Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Hardcore Risette Fan

I've been playing Persona 4 Golden since late last year. Exquisite Japanese role-playing game. It combines some light dungeon crawling with social/dating sim elements and wraps them in an insanely tight but intuitive time-management system that guarantees you'll have to finish the game twice to have a hope of seeing everything. (It's also an anime available on Hulu Plus if you want to watch a good high school supernatural murder mystery.)

Part of playing a video game these days is achievements, or "Trophies" if you're on a PlayStation device. (It's going to be achievements for me - XBox 360 OG here.) Persona 4 Golden has them, and supposedly one of the hardest to get is called "Hardcore Risette Fan". I got it last night without hardly trying. Here's how I did it.

The point of the trophy is that one of your party members, Rise, will say little random quotes as you fight monsters or run through dungeons. You need to hear 250 distinct quotes to get the achievement. That doesn't start until about halfway through the game so don't worry about it at all early on.

Once Rise turns up, do the following:

-Balance your party. Divide it into two teams and swap between them to keep your levels even. This also ensures you're going to hear more character-specific lines because you'll be playing with everyone you can.

-Make friends with the Fox. You need to spend a lot of time in the dungeons to get this achievement, and ranking up the Fox's social link will let you get the cheap healing you need to do it. Also make sure you keep enough dungeon-exiting items around so that you don't have to leave early. The Traesto spell is huge if you can get it and keep it.

-Go through the Void dungeon before you rank up Rise's social link too much. Some of her lines stop happening once your social link rises above 2 or 3. You should be able to get a good chunk of them in the Void. Speaking of, let the Void boss rebuild his little pixel bot when you're fighting him to get a bonus quote.

-Fight a lot of different enemies, don't just run past them (unless you get super bored like I did in the last dungeon). You want to fight enemies with different strengths and weaknesses, especially elemental ones. Also make sure you have all your party members hitting weaknesses when they can, one monster at a time if possible. And make sure you fight the little hand monsters when you see them.

-Fight the bonus bosses and do all the quests. It helps cut down on the tedium of grinding enemies if you have a larger goal.

-Don't heal after a fight if one or more characters is low on hit points. Rise will warn you about it and that counts as a line.

-If you find an enemy with Debilitate, let everyone in your party get hit with it, then start scanning enemies and backing out until Rise has identified everything that's just gone horribly wrong for you. 3 things per party member.

-When you're fighting Ring Head (you'll know him when you see him), let him screw around with the environment for awhile halfway through the fight. When you're fighting the culprit, let him use Heat Riser early in the fight. I got the achievement fighting the culprit so you don't need to get every special boss quote.

I got the achievement on my first playthrough, so don't listen to anyone who says you need to go through the game twice or wait for the second run. And the only farming I did was hitting all the quests and the bonus bosses, and doing the Debilitate trick once. (Not even on everyone in my party!)

And this is what I've been doing instead of fucking writing. (Well, that and raising a tiny human and miscellaneous other family-related things.) How were your holidays?