Tough/Mean Achievements?

[Moonface]

I saw that the trophy lists for the Tomb Raider I-III Remastered trilogy got leaked so I took a look at them, and man I can't remember the last time I looked at the trophy list for a game and felt   while reading what some of the trophies require of the player:

Beat Tomb Raider III with only the pistols.
This just sounds painful unless the final boss can be beaten with glitches somehow. He takes five shots from the strongest gun in the game just to stun him and that has to be done at least four times before he becomes vulnerable, so I can't even imagine how many shots it takes with the pistols.

Finish Tomb Raider I in less than five hours.
Finish Tomb Raider II/III in less than six hours.
I've never been a big fan of speed run trophies, but all three of these sound really rough. The only thing that could make these significantly easier to manage is if glitches don't disqualify a run because the remasters have retained all of them and they're not hard to pull off even for a casual player.

Tomb Raider II - Beat Tibetan Foothills on foot.
This level is very centered around using a vehicle. I don't even know how challenging this is but it intimidates me because I've never once considered not using vehicles when they show up in Tomb Raider games.

Tomb Raider II - Prevent the monks from being killed.
This just sounds awful. There's a level in the game where monks are fighting against the enemy organization Lara is fighting, and only the bad guys have guns. Furthermore, Lara can lock on to anyone on either side so you can't just easily run in and gun down the bad guys, because a single shot on a monk will turn every single monk against you.


There's more I could probably list, but these are some that really stood out to me. Maybe most of them turn out to be easier than I think they will be, but until I try them they come off as pretty rough achievements to try and go for. I certainly can't recall another game that had this many achievements in it that made me strongly question whether to try going for 100% of them; most other games have like maybe one or two rough ones.

[Maniakkid25]

Speaking of speedrunning achievements, there's an achievement for beating RE4 on Professional in less than 5 hours, 30 minutes, with less than 15 saves (i.e. 1 per chapter clear).

And speaking from experience, there is Rock Band 2 with it's Bladder of Steel Achievement. To unlock this achievement, you have to play a special playlist that consists of every song on disc. This must be done without pausing, taking a minimum of 6 and a half hours! Also, if you ever fail out, you lose the progress you had. If you shut down the console, you lose the achievement progress. The only mercy the game gives that it does not track what difficulty you play on (which means if you play on Expert, like I did, you have no one to blame but yourself). I actually tried to go for this achievement with a party of two other players, and we failed out, like, 3 songs away from completion because the drummer couldn't handle it. No blaming him; he had to get through Battery and Panic Attack, two of the hardest songs in the game!

There is a single way to cheese this achievement. The songs don't automatically go on; you have to select the next song when ready. This means you CAN take those breaks, but they have to be between songs (the game doesn't keep track of idle time). Still, this is a BRUTAL achievement to go for, legitimately or otherwise.

[Moonface]

Speaking of speedrunning achievements, there's an achievement for beating RE4 on Professional in less than 5 hours, 30 minutes, with less than 15 saves (i.e. 1 per chapter clear).

Oof, yeah I forgot about this one. This might be one of the roughest speedrun achievements I've seen in a game; any other game I've played with a speedrun trophy doesn't lock it to a difficulty so you can usually just crank it down to the easiest, which only leaves traversing the levels as fast as possible as the only real challenge left present.

And speaking from experience, there is Rock Band 2 with it's Bladder of Steel Achievement. To unlock this achievement, you have to play a special playlist that consists of every song on disc. This must be done without pausing, taking a minimum of 6 and a half hours! Also, if you ever fail out, you lose the progress you had. If you shut down the console, you lose the achievement progress. The only mercy the game gives that it does not track what difficulty you play on (which means if you play on Expert, like I did, you have no one to blame but yourself). I actually tried to go for this achievement with a party of two other players, and we failed out, like, 3 songs away from completion because the drummer couldn't handle it. No blaming him; he had to get through Battery and Panic Attack, two of the hardest songs in the game!

