Topic: The Trophy Discussion Thread

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Some of you may have seen that I made a comment on @Quintumply’s Going Platinum No. 5 - The Sexy Brutale article over the weekend. I won’t go into what I said but if you saw it, you’d be forgiven for assuming that this soon to be article-length post is somewhat in response to that. You’ll have to take my word for it that it isn’t, as I’ve been grumbling about this particular subject in party chat for the last few months. I believe the consistent threat that I posed was, that I’ll be writing a strongly-worded appraisal of this particular platinum on Push Square once it’s done… if it’s ever done! Well, it isn’t actually done yet in all fairness… as I still have one single player trophy leftover but the back of it was well and truly broken today. So much so, that even though I popped three other plats this morning to start the year off with a… well a pop I suppose, it was the completion of all multiplayer trophies on this particular game today that provided considerably more satisfaction than my three 2026 plats (and counting) combined. So here goes…

I don’t really post in here much anymore, unless it’s a milestone or something I’d experienced that was both trophy-related and out-of-the-ordinary… and well this one certainly falls in the camp of the latter. And, well… I actually might end up keeping it for a milestone too as it goes. As things currently stand, I have one single player trophy left (complete the campaign on Infernal difficulty) and it definitely feels landmark worthy, what with the journey I and my co-op compadre have had these last several months.

Resident Evil: Revelations - what an absolute nightmare! Platinum-wise at least. The game itself is a decent third-person survival horror, maybe a 6.5-7.5 out of 10 in terms of quality. Apart from the odd sharp difficulty-spike here-and-there during my Normal single player playthrough back in early August, phase 1 of the plat-chase felt ‘pretty’ normal all things considered. With that said though, I was aware going in that this was widely considered the toughest Resi plat… but with ‘just’ a 7/10 difficulty on PSN Profiles, how bad could it be? Real bad as it goes… real bad!

I don’t wanna drone on too long (although I undoubtedly will I’m afraid) but the tldr of it all involves a smorgasbord of issues that impinge on a platinum-chase. It has pure difficulty, grind, the need of a committed co-op partner (not to be underestimated), inherent-jank, Grind, ****-take enemy-spawns, rng-from hell, high skill-requirements and ultimately… yet more GRIND. @White_Moose and I started the co-op Raid Mode on 5 September, under the assumption that we’d be done well before his PS+ expired in early December. Well let’s just say he had to subscribe for an extra month and I… well I had to shift Resident Evil 2 Remake up the schedule from Q1 2026 to October 2025, so that I could comply with my commitment to plat 2x Resi’s per year until they’re all done. I’d already done Resident Evil HD Remake earlier in 2025 and figured Resi Revels would be number 2. To say that I was mistaken would be an understatement.

Between 5 September and today, Moose and I were left scratching our heads at many points during our journey. There was just so many times where we just flat-out ran out of ammo with more than half the enemies left on a particular level, or fell to a one-hit kill enemy that spawned directly behind us while focussing on the imminent threat ahead, or… any number of other wince-inducing moments that threatened to break our resolve. What made the overall task seem even more overwhelming was, that during many of those points we were simply trying to get through the mission, let alone do it with the style that would eventually be necessary for all multiplayer trophies. While neither of us really wanted to admit it to each other, I think we both felt well-and-truly beaten a few times… I know I did!

With it looking likely that Moose would have to stump up for yet another month of ps+, he chanced his arm by creating an open lobby for the hardest (and rarest) of the trophies. You have to complete the Ghost Ship (basically all of the missions combined into one but with no ammo or health drops) on Chaos difficulty. We’d been running this particular Ghost Ship for a wee while by this point, though never under the assumption we’d beat it on those occasions. It’s basically the best opportunity to get Legendary weapons to drop, so we’d playthrough a few sections before retiring and seeing whether the rng gods had been kind (they rarely were). Well, anyway Moose ended up getting joined by someone so OP, that he’d make @BlAcK_SwOrDsMaN blush. Needless to say the Elk-by-any-other-name got the bloody thing done and without actually having to do much to boot!

