Journey to Platinum all Sega games (Part 1)

Sixty years is a long time for a company to be around, let alone a company that is now known for primarily publishing video games. For my entire life Sega has been around and a constant presence in my mind, and for half of it they have been my favorite video game company. Don’t get me wrong, they’re not flawless. Sega has made some bad things over the years, ranging from business decisions to just some bad games. But what company hasn’t? Even the great and mighty Nintendo has messed up colossally over the years, but even then I’m not writing this article to defend Sega’s honor or change people’s minds about them, no I’m writing this to talk about what I personally did to celebrate Sega’s 60th anniversary.

I have maintained the opinion that this console generation is gaming’s greatest, and so the PS5, Xbox Series X, and second half of the Switch’s lifespan generation will have a high bar to pass, if it’s even possible. Some of the greatest games ever came out on the PS4, Xbox One, Wii U, and the first half of the Switch’s lifespan, and Sega has played no small role in that. Whether developing, publishing, or licensing out one of their IPs, Sega has released some of the greatest games ever this generation. As a completionist and my own personal way of celebrating Sega turning 60 years old I decided to do what I do best, platinum each and every Sega game on PS4.

Now, because of Sega’s position as both a developer, publisher, license, and owner of other companies it would be best to go over what games this details.

• Any game that is directly developed by a Sega studio is in the running obviously
• Any IP owned by Sega, but developed by another company also counts. So games like Shenmue 3 were included in this
• Any Atlus made game also counts, Sega has full ownership of Atlus even if they let Atlus act independently. So they count
• Although published by Sega in the West, Utawarerumono Mask of Deception will not be in the running

Now there are a few games I will not be covering the trip of getting all the trophies for, and I have my reasons for such:

• Sonic Mania – The game has no platinum
• Hatsune Miku Project Diva Future Tone – The game has no platinum
• Sonic Forces – I choose to live in my own micro reality where it never released outside of a music CD
• Bayonetta and Vanquish Remastered – I have no more money
• Panzer Dragoon Remastered – I have no more money
• Shin Megami 3 Nocturne and – While I would love to do so it is releasing after I start writing this, so I wouldn’t have enough time
• Catherine Full Body – I refuse to purchase the game over trans issues

While that seems like a large amount of games excluded from the list, believe me, it’s not. With the Sega and Atlus games left on PS4 that means I will be platinuming;

1. Puyo Puyo Esports
2. Valkyria Chronicles Remaster
3. Valkyria Chronicles 4
4. Persona 3 Dancing in Moonlight
5. Persona 4 Dancing All Night 
6. Persona 5 Dancing in Starlight
7. Persona 5
8. Persona 5 Royal
9. Shining Resonance Refrain
10. Shenmue
11. Shenmue 2
12. Shenmue 3
13. Fist of the North Star Lost Paradise 
14. Yakuza 0
15. Yakuza Kiwami
16. Yakuza Kiwami 2
17. Yakuza 3
18. Yakuza 4
19. Yakuza 5
20. Yakuza 6
21. Judgment
22. Sakura Wars (2019)

Twenty two games to platinum, nearly all of them being either very hard or very time consuming. To be honest though, I didn’t get a fair amount of these in 2020. A lot of these are some of my favorite games of all time so I got the platinum before I chose to make this a goal. However, that still left a lot of games to platinum this year and I have vivid memories of the ones I got before this goal so that’s not too relevant.

Now that the explanation is over with, let’s get into the journey of platinuming these games. For the sake of making this interesting to read I’ll be going over the platinums in the order of easiest to get to hardest to get. While I encourage you to go for some of the easier platinums on here for the fun of completionism, I do not advise going for all of them like me if you value your sanity. Also while this article will have a huge focus on the platinums and the journey of getting them this will be a more overall look at Sega’s library on PS4.

1. Shenmue 1 and 2

Shenmue is an experience.It’s  one of gaming’s greatest anomalies in that it defies everything gaming is while still being one of the most engaging games ever.  The story of teenager Ryo Hazuki trying to track down the villainous Lan Di and avenge his father has stuck in the minds of gamers for two decades.

