 36.23%)

Enjoyment; 6/10

Difficulty; 2/10

Trophies; 5/10 (only four tiles although the Plat image is NICE, dull list, hilarious alliteration in names)

Game Boy era nostalgia; 10/10

Review found here

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Roadmap & Statistics update;

Well, that certainly was an eventful month, no? A big shout-out to @Heather342 as she recommended two of the three games I played in January! And it was a very fruitful month, too; three Vita lists that combine for 124 Trophies and 4020 leaderboard points. None of this trio has a multiplatform list (New Little King's Story and Adventures of Mana are Vita-exclusive, Oceanhorn has a stack with PS4), so all those points went straight onto my Vita pile meaning that I took a massive step towards my most important leaderboard goal. Let's take a look where we are at currently;

75,051th in the world overall (up from 78,617th, target; top 100,000)
1,141st domestically overall (up from 1,173th, target; top 1,250)
108th domestically for Vita (up from 121st, target; top 100)

I suspect 108th is the closest I've ever been to the domestic Vita top 100, and I am within striking distance of the chap currently in #100th place - only 1965 point separate us, which amounts to about a game-and-a-half. I am a little bit frustrated thoughbecause every week or so, some shitbag running purely on Ratalaika games seems to overtake me and squirm their way into the top 100 - this just rubs salt in the wounds as I know very well that I am fighting a losing battle here. I will be in the top 100 before the midway point of February, I have no doubts about that, but I will be squeezed out again as early as March or April. I try not to be elitist, but ffs, Ratalaika has come close to spoiling the fun for someone who tries to make their way up the rankings without essentially spamming one-hour-long games.

Anyhow, my goal is to crack the top 100 - not stay there forever - so any amount of time I spend in that most enviable position will just be a bonus. And I've got a batch of highly valuable games to take me there in this new month;

390 Points in Farming Simulator (I grinded to within five seconds of Platinum in December)
390 Points in F1 2011 (I need a semi-clean time trial on Yeongam International Circuit for the Plat)
1,290 Points in LEGO Marvel Super Heroes: Universe in Peril
1,260 Points in Madden NFL 13
1,305 in Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate

Those five games combine to 118 Trophies (2 - 2 - 53 - 30 - 31), leaving nine Trophies to reach my monthly quota. I am currently eyeing Let's Fish: Hooked On, a game I've owned since launch but never tried, for the remainder. It is said to be a massive grind, quite glitchy, and genuinely just not very good but I do own it and it represents a good rarity value plus those increasingly valuable Vita leaderboard points. The trio of games I played and Platted in January got me to 124, and I used the leftover time in the last two weeks to grind out three unearned Trophies in Far Cry 2 - including the ridiculously awful and rare Wages of War. If I change my mind on Let's Fish, I'll grind another three or so unearneds out of Far Cry and a handful out of WipEout HD to get me to 127.

With that out of the way, I've got some Milestone trickery to worry about; I am coming up to my Lv. 390 milestone and have 915 points to go. I am currently planning to eke about 855 points out of LEGO Marvel from today until Super Bowl Sunday, and then pop a few Bronzes in Madden as we approach kick-off time. I was tempted to use Cleveland Browns Award or Buffalo Bills Award for the level up - because I like the former and was hoping the latter would reach the Super Bowl - but have decided to instead use Tom Brady Award. I will pop it in the first half of the big game to wish the man and the Buccaneers luck as I would find a second title in a row for the Chiefs just ever so boring. Also because I think the Bucs are a nice enough team and I don't have to dislike Brady anymore now that he is no longer with the Patriots.

The really big Milestone I am looking forward to, however, is my 5,000th Trophy. Last year I went through Hell to get Yakuza 3 - my first game in my favourite ever series of games) - to within a hair's breadth of Platinum, but decided to hold off on popping it. The evening of April 25th marks my eleventh anniversary of starting the game and the franchise, and I've decided I want to pop the Plat as close to the time of my first Trophy as possible. However, I realized that occasion would be forgotten without a proper Milestone tracked by PSNP, so I did some calculations and realized that if I kept up the 127 Trophies a month streak from December 2020 into April 2021, the Yakuza 3 Plat on April 25th would hit the window of my 5,000th Trophy (I am to reach 5,040 by April's end).

That means a couple of things; I need to get 127 in Feb, 127 in March, and then 85 from April 1st through to April 24th to pop Testament to Strength as 4,999th and Kiryu's bust attached to Platinum Trophy right after as 5,000th. Y3's Platinum is by far the most prestigious in the series and the game itself is one of my favourites so it would be an amazingly fitting Milestone. I'll probably cry many a tear since I have a feeling Microsoft is about to buy SEGA and make the series an XBox-console exclusive, but so be it.

