The 25 Hardest PlayStation 3 Platinum Trophies

Mortal Kombat 9

The Hardest PlayStation 3 Trophies of All Time

Mortal Kombat 9’s trophy list may not seem all that daunting at first. Yes, there are some trophies that require you to complete the arcade ladder on max difficulty without using a continue and another without using block, but there are sneaky little tricks to get around these otherwise seemingly impossible feats.

The real challenge comes in the dedication that Mortal Kombat 9 asks you for in order to unlock its ‘My Kung Fu is Stronger’ trophy. Not only is it the only gold trophy on the list for the game, but it requires you to put in a staggering 28 days of gameplay into it. Players must ‘Gain mastery of all fighters’ which may not seem all that bad. That is until you realize that in order to gain mastery of one fighter requires:

– 100 wins
– 100 -alities (fatalities and/or babalities)
– 150 X-Ray moves
– 10,000 liters of blood (each character)
– 24 net hours of play

So to do so for all fighters requires:

– 2,800 wins
– 2,800 -alities (fatalities and/or babalities)
– 4,200 X-Rays moves
– 280,000 liters of blood
– 672 hours of play

Yep, that’s the equivalent of playing Mortal Kombat 9 for 28 days, 24 hours a day… I think we’ll pass!

Star Ocean: The Last Hope International

The Hardest PlayStation 3 Trophies of All Time

Star Ocean: The Last Hope International’s trophy list focuses heavily on the player obtaining, collecting, creating or finding a number of different collectibles or items. While this may seem pretty straight forward, obtaining some of the battle trophies will require some serious skill and can be time-consuming. Creating a number of the different items in the game with no recipe to tell you exactly how to create them also proves difficult.

What makes things even worse is Star Ocean’s chaos mode, putting the difficulty through the roof which results in the game’s final few bosses requiring a lot of tactical play and put your skills to the test. Round all that off with some people who have obtained the platinum stating it could take in the region of 500 hours to complete and you’ve got yourself a tricky platinum to unlock.

Lost Planet 2

The Hardest PlayStation 3 Trophies of All Time

Lost Planet 2 wants to make players really work for that platinum trophy. Not only do they have to play through the campaign a minimum of four times in order to unlock the hardest difficulty setting but they must then complete it on Extreme difficulty also. Once you’ve done that you’re gonna have to play through it a couple more times as the trophy ‘300-Chapter Playback’ requires players to complete 300 chapters (it has fewer than a couple dozen chapters, so you’ll be replaying plenty of them).

Combine that with collecting a number of different items (the Nom de Guerres being particularly tricky to getting a complete set of) and Lost Planet 2 is one serious slog of a platinum trophy.

Far Cry 2

The Hardest PlayStation 3 Trophies of All Time

Far Cry 2 was one of those games that came out during the era where developers didn’t see the big deal with online trophies, so poured them into their games. Trophies such as ‘Warlord’ and ‘Soldier of Misfortune’ were two trophies that require countless hours of grinding in order to unlock them. ‘Warlord’ tasked players with reaching level 30 online, requiring 1.5 million XP which. Considering you only got 10 points for knocking out an enemy and then a further 5 for finishing them off, well, we’ll let you do the math.

As for ‘Soldier of Misfortune,’ the trophy asked players to unlock the field manuals for all weapons. This required about 9,000 kills spread over a variety of different weapons on servers that were pretty unstable.

If the multiplayer ones weren’t enough for you, the ‘Wages of Conflict’ single player trophy requires players to go and find all 1000 diamonds hidden across the game’s map. Oh, and to make things even worse, some of them had a tendency to be glitched.

Wipeout HD

The Hardest PlayStation 3 Trophies of All Time

Sony’s popular futuristic racing series, Wipeout, made an appearance on the PlayStation 3 in the form of WipeOut HD and brought a fiendishly difficult platinum trophy with it. The two most difficult trophies came in the form of ‘Elite Campaign Legend’ and ‘Beat Zico.’

‘Elite Campaign Legend’ tasks players with obtaining a gold medal for every cell in the race campaign on Elite difficulty. While this may not seem all that bad, the AI can turn out to be pretty aggressive and make your time on the track a living nightmare.

In order to grab the ‘Beat Zico’ trophy, players must equal or beat the lap time of 30.82 seconds on Anulpha Pass, Speed Lap, and Venom using the Piranha. While there are a number of methods out there online in order to help players achieve this, beating this incredibly fast lap time requires patience and a whole lot of skill. Kudos to any of you out there who have managed to grab this one.

Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2

The Hardest PlayStation 3 Trophies of All Time

If you’ve ever played a Ninja Gaiden game before you may have noticed that the games are pretty unforgiving and boss battles are relentless in ensuring you’re mentally and physically drained when you reach the end of the game.

When Ninja Gaiden 2’s trophy list revealed that in order to obtain the platinum trophy players must obtain a Master Ninja rank on every chapter on Master Ninja difficulty, it was clear that the developers hadn’t changed their ways. These Master Ninja chapters will put you through your paces, making enemies much tougher to take down and making you much more susceptible to damage. You really are a true ninja if you’ve grabbed this one.

Super Street Fighter IV

The Hardest PlayStation 3 Trophies of All Time

Just like we mentioned in our toughest PlayStation 4 platinum trophies list, the Street Fighter IV group of games had some of the toughest platinum trophies in the PlayStation 3 era.

In order to unlock the platinum trophy, you’re going to need to have some pretty impressive Street Fighter skills to take on the challenge. While seasoned players should be able to unlock some of the trophies with some time and elbow grease, it’s the ‘Trial Athlete’ trophy that will be the main obstacle in your road to platinum glory. You must complete all 24 challenges within each of the 35 character trials in order for it to unlock. As you progress through the challenges, the difficulty increases, so just wait until the final few if you’re finding it tough near the beginning.

Persona 4: Arena

The Hardest PlayStation 3 Trophies of All Time

Persona 4: Arena is a fighting game based on the incredibly popular Persona 4 RPG. The game not only includes some tricky single player trophies that we’ll get to in a minute, but if you want to get that platinum you’re going to have to take your skills online.

Unfortunately, you’ll need to play until you reach level 30 online which requires racking up a total of 4.25 million points. Depending on whether you’re winning games and how stylish your victories are this will come faster to some than others. Even without the frustrating online trophies, completing Score Attack mode with all characters for the ‘C’est Magnifique’ trophy will be a challenge in itself as you’ll have to take on a number of incredibly difficult opponents with some infuriating power-ups too.

Raiden IV

The Hardest PlayStation 3 Trophies of All Time

Raiden IV’s platinum trophy is guarded by a seriously difficult challenge. You’ll have to beat every single difficulty without using any continues. In other words, if you die once that’s game over.

While this may not be too much of a challenge for experienced players when taking on the lower difficulties, the game gets a bit insane on the “ULTIMATE” difficulty setting. Just check it out for yourself here and skip to about the 57-minute mark to see what lies in store toward the end of the game.

NBA 2K16

The Hardest PlayStation 3 Trophies of All Time

2K’s, NBA 2K basketball series is pretty well known for having some seriously tough trophy lists which make grabbing those elusive platinum trophies difficult. Unfortunately for fans, NBA 2K16 wasn’t any easier.

First off, to get the ‘198 Problems and Domination IS One!’ trophy, you’ll need to earn 198 stars in Domination and Historic Domination in the MyTeam game. The problem is, these stars aren’t just dished out by winning a match. Instead, your the number of stars you are awarded is judged in-game based on the performance of players, not purely based on if you win the match or how many actual match-points you rack up. Therefore, ensuring your players perform up to the standard they’re expected to, making this much harder if you’re using all ‘Gold’ players, becomes the main task.

To make things even more tricky is the ‘Fortune Hunter’ trophy which requires players to acquire all runes in order to see the trophy pop. Runes can be found by viewing your player cards and rotating them until the Rune appears. What makes this so difficult is nobody knows exactly what player cards hold the runes as each account has 30 randomized cards spread equally across bronze, silver, and gold cards for both current, and historic players. In other words, the 30 runes in my game may be completely different to the 30 in your game, so a lot of searching and viewing of cards is required. It may not be difficult but it certainly makes things a lot more time-consuming.

Gran Turismo 5

The Hardest PlayStation 3 Trophies of All Time

Gran Turismo 5’s Platinum trophy just wasn’t worth it for most players. It’s sky high requirements turned a solid racing title into an endless grind of failure and self deprication.

It all starts at the “Gold Standard” trophy, which requires you to get gold in every race and event — basically, it wants you to perfect the game. That typically wouldn’t be so hard, were it not for the notorious Suzuka Circuit, which needs to be completed in a ridiculously short amount of time using a ridiculously uncontrollable car. Those that spend days upon days learning each and every bend of this track were the only ones reaching that Platinum, and even after this hurdle, there’s still the 24-hour endurance races to complete.

