**I did search to see if this thread already existed but if it does it's not attached to the achievements topic.

I love Pillars of Eternity. Normally with games I love I like to try and get all the achievements as a sort of acknowledgement that I really dig this thing and normally because they are fun too. I will not be doing this with PoE despite it being my favourite game in years. Why? Because it has the single hardest achievement I have maybe ever seen.

Behold. For those of you (the majority I bet) who look at this and say "dragons, so what?" let me explain some of this. Cilant Lîs is the tutorial zone so that just means you must finish the game with no party members. Unlike Mass Effect that doesn't mean giving up 2 or 3 support AI, it means forgoing 5 other equally powerful characters for the entire game. That's no so bad in the long term though, but the rest is where it gets harsh. Trial of Iron is an Iron-man mode. 1 save and death = deletion and Path of the Damned it's basically the hardest mode with all the optional settings set to be as hateful as possible. So you need to beat the game on the hardest setting with one character without ever dying. That's a fucking harsh feat but one that maybe, just maybe with an insane build and conservative play you could best. In fact this was one of the launch achievements (which I saw as a distant goal I might achieve in the same way a spotty teenager sees one day having a girlfriend).

The added wrinkle of having to face EVERY SINGLE ONE of the hardest fights in the game pushes the teenager's fantasy from "one day having a girlfriend" to "one day having a girlfriend who is actually [insert your most desirable famous person partner here]". Skipping those super risky super lethal fights is one of the ways to make the super-hard run at least a little manageable but making them part of the deal makes this probably the harshest achievement I've seen.

For the record this probably isn't the hardest in the sense of pure tedium, some of the stuff in WoW wins that prize, but this wins in basically being a tremendous test of will/skill but that's how I am defining hard in this case. So now that I've shared my nightmare achievement with the class, maybe share yours?

The Three Mountains from EU4. I've only ever seen two people complete it, and Paradox (the developer) hired one of them. There might be others, but as far as I know, no one (including the two I've seen) has ever done it without exploiting the game in some way, to the point that you can say whether or not you can actually get it is dependent on the current patch at the time (as well as your own insane skill level).

In case you don't know it, you have to conquer the entire world as Ryukyu, a small island nation just south of Japan. Without going in depth about the mechanics of the game, the shear absurdity of that means that even the best players will never come close to pulling it off. Most won't even waste their time unless a major exploit is floating around at that moment. It all has to be done on Ironman meaning you only get one save slot (and it force autosaves every in game month) for the entire campaign, which can last 50 hours or more, easily.

It's absurd. Beyond absurd. I've played 500+ hours and I still think it's impossible. You can't even follow the same strategies as the ones that did it before, as more than likely those exploits are gone now, and even if they're still in, the game has more than enough random chance and elements out of your control that you'd have a better chance at taking over Ryukyu and dominating the world in real life.

EDIT: The more I think about it, the more absurd it is. You start as this tiny fucking island with the lowest possible amount of troops, in a world where anyone can just gobble you up at any given time if they are close enough to get a claim on your land. You need to expand, and fast, in order to survive the opening game. Ruler dies and you get a regency council (making you unable to declare war until your heir comes of age)? Restart. Lose too many troops in the early game? Restart. Expand too fast (yeah, I know what I just said) and piss off enough countries so they gang up on you? Restart.

And that shit can happen 30 hours in! Whoops, my ruler died, now I have to wait 14 years to fight. Oh, what's that? I waited those 14 years, he was king for three and now he's fucking dead as well? RESTART. Oh good, France took over half of Europe and now has 400k troops at their beck and call. Restart! What's that, I spotted a comet? Restart! How the hell did Austria get a personal union over Russia? Restart!

Fuck it, I'm going back to playing as Brandenburg. At least then my troops act like I have Space Marines in the 1400s.

Any of the ones in Super Meat Boy that require you to go long stretches without losing a life always looked absurdly hard to me.

Whenever this question comes up I always jump immediately to the high-level Guitar Hero achievements for songs like Jordan and Through the Fire and Flames. With those songs, either you had the physical dexterity to pull it off, or you didn't. There was no in-between.

@mirado: @hayt: Two Paradox games ey? ;)

Hmm, well watching Brad get "Mile High Club" in COD4 was pretty hard..

That EU one is ridiculous. It's definitely the worst one I've seen.

Another bad one, though not quite as bad, is the 1001% achievement for The Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth. It's the achievement that requires you to get all of the items, secrets, endings, characters, etc. in the game. Average time to complete? 370 hours. It's basically impossible to get unspoiled. There's just so much shit you have to do, so much you need to be lucky to pull off, etc. That's more than 2 weeks of constant Binding of Isaac runs, each run lasting from 40-70 minutes.

Any game where there is an achievement for being #1 on the worldwide leaderboard. For example, Trials 2 on Steam has one. http://steamcommunity.com/stats/Trials2/achievements/

0.5% of players have it, because I imagine within the first few days and weeks the #1 slots on various tracks changed hands multiple times, but the shitty thing is, it's one of those achievements that gets harder over time, and I imagine right now it would be difficult to get anywhere near the top time on a track because they've been refined so much.