I will share my roadmap for March towards the end of February, as things might remain in flux dependent on what I do with Let's Fish. I am eyeing the Ratchet & Clank collection and a physical copy of The Deer God on Vita, have PulzAR, Octodad, and Spy Hunter ready to go on Vita, and Call of Juarez: The Cartel plus some leftovers (including the LEGO Star Wars III Plat) on PS3 to get me near 5,000 - and I'm tempted to use VA-11 Hall-A to close out April on 127 - after the Y3 Plat on the 25th, I have precious little time to get another 40 Trophies before May hits - VA-11 Hall-A would quickly give me 34.

The future of the 127 streak will then be decided by whether I have a PS5 as May rolls around - if I do, I might try and push for another month or two of this bizarre streak. If I don't, it's dead in the water as I will have run out of Vita games.

Still though, check out that sweet plateau on my stats page! My average rarity has been lowered from 36.34 to 36.18 - I want to reach and stay in the 35% range before long, and my Unearneds now sit at 320 - I suspect they will be at 316 by the end of February, and dip into the 200s for the first time since like 2011 as I clean up LEGO Star Wars III and some miscellaneous Trophies.

Edited February 1, 2021 by Golem25

Heather342 · February 2, 2021

Congratulations ? and I'm glad you enjoyed my suggestions. I'll let you know if I come across any other Vita gems that may interest you. But I would say pick up Severed when you can. It's a short game but a great one for the Vita

Golem25 · May 1, 2021

Update 20

It has been three months since my last update in this thread, but don't think I've forgotten about it. These checklists are massively helpful in guiding a Trophy collection and providing a frame of reference for how Trophy percentages can rise and fall over time, so I've been returning regularly to check in on what I've scribbled down previously. If you refer back to the OP, you'll also notice that it has been rewritten with a copy of the original retained in spoiler tags.

February, March, and April were all about continuing the 127-Trophies-a-month-streak for me, as well as branching out from Vita games and PS3 list cleaning into the next generations; I own a Playstation 5 which will be my platform of choice going forward as I've exhausted most of the Vita's library with physical copies of games now ridiculously expensive due to Sony's mishaps regarding the online store. Since the last update I've accumulated eleven Platinum Trophies including two Ultra Rares that now stand as some of the proudest achievements in my collection.

As per the new format for updates in this thread (started with Update 19), I will only list the specifics of each Platinum with a link to a full review in the 'Most Recent Platinum' thread. This to keep posts in this Checklist as succint as possible (a real challenge with my writing style) and to ensure that readers don't have to scroll through reviews they have no interest in.

Going forward, I will be updating this thread every month, preferably on the 1st every time. Given my current pace, this will ensure there is always something to write about. But to start, let's catch up on the eleven games I Platted since the start of February with a link to each review - I will hide the whole lot in spoiler tags as it's quite the list;

Spoiler

Platinum #80 - LEGO Marvel Super Heroes: Universe in Peril (Vita)

Your Fabulous No-Prize! - Collect all trophies

16,503 Owners - 4,532 Achievers for a percentage of 27.46% (average completion; 36.29%)

Enjoyment; 6/10

Difficulty; 2/10

Trophies; 6/10 (unique tiles, lots of references in unlock requirements)

Anger at invincibility frames on bosses; 10/10

Review found here

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Platinum #81 - Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate (Vita)

The Dark Knight - Unlock All Other Trophies

44,492 Owners - 4,385 Achievers for a percentage of 9.85% (average completion; 23.55%)

Enjoyment; 7/10

Difficulty; 3/10

Trophies; 2/10 (four tiles, cruel requirements, but some fun names)

Joy at replaying the game; 3/10

Review found here

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Platinum #82 - Madden NFL 13 (Vita)

Madden NFL 13 Master - Congratulations on earning every Madden NFL 13 trophy!

12,348 Owners - 657 Achievers for a percentage of 5.32% (average completion; 28.06%)

Enjoyment; 8/10

Difficulty; 3/10

Trophies; 7/10 (unique tiles, fun requirements, let down by a bad Plat tile)

Tom Brady's ratio of rings to fingers; 7/10

Review found here

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Platinum #83 - Farming Simulator (Vita)

SEEN IT ALL - You unlocked all the trophies.

