That One Achievement: Difference between revisions

{{quote|''"Motti has begrudgingly admitted that Dash Race was too hard."''|'''[[Atlus]]''', on That One Achievement in ''3D Dot Game Heroes''}}

 

 

It's guaranteed to cause [[Cluster F-Bomb|Cluster F Bombs]]. It can easily involve [[The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard]] or [[Fake Difficulty]], though in many cases, the difficulty is indeed legit. It often needs to be unlocked in [[That One Level]], during [[That One Sidequest]] (of which it is a [[Sub-Trope]]), or while fighting [[That One Boss]]. Often it's something absolutely no one would think to do. Worst case scenario, it's rendered [[Unwinnable By Mistake|unattainable due to a glitch]]. And for gamers afflicted with OCD, it's their worst nightmare.

 

 

{{examples}}

* "Nice Shootin’, Tex!" in ''[[Ghostbusters the Video Game]]''. You have to complete the game with less than $100,000 in property damage. However, it is far too easy to go over that amount unless you are really, really careful.

** To give a better perspective of how difficult this achievement is, the second level of the game is in Times Square. Hit a police car with your beam, that's $35,000. Hit a bus? '''$80,000.'''

* ''[[Lost Planet]] 2's'' "Committed 'Til The End" achievement takes the ''[[Ghost Recon]]'' example below and goes one step further. You not only have to achieve all the "Good Job" awards in every level (across six chapters, with some truly insane feats required), but you have to collect 500 titles (some of which include co-op achievements), level yourself to level 99 with ''six'' different factions and become #1 on the global leaderboard. That's in addition to the "Noms de Guerre" special titles, some of which require insane circumstances (some titles are only unlocked for having save games from every previous ''Lost Planet'' on your hard drive, going to Capcom promotional events, etc).

* Similar to ''Brawl's'' challenges, ''[[Kid Icarus: Uprising]]'' has three "treasure hunts", each consisting of 120 achievement-esque challenges. Palutena's are pretty easy, {{spoiler|Viridi}}'s are trickier but {{spoiler|Hades}}? ''ALL of his'' may as well qualify. {{spoiler|(Of course, that's [[For the Evulz|perfectly in character for him]])}} It features several that look deceptively easy ("Beat Chapter 3 using a Club") until you read the fine print ("[[Harder Than Hard|Intensity 9.0]]") For the previous sets of challenges, the difficulty cutoffs were mostly just there to ensure you didn't be cheap and set the difficulty to [[Easier Than Easy|Effortless]], but here they ''really'' matter. Oh, and you have absolutley no idea what reward you'll get from each one, so you could have gone to all that trouble for a pathetically weak weapon, an Idol you already have, or just Hearts.

 

== Fighting ==

** In CS2, there's a medal for clearing all of the [[Boss Rush]]es in a specific Legion 1.5 stage. On Stage 6, this is a ''very'' tall order, as one of those consists of, in order, Unlimited Hakumen, Nu-13, Unlimited Mu-12, Unlimited Hazama and Unlimited Ragna.

*** Arc System Works actually ''toned down'' the difficulty for the toughest achievement in its most recent fighting games compared to their earlier game, [[Battle Fantasia]]. That game still has the dubious honor of possessing their most infamous Achievement requirement (and possibly the single hardest Achievement in the history of fighting games), aptly named "You Want Me To WHAT?!". What does it require you to do? Simple (not)... you must parry all 22 hits of the final boss's Super Move flawlessly, and win the fight ''at full health''. Yes, it's as hideously hard as it sounds. Yes, it means you have to be an absolute parry god and do a perfect match. To put things in perspective, Daigo's infamous EVO comeback only required him to parry Chun Li's Super (15 hits), and he didn't have to win with full health against a [[SNK Boss]] with at least two unblockable moves. You do the math.

* ''[[Super Smash Brothers|Super Smash Brothers Brawl]]'' has its fair share of difficult challenges, the worst of which include clearing the [[Boss Rush]] on [[Harder Than Hard|Intense]], clearing [[Multi Mook Melee|100-Man Brawl]] with all characters, and probably worst of all, trying to get a set amount of kills on Cruel Brawl. Luckily, there's the Hammers, but even then, they don't work on some of the achievements(In the US version, that is)... and of course, let's not forget the insane amount of time you'll be spending trying to get [[Last Lousy Point|every sticker in the game.]]

* ''[[Transformers: War for Cybertron]]'': [[Transformers: The Movie|"Wait! I Still Function!"]] can only be obtained in Co-Op Campaign or Escalation mode. To get it you must lose all of your health and destroy three enemies in the ten-second "System Failure" mode before you blow up. The problem with this is that you lose your targeting reticule, rendering it almost impossible to aim correctly, you can't move to get more ammo should you run out, any damage you receive while downed cuts down on said ten-second time limit, and it's near-impossible for your online teammates to tell when you're going for this achievement/trophy so they won't run over and revive you.

