PlayStation 4 Trophies that take some serious planning

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Trophy hunting can be extremely demanding of your time. Here are 5 PlayStation 4 Trophies that some take serious planning and are extremely hard to earn.

Whether a serious or casual gamer, there always seems to be some sort of satisfaction when seeing the notification and accompanying “ping” in the top left corner of your screen announcing you have just received your next PlayStation 4 Trophy. These trophies, like most gaming platforms, vary in categories and worth, all amounting to a total summary of ego or shame depending on how seriously you decide to take them.

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But what about all the PlayStation 4 trophies that don’t conveniently pass you by in a congratulatory way for just simply playing the game? Some of these rewards aren’t even per say the most difficult to accomplish. But there are definitely more than a few we have come across that resulted in some serious thinking, planning, and maybe even a bunch of self-made notes or accompanying walk-throughs to achieve. However, it isn’t just about collecting them, effective planning has a role all in itself. No one wants to end up replaying a game to the point where your PlayStation controller actually starts to face the risk of an early retirement by attempting a short lesson in flying across the room.

Here are 5 PlayStation 4 Trophies that required a lot of brain-power and some serious planning to achieve.

Yharnam, Pthumerian Queen – Bloodborne (FromSoftware, Inc.)

It’s no secret that FromSoftware’s games are already a challenge on their own. But what makes this Gold PlayStation 4 Trophy a particular challenge is everything you have to do to reach the Boss in question. Namely, the Pthumerian Queen, waiting ever patiently with her duplication tricks and blood splatter weapons to teach you a new lesson in the meaning of a Boss Fight.

Taking into consideration that there is no save system in the game other than starting you off exactly where you left off last, there is little space for error in gathering the right ingredients, tools, gestures, chalice cups, and even explore hidden optional areas before accidentally moving past a point of no return. This is all part of the main campaign, however, but you won’t be finding the Pthumerian Queen anywhere here apart from the occasional glimpse. After gathering all you must in the story part of the game without missing something, or a replay will be in order, you then need to start creating Chalice Dungeons, if you haven’t already. These Chalice Dungeons, as the name would suggest, is the dungeon crawling segment of Bloodborne.

Naturally, there are twenty-five story Chalice Dungeons and the Pthumerian Queen is waiting for you as the very last boss, in the very last dungeon. But why the last boss in the last dungeon you may ask? Well, each dungeon has three depths, and each depth has its own boss waiting for you somewhere in the maze of its Lovecraftian themed layer. So three layers, three bosses, one Chalice Dungeon complete, right? Not necessarily. Let’s hope you’ve covered every corner and occasional treasure room to require the right amount of materials and Blood Echoes, the game’s one and only currency and experience points all rolled into one, to create the next dungeon. What you might not have realised, is that this trophy can actually become much more achievable, while remaining as sane as Lovecraft will allow, with some detailed pre-planning.

By pre-planning the Chalice cups, ingredients, tools, and maybe even the required Blood Echoes for both currency and appropriate levelling, not only is it possible to play the main campaign once, but you can bring down the number of Chalice Dungeons you have to do to about ten in total. This planning might sound tiring already, but it was well worth the trade to finally run through Bloodborne looking like you have some direction as well as finally hearing that Gold PlayStation 4 Trophy “ping”. Of course, that was when we weren’t running in the opposite direction to retrieve our lost Blood Echoes after dying a couple, or maybe more, times.

Sister of Mercy – Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition (Larian Studios)

Although Larian Studios have been releasing games since 1998, their game Divinity: Original Sin, released in 2014, became their breakthrough success after becoming their fastest selling game. Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition released a year later on the PlayStation 4, and on more platforms, gives us PlayStation 4 gamers a crack at the game and its extensive trophy list. While we might be more forgiving when you accidentally miss a trophy, teaching your new Southern speaking party companion, Madora, forgiveness is a whole other type of challenge.

Forgiveness is what this whole, sadly only Bronze PlayStation 4 trophy, is all about. What you may not have realised though, is that this trophy is far from forgiving, and you’ll be keeping your planning either next to you or continuously active in your mind till quite far into this quite vast and long adventure world known as Rivellon. The trick is to complete Madora’s companion quest; “Revenge of the Source Hunter” with a peaceful resolution, and the only way to achieve this is to show Madora that mercy is a good quality to have by how you treat her, situations, and even how you manage your own two Source Hunters.