4,108 Owners - 921 Achievers for a percentage of 22.40% (average completion; 40.50%)

Enjoyment; 1/10

Difficulty; 1/10*

Trophies; 2/10 (unimaginative names and requirements, +1 for unique tiles)

Futility in resisting boredom-induced coma; 10/10

Review found here

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Platinum #84 - F1 2011 (Vita)

COMPLETE - CONGRATULATIONS ON COMPLETING F1 2011

10,939 Owners - 1,213 Achievers for a percentage of 11.09% (average completion; 34.11%)

Enjoyment; 7/10

Difficulty; 7/10 (3/10 outside of Time Trials)

Trophies; 8/10 (unique tiles, diverse requirements, SCREAMY TITLES)

2011 was a better era of F1; 10/10

Review found here

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Platinum #85 - Spy Hunter

Exemplary Service - Acquire all Trophies.

6,621 Owners - 1,489Achievers for a percentage of 22.49% (average completion; 36.46%)

Enjoyment; 6/10

Difficulty; 3/10

Trophies; 7/10 (nice if slightly generic tiles, diverse requirements)

Spies Hunted; 10/10

Review found here

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Platinum #86 - Gal*Gun Double Peace (European Version)

True Gal*Gun Master - Unlock All Trophies

6,643 Owners - 388 Achievers for a percentage of 5.83% (average completion; 19.10%)

Enjoyment; 9/10

Difficulty; 2/10

Trophies; 2/10 (recycled tiles, repetitive names, unimaginative requirements)

Desire to dip in the Sakurazaki pool; 10/10

Review found here

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Platinum #87 - LEGO Movie: The Video Game (Vita Version)

Everything Is Awesome - Collect All Trophies

12,830 Owners - 3,436 Achievers for a percentage of 26.78% (average completion; 38.08%)

Enjoyment; 5/10

Difficulty; 2/10

Trophies; 4/10 (good tiles, good names, but glitchy and collectibles)

Anxiety over bad coding; 10/10

Review found here

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Platinum #88 - ModNation Racers; Road Trip

ModNation™ Legend - Earn all the ModNation™ Racers: Road Trip trophies to unlock this platinum trophy

73,982 Owners - 657 Achievers for a percentage of 0.89% (average completion; 13.93%)

Enjoyment; 6/10

Difficulty; 7/10

Trophies; 2/10 (good tiles but overly reliant on multiplayer and ad hoc)

Pride; 10/10

Review found here

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Platinum #89 - Yakuza 3

Platinum Trophy - Earn all other trophies in the game.

54,077 Owners - 1,712 Achievers for a percentage of 3.17% (average completion; 21.16%)

Enjoyment; 10/10

Difficulty; 9/10

Trophies; 7/10 ('actual' Trophies for tiles although many are repeated, decent names, diverse requirements)

Desire to visit Okinawa; 10/10

Review found here

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Platinum #90 - VA-11 Hall-A (Vita Version)

Jill of all trades - Unlock all trophies

3,714 Owners - 1,027 Achievers for a percentage of 27.65% (average completion; 21.16%)

Enjoyment; 4/10

Difficulty; 3/10

Trophies; 7/10 (love the Plat name, screenshotted tiles, actual challenge in a VN)

Hatred for Nico Nico-style comments; 10/10

Review found here

Wew, that was a mouthful, wasn't it?

Roadmap & Statistics update;

With the Playstation 5 quietly humming away in my living room, I am now absolutely spoilt for choice in terms of what to do next. I have already purchased and started Hitman 2 a while ago, while I also found and booted up a cheap copy of No Man's Sky. I have a fair few games from Plus that can be played, plus the PS4 and PS5 versions of Yakuza Like a Dragon. Yakuza 0 is also available for further clean up. However, with my usual 127 quota, I am aiming to get the following Trophies in May.

No Man's Sky (PS4) (22 Trophies)
No Man's Sky (PS5) (28 Trophies)
Persona 5 (49 Trophies)

Personally I blame Heather for this, but it is time to get over my love of P4's Inaba and try Tokyo next, with Persona 5 being freely available thanks to my PS Plus membership granting access to the Instant Game Collection. I've already played the first few hours of the game on a dummy account and loved it, so I'm looking forward to properly starting it on my own account. However, I will (quickly) finish No Man's Sky first. For one because I've managed to amass quite the fortune in-game already, which will see me through all the way to the Plat, and for two because I can auto-pop the PS5 version by bringing over my old save. I will do so once I have one Trophy 'til the Plat remaining, as a one-second-Plat wouldn't look or sound right. However, once both are in the bag, I have the rest of the month free for Persona.