Fight Night Round 4

The Hardest PlayStation 3 Trophies of All Time

Most of Fight Night Round 4’s trophies are reasonable, nothing you wouldn’t expect in a boxing game on the PlayStation 3. Unfortunately, it’s the L, XL, and XXL requirements that send this one over the edge. These trophies demand you be matched with and defeat the belt-holder in each category of these weight groups.

This practically meant living and breathing this game’s online, and probably to zero success. You were highly unlikely to even pair up with the proper person online, yet alone defeat them then and there. 

Killzone 2

The Hardest PlayStation 3 Trophies of All Time

Killzone 2’s hardest trophy is simple: beat the game on its hardest Elite difficulty. If only that wasn’t near impossible.

The enemies of KZ2 turn into superpowered genius AI on Elite, nailing one-shot kills should you leave cover for more than a second, and lobbing humanity’s most destructive and accurate grenades. And if you manage to get past all that, it’s the final boss that will have you crying. Radec is furiously difficult on even the lowest difficulties, and he’s extra no-joke here. 

Battlefield: Bad Company

The Hardest PlayStation 3 Trophies of All Time

Battlefield: Bad Company falls under the list of games that needlessly require endless grinding in order to get its Platinum. In this case, players need to attain 10,002 kills in multiplayer. If you’re an average human who needs to eat, sleep, and do things other than play Battlefield for dozens of hours straight, this trophy can take anywhere from 100-150 hours. 

Fight Night Champions

The Hardest PlayStation 3 Trophies of All Time

One of the hardest PS3 trophies to obtain is Fight Night Champions’ Squat Thrusting, which asks you to reach boxer level 60 in the Online World Championship. Most opponents you’d face were massive challenges, and the game’s inherent disconnects didn’t help out. Usually, this one came down to tons of grinding and a few prayers for a one-hit KO. 

DC Universe Online

The Hardest PlayStation 3 Trophies of All Time

DC Universe Online didn’t have awkwardly hard trophies, just a really demeaning free-to-play system. Once the game went F2P, it was announced that only paying Legendary Access players could unlock trophies. That meant anyone hoping to grab the Platinum needed to dole out $14.99 a month for the privilege. 

Zen Pinball and Zen Pinball 2

The Hardest PlayStation 3 Trophies of All Time

Much like DCO, these games hid trophies away behind DLC tables. Nothing on the trophy list was too daunting, but players would have to fork over some cash in order to get the Platinums for these titles. 

Major League Baseball 2K10

The Hardest PlayStation 3 Trophies of All Time

MLB 2K10 carried plenty of technical challenges, ones that would have you playing game after game in order to collect the majority of trophies, but that’s not what makes this Platinum such a headache. No, that award goes to Mid-Summer Classic, which needed you to play the MLB All-Star game on July 14, 2010. On top of that, the EpidemiK asked you to play a game against a 2K developer or someone who already had this trophy. 

Blacklight: Tango Down

The Hardest PlayStation 3 Trophies of All Time

Blacklight: Tango Down’s Gearhead trophy was hopelessly bugged on the PS3. It asked players to acquire all weapons and gear in the game, a feat that should be done once a player hits max level. Unfortunately, the glitch caused some players to hit level cap without having received all weapon tags, making the trophy impossible to get, and the Platinum equally out of reach. 

Ghost Recon Future Soldier

The Hardest PlayStation 3 Trophies of All Time

The Anything You Can Do… trophy was the nail in this Tom Clancy game’s Platinum coffin. It required you to send challenges back and forth between you and a friend, except you needed the challenge to be a specific one out of a randomized list, and you needed really unskilled friends. The necessary challenge will ask you to top a feat of theirs, so if they’ve been playing multiplayer, you’re going to be stuck with upping an already high bar. Ultimately, this trophy relied on way too much friend deleting to be worthwhile. 

Rock Band 3

The Hardest PlayStation 3 Trophies of All Time

Rock Band 3 is perhaps the most unique difficult Platinum, in that it’s just straight up expensive, and nobody wants to be paying hundreds of dollars for a Platinum. To get all the trophies, you’ll need a guitar, a drumset, three microphones, and a keyboard. You’ll also need a PRO guitar if you don’t want the challenge of playing normal guitar on it. And then, after you buy all of this otherwise useless plastic, you’ll have to master them fairly thoroughly, as the skill-based trophies are no joke.

