Topic: The Trophy Discussion Thread

@CaptD I’ve never been into card deck builder games, but I did try Slay the Spire, on the back of its praise I’d been hearing. It was decently fun and if I didn’t have a large backlog of games to pull me away then I would have spent more time with it. But as it turned out, I just played it for a few hours and then drifted away from it.

These card games can be addictive though, so if it clicks with you it might keep you engaged for 100 hours.

I definitely want to try Inscryption though because it has some mysterious and weird vibe to it. Also might try Midnight Suns if it dropped onto PS+

@Th3solution Yes midnight night suns looks good, I'm sure it will drop on PS+ (Extra at least) at some point.

@sorteddan @Th3solution @CaptD

Thank you folks (well not you Sol). Funnily enough, Inscryption and Midnight Suns are the two games I've played in the genre and enjoyed them both.

Inscrpytion is weird and part of it is not knowing what is going on and how the story reveals itself and how the game changes with this (I'm also being vague as it's best experienced for yourself). The first part of the game is designed to be failed multiple times to give you chance to reveal things so not to get too disheartened! The "Kaycees Mod" part is DLC where you replay part of the game but with more specific starter hands and unlock difficulty modifiers as you complete runs.

Midnight Suns is cool as it has some XCOM elements to it and lots of little things that makes building and improving your deck really fun. It also has a good central story and an interesting mix of well and lesser known characters in the Marvel Universe. I took a punt on it and had real fun.

I haven't played Slay the Spire though and feel I probably should seeing as it seems to be the gold standard for the genre. I seem to remember it being as PS+ game at some point so probably have it in my library.

I got the platinum in Yakuza 4 Remastered. Relatively easy trophy list for a Yakuza game without much completion of minigames etc. required but you do have to play it three times and that is unacceptable. Anyway, I did it.

@johncalmc You the man!

I got everything I could on one play through; what was it that required three runs?

@Thrillho There's a trophy for beating the game on Normal and a trophy for beating the game on Legend difficulty. Legend difficulty only unlocks by beating the game on Hard. So you have to beat Normal, then Hard to unlock Legend, and then Legend for the last trophy. It's poor.

@johncalmc Great stuff, well done. I take it there isn't any dancing mini game in this one then?!

@johncalmc A very weird decision to make Legend more unlockable that way when literally no other game in the series does.

Ping ... Callisto Protocol
What a disappointment, it's like the Devs said "how can we make this different from Dead Space" when people were expecting (Yeah expectations) a spiritual successor which was certainly implied by the early trailers.
Felt more like Evil Within than Dead Space, Combat was boring , bosses were terrible with one hit kill mechanics , constant rushing at you when it takes 10 seconds to heal. Dead space had these features but statis prevented it being an issue...no such mechanic here.
However the game does have great atmosphere although you do get sick of vent shafts...I really do know what a TV dinner feels like.
Terrible waste really and it seemed very little thought went into the combat mechanics, perhaps they changed late into development.
It is definitely worth playing if you are a sci fi buff, if you do though just be aware that there is a strange bug which may load an incorrect save on restart and show you an incomplete set of saves. I panicked when it set me back 4 chapters and lost an entire day of saves, it only showed 4 saves when there are probably 20+ (it auto saves all the time and keeps quite a few, clearly very paranoid ). I suspect this might be a threading issue with their FILE system that they implemented (probably to minimise the stuttering that plagues the PC version), I say this because it might be down to me starting the game before it has finished initialising...so basically give it a few seconds after startup. Just a thought and I'm probably wrong. If this occurs to you then simply restart.

Anyhoo 3/10 difficulty if you play on easy (which isn't easy) and then NG+ on hard. This was quite fun this way because in NG+ I had so much money I just shot or slammed everything.
Time 20 hours. Enjoyment 6.5/10 (I'm not upset, I'm just disappointed).

Thank goodness we got a Dead Space remake.

@CaptD Nice work. I've never played Dead Space but quite liked the look of CP so plunged in day 1. The atmosphere of those first few levels I thought they'd nailed and you can see all the work they did on the graphical side of things paid off. It's not long though before those issues with the combat start creeping in and it just gets very old very quickly. The lack of variety and the issues fighting mobs really grated on me towards the end, I was really glad to finish it.

Back when I played it there was no NG+ and I wasn't relishing a second playthrough on a harder difficulty but luckily as I had the disk version I was able to load a save just before the credits rolled and switch the difficulty to pop that last trophy as there's no way I'd have got the platinum for it. Real shame though as I was hoping for a lot more but hopefully when I get around to playing Dead Space I'll see how good a game of this type can be 😄

@Thrillho @johncalmc Congrats on your platinum trophies too.