Of course, those three games together only account for 99 Trophies; the remaining 28 I will need to get from some other title. I will do a quick boost to get at least three Far Cry 2 Trophies out of the way as well, and the rest will be filled by a combination of Hitman 2 and Yakuza 0, plus potentially Until Dawn and Wreckfest - provided the latter impresses me enough through gameplay footage once the PS5 version is out. I also still have 16 LEGO Star Wars 3 Trophies and a dozen in WipEout HD that need cleaning, and 20 in Jacob Jones on the Vita which I have yet to start. You'll see though that once I clean up Hitman 2 and No Man's Sky, I am now below 300 unearneds - another one of my goals and a huge achievement considering I was sat on 747 last August. I'd like to reach 249 at some point, just so I can say I took two-thirds off the total.

*****

Three months of Trophy hunting have naturally resulted in massive changes to my leaderboard rankings, so let's have a look;

64,716th in the world overall (up from 75,051th, target; top 100,000)
1,005st domestically overall (up from 1,141th, target; top 1,250)
86th domestically for Vita (up from 108th, target; top 100)

Yes, I managed to sneak my way well into the top 100 Vita players domestically! As high as 86, although checking the leaderboards now I see some.... gentleman popped two dozen Ratalaika games to overtake me. I try not to Trophy-shame people, but good grief does it suck the fun out of leaderboards when someone can equal my nine years on the Vita in just a month with ten minute Platinums. It's such a shame too, because everyone around me has masses of Rata titles yet I managed with pure dedication and, at worst, a few LEGO titles. Thank goodness I still have the screenshot, posted below for the sake of posterity;

I refuse to play any games I don't have any actual interest in for the sake of catching up further, so 86 (well, 87) is the ceiling for now. I might get more digital games since physical is now prohibitively expensive, but until then, I just have to hope my compatriots conveniently forget about the Vita.

Quote

The really big Milestone I am looking forward to, however, is my 5,000th Trophy. Last year I went through Hell to get Yakuza 3 - my first game in my favourite ever series of games) - to within a hair's breadth of Platinum, but decided to hold off on popping it. The evening of April 25th marks my eleventh anniversary of starting the game and the franchise, and I've decided I want to pop the Plat as close to the time of my first Trophy as possible. However, I realized that occasion would be forgotten without a proper Milestone tracked by PSNP, so I did some calculations and realized that if I kept up the 127 Trophies a month streak from December 2020 into April 2021, the Yakuza 3 Plat on April 25th would hit the window of my 5,000th Trophy (I am to reach 5,040 by April's end).

That means a couple of things; I need to get 127 in Feb, 127 in March, and then 85 from April 1st through to April 24th to pop Testament to Strength as 4,999th and Kiryu's bust attached to Platinum Trophy right after as 5,000th. Y3's Platinum is by far the most prestigious in the series and the game itself is one of my favourites so it would be an amazingly fitting Milestone.

That's a quote from the last update, and as anyone can now see on my profile, I did indeed pop the Yakuza 3 Platinum for my birthday - in fact, I tried to pop it exactly eleven years to the second from the timestamp of the first Trophy. Unfortunately, I was off by seven seconds but I still think this is a very, very honourable achievement and milestone. Yakuza 3 is a 8 or 9 out of 10 in terms of difficulty, the hardest in the series, and yet I still managed to unlock it. I can feel a clean sweep of the series happening across the next few years;

PSNP has a messed-up way of calculating months, hence why the Platinum time sounds off despite the correct timestamps.

*****

And for the final bits, I have a new rarest Trophy in the form of the ModNation Racers; Road Trip Plat (also my first sub 1.0 percent Trophy) for which I had to buy a second Vita for ad hoc purposes, and my average rarity went as low as 35.73% following the Yakuza 3 Platinum. That has since been pulled up to 35.82 thanks to the easiest NMS Trophies and the full list for VA-11 HALL-A, but I expect to record a new record before the month is over. Which will then again be brought up through Persona 5, but such is life sometimes. It'd be really cool to reach 34.XX one day, though!