Shenmue 1 and 2 are games filled to the brim with details and scenes that most players don’t even know exist. When a friend of mine played they just straight up didn’t see the Nozomi and Ryo christmas scene that was one of the most notable scenes in the game for me. Shenmue 2 even has an infamously hidden duck racing minigame that seems impossible to learn about without someone telling you about it.

They’re also filled with great time wasting things like Sega arcade games such as Outrun and Space Harrier, or you can spend time getting capsule toys of Sega characters. Shenmue 2 also had gambling in the form of Lucky Hit, Flower Bird Wind and Moon, and Arm Wrestling.

So what does the platinum require of you? What great, hidden tasks are hidden that must be near impossible to learn about on a casual run? Nothing. There are a few missable trophies in the game, but nearly all of them are the kind that you’ll see on a casual run. For game’s as famously dense as Shenmue 1 and 2 the platinums are brisk and easy, free prizes to be given to you at the end of your run.

I could talk about how things like learning the Tornado Kick can be a bit annoying because of the button inputs or how gambling for some money in Shenmue 2 is literal RNG, but that would just be nitpicking what is just a pleasant journey. Which in a way, is the perfect thing a Shenmue platinum could be, just live and play at your own pace and these two platinums will fall into your hands. Don’t even think about them and just immerse yourself in the world of Shenmue.

2. Persona 5 Royal

The advanced rerelease of Atlus’ hit JRPG Persona 5. The game that turned the Persona franchise into something people had heard the name of, into a full on mainstream game series. Persona 5 Royal is everything loved in the original Persona 5 with some quality of life improvements and some dungeon design changes.

Having moved from a niche title to a mainstream game, the platinum of P5 Royal has moved to the difficulty of most mainstream game ones, which is very easy. While you can potentially not get the platinum on a casual playthrough many of you reading this probably have.

The steps to getting the platinum are only slightly more than the bare minimum story. You need only to get max social stats (something you’ll probably already do), collect all stamps in Mementos, and defeat the Reaper.

Collecting all stamps in Mementos is not a hard task, but it can be a bit of a time consuming one as the stamps have a random chance of showing up, but that random chance isn’t low. I would always get at least 2 stamps in a Mementos trip and there aren’t many total.

The Reaper is the only true challenge of this run being a hard boss if you are unprepared. However he’s far from the hardest boss in the game. There are many strategies online to cheese the Reaper fight, but personally I would encourage you to try fighting him legitimately with your own strategy. He’s a fun fight if you prepare properly.

While it is a bit of a disappointment that Persona 5 Royal isn’t as hard a platinum as the previous Persona games including its non-enhanced version, I can’t complain too hard about a free plat. Plus Atlus emailed a Lavenza PSN theme to people who did get it. Or at least they were supposed to, I never got mine and I am still mad about it.

3. The Persona Dancing Trilogy

These three Platinums all have around the same difficulty, so there’s no real need to give them seperate placements on the list. The existence of the Persona dancing trilogy is odd, rhythm games reminiscent of the Hatsune Miku Project Diva franchise with remixes of Persona music.

The remixes in these games can be very hit or miss. Personally I think Persona 4 Dancing All Night is a soundtrack of mostly hits while Persona 3 Dancing in Moonlight and Persona 5 Dancing in Starlight are mostly misses. However that just comes down to personal taste.

What isn’t just determined by taste though is the difficulty of platinuming these games, it’s really easy to do. Other than just playing all songs all you have to do in each and every one of these games is buy all the items in the shop. Something that only requires slight grinding as you will have nearly enough money to do that by the time you have cleared all the songs. Persona 3 and Persona 5 Dancing require slightly more effort as you need to social link between songs, but that’s also something you’re likely to be doing anyway.

These games are also incredibly short, even just compared to the Project Diva series, the song list in these games is very small with each character only getting two or three songs to dance to. Persona 4 Dancing All Night is slightly longer due to having a story mode, but not by much.

A trilogy of small dancing games with hit or miss soundtracks that are incredibly overpriced for what they are. The Persona Dancing games are not going to be making many people’s favorite games lists but they are at least three easy platinums.