You start your adventure off by creating two characters, the renowned Source Hunters, sent in to hunt, well, anyone who uses evil magic known as Source. But in true role-playing, turned-based gaming, half the battle already begins with this character creation, as it involves choosing a class for each, their abilities, attributes, skills, and talents. However, not soon after setting foot on the beaches of Cyseal, the first area of the game, do you learn that both your characters also require Traits. Traits work parallel to each other, granting statistical bonuses dependant on how each character has individually reacted to a scenario through various dialogue options.

All right, that’s great and all, but why am I telling you about character creation and Traits if the trophy is to teach Madora about forgiveness? Good question actually. Well, you’ll need both your characters to have the Forgiving Trait over the Vindictive Trait, and seeing as traits can change throughout the game simply from a-not-always-so-clear-dialog-option, your first part of planning would be to see which dialogues actually affect this particular Trait, when they occur, and what option each character would have to choose to sound as sweet and sincere as possible.

The next step of planning is your actual conversations with Madora. These trigger after certain events, and you hope you have ensured that she is the companion accompanying you when these event conversations occur. This is because there are four story related companions, each with their own quest, but you can only have two accompanying your Source Hunters at any given time. You will also need to double-check how to respond to these in the most appropriate way as, once again, the dialogue options in teaching forgiveness are hazy at best.

Let us just admit here, that everyone’s opinions about what sounds more sincere don’t always align, and we certainly would not have guessed sarcasm falls in this category. Who would have guessed that telling Madora to “keep her crackpot commentary” to herself would teach her to be merciful, right? Regardless, if all your preplanned work has been in order and Madora doesn’t end up killing Norak in her quest for revenge, then congratulations, you have officially earned one of the most complicated Bronze PlayStation 4 trophies we have attempted to date.

Trial of the Fool – Dragon Age: Inquisition, Trespasser DLC (BioWare)

The name of this trophy, “Trial of the Fool”, says it all really. It’s one of those trophies where you’ll have to be a special kind of determined to achieve them. What many may not realise, if you haven’t played Dragon Age: Inquisition before, is that there isn’t really a way you will be able to achieve this trophy without planning it out beforehand. Either that or you must have the type of luck that any politician can only dream of during the election season. Not to mention if you happened to play the game before the Trespasser DLC released, or started playing the game in a more natural way with his Trial activated, you’ll have to restart or create a new character just to stand a chance of gaining this real trial in trophy achievements.

The first step starts in character creation, where you’ll need to activate the appropriate Trial. These Trials are a feature that comes with the Trespasser DLC, and are also the category under which this shockingly hard Bronze Trophy falls. These Trials are challenges that adjust various mechanics in the game that either strengthen enemies, weaken your own party, and just generally make things harder for you, like your own companions disliking you even more when disagreeing with you. Fun, right? So, if this is your cup of tea and you want to give this trophy a go, you’ll want to activate the Trial “Take It Slow” which allows you and your party to gain experience (exp) at half the normal rate. Note that this doesn’t apply to enemies who are all still at the same level scaling as before for their given areas. Another thing to take note of is that you cannot deactivate this Trial at any time during your play-through, or at least until you’ve achieved the trophy, or it will not count any more.

The trophy is more specific though, as it doesn’t just ask you to have the Trial activated but to “reach Skyhold at level 5 or less”. Skyhold, which has a recommended level of 10 and up, is the second home-base your character will reach by following the story, the first being Haven. The exp trick comes in knowing what to interact with and what not to, in order to progress the story enough at this point without gaining too many levels. Surprisingly, its very easy to actually surpass levels by fighting, progressing the story and even reading documents, known as a Codex. This leads to a difficult path of only gaining exp to progress the story and knowing exactly what to interact with and what to leave far behind to only linger in the frustrated mind of an OCD completionist-type gamer. Battles can even result in you having to kill only specifics in a group to progress and then hot-heeling it out of there leaving the rest of the enemy group running after you in FOMO confusion.

Let us just also remind you that even though you might have all this planning down to a T, that the other challenge of this trophy run is that the enemies will not scale for your convenience. For example, one of the main story quests you’ll be doing has a recommended level of 8 to 11, and the enemies will be around this level too, regardless of your level 4 party running and flailing around like a poor fish out of water. Not to mention our prior tip of actually not killing all enemies, but only story related ones. In other words, don’t be too ashamed running around in circles with an angry mob behind you in order to occasionally hit the intended enemy. Also, don’t be too ashamed to repeat these over and over, provided you made save slots at the right points and have the patience and control over your anger like a graceful Ballerina in painful point-shoes. Master all of this, and you can know proudly say you’ve accomplished an achievement that even by the game’s standards, is one for fools.