That's all for now, I'm off to restart work on No Man's Sky so I can get to Persona 5 ASAP. Lots of work to do if I want to preserve that sweet, sweet plateau on my Monthly Activity graph!

realm722 · May 2, 2021

12 hours ago, Golem25 said:

Personally I blame Heather for this, but it is time to get over my love of P4's Inaba and try Tokyo next, with Persona 5 being freely available thanks to my PS Plus membership granting access to the Instant Game Collection. I've already played the first few hours of the game on a dummy account and loved it, so I'm looking forward to properly starting it on my own account. However, I will (quickly) finish No Man's Sky first. For one because I've managed to amass quite the fortune in-game already, which will see me through all the way to the Plat, and for two because I can auto-pop the PS5 version by bringing over my old save. I will do so once I have one Trophy 'til the Plat remaining, as a one-second-Plat wouldn't look or sound right. However, once both are in the bag, I have the rest of the month free for Persona.

Of course, those three games together only account for 99 Trophies; the remaining 28 I will need to get from some other title. I will do a quick boost to get at least three Far Cry 2 Trophies out of the way as well, and the rest will be filled by a combination of Hitman 2 and Yakuza 0, plus potentially Until Dawn and Wreckfest - provided the latter impresses me enough through gameplay footage once the PS5 version is out. I also still have 16 LEGO Star Wars 3 Trophies and a dozen in WipEout HD that need cleaning, and 20 in Jacob Jones on the Vita which I have yet to start. You'll see though that once I clean up Hitman 2 and No Man's Sky, I am now below 300 unearneds - another one of my goals and a huge achievement considering I was sat on 747 last August. I'd like to reach 249 at some point, just so I can say I took two-thirds off the total.

And for the final bits, I have a new rarest Trophy in the form of the ModNation Racers; Road Trip Plat (also my first sub 1.0 percent Trophy) for which I had to buy a second Vita for ad hoc purposes, and my average rarity went as low as 35.73% following the Yakuza 3 Platinum. That has since been pulled up to 35.82 thanks to the easiest NMS Trophies and the full list for VA-11 HALL-A, but I expect to record a new record before the month is over. Which will then again be brought up through Persona 5, but such is life sometimes. It'd be really cool to reach 34.XX one day, though!

I'm so happy to find another user on here that loves Persona! I can personally say that my first ever experience with the franchise was with Persona 5 via a few YT let's plays - and I utterly adore the entire concept around the series. I think the snappiness of P5 makes it's gameplay and turn-based combat an even faster feel and I know there are those who prefer the P4 cast, for me P5 is just a has bit better. I wish more games would try to experiment with the "social links" idea as it really does make you feel like you're personally going out of your way to get to know a character.

As an extra note - I love the unique quirk of tryna hit a specific trophy amount each month. It does make for a pleasing to look at plateau underneath your stats. It's fun to have strange achievements to go for apart from the usual milestones. For myself personally - it's to try and hit a platinum for every "level-up" milestone (got ruined thanks to the level changes but I'm trying again) as well as tryna ensure I play a minimum of 4 games each month so that by the end of the year I'm close to 50 and got a good amount of variety. Keep up the great work!

Heather342 · May 2, 2021

I'm glad you finally took the plunge with Persona 5. It really is a great game. When Sony announced the old digital store closures I went on the PS3 and picked up a copy of Persona 3 FES. I haven't got too far into it yet, but so far it's been pretty good. It would be pretty cool if Atlus did a remaster of this for the newer gen consoles, and with trophies too. Considering the remaster of SMT 3 Nocturne, I hope the older Persona games will get some re-releases

Golem25 · May 8, 2021

On 02/05/2021 at 3:36 AM, realm722 said:

I'm so happy to find another user on here that loves Persona! I can personally say that my first ever experience with the franchise was with Persona 5 via a few YT let's plays - and I utterly adore the entire concept around the series. I think the snappiness of P5 makes it's gameplay and turn-based combat an even faster feel and I know there are those who prefer the P4 cast, for me P5 is just a has bit better. I wish more games would try to experiment with the "social links" idea as it really does make you feel like you're personally going out of your way to get to know a character.

As an extra note - I love the unique quirk of tryna hit a specific trophy amount each month. It does make for a pleasing to look at plateau underneath your stats. It's fun to have strange achievements to go for apart from the usual milestones. For myself personally - it's to try and hit a platinum for every "level-up" milestone (got ruined thanks to the level changes but I'm trying again) as well as tryna ensure I play a minimum of 4 games each month so that by the end of the year I'm close to 50 and got a good amount of variety. Keep up the great work!

I was inspired to go for P4G due to the dearth of good games on Vita, in hindsight a really a good decision to have made - I still regularly play both the 'normal' OST and the versions of the songs that came with Dancing All Night. Snowflakes falling on your faaaaaace ?