On hearing this, I reached out to someone on my friends list who has the the plat and kindly asked (some would say begged, not I… but some) if they wouldn’t mind helping me through the Ghost Ship in much the same manner as the Mooseman was aided a couple of days prior. To say he was over-confident would be an understatement. I mean, don’t get me wrong I was extremely appreciative of him going out’ve his way to help… but we got nowhere! We were left completely out of ammo… and that was well before we got anywhere near the final boss. I was a bit confused, as when I expressed doubts over my build’s ability to get through it prior to our session, he calmly proclaimed “Don’t worry, I’ll carry you.” Then two attempts later, I was ahead both times on kills but we were way off it in terms of our end goal. I enquired calmly, actively trying to veil my suspicions “So how did you manage this when you got the plat?” His response allowed any last remnant of hope to leave the building:

“Ahh, I played with someone on PC who could hack the game…”

At that point, I thanked him for his efforts and considered logging off with my tail between-my-legs. Before I did though, I thought… well, I might as well at least try what my at this point long-time co-op partner had done a couple of days earlier. I created a lobby and selected ‘Help Wanted: Pros’ as the lobby information. Less than a minute later a player with a weapon score in the thousands (Moose and I had been playing for months at this point, farming weapons and mods to only have a weapon score in the high two hundreds) joined my game. The next ten minutes basically involved me simply having to stay alive while this blackswordsman cheek-botherer absolutely annihilated everything!

So the most difficult part was done for both Moose and myself and… well, we hardly had to fire a bullet during those particular runs. A bit anticlimactic all told but after everything we’d been through at that point the relief superseded any element of chagrin. So that meant that we just had the ‘normal’ Ghost Ship left (we still struggled tbh, both running out of ammo on the final boss and having to resort to a piggy-in-the-middle stab-fest… we actually had a different name for it at the time but I’d imagine this post would be removed if I used it), together with all the S ranks and mission awards. The latter involved Moose and I taking point alternately… or more accurately one of us doing the whole mission on our own essentially, with the other player in game but held up in a safe spot as not to take damage. It meant having to rerun each mission twice (at least) but we thankfully got them done in the end.

The two overriding sentiments that both Moose and myself had throughout the experience was 1. How the **** isn’t the plat Ultra Rare on PSN Profiles? (as an aside, it is Ultra Rare on PlayStation Network… but the latter doesn’t really cut it around these parts) and 2. The current and accepted rating for a platinum via difficulty alone might not be fit for purpose in all cases. The reason being is that this felt like a 10 to us at least (probably eleven!)… and we’ve both popped some tough Ultra Rares in our time. We couldn’t settle on a name for the scale on how to rate this appropriately but given the difficulty, the sheer amount of multiplayer hours required (think we clocked around 95 hrs in co-op alone), the requirements (you need to s rank every mission, on every difficulty… and then earn at least 150 awards for things like taking no damage and killing all enemies etc.) and then just the sheer cheapness that the game throws at you in terms of enemy spawns, amount of enemies in enclosed spaces etc… we took to rating it as a 10/10 on the Ball-ache scale. Gear-grinding, Bull-**** and Nightmare were also terms we threw about as possible titles.

With all that said though, it was an experience that forged some strong bonds between Moose and I. Very occasionally it even got a little testy between us but we were both cognisant… or worked extremely hard to remain cognisant that it was the game that was causing our frustration and not each other. And the fact that we were able to keep positive for the other, even when we were seriously flagging ourselves will stick solidly in the mind. We’ve ’probably’ had enough of each other for a while now, as I can’t tell you how nice it’ll be to not have a daily message pop up on my PSN app that simply stated “Raid?”. But we’ll run into each other again one day or another, in one trophy boosting thread or backlog-breaking group chat and when we do, one of us will simply have to post the picture of Dutch and Dillon breaking into a freestyle table-less arm wrestle by-way-of-a-handshake from Predator and the other will undoubtedly respond with “You son of a ****!”