* Although later achievements have become considerably easier to obtain, the first achievement packs in ''[[Team Fortress 2]]'' were pretty hard and/or [[Only Idiots May Pass|counterintuitive]] to obtain, particularly the Medic's, which included a lot of fighting for a class whose main purpose is healing.

** Pyromancer: Deal 1,000,000 points of fire damage as a Pyro. That's basically '''5,000''' Soldiers. There are career Pyros out there that ''still'' don't have this one, never mind that Steam's achievement system sometimes forgets progress on progressive achievements such as this one. "Tartan Spartan" is pretty much the same way, as you must deal 1,000,000 points of explosive damage as a Demoman which, unlike Pyromancer, has a glitch that causes it to erase all points gotten and make you start over.

*** Makin' Bacon: Kill ''50 Heavies'' with your ''flamethrower''. Not only do Heavies completely outclass the Pyro's damage output at close range, but they have absurd amounts of health, the Sandvich and Medics to combat afterburn damage as well, so you can't even rely on hit-and-run or posthumous kills. You'll be hard-pressed to make any progress on this one without the [[Critical Hit|Backburner or Phlogistinator]].

*** Also, you can to roll EXACTLY one higher than the last person.

* This is starting to crop up in ''[[Star Trek Online]]''. Several of the "Kill" accolades involve defeating up to 1,000 members of each enemy faction; the problem is that while some are very easy due to the existence of Fleet actions, where the ground is covered in hundreds of enemies at a time, several of the factions only appear in 2 or 3 missions. The best mission to hunt Nausicaans only has 25 enemies, and it's the only mission you can choose, meaning it has to be replayed about 40 times! This isn't even getting into cases where the enemies appear to be a member of the faction, but won't actually count towards the Accolade (looking at you, Kuvah'magh mission). Combine this with the fact that most players have a... distaste for ground combat, and you hear a lot of complaints. On the "Space" side of the accolades, there's the "Breen Capital Punishment" one, which requires you to, naturally, defeat 3 Breen Capital ships. The problem here is that the ships spawn very, very rarely, and typically wander through the maps far outside the mission area in each Daily's location. Keep in mind these are SPACE missions, which means that it's hard to tell exactly where you are in the map (Space is mostly empty, after all.) and so you could easily waste a lot of time wandering around looking for something that's not there. Since, unlike the other missions, this one can only be done once a day, this is the worst combination of [[Luck-Based Mission]] and forced waiting in the game. The only upside is that missions are instanced, so there's no chance of anyone interfering in the kills.

** Some of the luck based missions have since been removed as requirements for the events, such as the requirement to get a black dress in Love is in the Air, but "School of Hard Knocks" is not only quite difficult for people who don't PVP often (the other PVP-based holiday achievements only require honorable kills, which do not require the achievement seeker to get the killing blow), but also results in battlegrounds being full of people who want the achievement and who don't know how to PVP, thus angering many regular PVPers.

** Herald of the Titans requires that players defeat [[Bonus Boss|Algalon the Observer]] in Ulduar ''without any gear that is higher level than what is available in the '''10 man''' version of Ulduar''. Not only is this quite difficult on its own, but it's also impossible to outgear, and virtually impossible to find people who are willing to do it.

** Cataclysm also gives us an achievement so insanely difficult to obtain, guilds have been pulling their hair out over it for months: "I Can't Hear You Over the Sound of How Awesome I Am". The criteria? Beat [[Bonus Boss|Sinestra.]] On your first try. [[No Casualties Run|With not a single death at any point in the battle.]] If someone has earned this, props are very much deserved.

** Headed South is considered one of the most difficult Cataclysm dungeon achievements. You need three stacks of a debuff on you at the time, of Siamat's death, but 1)The buff is collected from adds in the first phase and Siamat only takes full damage in the second; even with the trick, you need high DPS, 2)The debuff also increases damage taken, and thus the strain on the healer, and 3)Only the people with three stacks get it; if a group is having trouble with 2), they might have to decide who gets it.

* ''[[Billy vs. SNAKEMAN]]'' has a couple contenders among its Trophies. "Scrapbook Hero" requires you to beat [[Luck-Based Mission|Candy]][[Holiday Mode|ween]] ''six times''. To get "Let It Ride", you bet a valuable item on ''1:36 odds'' and win. For "Tiny Three", you need three different variants of a very infrequently found item. "Enough Already" takes a month of Season grinding ''beyond'' what has any other purpose.