It's a goal to aspire to, but it makes for a shitty achievement because its difficulty is inconsistent; some schmuck might've earned that achievement within the first couple days of release by complete luck, while now for anyone to get such an achievement would require a very considerable amount of practice.

@drgreatjob said:

I think I may be in the minority on this one, but I just don't like all the dumb secret bullshit in Rebirth/Afterbirth. Like, it's cute, and I guess it's meant to be a fun scavenger hunt for the collective community, but for the average individual player, the experience is "let me go look at a guide, boy, that sure is a lot of random bullshit I have to do to unlock some things, ok I eventually did it all." On some level, I vastly prefer the original game because you could mostly unlock everything by playing the game and just having fun with it, even post-Wrath-of-the-Lamb. Rebirth has better performance and sorta better balance maybe (I'll miss having soul hearts that scroll off the screen), but worse music, and just isn't different enough that I feel like sinking hundreds of hours into completing it.

Also, for real, in all versions of the game new and old, the UI for trinkets is complete shit because it isn't enough text to explain some of their effects, so you just need platinumgod open at all times. Some of the item pickups are a fun "haha, what does this do?" moment and later you finally figure it out, but some of the trinket effects are so minor that they're not noticeable so it should really just tell you. Also baffling that neither game has a good item compendium in the main menu that briefly explains every pickup you've found. Instead it's just like "yo here's a picture and a title, enjoy!"

The hardest achievements are: Vanquish Tactical Challenger, Wipeout HD Platinum, Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 Platinum, and the Star Ocean 4 Platinum.

Three Mountains is tough but bullshit, it's not really something that's attainable without various exploits and not really playing the game the way it was intended, not to mention a tremendous amount of luck. A crucial aspect of an achievement being challenging is knowing that it's actually possible within the bounding rules presented by the game.

Additionally rarity doesn't matter for the most part, in fact the mystique of something being challenging drastically increases the trophy rate (the Bloodborne Platinum is the most common one in existence). My rarest trophies are from Dragon Fin Soup (one of which I was the second in the world to get), a game that still has various trophies that are completely unattainable and was on PS+, apart from being extremely difficult on top of all that; it would be very hard to ever get something rarer that was actually played by a decent number of people.

There's also achievements that have the bullshit where you can't die once in the entire game, the hardest one of those is Max Payne 3, not because the game is that much more difficult, but because the game frequently crashes in the span of the run (since the entire game must be loaded at once) and kills your save file in the process.

@sneeze: Mile High Club is actually a fairly common achievement, the level is just too short so pretty much anyone can bang their head against it and eventually win.

@bisonhero: I was going to mention GRAW (not sure which one) for this exact reason. They had an achievement for #1 on the multiplayer overall leadeboard. Although I think people found an exploit for it eventually.

Another one I can remember is the endless set list on Rock Band 2. You had to play every on disc song without pausing once. It was like 6-8 hours of playing to get it.

7 Day Survivor in Dead Rising was pretty tough, you have to survive for 7 days in the game, also known as 14 hours in real life, real time, no saving or pausing and your health continuously drops so you can't just put yourself somewhere safe and leave the console running, you have to make sure you have healing items, which means you have to make sure to brave the dangers and possible die, and if you die, tough shit, start over.
There are of course guides at this point that probably streamline it as best they can, "Go here, enough food to wait an hour go here, enough food to wait another our" or some such shit, but at the time, damn.

There was even a thread on good old Giant Bomb Dot Com (A website about Video Games!) talking about this very achievement Seven years ago.

I remember falling in and out of sleep while getting it, and every time I woke up I would just be panicked "Oh god where is my health at?!"

Achievements that depend on online features can be plain impossible some time after the release of the game. They go beyond experience, skill, time consumption or plain luck...

There is a trophy in Titan Souls for beating the game in hard mode without dying once. I beat the game on normal and died over 400 times. Hard is much harder and I'm pretty sure you can't hard save in multiple slots so when you die, you have to start over. To get the platinum you actually have to complete a bunch of what seem like the most fucked list of trophies I've ever seen.

Some of the trophies in Kingdom Hearts 1.5 required dozens of hours of building and flying the terrible gummi ships in inarguably the worst part of the game.

This is rather timely, I'd say any in DOAX2. mile high club was child's play in comparison.

Man, that achievement was total BS. I remember really being into achievements during 360s launch. As soon as I saw that though, I lost all interest in them. Call me crazy, but I think achievements should be...y'know...achievable? XD

The 'Hardcore Risette Fan' trophy in Persona 4: Golden is deceptively tricky. It requires you to hear 250 unique Rise voice lines from her support dialogue that triggers during battle. There's no good way to track your progress so the trophy becomes frustratingly random. It could pop on the final boss fight, or it you might be forced to go all the way through new game plus if you haven't been following a guide closely. There's not even a definitive answer on whether or not the progress carries over into new game plus.

There was an achievement for Burnout Revenge that required getting a clip to the top twenty most downloaded, which is a weird thing to have to do.

The one that comes to my mind is beating Spec ops the line on Fubar difficulty.