4. Sakura Wars (2019)

The grand return of one of my favorite video game franchises and the debut game of my favorite fictional character. Sakura Wars (2019) released last year and I played it day 1. I remember the day it released vividly, finally being able to play one of my most anticipated games ever, even if I didn’t know a large amount of what was going on because I can’t actually read Japanese.

That didn’t stop me from getting the platinum however, which is actually a very easy task. To get the platinum requires getting all endings, collecting all bromides, and beating everyone in Koi Koi.

Getting all endings was something I planned to do anyway, that’s 5 playthroughs requiring you to choose a different Vice Captain at the end. I went with Azami on my first run because of course I did, then Claris, Anastasia, Hatsuho, and Sakura. Doing a New Game Plus run is actually pretty boring though. Everyone already has all the affection they had for you in your first playthrough so you can pretty much make any choice you want with no consequences.

Next is all bromides, getting 90% of the bromides is very easy as the ones that are on the ground are marked on the map in NG+, however the remaining 10% are obtained through Battle Bot Simulator. You have to do all Battle Bot Simulator stages for a trophy anyway so you’re not going too out of your way for it. However Battle Bot Simulator is easily the most tedious part of the platinum as it requires you to replay each stage in the game four times with a different partner. It’s very tiring to go through the same thing over and over when you’re already replaying those stages with the default partner as you replay the game for the other endings.

Finally there’s Koi Koi, a lot of people actually don’t like this minigame, however I love it. Koi Koi is one of few traditional Japanese games that I’m actually really good at. I just love the feeling of watching my opponent call Koi to try doubling their score only for me to dash their hopes with my own junk hand. It’s good fun and I enjoyed beating each and every Sakura Wars (2019) character at it. A tedious experience sure, but one I enjoyed the entire time which sums up the Sakura Wars (2019) platinum in general.

5. Yakuza 6: Song of Life

The finale of Yakuza’s Kiryu saga a very divisive game among Yakuza fans. Personally I think it’s one of the best. The combat may be slower than before, but with the powerful charge attacks, and the knowledge that this is Kiryu’s last game makes it feel like Kiryu is no longer just a fighter but a powerful old man. However the game is clearly unfinished in some areas such as not having an arena despite there being an arena in the story and it has a shocking lack of fanservice for a finale entry. I can look over these issues though as the main plot and gameplay are very engaging and one of my favorites in the series. Now let’s talk about the platinum.

The Yakuza franchise has some of the hardest platinums in gaming, forcing you to become excellent at every minigame, see every inch of content the game could possibly offer, and become a pro at the battle system. Anyone who has ever gone after a Yakuza platinum has a horror story to tell you.

That is, for every game in the series except 6. I don’t know what happened during the trophy planning for 6 but it’s platinum is significantly easier than every Yakuza game before and after it. The normally hundreds of hours spanning task of doing everything on the completion list has been simplified to just needing to do 100 tasks on the completion list, something that’s entirely likely you’ll do naturally in a playthrough. Other than that the only real challenges in a platinum run of Yakuza 6 are to fight Amon and beat the game on Legend mode.

Except, even these two tasks have been greatly simplified compared to how they are in the games before and after this. Amon is no longer the ultimate superboss fought after completing all substories (Although you still need to do all substories for a trophy). He has been reduced to a simple street boss who sends Kiryu a letter and then you fight him with little fanfare, and for Kiryu’s final fight with Amon that’s just sad.

Legend Mode is a Yakuza standard trophy. You unlock Legend Mode upon beating the game and it’s the hardest difficulty. Enemies do insane amounts of damage and if you die you must reload your save, a truly grueling experience in many of the games. However, someone must have not been paying attention with Yakuza 6’s difficulty settings as you can change the game to Legend Mode at any time, allowing you to merely reload a save before the ending, switch to Legend Mode, and instantly pop the trophy.