* ''[[Maple Story]]'' has the Quest Specialist Medal, which gives a higher stat bonus than any other medals with the exception of ones that come from events, but it requires you to complete 800 quests. Each step in multi-step quests counts towards the goal, so it's not as bad as it could be, but many of them are long and would mean slowing down your [[Level Grinding]].

* ''[[Spiral Knights]]'' has "Master Miner" (deposit 10000 minerals into a gate) and "Dauntless Delver" (go from 0-29 without dying). The latter is made easier if you have a buddy to take the hits for you and if you pick simpler levels, but still requires a considerable chunk of time and Crystal Energy (or an [[Bribing Your Way to Victory|elevator pass]]). The former is simply tedious; assuming best conditions (4 maximum sized minerals on every level, and 4 players to carry them all up) which lets face it, isn't going to happen, it still takes a bare minimum of 625 levels to do.

 

* The achievements for beating the vehicle levels without dying in ''[[Lego Adaptation Game|Lego Star Wars II]]''. The standard levels can be fudged by being the invincible ghost characters, but the vehicle ones are pure skill.

* ''[[Mega Man (video game)|Mega Man]] 9'' and ''10'' both have the Mr./Ms. Perfect achievement. You may be good; but are you good enough to beat the entire game [[No Damage Run|without taking a single hit]]?

* ''[[Meat Boy|Super Meat Boy]]'' has "Impossible Boy" achievement. To get this, you have to complete every Cotton Alley (which is a [[Brutal Bonus Level|Brutal Bonus Chapter]] and can take more than a thousand tries to complete it) level in a row without dying. And that with a [[Dark World]] variations of levels, majority which are harder than the Light World ones.

* ''[[Ratchet and Clank]]'' A Crack in Time has the "My Blaster Runs Really Hot" achievement, which requires the player to get 10,000 points in the arcade game. Far harder than it sounds {{spoiler|but easily exploitable when you find out that playing it with two people combines your score, so you only need to get a total of 10,000 points between the two of you}}. Which is, of course, a case of [[Guide Dang It]], since that's not mentioned ''anywhere'' in the game.

* In ''[[Super Mario Galaxy 2]]'', "The Perfect Run" is an achievement where you have to cross an entire area full of mines and Bullet Bills by having Yoshi grab onto some flowers with his tongue, turn several blue tiles yellow without being hit by any lasers, cross an electric maze with the Cloud Flower, cross an entire path full of tiles that either flip back and forth or disappear while dodging enemies that fire either lasers or coconuts, cross another electric maze (only this time with the pull stars), and finally past these Hammer Bros. and kill the Boomerang Bros. at the end to beat the game, all with only one health point and no checkpoints!

** A similar level actually serves as the ''real'' final level of ''[[Super Mario 3D Land]]''.

** "Prize for the Reckless". You have to navigate a series of rooms to break a disappearing platform which lets a moving platform move, then kill yourself to respawn, flip onto the moving platform, and grab the trinket, without touching any of a number of inconveniently placed checkpoints or dying in between.

** There's also the trophy "Master of the Universe". How do you get it? By completing the game. In [[No Damage Run|No Death Mode]]. In a [[Nintendo Hard]] platformer starring a [[One-Hit-Point Wonder]]. Without saving. Have "fun".

* The Math is Hard achievement in the Steam version of ''[[Psychonauts]]''. Getting to rank 101 requires completing all stages of the target mini-game in Basic Braining, which is frustratingly difficult.

* [[Limbo]] Has the "No Point In Dying" achivement. [[Everything Trying to Kill You|You have to survive the whole game in one sitting...]] [[One-Hit-Point Wonder|with 5 or less deaths.]]

== RPG ==

* The first ''[[Mass Effect]]'' has the "_____ Ally" achievements. Each of them requires you to have a particular character in your party for the majority of the game. They're not difficult (although the "Asari Ally" achievement may be a minor [[Guide Dang It]])...but getting all six of them requires playing through the ''entire game'', sidequests and all, a minimum of ''three times''. And you need to have the same character(s) in your party for 40-50 missions. They're despised by the fandom not for being challenging, but for being ''tedious.''

** The ''Arrival'' DLC also gave us the skull-cracking 'Last Stand'. You have to survive five waves of enemies in a small room with bad cover. Among the enemies are Engineers, which can throw incinerates at you to knock you out of cover, and Pyros, which are fully capable of stunlocking you with their flamethrowers. The soldiers themselves will constantly advance on you, working to knock you out of cover and destroy your shields. Oh, and you have to fight off an YMIR mech at the very end. Good luck getting through this as any class other than the [[Stone Wall|Sentinel]].