@Thrillho It's a dreadful decision. I like the trophy lists like the one in Yakuza 4 generally, because it doesn't get too silly into the mini-games. It's not like you need to 100% everything, and beat Virtua Fighter with every character in the arcade, and because the shogi master etc. Some of the trophy lists have stuff like that and it's such a slog. But they do ruin this trophy list with the three playthroughs. Still, it's over now.

On to Yakuza 5 which is the one I've been dreading.

@johncalmc
Congrats on your arduous and we'll earned Shiny!

@CaptD
And good stuff to you too. Sorry to hear about its disappointment but 6.5/10 enjoyment is not too bad. I've been on the fence about whether to start it up or save it for later, I'm guessing probably later. And thanks for the NG+ info, was 20 hours for both playthroughs then?

Cheers peeps.
@sorteddan Yeah about 20 for both. The good thing about ng+ is that the collectibles (amongst other stuff) carry over so you can do a blind playthrough and then on ng+ you can look at the collectibles on a chapter by chapter basis and see which, if any, that you missed.
I did a blind playthrough on NG although I did look at the best upgrades to invest in as everything is so expensive and I didn't want to waste.

@johncalmc Good luck with Y5! I only have the plats for Y6 and LaD as there’s no legend mode shenanigans or 100% completion list nonsense.

Dead nation. Only took me 9 and a half years, love this game but thought I would never platinum it.
Enjoyment 9/10 Difficulty 5/10 and about 40 hours.
I hope Housemarque don't forget these smallish games, however it does seem that this one has already been forgotten as it crashes at the end of every level on PS5 so I played on PS4.

Riders republic. Another throughly enjoyable game, it feels like Ubi almost have the gameplay loop nailed, the handling was great, the choice of events and even multiplayer was mostly good. Just hope that the series continues especially as SSX isn't going to happen.
Enjoyment 9/10 Difficulty 3/10. Not sure how long probably 30 hours but I still have loads of events that I never even tried so I shall return every so often.

#37 Sea of Stars. Definitely took me way longer than expected at 55 hours (1.5 playthroughs).

Not entirely sure where I come down on it.
It had the common problem a lot of games have where the middle just drags on for far too long (padding?). It would’ve been perfect had it been 10 hours shorter. At times I thought it was ‘ok’ & then there were moments I thought that this was a modern ‘masterpiece’.
It probably helps that the beginning & especially the end-end are very strong. Felt very wholesome & rewarding.

As for the platinum it’s very straight forward. Just collect & do everything in the game as well as best 10 bosses on hard mode.
Wish the in-game log was a bit better. It’s just the trophy list with some stat tracking, but it didn’t really go far enough to be of any help.
There’s also a Parrot that indicates whether or not you have treasures/secrets left to find in an area, but again they didn’t take it far enough. You’d get 1-3 at a time if you cycle through, but once you’ve collected the item you’d have to leave the area again to check if there’s anything left there.
They had the right idea with QOL features in the game & hope they expand on it.

Forgot to post, got this on Saturday:

#50 - Assassin's Creed Mirage
Liked this one a lot. The focus on stealth made it quite satisfying when I'd pull off a mission undetected.
It's short for an AC game (took me 30-ish hours to plat but I'm sure it can be done quicker, I was taking the scenic route a lot of the time) - I think the middle ground between this and Odyssey/Valhalla would be perfect for the series going forward.
As a side note - the game is quite polished, looks good at 60 fps with very few frame drops and I only encountered one minor bug which made me have to allow the guards to kill me to get unstuck.

@Fight_Teza_Fight You can actually access the map (and by extension, the parrot) from the menu without leaving a location. I figured it out way too late

@CaptD Nice work on both those plats. I've loved every Housemarque game I've played so far, but admittedly haven't played them all. Dead Nation had a good pace to it, and a good selection of weapons for when the action got hot. Like you say it would be great if they could come up with the odd smaller arcade title whilst working on something larger like Returnal. I think it's something they do really well and have managed to take that gameplay style into the AAA gaming space.

@Fight_Teza_Fight @Voltan Nice work you guys as well. Looking forward to playing both of those titles at some point. I like that Mirage sounds smaller and more focused as that's about the right length of game for me at the moment.

@render Thanks!
@Voltan oh I see. Would’ve been helpful😅.
Pretty excited to get to AC Mirage, but I play the series at my own pace (1 every 18months or so). Not missed one yet. I do wonder whether we’ll get into AC remake territory soon.

#45 - Enter The Gungeon

One of the very best roguelites out there, even if the last trophy took me absolutely ages. Really need Isaac on PS5 solely for trophy support now I think about it.