Theworld of trophiesand achievements is a parallel subculture for gamers, increasingly gaining relevance and its place in the spotlight.
It lets achievement hunters showcase their hard-earned accomplishments in a game and gives developers an extra incentive for players to keep engaging with their titles.
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InJRPGs, the best trophies guide us to complete all the game’s content, be it secret bosses, final weapons, or completing every quest.
However, some JRPGs test our patience with skill-based, complex, or just extremely lengthy and tedious achievements, making them obtainable only to the most hardcore players.
8Final Fantasy IX
Jumping Rope Master
Final Fantasy 9
JRPGs usually include completionist achievements, such as reaching the maximum level, obtaining the ultimate weapons, defeating secret bosses, or clearing every dungeon. These are wonderful goals that further enrich a game.
But if there’s something Square Enix loves to do, it’sadding minigames to their games. To make things even better—or worse—they load these minigames with insane achievements, as inFinal Fantasy IX’sjump rope minigame.
Final Fantasy IXalready has annoying trophies, but jumping rope 1,000 times is pure madness and utterly unnecessary for overall enjoyment. Plus, it doesn’t add anything to the JRPG experience.
Jumping rope inFinal Fantasy IXis so dull and challenging that someone even created an automatic script to jump rope for you. Console players can remotely connect to a PC and use this script if they want to make Vivi the rope master and eventually earn a platinum trophy.
7Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories
Reach Level 99
Kingdom Hearts Re:Chain of Memories
MostKingdom Heartsremasters don’t necessarily have hard achievements, but some fall into the needlessly complicated and tedious category. The one that really stuck with me and left me annoyed wasKingdom Hearts:Chain of Memories.
A small spoiler warning here for those who haven’t played the game yet—discretion is advised in the following few paragraphs.
After finishing with Sora, we unlock Riku’s campaign, which is much shorter and relatively easier since the power of darkness is stronger. By playing naturally, you’ll finish the game with Riku between levels 45 and 50, sometimes less.
However, one achievement requires leveling Riku up to level 99, which is an unnecessary and bothersome grind.Grinding can be fun in JRPGs, but that’s definitely not the case here.
I managed to finish the game on Proud mode, the hardest level, at level 50. So why does the game require level 99 for an achievement? There isn’t even a secret boss that demands such a high level. It just bloats the game’s playtime. This achievement is difficult because it puts the player in a paradox—feeling bored while playing a video game.
6Tales of Vesperia
Getting All Titles
Tales of Vesperia: Definitive Edition
One category of achievements I loathe is missable achievements, especially those without markers indicating the content is missable, which forces you to replay an 80-hour JRPG all over again.
Tales of Vesperiatakes missable achievements to a whole new level. The game has numerous contents that are missable for simply breathing wrong, and if you miss these side activities, you lose a title and the achievement of getting them all.
Missed a save point in an area you can’t revisit? Achievement gone. Didn’t kill a certain monster? Lost an achievement. Forgot an item? Bye-bye, achievement.
But the worst are the side events inTales of Vesperia, which have very odd timing requirements and are incredibly counter-intuitive. To make matters worse, no markers indicate these events, making it nearly impossible to get all achievements without a guide.
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For example, after Repede and Karol join the party in the Ehmead Mountains, the player must return to the city of Halure and speak to an old man under a tree.
That is, go back to a previous town from where you’re headed and talk to a random NPC. This triggers an event that can lead to another, eventually earning a title for Estelle and the achievement tied to it.
This is just one event, andTales of Vesperiais packed with them. The absence of markers indicating new events dramatically complicates the process, making earning the All Titles achievements incredibly tricky.
5Star Ocean: The Last Hope
Completing All Battle Trophies
Star Ocean: The Last Hope
Star Ocean: The Last Hopedemands around 500 to 1,000 hours to collect all achievements. Beyond having multiple missables, which require following a guide from start to finish, there’s also an achievement for collecting all battle trophies. Anyone who’s played the game knows just how ridiculous these battle trophies can be.
During battles, depending on specific actions you take with the controlled character, you earn a battle trophy. The system encourages switching between characters, and it would be fun if some of these trophies weren’t insanely ridiculous.
Every guide mentions that players give up on the game’s completionism because this battle trophy achievement alone takes an average of 400 hours.
The easier ones are simple, like defeating 200 enemies with the protagonist or dealing 500 damage with Faize. But the requirements get bizarre as you get closer to the final ones.
One of Bacchus' trophies requires dealing exactly 65,536 damage. No more, no less. And there are several trophies for dealing a specific amount of damage.