@walkertr77 said:

Yeah, Team Fortress 2 added the ability to export videos/replays of the game, so it has achievements related to how many views your video has on Youtube. The toughest one is getting 10,000 views, which a surprising 6.1% of players have. No idea how, given that only a subset of players ever interact with the feature and many of the videos are probably terrible, so maybe they're gaming the whole thing with a bot network or something.

Didn't one of the Fight Night have some thing like "be nr. 1 ranked player in the world"? I imagine that would be quit a hassle to achieve.

Oh my god why. So that's pretty much just pure random chance whether or not you get that? Or do they trigger on certain situations?

And here I thought I was a super cool guy for 100%-ing RE4 on Steam.

@hayt: She has a few lines specifically for each party member. At the very least they include that character taking out a monster and being at critical health. No idea how much more there is.

I'm always overwhelmed not by the difficulty of certain achievements, but by the amount of play-time that it would take to complete them. Every game with a "kill a million people in multiplayer"-esque achievements can just go away. I mean sure, I could probably complete that if I spent the next few years of my life consistently playing only that game, but why the hell would I want to do that?

@hayt@adequatelyprepared: The only way you'll get the trophy is by deliberately playing the game in a way that triggers all of her dialogue lines. Even then it's still annoyingly random because your other party members have their own dialogue that will interfere with Rise's, and the enemies you come across in the game will determine what she can/will say. It forces you to be under-leveled and over-levelled for most every encounter, getting all party members hit with all status aliments, getting ambushed by most every encounter, and carefully managing your social links with Rise. It's such an involved process that you shouldn't really set out to do anything else other than acquiring that trophy in that specific playthrough. And we're talking about a 50-80 hour game here.

This is the answer. That final challenge is is such a step up in difficulty. You can do everything in that game, breeze through God Hard difficulty, clean up the other challenges, and you're nowhere near ready for that last challenge. Never got it.

One of the more difficult achievements I can recall trying to get would be the achievement to survive for 7 days in the free-roam mode in the first Dead Rising.

For the record, a day in that game lasts for 2 hours, so you need to have the game on for 14 hours straight to even have a chance at it. In addition to that, if I recall correctly, food doesn't respawn and your health steadily declines at a rate of half a health point every 30 seconds or something nuts like that. Basically, the way to get the achievement is to get all of the food you can find without being hit, and then hide out somewhere for 14 hours straight.

It might not necessarily be the hardest achievement out there, but it's really annoying. I remember giving up and just going for the 3-day achievement and saying that was good enough for me.

Other than that, another achievement I can think that is really hard to get is the Achievement to save *Mute in the sequel to Analogue: A Hate Story. It's really hard because it's literally impossible to do. I don't think impossible achievements really count though, just thought I'd mention it.

Edit: God damn it, someone already mentioned it! I figured no one would have since it's an older game that no one really talks about anymore, haha.

Getting the General rank in the original Warhawk.

Let me paint the picture for you.

There are 19 promotions you need to earn. Each promotion requires both points and obtaining specific badges, like killing X players in a game, or spending Y hours in a Warhawk.

The total number of points you have to earn is 1,603,350. In a Deathmatch game you earn... 1 point per kill. In CTF you can get 30 for capturing the flag.

A good player can average maybe about 100 points per round (probably playing nothing but CTF). Assuming a very conservative 20 minutes per match, this means that the estimated time to get the trophy is... about 7 months in-game.

I realize that's probably not as much as some MMOs, but damn. That trophy sure made an impression on me when I saw it as a teen.

Single crediting Smash TV on XBLA. Which afaik was bugged so even if you were some kind of savant and could do that (and the level of skill required is exceptional), you didn't get it anyway.

I've always hated some of the Disgaea trophies for their randomness, but in researching the trophy lists for some of my backlog, I came across this description in the Mugen Souls guide. This next bit pertains to the trophies " The Goddess Has Descended? and Overwhelming Peon Ball, GO!"

These two trophies alone will probably take over 200 hours to get after getting all other trophies. In your quest to obtain the platinum for this game, you will come to understand the real meaning of grinding.

Of course, if you're going for pure difficulty as opposed to just time consuming, I guess I'd go with the no death trophies in Super Meat Boy. I know that was already mentioned, but I honestly cant see a point in time where I would be able to even come close to finishing them.

Not technically an achievement, but everyone who unlocked Invincibility in GoldenEye remembers doing it.

It's a lot like Mile High Club where you have to run a short level blindingly fast, but like 4 out of 5 times the scientist who gives you a key doesn't spawn in the right place and you have to start over half-way through.

Halo 2 LASO by far........

@sciential: Huh, I had no idea you could unlock them with something other than just the code inputs at the menu.

As to all the people mentioning leaderboard ones yeah those are a real son of a bitch. Especially if the game isn't popular at all.

I'm glad to see a couple people mention the 7-day survival achievement from Dead Rising since that was the first thing that popped into my mind as well. True story, I had to cut bait on this achievement all the way back in 2010 because of a thunderstorm and concern that after leaving my 360 running since the prior night that my power would go out and I wouldn't get credit for having made it to 5 days.