Grand Theft Auto IV

The Hardest PlayStation 3 Trophies of All Time

GTA IV’s trophy list is a massive collection of time-consuming requirements, both in single player and multiplayer. The worst may just be Key To The City, a trophy earned by completing the game 100%. In a world as huge as this, though, that means doing tons of missions, activities, thefts, and more. Meanwhile, the multiplayer trophies require some serious boosting just to bring their completion times within humanly ranges. 

Vanquish

The Hardest PlayStation 3 Trophies of All Time

The trophy list for this Platinum is a breeze, until you get to Tactical Challenger. After beating Vanquish, players will unlock five bonus missions, and a sixth once those are complete. All you have to do is beat these on at least Normal difficulty, but even that is a crazy challenge. Moreso, the sixth mission is near impossible, and your attempt is pretty much voided should you make a single mistake. 

Death Track: Resurrection

The Hardest PlayStation 3 Trophies of All Time

Death Track: Resurrection is another huge game that wants you to reach 100% before awarding that sweet, sweet Platinum. Sadly, the tasks to get there include winning all scenario races on hard difficulty without dying, complete all basic challenges (which requires you do insane things without dying), and get 200,000 points with one nitro acceleration (largely up to luck). There’s plenty of other not-fun things on DTR’s trophy list, and we’d absolutely recommend looking elsewhere for a Platinum. 

Warhawk

The Hardest PlayStation 3 Trophies of All Time

To get Warhawk’s Platinum trophy, you’ll need to spend more time with the game than any sane human would rationally want to. You’ll need to pull off thousands of specialty kills (listed below), but also reach General rank, which means grabbing 275,000 points. That would take you months without boosting, and even if you have a good boost buddy, the thousands of kills will still be a huge pain in your side:

Defense Badge: 500 Flag Carrier Kills globally – 9 Kills IAR
Ground Combat Badge: 1000 Kills as Troop globally – 20 Kills as Troop IAR
Munitions Badge: 16 Warhawk Weapon Badges – 20 Kills IAR
Offense Badge:- 500 Kills globally – 3 Flag Captures IAR
Teamwork Badge: 10000 Team Points globally – 150 Points IAR
4×4 Badge: 750 Kills with 4 x 4 globally – 15 Kills with 4×4 IAR
Tank Badge: 1000 Kills with Tank globally- 20 Kills with Tank IAR
Turret Badge: 1000 Kills with Turret globally – 20 Kills with Turret IAR
Air to Air Badge: 2000 Air-to-Air Kills globally – 15 Air-to-Air kills IAR
Air to Surface Badge: 5000 Air-to-Vehicle Kills globally – 15 Air-to-Vehicle kills IAR
Air to Troop Badge: 1000 Air-to-Troop Kills globally – 15 Air-to-Troop kills IAR
Air Mine Badge: 1000 Air Mine Kills globally – 10 Air Mine Kills IAR
Cluster Bomb Badge: 1000 Cluster Bomb Kills globally – 10 Cluster Bomb Kills IAR
Homing Missile Badge: 1000 Homing Missile Kills globally – 10 Homing Missile Kills IAR
Lighting Gun Badge: 1000 Lighting Gun Kills globally- 8 Lightning Gun Klls IAR
WH Machineguns Badge: 1000 WH M-gun Kills globally – 10 WH M-gun Kills IAR
Swarm Missile Badge: 2000 Swarm Missile Kills globally- 10 Swarm Missile Kills IAR
TOW Missile Badge: 1000 TOW Missile Kills globally- 8 TOW Missile Kills IAR
Binoculars Badge: 1000 Air-Strike Kills globally – 10 Air-Strike Kills IAR
Flamethrower Badge: 1000 Flamethrower Kills globally – 10 Flamethrower Kills IAR
Grenade Badge: 1000 Grenade Kills globally – 10 Grenade Kills IAR
Knife Badge: 500 Knife Kills globally – 8 Knife Kills IAR
Pistol Badge: 1000 Pistol Kills – 10 Pistol Kills IAR
Land Mine Badge: 1000 Land Mine Kills globally – 10 Land Mine Kills IAR
Rifle Badge: 1000 Rifle Kills globally – 10 Rifle Kills IAR
Rocket Launcher Badge: 1000 RL Kills globally – 10 RL Kills IAR
Sniper Badge: 1000 Sniper Kills globally – 8 Sniper Kills IAR

Have you got any of these platinum trophies? What about any of the ones on our PlayStation 4 list? Let us know in the comments below.