The platinum trophy. This digital award proves to all other PlayStation gamers that you have completed a game (not counting DLC). It’s the ultimate reward for the time, effort, and sanity you put into a game. But sometimes you must pay a little more to get that coveted platinum trophy, like your life! I’m exaggerating a little bit, but there have been some platinum trophies that have made me feel the years slip away. So, to honour those lost years, my fellow contributor Iain and I have compiled a list of platinum trophies that brought us ever closer to the end.
Tom: I’m starting things off with a game that I actually rather enjoyed and still play to this day: Monster Hunter: World. This game about hunting monsters was fun, and the trophies weren’t bad either. Hunt 50 monsters, capture 50 monsters, craft some armour, all the usual stuff. All was going swimmingly until Mr RNG arrived. If you’ve gone for this platinum, you know that I’m talking about crown hunting. Each monster in the game comes in various sizes, with a gold crown awarded for hunting the smallest and the largest ones.
Seems pretty simple, right? That would be the case, except you have a baseline chance of 1% of encountering a monster of these sizes. You can boost that number up to 3% or 6%, but that’s still not a lot. And you have to do that for every monster. It’s a monumental grind that pushed the completion time from around 100 hours to well over 300. And then the Iceborne DLC has you do crown hunting on top of that (which is just excessive). But I’ll still probably go for it eventually to get that 100% completion back.
Iain: I made TLOU Remastered my 100th platinum trophy. I made the decision to go for it because it’s one of my favorite games of all time. In hindsight, although I love that I have it as a big milestone trophy, Dear Lord! By the end of this journey, I needed to take a break from any Last of Us content for an extended period.
Most of the trophies are fun, difficulty-based or collectible-based fare. Not too bad. However, it’s the multiplayer Factions trophies, “Hunter” and “Firefly,” which is its downfall. For both of those, you have to survive 12 weeks as each faction (1 match = 1 day). It’s not only “play 84 matches as a Firefly,” but you must also play well enough so your community survives. This is around 30 hours PER FACTION, 60 hours overall of the same repetitive sh*t while hoping you don’t get owned so much you have to start the whole 12 weeks from the beginning again!
FML, this was a slog. I’m never playing Factions again!
Tom: Sports games are notorious for having trophy lists filled with long grinds and stupidly hard challenges, and WWE 2K19 was no exception. I started this platinum journey with misplaced confidence, thinking I could smash it out easily. Oh, how wrong I was. Not only did I have to win 50 matches in the repetitive universe mode, but I also had to slog my way through the weirdly long career mode with a created superstar. Then I had to win 50 online matches with this created superstar, and by the time I went for this platinum, the only people I could match up with were people who had put in way more hours than I had. It didn’t help that most of them chose to create a super heavyweight wrestler (I picked the normal heavyweight), so I couldn’t even pick their characters up to slam them down. Add in the dodgy Australian internet that would disconnect randomly, and you can only imagine the pain.
And that’s not even mentioning the super difficult AJ Styles tower, where you had to win ten matches in a row on legend difficulty with one health bar, and if you lost once, you gotta try again from the start. Did I cheese this tower after one too many failed attempts? Yes. Do I feel bad about it? Hell no. Don’t go for a sports game platinum; they’re never worth it.
Iain: Damn you, Knitted Knight Trials! DAMN YOU!!!!
For the most part, Sackboy: A Big Adventure is a nice, chill kids’ game. And then it brings out THE RIPSNORTER. The Ripsnorter is a speed challenge and precision platformer in one. Think about The High Road relic challenge from Crash Bandicoot, and you’re halfway there. It’s worse than that level for two reasons. 1. It’s a ten-minute race as opposed to a one-minute thirteen-second target; and 2. You can only take damage once, and there is no way to regain health like Aku Aku masks.
This one took me a long time to achieve, yes, but it wasn’t the time to pop that sweet trophy that took years off my life. It was the number of times I was five or six minutes into a run when it died. Further, all those times, it died when I’d played so well up until the failure. I’m having flashbacks. I need to stop talking about it.
Tom: One of my recent platinum trophies and also one that made me question what I was doing with my life. Marvel’s Avengers was already an average game. It had a decent story with good graphics and gameplay that was fun for the 20-30 hours it took me to get through all the story content. I was feeling pretty good about this platinum, but then the grind started. Hours upon hours of repeating the same missions over and over again. Hoping that the specific missions I wanted would be playable on the day. Completing 30 missions on hard difficulty, reaching level 50 with five characters, completing 100 assignments, opening 50 chests (only specific ones that are only in one or two missions), and the grueling task of 50 hive missions.
Some missions could be completed within a couple of minutes, but the hives took at minimum 15 minutes for each run. And that’s if you do everything perfectly and don’t have a brain fart at the last minute, wasting your time and having to start again. These trophies added an additional 70 hours of repetitive gameplay that I could’ve done without and made the eventual deletion off my console all the more cathartic. If you’re interested in this game, just play through the story and don’t bother with the platinum; it’s not worth it.
Iain: I love The Witness. It’s intuitive, but challenging puzzles are so freaking great. They’re so inventive at times, too, using auditory cues from the environment to provide solutions to the puzzles from out of nowhere. There’s no tutorial to teach you how to solve each type of puzzle, and, despite this, everything is solvable with a bit of care and attention.
Until The Challenge.
The Challenge is a timed relay consisting of multiple puzzles you need to solve before “In The Hall of the Mountain King” by Grieg ends. There’s no guide you can use; no, no, no! The puzzles are randomized after each failure, so the difficulty remains intact for each attempt. Not only that, but “In The Hall of the Mountain King” is notoriously nerve-jangling. It affects your brain, causing anxiety and affecting your problem-solving abilities.
God damn, this trophy was hard to get, and I felt such elation when I finally popped it! It ruined that piece of music for me, though.
Platinum trophies are a cruel mistress. They provide that hit of dopamine that we all crave, and seeing that progress bar fill up to 100% is always satisfying. But maybe don’t bother with these games. It’s not worth shortening your life. Instead, keep it locked to Couch Soup to read more about how we’re stupid enough to go for these horrible platinum trophies.
Have you earned any of these platinum trophies? How many do you have? Is there a platinum that you regret? Let us know in the comments where we can talk all things trophies.
Ya’ll are nutty. Haha