* ''[[Final Fantasy XIII]]'' has the "Treasure Hunter" achievement. To get this, you must possess or have possessed every single possible weapon and accessory available in the game, though not necessarily all at the same time. Doing this requires insane amounts of grinding for money, ore, and other materials. Also, if you happen to have sold any of the unique accessories that can be upgraded into other unique accessories, without upgrading them first, this achievement becomes unobtainable.

** There's also "L'Cie Paragon." What does this achievement require? A five-star rank on every single Cie'th Stone mission on Pulse. Every single one. Including the one with [[Bonus Boss|Vercin]][[That One Boss|getorix.]] Yep. Have fun!

** ''[[Final Fantasy XII]]'' had worse: One thing requires getting everything in the game, including more than one extremely difficult boss and more than one [[Marathon Boss]]. Yeah.

** [[Final Fantasy XIII]]-2 also has its share of annoying achievements; Finishing Fragmented (getting all fragments) meant fighting a number of monsters that appeared only in ''very'' specific circumstances that no-one would ever encounter unless they where looking for them to get one of the fragments that requires you to get every enemy in your bestiary: this also includes a boss with multiple forms, all of which can only be fought if you exhaust the entire [[Dialogue Tree]] between each battle before you pick the one that stops him from respawning and advances the story, and a very specific encounter in the final dungeon that can contain 1 or 2 different monsters, all 3 of which you need to fight and none of which respawn, forcing you to do the entire platforming puzzle-ridden dungeon at very least twice. Then there's Clock Stopper, which is easy but tedious, and has an annoying habit of the smaller monsters going under the attack you needed for a pre-emptive strike and thus breaking your chain, although thankfully you can save as often as you want between battles and can also repeat the same battle by selecting Retry to eliminate the chance of spawning enemies that attack you as soon as they spawn. Lastly, there's Giant's Fist, which can be difficult to get if you're aiming for it specifically and aren't fully aware of all the gameplay elements, but chances are that you'll get it without trying when trying to get any of the achievements involving any of the stronger enemies you need to kill.

* ''[[Ryu ga Gotoku|Yakuza 3]]'' has the aptly named Minigame Master. To get this, you need to meet the clear conditions in all the minigames. The game has 16 minigames in the western version and 20 in the Japanese one. Clear conditions go from 'easy as pie' for some gambling minigames to '[[The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard]]' for some of the skill minigames, like darts and pool where you have to beat in ALL sub-games all computer players. Including the one able to hit double-bull (or any other point of the dartboard) with over 90% accuracy, and the guy able to bunk with distance of an inch and completing the minigame without missing a shot (or even on the first one). It's a very long, very hard, very varied endurance test. In a game that's basically a sandbox brawler.

** ''[[Star Ocean the Second Story]]'' had another one, which was in some ways much more painful, and that was the Voices. To achieve 100% completion of the voice board, you had to obtain every character, use every possible skill every character could learn, and have every single character obtain high enough relationship values with every other character that they would shout their names upon dying. You can only obtain six optional characters per game. Getting certain characters makes it impossible to get others. Playing with one main character means certain characters won't join. Yeah, getting 100% involves playing through the entire game many times, and worse still, you have to actually listen to the voices.

* ''[[Fable III]]'' has an achievement called "You can't bring me down", which requires you to go through the entire game without once being knocked out by any enemy. If you're playing the game before you travel to {{spoiler|Aurora}} and are thinking, "Ha! I've managed it up to now!", wait until you encounter a {{spoiler|Sentinel, big enemies with the power to use the darkness against you in the form of demon shadows and crows spurting from the ground.}}. And there's no way to avoid fighting one, because they appear at the point where {{spoiler|Walter Beck goes blind.}} and {{spoiler|on the bridge in Bowerstone Market during the fight against the crawler.}}

 

== Sports ==

* The "Beating Tough Competition" achievement from ''NHL 08'' requires playing (and beating) one of the Top 50 ranked players on the game's servers. Not only is this a ridiculous feat in itself (as anyone who's gotten to that point has likely mastered the game), and not only is it nigh-impossible to randomly be paired up with a Top 50 player, but (according to reports) hordes of players spam the inboxes of the Top 50 players asking if they can beat them to earn the achievement, which means they likely won't play you voluntarily. As of 2011, the achievement is also unobtainable (as the servers were shut down).

 

== Strategy ==

 

== Wide Open Sandbox ==

* The [[Saints Row]] games have mostly easy achivements, but each has at least one that is a nightmare to get:

** [[Saints Row]] 2 has the "Blue Collar" achivement. Most of the other minigames are easy with a little practice, but the tow truck one will have gamers pulling their hair out as one tiny bit of bad luck near the end sends them all the way back to the start. The controls and time limit don't help matters much either.

{{reflist}}

[[Category:That One Index]]

[[Category:Scrappy Index]]

[[Category:Video Game Difficulty Tropes]]