I succeeded in getting my 25th platinum trophy this morning: the brutal Bloodborne, a game I formerly abandoned, deeming it way too difficult. But after returning, I discovered just what a brilliant masterpiece it truly was. The lore, the visuals, the gameplay: utter remarkable. And getting that platinum required some serious time and dedication. But was it the hardest of all my platinums?
25 is an impressive number, I might say, and I can genuinely recall getting each and every one of them. However, with two being My Name Is Mayo, suffice to say they were not all significantly difficult. I thought I’d run through them all looking at which was the most grueling. To start, here are the 25 in alphabetical order.
- Bloodborne
- Borderlands
- Color Guardians
- Far Cry Primal
- Guacamelee!
- Horizon: Zero Dawn
- Lego: The Hobbit
- Lego: The Lord Of The Rings
- Lego: Marvel Super Heroes
- Lego: Pirates Of The Caribbean
- My Name Is Mayo (PS4 & Vita)
- Resident Evil 5
- Resogun
- Rocket League
- Tales From The Borderlands
- Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD
- Uncharted
- Uncharted 2
- Uncharted 3
- Uncharted 4
- Uncharted: The Lost Legacy
- Walking Dead, The: Season One
- Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward
- Zero Time Dilemma
The easiest would clearly be the absurd game about hitting a mayo jar. Next to that would be both the Telltale games: The Walking Dead and Borderlands as simply beating the game rewarded me with the plat. Similarly, the two Zero Nonary Games platinums benefited from some guide help, but neither required any actual dexterity.
Most of the Lego games are rather straightforward. Though some had challenging sections, they reside low on this list. Now we’ve covered 10 of the 25. The open-world games like Horizon and Far Cry Primal were both fun checklists of tasks. Rocket League was similar – not difficult, just time consuming and it was made easier when they changed the requirements for one of the trophies. THPSHD was a tough one, as I got stuck on that final trophy for years. Four-and-a-half to be specific. But a glitch (Robomodo + glitch = surprise!?!) allowed me to achieve it with utter ease. Color Guardians had some really tough segments but glitches worked against me here: I had to re-do entire stages, acing them repeatedly to get the trophy to pop. Live by the glitch and die by the glitch!
Now at 15, we have 10 left and things are getting a bit more difficult. Half of those are Uncharted games and not all were particularly challenging. The latest one had so many save points and auto-locking whereas the first had three specific, crushing sections on the highest difficulty. Oh what a nightmare those were!
Guacamelee! required some major start-over sections – repeatedly dying and retrying and dying again. Resident Evil 5’s professional difficulty was particularly trying. However, doing so in co-op really alleviated the challenge. That stupid troll segment was just annoying as hell though and almost made me quit that attempt.
Now I’m left with Bloodborne, Resogun and Borderlands. The latter took me over two years to finish, but with some high-level friends, it wasn’t all too brutal. Resogun was a solid challenge and the PSN says only 3.1% of players actually platinumed it. Bloodborne on the other hand shows 7.3%, a surprisingly-high figure. Now that we’re tossing figures out, Uncharted 3 and 4 are listed at 1.3% and 0.8% – Wat? o_0 Anyhow, back to things, while Resogun was indeed a chore, it was manageable in short spurts. Bloodborne on the other hand was an incessant trial of repetition, memorization and perfection.
The boss fights were maniacal: Blood-Starved Beast, Martyr Logarius, Rom the Annoying-As-Shit Spider, that Watchdog Of The Old Lords and that damn Pthumerian Descendant…the list goes on. That whole Defiled Chalice Dungeon (aka the ‘you inexplicably have only 50% of your normal health, good luck!’ dungeon) was brutal. Then I had to fight Rom again. And Blood-Starved Beast. Holy shit, some of these guys I was stuck on for days. I genuinely disliked myself during those days.
So, higher percentage or not, (PSNProfiles shows 23.8% got this platinum) I don’t care. This was a marathon trophy that beat me down repeatedly and this doesn’t mention just how bloody hard those opening hours were. And by hours, I really mean like 30 minutes, because I died 47 times just learning how the game worked. Brutal, I tell you! And so after looking at its two dozen platinum competitors, I really have no qualm in claiming that Bloodborne was my hardest platinum. It was my most rewarding and in some ways the most fun. It wasn’t without issues, of course, but they were worth overcoming to achieve the pinnacle of Playstation gaming.
Oh, and I tossed up some BB images from the latter parts of the game, for anyone interested.