Note that this exploit affects the mainline games that use the “Dragon Engine” (Kiwami 2 and 6) in general these are easy games, even on Legend Mode you’re not likely to be threatened by anything. A fresh save on Legend Mode can be beaten in a few hours (Yes the Yakuza series without cutscenes and side stories is actually full of short games) and barely break a sweat

And that’s all I have to say on Yakuza 6’s platinum, Kiryu’s final journey delivered an easy platinum not worthy of being considered a true Yakuza plat, not coming close to the grueling experiences the other games in this series bring

6. Valkyria Chronicles Remastered 

An HD Remaster of the first game in Sega’s cult classic Valkyria Chronicles franchise, a series of amazing SRPGs that took the ARMS strategy gameplay established in Sakura Wars 3 and 4 and fine tuned it into something truly special. The original Valkyria Chronicles released on PS3 before trophies were a thing however the PS4 Remaster added them in.

Being something that was added in later they’re all pretty simple. Essentially all you need to do is kill all enemy aces and get an A rank on every stage. Something that is unlikely to happen on a first playthrough but on a NG+ run where you can replay stages at your leisure it’s just a matter or practice and getting good at the game.

Theoretically anyway, a well known thing about Valkyria Chronicles 1 is how unbalanced it is, not in the enemy’s favor, in your favor. Specifically, for your scouts. Alicia eats bullets for breakfast, send her running into the battlefield and her interception defense skill and heal skills will allow her to survive tanks, machine guns, the works. Since A ranking stages is entirely dependent on how many turns you take, the strategy is to have her run head first to the goal.

There are, however, two stages where this strategy doesn’t entirely work, and thus those two stages end up being the hardest in the game. The first is the Battle of Barious, this stage is centered around taking down Maximillion’s giant tank, meaning you must use your Lancer units to shoot it. Lancers are slow so there were too many times where I had to use too many turns just moving them into a position where they could hit the weak points which led to many failures.

Then there’s the second to final stage, the Showdown at Randgriz. This stage sucks to A rank for one reason and one reason alone: on the first turn your Lancer must hit a sheet of metal to create a platform for your other units to get up to the Marmota. I missed this one shot over and over again. Constantly resetting on the first turn for like twenty minutes until I finally got it. However, while this was annoying, it was more on my luck than anything actually difficult, a small inconvenience for an overall brisk platinum.

7. Persona 5

Just because Persona 5 Royal was very low on the difficulty scale doesn’t mean that base P5 is much higher. The 5th and long awaited game in the Persona series, Persona 5 launched the franchise into mainstream gaming with great battle gameplay loops and engaging dungeon design. It stole the hearts of many a gamer.

The journey to get the platinum can be done on 1 playthrough, but for a majority of players it will take 2 runs, as it requires you to see almost all of the content the game has to offer. All social links, all Mementos requests, all Personas, and the two super bosses of the game.

Doing all Social Links is incredibly easy, much more so than Persona 4 and especially Persona 3, given that they are mostly split between day and night social links and a larger amount of them are achieved through story progression than before so doing them all on a first playthrough was incredibly feasible even before Royal gave you an extended amount of time.

Getting all Mementos requests isn’t hard but does require you to do all social links along the way as well as work at multiple part time jobs. So long as you are diligent about doing them and frequently check your phone for Mishima to send them you should be fine.

Next is getting all Personas, this is the biggest grind of the playthrough as it requires loads and loads of fusing and figuring out who to fuse with whom to form what. Plus since you can’t create treasure demons with fusion you’ll need to go and recruit them manually.

Before I highlight the super bosses I’ll also call out two miscellaneous trophies that have caused pain for some people. Reading all books and playing all video games. Reading all books requires you to read several of them from the library and sometimes you can just be unlucky as they’re already checked out and buying the rest from the book store. As reading books takes time this can detract greatly from doing other things such as maxing out all social links. Playing all video games requires you to buy them from the store and play them. Some are a button mashing minigame and others are pure rng dice rolling, it’s not very fun but not very high on my list of annoying things.

Finally we have the super bosses. I already highlighted the Reaper in the Persona 5 Royal section so it would be redundant to talk about his fight again. However it is worth noting that in the original P5 he wasn’t immune to the despair status effect which causes him to kill himself in 3 turns, so if you really want to cheese it you can just fight him on Flu season where he has a high chance of starting the battle with despair.