There is a single way to cheese this achievement. The songs don't automatically go on; you have to select the next song when ready. This means you CAN take those breaks, but they have to be between songs (the game doesn't keep track of idle time). Still, this is a BRUTAL achievement to go for, legitimately or otherwise.

So if this was done on the easiest difficulty the game offers, would you say the hardest part of it is still the songs or does it really become more about the endurance of having to do all the songs in a single sitting even with breaks?

[Maniakkid25]

Endurance. Full stop. Six and a half hours of music is not a playground, even cranked down to Easy. You have to have a good solid amount of time to do this, and that's not guaranteed. Also, your console has to handle it, too. If the console locks up, overheats, or otherwise fails, you get to start all over. Yeah, nope, just the endurance is bad enough. And just to bust your balls, they brought a sequel to Rock Band 3, because screw you why not?

[Moonface]

When I read your reply yesterday it made me think of another game I'd seen years ago with an achievement that was hard to get because it hinges on your console not crashing from how long you have to spend in one sitting to get the achievement, but I couldn't remember it until now...

Fuel, which was released in 2009, has an achievement for driving from one side of the map to the other I believe. Achievement Hunter tried going for it way back in the day and 5/6 of the Xbox 360's running the game crashed at various points of the attempt (which clocked in at almost two hours), and I also think the one person who did make it to the destination didn't end up popping the achievement for some reason. XD

[Kyng]

I remember a game called "Piraka Attack", in which you were playing as one of Bionicle's villainous Piraka characters, trying to capture as many Matoran villagers as you could. There were 12 achievements in this game: 11 sensible ones, and a 'Secret' one. Many players - myself included - assumed that you'd have to do something seriously impressive to unlock this achievement - but no matter how well we did, we couldn't unlock it.

In the end, we discovered it was a 'Weakling' achievement: to earn it, you had to get a Game Over without capturing any Matoran.

Yeah... that was kinda amusing, but also a complete waste of everyone's time.

[ShiraNoMai]

There's something especially degrading getting a trophy for fucking up in a spectacular fashion. Might as well put the dunce cap on at that point.

I don't tend to go for achievements in games, so I don't particularly pay attention to them unless I get them without trying. That said, the ones here already posted seem brutal as hell enough

[Moonface]

This wasn't required for The Evil Within 2, but the first game had this utterly sadistic achievement:

You Asked For It - Finish the game on 悪夢(AKUMU) mode.

Akumu mode is a one-hit kill difficulty, and you will die to any form of damage no matter how minor, and even if it wasn't done by an enemy. I prefer when this sort of difficulty mode just exists without any bonus tied to it because there's no way most people would beat this let alone want to.

[Maniakkid25]

Speaking of difficulty achievements, Halo: The Master Chief Collection gives us one for Halo 2 that doubles as a speedrun achievement. Named after a speedrunner, Monopolized requires you to have a total completion time on Legendary difficulty of under 3 hours. Note the wording. I'll come back to this.

So, Legendary to begin with is no playground. It's not necessarily a meat grinder if you are any good at FPSes, but your abilities will be tried. Especially those freaking annoying Jackal snipers; they are just crawling around ready to aimbot your face. But completing that gauntlet in under 3 hours? Unless you're just that good, you're probably gonna have to learn actual speedrun strats and techniques to come in under this number. All for 30 gamerscore. Joy.

Now, there is a slight cheese to this. It doesn't require you to beat the whole game in one sitting in under 3 hours. Each mission of the game keeps a "best of" time for completion, and much like the Infinite Rocket Launcher in RE5, it only checks if your TOTAL time is under 3 hours. So, beat each individual chapter as fast as possible, and as long as your "best of" times add up to under 3 hours, you should get it. To put this in perspective, there are 15 missions in total. That's 8 12 minutes per mission (edit: math error. My bad). Good luck, sucka!

