Trophies and Achievements that are seriously silly or extremely and almost impossible.

[Sunrider]

Big Boss achievement from Metal Gear Solid 3 or 4, I don't really remember which. I'm far too bad of a player with a controller to ever manage to get achievements like this. No alerts, no kills, less than four hours or something like that, I don't even know.

Impossible for someone of my mediocre skill, to say the least.

 

[Asita]

On the ridiculously stupid end of things we have achievements for events required for early-game material. Yes, I can see giving an achievement for completing the game on , but why do we need an achievement like Bioshock Infinite's "Written in the Clouds", which you get for completing the lighthouse...the first part of the game, before a single enemy spawns and with the only puzzle being a very simple 'ring the bells X times' thing, an a compulsory moment to boot. Short of electing to quit playing before you climb the first set of stairs you encounter, it's pretty much impossible to miss. That is a stupid achievement.


On the other end of the scale we have the "No Point in Dying" achievement in Limbo, which can only be achieved by completing the game in one sitting and dying less than five times over the course of the playthrough. It's a harrowing achievement (And unlike "Written in the Clouds" it actually is representative of an achievement), but it is by nature incredibly frustrating by forcing you to start from scratch if you mess up a handful of times over an entire playthrough.

 

[MrMisfit]

There are plenty of "Trochievements" ( I like this term ) that I find silly. I recently got the 1000 hit combo trophy for GoW : Ascension which can only be gotten ( as far as I know ) by beating up a particular wall about halfway through. I also find the hidden/secret kind of trophies silly. They're either unavoidable or completely random so hiding how to acquire it makes no sense to me. There's one trochievement that I find silly in a good way. The "Six degrees of Schafer" from Brutal Legend. When the game came out, members of the dev team played the multiplayer and whoever they played against got the trophy. From that point on anyone who played someone who had the trophy got the trophy. I'm surprised that no one else ( again as far as I know ) has done a viral trochievement.

 

[Epicspoon]

Theeres an achievement in a bullethell game called deathsmiles that you get by defeating a secret boss called Bloody Jitterbug. Beating the boss isn't hard. It's GETTING to the boss that's hard. You have to go through the entire game including the optional level on the highest difficulty without taking a single hit. After you do this and beat the final boss the boss coughs him up when he dies.

 

[Therumancer]

Hmmm, well, I'm not a huge Achievement hunter, I go after some, but am not obsessive about it, so I sadly don't remember many really bad ones, since I typically decide if an achievement is more than moderately annoying I'm not going to bother. The exception to this is games where some kind of reward is attached to the achievement.

I did want to mention a couple of things though.

First off, I think a lot of people miss the point of the "free achievement for turning on the game". The idea behind that is so that game companies can tell how many accounts their game was played by. This is in part how they track statistics as to how many copies of a game they moved, as opposed to how many people played it, for the arguments they make about things like used game sales. They aren't "gifting" you a free achievement or helping you boost your gamer score, and being uncreative, they are tagging you. A piece of info I ran into years ago from conversations with people who were all upset that they couldn't voluntarily remove achievements from their list. Some elitists being upset that having a bunch of games with low scores and completion percentages showing up on their list made them look like bad gamers to their elitist friends, them wanting to display only games they had every, or nearly every, achievement for. Apparently Microsoft at least explained that they couldn't allow people to erase achievements or voluntarily lower their score due to data tracking agreements. I have no idea if this changed as I haven't used XBL in ages (my 360 is gathering dust). It's annoying, but there is a method to the madness, and "lazy developers" is kind of what they want you to think, as opposed to the developers tagging you like an animal. The idea being that without this "gift" for you to register you'd have to actually play enough to earn one of the achievements, when they ultimately want to know as
soon as the game enters your machine and turns on.

Secondly, while not a big hunter myself, I have mixed opinions about what achievements represent. To be honest I think the term should be changed. I find them a good way of telling how far someone progressed through a game and things like that. It comes up rarely, but on occasion it's nice to see if someone who seems to be talking out their butt is telling the truth or not, which can be determined by looking at the achievements for some games that reward them just for playing. When it comes to difficult accomplishments in games, basically a test of skill, or at least dedication and patience, I find them less useful due to ways of cheating/glitching through a lot of the hard ones, and I'm more of a believer that there should be some in-game motivation for doing something other than an achievement. Honestly I'm surprised most achievements that aren't awarded for casual play are so popular because it's akin to jumping through a hoop like a trained monkey for a game developer (and I'd imagine many of them laugh at gamers for this). Something like killing a final boss naked twenty times or whatever, which takes perfect timing... giving you a reward showing you were actually dumb enough to do it. It's even worse when the achievement might be something like actually jumping your character through X number of hoops.

On the other hand, I will say that before my WoW retirement I did pretty much every holiday achievement for an entire year to get that Violet Protodrake. I just noticed at least one person talking about how annoying some of those were... and yeah, I agree. It's one of those times I did something like this because of the reward (which is pretty uber as far as mounts go, since it also seems to auto-train skills, or did) and also because at the time I was with a fairly hardcore endgame guild and we were all showing off to each other, and you know, having what was the greatest prestige mount "ever" at that point a big thing. If I ever returned to WoW i'd be a sad guppy stat wise, and probably see Violet Protodrakes either filling the skies, or being considered a scrub mount. One of the reasons I'll never go back, especially with the people I played with pretty much departed (which is why I quit, I tried to return when Pandas came out... but it wasn't the same).... but yeah... I have had my own bouts of insanity, including one which lasted an entire year.

 

[Fireaxe]

Achievements that involve you losing or dying give me the shits. They're incredibly silly.