The other major super boss you need to fight for the trophy is Justine and Caroline, and they are easily the hardest boss in the game as they have extremely high health, can use a multitude of elements to down you and get more turns, and most damningly can revive each other if you don’t kill them simultaneously. They will also kill you if you take too many turns fighting them. This fight may be difficult but if you plan and strategize correctly you will be filled with a lot of pride in yourself/ Or you can just cheese it with Yoshitsune, that works too.

8. Valkyria Chronicles 4

The fourth title in Sega’s Valkyria Chronicles franchise. Valkyria Chronicles 4 has always felt like a budget title to me, with a soundtrack completely reused from the first game and none of the gameplay changes of the second and third game making the transition to PS4. However, feeling like a budget title doesn’t stop the game from being amazing. Valkyria Chronicles 4 is the same fantastic strategic ARMS gameplay of the first game with a new cast of characters, stages, and a great story

The trophy list is pretty simple, being close to identical to Valkyria Chronicles Remastered. However there’s one major difference between this game and Remastered that makes the platinum a lot harder. There are significantly more optional skirmishes in this game than the first, and the later ones are a lot harder than anything the previous game had to offer.

The Scout class has also been fixed in this game. No longer are scouts next to unkillable units that you can send running into enemy lines. You’ll actually need to properly strategize and use every one of your classes wisely. It’s some of the most fun I’ve had with my PS4. It’s difficult for sure, but the sense of accomplishment when completing a goal where anyone can theoretically practice and become good enough of it to win is something I’ve always loved the feeling of. It’s why I go and platinum games, the effort that goes into completionism feels like I actually accomplished something.

Of course not all platinums are fun, and we need to go over those too.

9. Shenmue 3

The long awaited middle chapter of the Shenmue saga and my 2019 Game of the Year. Shenmue 3 was a fantastic experience that frequently has me reconsider what gaming is and should be. It’s truly a work of art that doesn’t follow any game design rules or expectations. I regret never writing a full review of the game outside of mine and Naalune’s Best of 2019 list, but I don’t know if Shenmue 3 is even a game that can be looked at in a traditional review lense. Sega didn’t develop or publish Shenmue 3, but it is still their IP so I will be talking about the process to platinum it, plus you can’t have a discussion about Sega without talking about the Shenmue series and this is an entire third of it

If any of you are reading this list and considering going for the platinums described yourself, this is the cutoff point where the easy journey’s end. Persona 5 and everything mentioned before are platinums, I encourage you to try getting yourself as they can show how fun completionism can be if you have the time for it. Everything from here on will either be tedious, mind numbing, or frustrating to the point of pulling your hair out. Speaking of those three adjectives, we have Shenmue 3’s trophy list. I’ll also be a lot more thorough about all the games from now on and explaining how much harder these platinums were

Everything about Shenmue 1 and 2 that could have been made into to the hardest trophies in gaming but weren’t, have returned in Shenmue 3, but this time the trophy list was built around those activities.

You know those capsule toy collections? Every Shenmue fan loves them, they’re a fun little collectible that you’ll probably buy one or two of as you walk by the machines and move along with your day. Shenmue 3 has a trophy for collecting all of them. 30 different sets of them. That’s essentially 30 different gachas that you need to complete. This alone will take several hours and maybe days for you to do. Not to mention the insane amount of ingame money it takes to do all of this but luckily I did this before the infinite money exploit was patched out, but as that implies, it was patched out. If you want to go for this trophy now prepare to be grinding part time jobs just for the chance of getting these capsules.

That is only the beginning however, Shenmue 3’s trophies will require you to see every inch of content it has to offer and every square inch of kickstarted land.

The next trophy I want to highlight is getting the high score on all arcade machines. That doesn’t sound too hard, right? There’s only 3 types of arcade games in Shenmue 3 so getting a few high scores isn’t hard. However I didn’t say high scores on all arcade games, I said all machines. Every single arcade machine in the game has their own individual high score
counter and you need to place first in them all, playing the same 3 minigames over and over again. At one point I cleared my 8th wack a mole machine and panicked when I turned the corner and saw 3 more waiting for me. Shenmue 3 has given me wack a mole PTSD!