[Dragon Lord]

I don't know about individual achievements, but Star Ocean: The Last Hope is infamously known for having one of the most brutally grindy trophy/achievement lists in gaming due to the trophy/achievement for completing 100% of the Battle Trophies. This list will require 300-400 hours if you plan ahead and know what you're doing, or 500-600+ hours if you're doing it blind and have no idea what you're doing, or even longer if you really screw things up.

These battle trophies include things such as defeating 30,000 enemies with two different characters (and yes, the character needs to get the killing blow themselves), doing a specific amount of damage, healing for a specific amount, reviving dead allies with a character several hundred times, killing thousands of more enemies between the rest of the characters, getting over 1,000 item drops from character's special skills, recovering from each status effect over 100 times each and many, many more that require some of the most brutal grinding you'll find in a game.

I finished the platinum for the game in 2018 and it still remains by far the rarest trophy I have in my collection. My seven rarest trophies are actually from this game.

I look forward to doing it all again once I get around to the 4K Remaster on PS4.

[Moonface]

Speaking of difficulty achievements, Halo: The Master Chief Collection gives us one for Halo 2 that doubles as a speedrun achievement. Named after a speedrunner, Monopolized requires you to have a total completion time on Legendary difficulty of under 3 hours. Note the wording. I'll come back to this.

So, Legendary to begin with is no playground. It's not necessarily a meat grinder if you are any good at FPSes, but your abilities will be tried. Especially those freaking annoying Jackal snipers; they are just crawling around ready to aimbot your face. But completing that gauntlet in under 3 hours? Unless you're just that good, you're probably gonna have to learn actual speedrun strats and techniques to come in under this number. All for 30 gamerscore. Joy.

Now, there is a slight cheese to this. It doesn't require you to beat the whole game in one sitting in under 3 hours. Each mission of the game keeps a "best of" time for completion, and much like the Infinite Rocket Launcher in RE5, it only checks if your TOTAL time is under 3 hours. So, beat each individual chapter as fast as possible, and as long as your "best of" times add up to under 3 hours, you should get it. To put this in perspective, there are 15 missions in total. That's 8 minutes per mission. Good luck, sucka!

At least it doesn't require one sitting so even if you want to practice speedrun techniques to do this, you aren't putting your whole run at risk if you mess something up because you can just retry the segment. It'd be cool if there was a way the game could track who earned that achievement with and without speedrun strats because I'm curious how many people have done this just through sheer skill at the game playing as presumably intended.

I don't know about individual achievements, but Star Ocean: The Last Hope is infamously known for having one of the most brutally grindy trophy/achievement lists in gaming due to the trophy/achievement for completing 100% of the Battle Trophies. This list will require 300-400 hours if you plan ahead and know what you're doing, or 500-600+ hours if you're doing it blind and have no idea what you're doing, or even longer if you really screw things up.

These battle trophies include things such as defeating 30,000 enemies with two different characters (and yes, the character needs to get the killing blow themselves), doing a specific amount of damage, healing for a specific amount, reviving dead allies with a character several hundred times, killing thousands of more enemies between the rest of the characters, getting over 1,000 item drops from character's special skills, recovering from each status effect over 100 times each and many, many more that require some of the most brutal grinding you'll find in a game.

I finished the platinum for the game in 2018 and it still remains by far the rarest trophy I have in my collection. My seven rarest trophies are actually from this game.

I look forward to doing it all again once I get around to the 4K Remaster on PS4.

Dear lord that sounds horrible. I always thought the 10,000 Ranked Matchmaking Kills trophy for Resistance 2 was the roughest I'd seen involving a grind but now I'm not so sure. The one thing SO:TLH has going for it over R2 is the latter being an online trophy means you only had while the servers were up to get it. I played.....I don't even know how many hours of R2 unranked multiplayer and I'd often get 60+ kills a game and my unranked kills total never came close to touching 10k, and in ranked games the most kills you could get in a match is 10...


