Hardest PlayStation trophies

There is an entire section of the PlayStation community that dedicates themselves to collecting trophies. These little in-game achievements were modeled after Xbox’s achievement system, but with one key upgrade: the platinum trophy. Unlike an Xbox title, if you can manage to earn every trophy in a game, you also unlock the platinum. It’s proof that you’ve mastered the game and everything in it. The more platinum trophies you have, the higher your “gamer cred” is. It has reached the level where entire websites are dedicated to tracking and helping people earn as many platinums as possible.

Some games try and cater to this crowd by offering easy platinums that can be earned in minutes with no effort. To most, these don’t count as “real” platinums since anyone who buys the game can instantly earn them. Many people pride themselves on avoiding those games and focusing their platinum hunting on games with long or challenging ones as a badge of honor. However, there are some games that take things too far even for the most hardcore trophy hunters. Just one bad trophy can keep you from earning that coveted platinum, and these are the worst offenders. I’ve earned my fair share of platinums over the various generations, but these are ones I wouldn’t even attempt.

1 Mortal Kombat 9

My Kung Fu Is Stronger

Fighting games have terrible trophies across the board. I could have picked one of the recent Street Fighters or Injustice, but I’m giving the slot to Mortal Kombat 9. The trophy in question is My Kung Fu Is Stronger which has multiple requirements, but even just one of them would be enough to turn most people off from trying. You need to earn mastery with a character that requires you to win 100 matches, perform 100 Fatalities, land 150 X-Ray attacks, spill 10,000 pints of blood, and play that character for 24 hours. Oh, and it isn’t just one character you have to do that with. You need to master all 28 characters on the roster. That’s a grand total of — at a minimum — 2,800 wins, 2,800 Fatalities, 4,200 X-Ray moves, 280,000 pints of blood, and 672 hours of playtime. Yeah, thanks but no thanks MK9.

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2 Final Fantasy 9

Hail to the King

I know what you’re thinking, “Oh man, a JRPG. I bet it has some crazy grind or superboss.” You’re not wrong about the superboss in Final Fantasy 9, but even that is manageable with the right build. And as annoying as grinding trophies are, they can all be done eventually. They’re tedious, not exactly difficult.

Hail to the King has nothing to do with leveling up or collecting items, but jumping rope. Yes, jump rope. Either at the beginning of the game in disc one or way later in disc three, you have the chance to play jump rope with some kids in Alexandria. For this trophy you need to jump 1,000 times without failing. And it isn’t as simple as just getting the rhythm and pressing it on beat 1,000 times. No, that would be annoying enough, but FF9 wants to make you suffer. After 20, 30, 50, and 100 jumps the timing changes with no warning, and then at 200 it starts doing double jumps for 100 jumps. You need to be completely focused and sharp for over seven straight minutes of jumping to nail this trophy.

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3 Rock Band 2

Bladder of Steel Award

There’s a lot I will put up with to get a trophy, but putting my body in actual danger isn’t one of them. Unless you have a team ready to tackle this trophy, I think it should come with a health warning because it goes beyond your guitar playing abilities. The Bladder of Steel Award is earned by beating the Endless Setlist 2 without pausing the game or failing at any point. If you’re unaware, the Endless Setlist 2 in Rock Band 2 takes approximately 6 hours and 15 minutes to complete. Without pausing, that’s an entire day with no time to eat or use the restroom (hence the name). And, you know, you have to actually beat all the songs too. If you are crazy enough to go for this, make sure your controllers are charged — and it isn’t going to rain — because if anything interrupts the game for any reason, you’ll have to start from scratch.

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Emperor!

MMORPGs are meant to suck players into a world and never let them go, but Elder Scrolls Online takes things way too far. Any modern MMO with trophies are too much even for people who play that game and nothing else. Between the classes, characters, and raids, most trophies require hundreds or thousands of hours to get. The king, or emperor, of all these terrible MMO trophies is Emperor! Becoming an Emperor in ESO is almost as hard as becoming one in real life and it all comes down to two things.

First, your alliance needs to control all six keeps around the Imperial City at the same time as you’re the highest-ranked player in that alliance. The first part isn’t easy, but the second is almost impossible. Only one player can be the top-ranked at any time for that alliance. So, not only do you need your entire faction to be coordinated enough to control all the keeps, but you have to personally play and grind more than anyone else to reach the top of the leaderboard when it happens.

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5 Crypt of the Necrodancer

Lowest of the Low

While there’s always room to argue about what the absolute hardest trophy is, the Lowest of the Low trophy is almost impossible to argue against. This trophy is so difficult that on PSN Profiles, a site made by and for trophy hunters to track trophies, only 23 people in the world have ever managed to get it. So why is this considered the toughest trophy ever made? Well, to start, Crypt of the Necrodancer is a roguelike that moves based on the music’s beat. So not only is everything random, but you need to move, attack, and dodge based on the rhythm of the level. For this specific trophy you need to beat a run where you beat the game in a single shot with all nine characters in a row without dying or picking up any items or using shrines to heal. That keeps your character at their weakest point with no way to heal, get new items or abilities, or anything to help your run. That basically means you need to play flawlessly in a random game for about two or three hours to do it with each character. Good luck.

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