I am also a bit disappointed that the arcade games in Shenmue 3 aren’t Outrun and Space Harrier like they were in Shenmue 1 and 2, making Shenmue 3 the only Sega PS4 game with an arcade that doesn’t have Outrun and Space Harrier (Trust me I’ll be talking about those two some more when we get to Yakuza). For a while I thought Shenmue 3 just couldn’t make Sega references because of legal reasons since not only were the arcade games not Sega ones but there also wasn’t any Sonic capsule toys. However near the end of my third playthrough I walked into a building I never had before and encountered a poster of the blue hedgehog himself so clearly they were allowed to use his image and just chose not to

Shenmue 3 also has substories like the Yakuza series and as expected you need to do all of them for the platinum. However unlike Yakuza these substories are never marked in any map making it hard to even find out if they exist and they’re all time limited making it very easy to completely miss them. These are some of my favorite parts of the game because they give extra character to NPCs, one of Shenmue’s specialities, but doing all of them in a single playthrough is very stressful

Learning all skills for a trophy is mostly stress free as you can buy most of them or the materials needed to learn them. However there is one skill that is a pain to learn. To get it you need to win at skill ball, a game very similar to pachinko. This is pure luck, I would frequently launch the balls in the exact same way and get different results. Winning this minigame is complete luck.

Then there’s the herbs, god the herbs. In Shenmue 3 you can find herbs on the ground and sell them for medicine. Any herbs you sell regrow. For this trophy you need to pick up every single herb in the game. There are hundreds of herbs and picking them all up is next to an impossible task, most of them are incredibly hard to even see. I spent two days just walking around the game with my face pointed to the ground looking over every inch of land for herbs. The fact that I knew they could be invisible made it all the more frightening. Yes you read that right, invisible. Because of what I presume to be an oversight by the devs one of the herbs is invisible! Only one, yes, but the fear I was filled with upon discovering that and thinking there could be other invisible herbs hiding anywhere cannot be overstated. There may be harder games to platinum further down this list but this was easily the hardest trophy I have ever gotten.

I also decided what the hay and went for Shenmue 3’s DLC trophies as well. Because I am insane. The story quest DLC was simple enough, just do the new story quests. However the other two DLCs Battle Rally and Big Merry Cruise were less so. Remember how I just went on a huge tirade about herb hunting and how painful it was? Battle Rally has more of that! Instead of hunting herbs for a trophy you’re hunting down Chobu-chans! Chobu-chans are in the main game as well but you always have a good idea where they were as each store had one so it was just a matter of searching near that store. Battle Rally however hides these in the wild and they’re just as hard to find as you may imagine!

Then there’s Big Merry Cruise, a DLC where Ryo goes on a cruise ship to gamble. Here you must simply win at each type of gambling minigame once and win enough one enough to win all items in a wheel of prizes. Gambling is luck and there’s no way around that. I won’t lie, I had fun with this one, something about this DLC and watching the turtle I bet on pull from last place to first place awoke the Kaiji fan feelings in me.

Herb hunting may have been the worst trophy on the Shenmue 3 list, but it certainly wasn’t the longest or most tedious. No, the final task I had to clear for Shenmue 3 was to catch 1000 fish. This trophy is nothing special, but you must understand that 1000 fish is a very, very large number for an optional minigame. I was fishing for three real life days before I got this trophy. I never want to play this minigame again, I’ve had enough.