Oh, and if I can find a EU copy / bite the bullet and get it digitally, I will be able to replay it in full for a second Platinum! I had 'One Who Has Proved Their Strength' for beating Margaret as one of my old level milestones, so I certainly feel your pain in that regard - but I simply started anew from level 365ish onwards. Tell you what, when I get the EU version of P4G, I should just use that region's Margaret Trophy for a level up.

On 02/05/2021 at 9:13 AM, Heather342 said:

I'm glad you finally took the plunge with Persona 5. It really is a great game. When Sony announced the old digital store closures I went on the PS3 and picked up a copy of Persona 3 FES. I haven't got too far into it yet, but so far it's been pretty good. It would be pretty cool if Atlus did a remaster of this for the newer gen consoles, and with trophies too. Considering the remaster of SMT 3 Nocturne, I hope the older Persona games will get some re-releases

I remember kind of wanting to buy a PSP and Persona 3 Portable back in the day (came with a cap of one of the characters, can't remember his name) but never did get around to it. Updated versions on PS4/PS5 or even PC would be wonderful - and with the 25th anniversary coming up, there's certainly a good excuse for them to be made/ported. Starting P5 on Tuesday when I finish off my Battlefield V via Plus Platinum (I swear that's the last game I sneak in before Persona now!).

Golem25 · June 1, 2021

Update 21

That's another month come and gone, so it's high time for a new update. Three new Plats added to the collection, although I should only really take credit for two;

Spoiler

Platinums #91 & 92 - No Man's Sky PS4 & PS5

Total Perspective Vortex (PS4 & PS5) - Platinum

PS4 - 245,767 Owners - 17,591 Achievers for a percentage of 7.16% (average completion; 26.73%)

PS5 - 7,154 Owners - 1,449 Achievers for a percentage of 20.25% (average completion; 31.05%)

Enjoyment; 8/10

Difficulty; 2/10

Trophies; 5/10 (unimaginative requirements, mostly just grinding, but all names are sci-fi references)

Procedural generation; 10/10

Full review here

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Platinum #93 - Battlefield V

World War Two Hero - Collect all other Battlefield V Trophies

136,597 Owners - 8,675 Achievers for a percentage of 6.35% (average completion; 29.23%)

Enjoyment; 6/10

Difficulty; 4/10

Trophies; 3/10 (60% multiplayer, one Trophy is luck-reliant and another tied to a removed mode)

Camping in Outpost; 10/10

Full review here

Yes, the joy of Playstation 4 > Playstation 5 autopopping! For the first time in thirteen years and 125+ games, I've utilized cross-platform features to unlock Trophies based on progress in another SKU. No Man's Sky lets you upload PS4 saves to the free PS5 upgrade, and then unlocks every Trophy you've previously earned by cross-referencing your in-game milestones - this was too good an offer for me to pass by last month.

I am feeling a little ambivalent about this; No Man's Sky is essentially 95% of the time a grind for the Plat rather than anything based on skill, so to do everything twice over would be a little counter-intuitive. However, all of my other 5000+ Trophies had been individually popped (even on games that support cross-play like Playstation All Stars Battle Royale, which I simply played twice) and NMS was a real break from that tradition. I'm not sure I will ever use this feature again, or at best judge it on a case by case basis, because it feels a little cheap despite being 100% perfectly legal from both Sony's and the PSNP leaderboard's perspective.

I'm still on my 127-Trophy-a-month streak, which is what kind of forced my hand in regards to NMS. There is only so much time in a month and there was a long, time-intensive project on my hands, besides Battlefield V which came free with PS Plus and was my third Plat of May. That project was Persona 5, which is easily a 100 hour game if you want to get the Platinum, and I'm very happy to report that I've only two misc. Trophies left that would each take five minutes to pop. I'm saving the Platinum itself for my #5500 milestone, which is due in August if I'm not mistaken.

P5 was a really joyful experience and a huge leap in QoL from Persona 4 Golden, if only because the latest in the series was on next-gen hardware. Dungeons are now carefully handcrafted rather than procedurally generated, the Tokyo overworld is massive compared to 4's Inaba, and gameplay has been streamlined to be even more newbie-friendly. The story was quite terrific too, as to be expected from a Persona game, but I think I still prefer 4. The main villain wasn't built up quite well enough for me, and while Tokyo is massive, the rural charm of Inaba made for a nicer setting. Also, the OST in P5 is about an 8/10 where P4G was as close to a 10/10 as you can get - but that's splitting hairs. Looking forward to unlocking the Plat when the time is right.