This one came to memory after bringing it up in another thread; Jak X has 10 trophies that involve unlocking items using in-game currency you earn from races/events, and it's impossible to unlock them all (legit) even if you fully complete Story Mode and then do it again on Hero Mode because you just won't earn enough currency. The only good way to get them is to buy everything in a category, pop the trophy, then grab a backup save file of your game from before you made those purchases so you can do it for the next category of items. If you're like me though, you didn't know to do this and spent everything until you ran out. My plan was to use the Custom Race/Event mode to just play a ton of battle mode to earn a huge amount of currency, only to discover that the PS3/PS4 version reduces the payout to zero if you change any of the settings, and the payout you get from leaving the settings as is is still vastly nerfed. It didn't do this in the PS2 version, which was why I was going to do this until I discovered first hand it had been changed.
My only choice now is to grind currency because I spent everything to use the backup save exploit, so those ten trophies are very easy but become very mean if you find out the hard way what the easy way is.

[Maniakkid25]

Dark Chronicle (aka Dark Cloud 2) has a re-release on PS4, and with it came trophies! And there are a few absolutely brutal ones.

Finny Frenzy First -- Okay, there's a bit to explain, here. So, in the game, you can fish, and then train and breed these fish to race in the Finny Frenzy. The Finny Frenzy has four classes, and to get the trophy, you have to beat the Master Class. How hard could this possibly be?! Well, let's put it in perspective: the BEGINNER CLASS requires you to have a fish with 15-20 in all stats if you want a hope of winning. The fish you catch have random stats that are usually in the single digits. The cap is 99. Your baits can increase these stats by one point per stat PER BAIT. Yeah, this is a game with a completionist time of over 100 hours, if you haven't guessed. Which brings me to...

Medalhead -- so, in each dungeon level, there are a set of challenges that you can do. If you complete one of those challenges, you get a medal. This trophy requires you to get ALL MEDALS in a single playthrough! Problem: there are over 120 levels in the game, each of which have a minimum of 3 challenges! You hate it, yet? It gets worse: if you complete Chapter 7 without collecting all the medals, that dungeon becomes inaccessible, and you have to START A NEW GAME! Oh, it still gets worse! See, some of the challenges require you to complete a floor with Monster Transformations, which is the singular most useless mechanic in the entire game! Speaking of!

What? Your Monster is Evolving -- Oh, god, the Monster Transformations! So, you unlock badges that allow Monica to transform into monsters by doing silly shit. It's not worth getting into. The point is that these transformations are ridiculously weak, and do not have the firepower to clear a dungeon floor FROM THE FIRST DUNGEON! See, the only way to increase their power is to level them up, and once you hit level 76, you unlock the final transformation of that badge, giving you the trophy. What's the problem, then? The transformation levels use the same xp system as your weapons! So, how does that work? It's hard to explain in a sentence, so allow me to give an example: at level 1, you need 100 xp to level up. At level 2, you require 100 xp to level up. After this level, you add 50% of the level 1 xp amount to that requirement EACH LEVEL, so at level 3, you require 150 xp, and then level 4 requires 200 xp, level 5 requires 250 xp and so on. And you need to reach level 76! Do you notice a logistical problem here?! You are dumping SO MUCH XP into this useless mechanic, and I haven't even mentioned that the transformations have a time limit! It sucks!

A True Visionary -- So, there's a mechanic in the game to invent new items. By taking 3 pictures, Max will get a hare-brained scheme to build some random object. You then gather the crafting materials, and you can build that object. So, the goal is to take pictures of as many things as possible, and start throwing shit together to see what sticks! Problem? Some of these invention ideas are PERMANENTLY MISSABLE, because they are tied to specific boss actions or missable environment items. Now, the game does show some mercy and only requires you INVENT everything possible, and not actually build it, but if you are not regularly referencing a guide, good luck!