Other battle trophies involve killing 3,000 enemies with a character, rolling a total of 10 km, healing from poison in 5 seconds, and other crazy challenges.
The fanbase considers the toughest battle trophy to be defeating the Ethereal Queen, thehardest bossinStar Oceangames, in under 10 minutes using Lymle. Completing all battle trophies awards you with a modest but hard-earned achievement.
4White Knight Chronicles
Leveling Up The Guild Rank
White Knight Chronicles
White Knight Chronicleshas a guild system where you must complete side quests to increase the guild’s rank.
The more you complete, the higher your guild rank. Back then, you could tackle these sidequests with players online, a feature that no longer exists, so you have to rely on your solo prowess.
One ofWhite Knight Chronicles’trophies requires reaching level 12 in guild rank. After rank 10, level 3 side quests become available, but they’re impossible to complete solo.
Thus, with the online mode gone, they’re pretty much inaccessible. So, if a solo player wants to level up in the guild, they must endlessly farm level 2 quests.
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The recommended side quest is Best Served Cold level two, which can be completed in 5 minutes solo with the proper setup, earning 5,600 points to boost guild rank.
The problem is that it takes a whopping 20 million points to go from rank 8 to rank 12. You read that right.
A quick tally reveals that reaching rank 12 from rank 8 requires about 300 hours of repeating the same side quest until your gray matter turns mushy. Note that it’s not 300 hours playing the game but 300 hours doing the same side quest over and over again.
Because of this solo achievement,White Knight Chroniclesis considered one of the rarest platinum trophies among allPlayStation 3 games.
3Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn
Six Months of Grinding
MMORPGs can be classified as JRPGs, too, right? Bear with me, please, because you’ll love knowing that an achievement inFinal Fantasy XIV: A Realm Rebornon the PS4 requires at least a six-month commitment.
In Square’s MMORPG, there are Levequests, repeatable activities that yield a large amount of experience for a particularclass or job inFFXIV.
To tackle a Levequest, you need to spend an allowance, and a player gets 3 Levequest allowances every 12 hours, a total of 6 per day, with a limit of 100 allowances at any given time.
One ofFFXIV’sachievements requires players to complete 1,000 Levequests, and I think you know where I’m going with this. Completing Levequests isn’t hard, but the limitation makes it tricky. If you do 6 Levequests a day, it’ll still take 167 days to reach 1,000 completions.
In other words, you’ll need to spend almost six months playingFFXIVon these activities if you want to earn an achievement in the game—not to mention other achievements that are just as time-consuming, like completing 1,000 FATES, which was increased to 3,000 FATES in the PS5 edition.
2Mugen Souls
Charming All Shampurus
This achievement inMugen Soulsmay not take as long as inStar Ocean: The Last HopeorWhite Knight Chronicles, but it’s the most tedious, making it insanely hard for any player in their right mind to tackle.
The JRPG features Shampurus, a kind of collectible creatures for the protagonist. At first, it seems fine. Collecting Shampurus and powering up the G-Castle, depending on the Shampuru’s tier, is fun.
That is, until you discover two of the most insane achievements that require a long, grueling grind.
Shampurus are also called Peons in the game, and one achievement involves creating a Peon Ball with a size of 10,000,000,000 km. The size of the Peon Ball depends on how many Shampurus you’ve collected, and to summarize, you need 1,002,000 Shampurus to make the ball reach that size.
It takes an average of 200 hours to complete this achievement, collecting Shampurus along the way, while the repetitive grind will slowly drain your will to play video games for the rest of your life.
1Xenoblade Chronicles X
Survey The Entire World
Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition
AlthoughNintendodoesn’t have a trophy or achievement system, some games include an internal system for tracking accomplishments, or players can track their progress on their own.
That’s the case with theXenoblade Chroniclesseries, which offers countless hours of content for players who want to experience JRPGs to the fullest.
For those looking to sink countless hours into a JRPG, you don’t have to look further thanXenoblade Chronicles X, which, fortunately, is gettinga remastered versionsoon on the Switch.
Xenoblade Chronicles Xputs you in the shoes of an explorer on Mira. The player must survey various regions of this new planet to determine if it’s habitable for humanity. Along the way, they’ll face countless challenges, including alien forces and Mira’s wild creatures.
And the world ofXenoblade Chronicles Xis massive. There are achievements for surveying each region of the planet and certain districts in New Los Angeles, the game’s hub base.
In the end, there’s an achievement for surveying all of planet Mira, which will take at least 200 hours if you’re familiar with the game or even more for newcomers. Still, though difficult, exploring the world ofXenoblade Chronicles Xis far more enjoyable than jumping rope.
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