Roadmap & Statistics update;

My streak of hitting an arbitrary number of Trophies every month is still intact, and has now been carried to full term; nine months of 127 Trophies per page of the calendar starting in September 2020. It was rather tough this month, as even with an auto-popped list of 28 thanks to PS5 NMS, I still needed to plough through the abysmal Battlefield V and the ever-so-long Persona 5 to get to my quota. I had a really intense week of grinding on P5 in the third week of May, but in the end I finished with five or so days to spare. I used that opportunity to clean up some of Far Cry 2's online Trophies, as Ubisoft had given conflicting information about the servers for the game being torn down on June 1st (today). They are still up at the time of writing, and let's hope that's the way they stay - when I move house in August, I will be buying either one or two extra PS3's to self-boost my way to the Platinum.

Now let's take a quick look at my leaderboard rankings - I hit my high-water mark a week ago but should still be able to post an improvement on two counts over April;

61,710 in the world overall (up from 64,716th, target; top 100,000)
956th domestically overall (up from 1,005th, target; top 1,250)
86th domestically for Vita (no change, target; top 100)

I'm surprised to find no change on the Vita front considering most active owners currently just use it to crank out Ratalaika titles by the dozen, but I'll take it! The real big news here, though, is that I've cracked the domestic top 1000, which is pretty sweet. Goes to show how far you can get with a bit of dedication and perseverance, right? I've long neglected my targets to the point where top 100,000 and top 1,250 just look silly, so let's mix it up; I'm going for the top 55,000 worldwide and top 800 in the Netherlands (despite not having lived there for years). They aren't nice round numbers like 50K and 750, but this way they sure are a lot more attainable. I've gained tens of thousands of places over the past year and a half and can really tell from experience that the gaps between places are starting to get wider. So, with these new targets, hopefully I will be able to match them somewhere in 2022.

My average rarity has once again been jumping around in the past month; I finished April with an average of 35.82 and a record low of 35.73, and in May I finished with 35.79 with a record low of 35.71. Good, that's progress! I am keeping track of the rarities of a few dozen Trophies via an Excel sheet and can tell that a lot of the games on my list are quickly dipping in rarity. Trophies for Spec Ops The Line, for instance, have dropped by about 0.04 whereas Hitman 2 has seen the rarity dumped by 0.15 (which is just insane!). This means that even as I continue to accumulate new Trophies, the old ones will keep helping me lower my average. And I expect a very handy new record low in June, as I'm planning on popping Trophies in the following games;

Just Cause 4 (61)
Call of Juarez; The Cartel (51)
Yakuza 0 (16)
Far Cry 2 (1 or 2)
Hitman 2 (4)
Persona 5 (1)

Just Cause 4 (free with PS Plus, bought the expansions at discount) and CoJ (delisted PS3 game, two quid at a used game store) are locked in for a total of 112, so the other fifteen needed for my monthly quota will come from the other games. Once I've got those two 'new' games out of the way I will be focusing on Yakuza 0 as it's a time-sensitive game for me; I want its Plat as my #100, and as I am currently sitting on 93, I need to get it done before long. I've actually cleared all the roadblocks to the 100% in-game completion, but have one big challenge left in the Ultimate Battles, plus a playthrough on Legendary.

Hitman 2 has snuck into the above list with three Trophies, which I intend to use to pop hit my level 400 milestone later today; I've picked the Gold 'Sayonara' in honour of the Hokkaido level, which is my favourite in the series and honestly one of the best stages I've played in any game ever. Once I hit it, I will start Just Cause 4 post-haste; my Plus subscription is running out on the 16th and I don't want to renew until there is a good selection of monthly titles again (June is a horrible month for me). So, if I can get JC4 out of the way before I lose access, I won't have a need to resubscribe for at least a month again!

That's all from me for today, so go check out that sweet extended plateau on my Statistics page (which has obviously cratered again because new month lol) and stay cool as we move into the warmer months of the year!

Golem25 · July 1, 2021

Update 22

July already, can you believe it? This month flew by! Time for an update right a I head into what promises to be the most tumultuous period of my year.

June's Platinum Trophies

Spoiler

Platinum #94 - Just Cause 4

Rico was Here - Earn all Just Cause 4 Trophies

82,803 Owners - 7,238 Achievers for a percentage of 8.74% (average completion; 13.59%) (100% completed; 1.66%)

Enjoyment; 8/10

Difficulty; 4/10 (based on one stunt)

Trophies; 3/10 (622 collectibles hahah lmao)

Wishing I was back in Panau; 10/10

Full review here

Just the one? Just the one, yep. That's the lowest number of Plats I've gotten in a single calendar month since.... October, actually. Huh, thought it would have been longer ago.