All Endings – Heavy Rain (Quantic Dream)

Wait, this must be a mistake? Why have we added an Interactive Movie Game to our list? Surely the trophies in a game based on the players’ choices cannot be that difficult to achieve, right? Well, in all honesty they aren’t, but the key to this Gold PlayStation 4 Trophy has more to do with efficiency and saving time rather than difficulty. These types of games, Heavy Rain included, rely on narrative forks based on the players’ choices, some choices having more severe consequences than others. This leads to many of these types of games either having two or multiple endings. The trophy in question here, requires you to “See all endings”. Great, shouldn’t be too hard, let’s get started! Oh wait, it is on this list, must be some kind of catch then? Right you are! Let us explain.

Heavy Rain actually has a total of seventeen endings, each grouped between the four main characters. The good news is you can team endings together to have four completed at a time. However, these endings divided between characters aren’t per say divided evenly, or you would only have to group the endings correctly together in a total of five play-throughs to reach all seventeen endings. Sneakily enough, one of the main protagonists nabbed seven different endings all for themselves. This means that the trophy will require you to see seven endings, if grouped and planned correctly. By grouped, we mean teaming appropriate endings for each character together efficiently, seeing as all might not jam well together but, also requiring the least number of chapter replay when your endings are stacked on each other. This being because chapters can be replayed once the game has been played through once. You can then choose any chapter to start changing your decisions, so you’ll want to plan stacking them. It’s either this or seven complete play-throughs from beginning to end. If that sounds appealing to you, good for you for dedicating so many hours to this great game. However, we’re talking about the planning to reach this trophy in a short and sweet manner.

So, in the end your planning will firstly consist of grouping the seventeen various character endings together so you’ll only have to reach seven endings instead of more. The second part will be planning out your stackable chapters to where you can play less and less with each play-through so you can save yourself from complete runs. Hopefully with this planning you’ll also factor in chapter specific trophies, as not all are just choice based, and you can save yourself individual chapter clean-up-runs after having achieved all seven endings. The point here is that without this type of planning, it may just take you a frustratingly long time playing through the game and hoping that this time round you might have achieved a new ending. We definitely will not judge you for having a sneak peak at at ending trophy guide or walk-through if you are planning to make this trophy part of your PlayStation 4 trophy list. We certainly did.

PULITZER – Outlast (Red Barrels Inc.)

Bring on the jump-scares, as the last game on our trophy-hunting planning list is none other than the first-person survival horror Outlast. Surely we shouldn’t have to think of any more in this game than actually trying to stay alive while simultaneously not trying to yelp like a small puppy. But alas, the Gold PlayStation 4 Trophy PULITZER will need you to put on your brave face and brain into over-gear as it requires you to “Collect all documents and complete all recordings”. Documents being written collectables, of which there are thirty-one, and recordings which are quite different to just picking up an item in-game. Recordings are moments you as the player-character, Miles Upshur, record with your camcorder to unlock Notes, Miles’ thoughts on his current situation, there being thirty-one as well.

Even if you are a fan of horror games and decide to run for this trophy, we understand that you wouldn’t necessarily want to spend an eternity running and hiding in circles, as you can not fight in this game, just to find that areas one or more documents or recordings while something is either trying to scare you to death or is actually killing you. The problem is as a linear narrative-based game, there are many points of no return you’ll reach that moves the game along to the next section, and if you accidentally trigger one of these before you have collected that area’s collectables you’ll have to redo that part in either a game or chapter specific replay that only unlocks when you have completed the game once. It is also easier to miss a recording than finding a document, as you’ll need to know when to hide and what to record to unlock a Note. Due to the genre and nature of how this game plays, it might be a little bit more clear as to why we suggest some serious planning to find all sixty- two collectables.

The planning is all in knowing where to run and hide to collect the documents and recordings in a way so you won’t die repeatedly or accidentally move the story along to a point where you can’t go back, at least not in this current run. We know for certain we were proud to survive this game once, we’re not so sure if we can do it again with our poor nerves. However, lets not forget that if you are planning on collecting all trophies for this game, that you’ll have to complete the game on the Insane mode difficulty setting for the Gold PlayStation Trophy LUNATIC, meaning that if you die once you’ll have to start from the very beginning. Even more reason to know where all those collectables are, right?

Where they worth it?

We’ll leave you to decide on that, it all depends on whether or not you actually want to have a go at one of these trophies that takes some serious planning or not. But at least you have been warned. All we can say now is good luck and we hope you now have a shorter journey to that long awaited PlayStation 4 Platinum trophy, if that might be the plan.

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