10. Fist of the North Star Lost Paradise 

A game that’s existence seems like a dream. A Fist of the North Star game with the gameplay of the Yakuza franchise. Fist of the North Star Lost Paradise is a fantastic game and easily one of the best licensed games in existence. Combining the precise combat of Yakuza with the hot blooded pressure point techniques of Fist of the North Star. Going for the platinum here isn’t very difficult, but it is tedious and a commitment. A hundred and ten hour commitment.Let’s start off by going over the trophy that nearly made me give up, and in fact for the year between me playing the game for the first time and now, did make me give up. There’s a Dr. Kenshiro clinic minigame. The minigame is a simple rhythm game where you press the button in time with the song in order to either cure your patients or make enemies explode. Winning this minigame isn’t hard, you’ll probably do it on a casual run. However, that’s not what the trophy is for. The trophy is for not missing a single note in every song, which is extremely hard to do. Can you imagine if a trophy for one of the Project Diva games or the Persona Dancing games was to do 1 song on Extreme without missing a note? That’s what this trophy is. Sure, it’s not impossible, but it’s extremely hard. I was determined however, I spent several hours on this singular trophy. Attempting the same song over and over again, commiting the button order to muscle memory. Eventually I finally won. I brute forced my way into getting this trophy
That’s the only truly difficult trophy in the game. The rest are just tedious, like the infamous buggy.The buggy and the racing minigame that come with it are a semi-big part of the game when playing normally, but when you’re going for all the substories suddenly that small part of the game becomes the largest part of the game. Not out of the racing and buggy building having a lot of content, but out of needing to grind for the materials to create the parts to make a better buggy. Getting the buggy materials takes what feels like a lifetime as they randomly spawn in the wasteland and even the ones you can just trade for take a lot of expensive trades. Once you finally create a good buggy the actual races actually aren’t that hard, it’s just the work to get there takes so long. Once you finally win all the races….you still won’t be done with them, but we’ll get into that soonNext is the Arena. The Arena is probably the most fun I had with the platinum as the combat in this game is really fun, as for Yakuza standard. You can refight recolors of every boss in the game for rewards. Every time you fight them they get stronger and give a different reward, giving ten rewards in total. Some of the later fights can take you down really quickly, keeping you on your toes.
Now that I have explained both the buggy and the arena to you, allow me to unveil exactly how much you’ll be playing these two minigames. There is an ability Kenshiro has called talismans. He can activate these in battle for a quick buff or attack to enemies. There are 24 talismans in the game and you need to upgrade every single one to level 7. The materials for upgrading them are obtained in three places. Buggy races, the arena, and the casino.You will need to continuously win buggy races over and over again to buy these materials. After the hours of driving the buggy in order to upgrade the buggy itself, needing to drive it even more just to buy other things felt like a gut punch. I played the final race so many times just to earn enough buggy points to buy the materials from the buggy shop
Then there’s the materials from the arena. You get 1 of each material you need here at the tenth fight for each opponent. However you need more than just one of these materials from these fights. Requiring you to fight each opponent in the arena at their highest difficulty six times to get all the materials you need. Even I, who liked these arena fights, grew tired of fighting hereFinally, there’s the casino. There are 3 options at the casino. Poker, Blackjack, and Roulette. I didn’t even attempt this legitimately. I suck at Poker and Blackjack has such a miniscule payout for victory. No I instead won Roulette in safe bets five times so I could challenge the house, saved, and then bet on 0. However even with save scumming and winning on 0, (getting a 72 times payout for my 2,000 chips) I still needed to do this four times to get enough chips to trade for the materials I needed.This may not seem like it took a long time when condensed to a few paragraphs, but a large amount of my 110 hour playtime was dedicated to just these three tasks. It is a majority of the platinum. The only other trophy I feel like bringing up is playing the game in Legend Mode. Every Yakuza game has this, Legend Mode is the hardest difficulty and a death in this mode requires you to reload a save. It’s not really an issue here as Kenshiro is a human tank so you likely won’t die, but it’s worth bringing up as it is series traditionWhat’s to come
So you undoubtedly noticed that I have put out this article before getting every single platinum. I have two reasons for this. The first is that I’m greedy for views and capitalizing on the success of Yakuza 7. The second is more serious, I have run into a major roadblock with this list, the main Yakuza franchise. The Yakuza franchise has some of the hardest platinums in gaming and at the time of writing this I have only platinumed 6, Kiwami 2, Fist of the North Star Lost Paradise, and Judgment. The other Yakuza games are giving me some of the hardest and most tedious challenges I have ever encountered and I need more time, very possibly more time than remaining in the year. So I made the decision to split this article in two. The second half will feature the entire Yakuza series except for 6 and the two other games I didn’t feature in this article: Shining Resonance Refrain (Which is turning out to be an easy plat so far) and Puyo Puyo Esports (Quite possibly even harder than the Yakuza series). Stay tuned for that