Anyhow, we are still doing the 127 Trophies-a-month streak, an arbitrary number I reach every month for reasons only my OCD knows. In the last update, I gave a pool of games and Trophies from which I would be unlocking 127, with the predicted numbers in italics and the actual figure in bold;

Just Cause 4 (61) (61)
Call of Juarez; The Cartel (51) (48)
Yakuza 0 (16) (14)
Far Cry 2 (1 or 2) (2)
Hitman 2 (4) (2, including my level up milestone)
Persona 5 (1) (0)

That makes 127 alright, so my streak has survived for a tenth month now - the one year mark is in reach! That being said, it is becoming more and more of a drag, a straitjacket, and a burden all at the same time, so I am pretty confident that - if I reach January - I am saying goodbye to the streak. Another six months.... for a total of sixteen. That has to be some kind of Playstation record though, surely?

The streak is exactly why I only got one Platinum this month; I only need five more minutes in Call of Juarez to unlock that one, but I wanted to use my time this month optimally. Popping the Plat would have cost another three Trophies to the limit, but with a few days on my hands I decided to continue work on Yakuza 0 instead. I have it earmarked as my 100th Platinum, but that means that I need to have it poppable when the time comes. The past few days I've finished the story, gotten to 100% in-game completion, and cleaned up all but one misc Trophy (which would take just 10 seconds and is thus being kept for the milestone). Today I also laboured through the ever-awful Climax Battles, the traditional extra mode that painfully shows how inaccurate combat in these games can be. Ideally I will beat the final six battles (including the big Sera-in-Ultimate-2 roadblock) tomorrow to have my first July Trophy, but we'll see. I've little time tomorrow.

Not because of other games, but because I need to catch a train for a house viewing 70 miles down the road. I'm forced to move again due to work obligations, and both my stress levels and rent are increasing. Move-out date is July 31st, so I need to secure something before then - and get the 127 Trophies again. Yay.

Roadmap & Statistics update;

So, last month I adjusted my leaderboard targets. There was no way I would make good on them this month, but there is some progress;

60,468th in the world overall (up from 61,710th, target; top 55,000)
943rd domestically overall (up from 956th, target; top 800)
87th domestically for Vita (down from 86th, target; top 100)

Good progress in terms of the world ranking, absolutely minimal progress on the national ranking, and one place down for the Vita - a slide that will only continue for the foreseeable future. Starting to get confident in my ability to keep climbing the world leaderboard, but only 13 gained places in the national ranking for a full month's work is painful. The lack of a second Platinum really hurting me here, I guess.

Better news comes in the form of my average rarity stat; May finished with 35.79 after getting a record low of 35.71, and now at the end of June I've absolutely smashed it to get to 35.46. Can my dreams of reaching 34.XX become a reality yet?! The main contributing factor to this massive change is Just Cause 4, which has an abysmal completion percentage due to having been on PS Plus, but the Trophies from Call of Juarez, Yakuza, and Hitman all clocked in below my current average as well. I expect another massive drop to manifest itself in July, as Tropico 5 is another PS Plus game (with an even worse completion percentage than JC4 had) and Hitman 2 benefits from having given levels away for free, bringing in lots of players who barely touched most of its content.

Considerations about rarity aside, here's the pool from which I will be taking my 127 this month;

Tropico 5 (64*)
Hitman 2 (72)
Yakuza 0 (1 or 2)
Grand Theft Auto V (9)

Tropico 5 is new in the collection thanks to a cheap eBay copy of the Complete Edition (DLC on disc, hurray!), but because I let my PS Plus run out I will not be able to unlock the seven online Trophies included on its list of 71. Hence 64. Hitman 2 has more than enough to then get me to 127, but as if my worries aren't big enough already, I now also need to add in GTA V. Rockstar has - admittedly kindly - warned that the servers for the PS3 version are shutting down in December, and with nine unearned DLC Trophies I have some work to do. The plan is to get to 64 Trophies in July via Tropico ASAP, then to 118 via Hitman ASAP, and then to focus on GTA V. I might only get to eight out of nine, but with plans to buy two extra PS3s in August (after the move), that last Trophy I will be able to boost on my own.

And then my suffering still won't be over, because those extra PS3s are being bought to grind out Far Cry 2's awful online. Yeah, I am torturing myself, but more on that in the next update. Cheerio, and say a prayer for me having things go smoothly this month!

Golem25's Trinket Cave

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