Finally another platinum. When I first bought Final Fantasy XIII (it was the first game I bought for my ps3, along with Star Ocean 4 and Vesperia jpn version), I just planned to play and finish the game without any thought of platinuming it. After I started playing, the platinum thought still had not crossed my mind, and then even after I finished playing the game last year, it still had not. It was mainly because when I read through the trophy list, I thought some of the trophy was quite troublesome and a pain to obtain due to the grinding needed (which at that time looked ridiculous to me). But hey, I’ve platinumed/1000G The Last Remnant and NieR, so who am I to say about “some” grindings?
The festive break finally gave me the chance to return to my ps3, and I simply had to use that opportunity to platinum FFXIII. Last time I left the game, there’s about 6 trophies I had not obtained: 3 Mark 64-related Trophies; beating Long Gui Trophy, 5-starred final boss Trophy; and the “most” tedious one, collecting all weapon and accessories Trophy.
The first problem I had, as I highlighted in my FFXIII post-game entry, was money. So I spent about a day going back all the way to Eden plaza and farm the adamantoise there for Platinum Ingots/money. In the end I still stick with Vanille’s Death method the whole time, because although it is not that efficient compared to manual killing, it allowed me to multitask, I mean I can just mash the death command (after summon/buff/debuff etc) while watching something on my laptop : ) Surprisingly though, the adamantoise there didn’t take long to go down from Vanille’s Death (average 10 mins to down one, which include the time I deeded to regain TP by fighting the nearby soldiers), and even more surprisingly, they dropped Platinum Ingot much more often than I thought. Heck I even got 7 (yes, SEVEN!) super rare Trapezohedron drops on that run. I guess luck was really on my side on that day.
With lots of Platinum Ingots, it became much easier to upgrade weapons and accessories to complete the list for Treasure Hunter trophy. But even then, there was still one material that I lack to complete my inventory list….the Dark Matter. 5 items required this catalyst for upgrade, but Dark Matter cost a whopping 800,000 gil from shops, and alternatively, it was a rare drop from Shaolong Gui…a monster that I’ve never beat before. The first time I face him, my party was annihilated by his Ultima…until I watched the video on youtube on how to beat him. Damn was it easy. Most video showed Shaolong Guis getting taken down within 1-2 minutes, and while I followed almost exactly the same paradigm deck as the video used, I used a “safer” approach in battle, which in the end took me about 2-3 minutes to take one Shaolong Gui down compared to 1+ mins in the video. Not much of a problem, since I only needed a minimum of 5 Dark Matters, and in the end I got about 10 of them, enough even to create create Kaiser Knuckles and Magistral Crests.
The last trophy that I feel I need to put on here is Adamant Will, that is, beating Long Gui. To be honest I really don’t feel like putting my effort on beating this guy, because I think he didn’t deserve the effort (by the time you face him, you’ve pretty much maxed your crystal and most of your inventory). So I used a bit of “cheating” to beat him: - max upgrade all 3 Doctor’s Code and disassembled them to get 3 Elixers (restore all HP/TP). Go fight a Long Gui. Buff etc, summon to disable Long Gui’s leg, switch to Tri-Disaster and pummel away the downed Long Gui until he is staggered. Switch to Devastation (2 Com + 1 Sab), then continue attacking him. When he’s back on his feet, use elixir to restore TP, buff, and summon again. Then rinse and repeat. Long Gui down in 3 summons sequence, job done and the trophy popped up. Then I reload the save before I disassembled the Doctor’s Code : )
Overall how do I rate FFXIII Platinum difficulty compared to others that I’ve platinumed/1000G? I guess I’ll put FFXIII between The Last Remnant (harder than FFXIII) and NieR (easier than FFXIII). In Last Remnant, I still remembered the pain I had to endure to get a proper party and max their skills, then grind the rarest item for 6 hours without getting anything, and much more tedious stuff. FFXIII in my mind didn’t reach to that level for me. NieR could have reach the level of TLR, but as I mentioned, I was pretty lucky with the moonflower and rate item stuff that it felt to me that the game was somewhat easier to platinum than FFXIII. Nevertheless, none of these could reach the level of SO4’s grinding…ever.
Next platinum project (hopefully): Sengoku Basara 3
Tales of Grace F
Warrior Orochi 3
FFXIII-2