 

[Iwata]

Not a single trophy per se, but I hate it when difficulty trophies don't stack. I like playing a game on Hard whenever possible, and getting the trophy for completing the game on that difficulty, but not Easy or Normal is just stupid.

Also, fuck multiplayer-only trophies.

 

[Neonit]

Well... in Europa Universalis 4, there is an achievement for conquering the WORLD, with ryukyu.

That is, conquer the world with tiny ass island (meaning low naval and army limits, so you cant even deploy your troops)
With a high tech malus
In a region with potential china, japan and india forming....
While the strongest nations ("World powers") get bonus ("Lucky nations") which makes them even more OP.

Soo.... im a guy who has been playing those games for a long time.... i pride myself on my byzantine playthroughs, which are considered to be challenging (but can be done if you are patient and understand strait blocking)

And i still think thats effing impossible. I have honestly no idea how you would go about it.

Oh yeah, you also have about 400 years to do it. Like thats the biggest problem that you will face on that road

 

[Sunrider]

Big Boss achievement from Metal Gear Solid 3 or 4, I don't really remember which. I'm far too bad of a player with a controller to ever manage to get achievements like this. No alerts, no kills, less than four hours or something like that, I don't even know.

Impossible for someone of my mediocre skill, to say the least.

If you follow a guide, you will have to run through the game 4 times on progressively more and more difficult and going faster and faster. You learn the levels so well that it ends up being a cakewalk even on the hardest difficulty by the end. I wouldn't worry too much about it. I can average a 2 hour run when skipping every cutscene now. The game is actually very short

Yeah, no. Not gonna happen for me. Trust me, I'm far too shitty when it comes to playing anything with a controller. I could never do it.
I've played through all the MGS games at least four times, and I'm still shit at them.

 

[Kilt'd]

The Stanley Parable has some unusual achievements on Steam, but that seems like an easy choice because they're supposed to be unusual. Still, Click on Door 430 5 Times taking more than clicking on Door 430 5 times was interesting.

The most pointless achievement I earned recently was in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 which hands out and achievement for watching the opening cutscene.

 

[Vale]

Bah. Ain't nothing impossible.
I remember this one time in TF 2, I headshot a sniper at point blank range with his own arrow as a pyro. Then I did the same thing from halfway across the map. I GOT NO ACHIEVEMENT. I was like "dammit Valve why won't you to tell me I'm beautiful :I"

 

[chozo_hybrid]

I think Deus Ex Human Revolution has a pretty difficult one.
It would be to get through the whole game without killing a single enemy (except bosses witch are "autokill")

I got that one on my second playthrough. I failed it on my first because I got this place and thought it would be a good idea to stuff all the enemies I'd knocked out into an air vent. Who would of thought that stuffing people into an air vent would be bad for them?

I think a harder trophy to get would be to save Malik from being killed while being on a pacifist run. That was incredibly frustrating and you only get a lousy bronze trophy for it.

I went through thinking I would get that one, but it counts before Adam becomes augmented >_< So the scene where all the shit goes down in the beginning, you have to be a pacifist there too, I didn't think it would matter. Silly me.

 

[Wrath]

The 10.000 kill trophy in Resistance 2...

That's 10k human player kills and matches where you got arround 20ish if you were the MVP which was very hard to do consistantly.There were "private" matches that lasted for something like 20 minutes and had a kill limit of 1000 or something crazy like that but those didn't count towards the trophy meaning you had to search again and again after every game you played that usually lasted 10 minutes.

Another one off the top of my head is an AC:Brotherhood trophy that required you to get I think 6 or something kill variations and bonuses in a single match.
Now that doesn't sound so bad unless you consider the fact that most people in that game realised pretty fast that running around like crazy wasn't as effective as actually being an assassin so you usually ended up with 4-5 kills per match(each worth like 400 points but still).

There are some I can think of in single player but most of those were skill-based (like the MGR:R VR missions and No DMG boss fights on the hardest difficulty or the Demon's souls get all equipment)but i'd say those two mentioned above cover up enough ground already.

 

[Evonisia]

I think multiplayer dependant achievements are all silly, especially because my gut reaction to getting an achiv is to look at it.

The achievement to do the major easter egg of the map "Buried" in Black Ops II was beyond unfair. Mostly because no matter what choices you make you need four people to shoot every single poster of a pop-up shooting gallery, meaning that all four people have to memorise the spawns over several hours and hit all them while trying to keep a Zombie alive so the round doesn't end. I know it's the major easter egg itself that's stupid but the achievement requires you to do all of it, and that's the last step.

 

[Yopaz]

Infinite Undiscovery had one where you had to beat an optional boss at the highest difficulty.

In order to unlock that difficulty you first have to finish the game on normal to unlock the hard mode, then you have to finish the game on hard to unlock the infinity mode. The best part is that the achievement is worth 1 Gamerscore. That's right, you need to beat the game 3 games, once on an incredibly difficult mode just to get 1 gamerscore.

 

[Loc_Zsu]

There's one trochievement that I find silly in a good way. The "Six degrees of Schafer" from Brutal Legend. When the game came out, members of the dev team played the multiplayer and whoever they played against got the trophy. From that point on anyone who played someone who had the trophy got the trophy. I'm surprised that no one else ( again as far as I know ) has done a viral trochievement.

I still don't have that one... I personally have only seen one other game with a similar trochievement, and that was in Split/Second with the Team BlackRock one: Beat a member of the development team or someone who has beaten them.

OT: I have a dislike for trochievements that you are just going to get by blind luck. Beating races with zero on the clock, land a hit that deals exactly 6784 damage. Really random criteria that you are just going to have to hope you one day randomly meet.

A trochievement that made me chuckle, however is from AC:2. You start the game, you are born, BANG! You have earned yourself "The Birth of an Assassin"! Well, that was easy...