That One Achievement

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
"Motti has begrudgingly admitted that Dash Race was too hard."
—Atlus, on That One Achievement in 3D Dot Game Heroes

Related to Last Lousy Point, this is that one achievement (or trophy) that keeps you from true 100% Completion. Particularly jarring to players when most of them were either easy to obtain, or fairly easy. Some players loath these with a passion. Others delight in actually getting these just to rub everyone's nose in it. Of course, there are those who are apathetic about it, but they are unlikely to be hunting for these in the first place.

It's guaranteed to cause Cluster F Bombs. It can easily involve The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard or Fake Difficulty, though in many cases, the difficulty is indeed legit. It often needs to be unlocked in That One Level, during That One Sidequest (of which it is a Sub-Trope), or while fighting That One Boss. Often it's something absolutely no one would think to do. Worst case scenario, it's rendered unattainable due to a glitch. And for gamers afflicted with OCD, it's their worst nightmare.

Often discouraging to achievement hunters, especially if it is on a console that gives an achievement for getting all achievements. Note that this Trope does not apply if every achievement is extremely difficult to get unless there is one that is so tough, it stands out by even that game's standards.

Examples of That One Achievement include:

Action

  • "Saint" in Dead Rising requires you to save fifty survivors. There are about fifty-three in the game. Even if you get an ending where Frank and Isabella are counted as survivors, your window of acceptable loss is really thin.
    • Nearly as difficult as "Saint" is "7 Day Survivor", where the game requires you survive for seven game days in Infinity mode. This is incredibly difficult because: one game day is 2 hours. Your health drains every 1 minute and forty seconds. There are limited health items, no saving, no continues, 14 hours all in one shot. To make matters worse, since you couldn't save this meant running your X-Box that entire time. In the early days of the 360, this ran a very real chance of giving you the Red Ring of Death. This game was released just near the end of the original one year warranty for launch day consoles. Have fun.
      • Once you learn the tricks and locations, the achievement becomes easy, except with such a long run time, there's a million ways to screw up, the most notable being failing to eat in time while waiting for your hit points to tick down. Plus there's still a good chance of your system screwing up by being on for so long.
  • "Nice Shootin’, Tex!" in Ghostbusters the Video Game. You have to complete the game with less than $100,000 in property damage. However, it is far too easy to go over that amount unless you are really, really careful.
    • To give a better perspective of how difficult this achievement is, the second level of the game is in Times Square. Hit a police car with your beam, that's $35,000. Hit a bus? $80,000.
  • When players started complaining that "Insane" difficulty in Alien Swarm was too easy, the developers added "Brutal," a difficulty level so hard even they couldn't beat it. They also added two achievements—one for beating a level in Brutal with friendly fire damage set to max, and one for beating the entire campaign in Brutal. As of this writing, they've respectively been earned by 0.9% and 0.6% of players on Steam. (The least-earned achievement, at 0.3%, is for killing 100,000 aliens, but that's not a matter of difficulty so much as grinding.)
  • Matador in Enslaved, which requires you to defeat a Bullfight Boss without once getting hit by its charge attack. Two things qualify it; one, it's a Puzzle Boss which you cannot defeat until a set amount of time has passed, and two, unlike most Bullfight Bosses, this one actually can course correct.
  • Lost Planet 2's "Committed 'Til The End" achievement takes the Ghost Recon example below and goes one step further. You not only have to achieve all the "Good Job" awards in every level (across six chapters, with some truly insane feats required), but you have to collect 500 titles (some of which include co-op achievements), level yourself to level 99 with six different factions and become #1 on the global leaderboard. That's in addition to the "Noms de Guerre" special titles, some of which require insane circumstances (some titles are only unlocked for having save games from every previous Lost Planet on your hard drive, going to Capcom promotional events, etc).
  • Similar to Brawl's challenges, Kid Icarus: Uprising has three "treasure hunts", each consisting of 120 achievement-esque challenges. Palutena's are pretty easy, Viridi's are trickier but Hades? ALL of his may as well qualify. (Of course, that's perfectly in character for him) It features several that look deceptively easy ("Beat Chapter 3 using a Club") until you read the fine print ("Intensity 9.0") For the previous sets of challenges, the difficulty cutoffs were mostly just there to ensure you didn't be cheap and set the difficulty to Effortless, but here they really matter. Oh, and you have absolutley no idea what reward you'll get from each one, so you could have gone to all that trouble for a pathetically weak weapon, an Idol you already have, or just Hearts.
    • One of them really takes the cake though: "Complete all chapters on Intensity 9." It's actually even harder than it sounds: since the game automatically bumbs down the difficulty when you die, the challenge is basically asking you to finish every stage on the highest difficulty with no deaths! Good luck.


Adventure

  • Three D Dot Game Heroes ' Trophy for obtaining all swords could well be the Trope Namer. It's nail-bitingly difficult even after Atlus patched the game to make it easier. And, let's face it, this is Atlus we're talking about. If even they think something is too hard...


Beat Em' Up

  • Dynasty Warriors 7 has the Quizmaster trophy, which is to get all the questions correct in the Conquest mode. The questions can be anything from "Who was Liu Bei's sworn brother?" to "In the 'Romance of the Three Kingdoms' novel, the Ten Eunuchs consist of ten members. However, in the 'Book of the Later Han', there are more than ten. How many eunuchs appear in the 'Book of the Later Han'"? Some answers aren't found in the encyclopedia, and some are really obscure. Heck, this doesn't even mention the shitload of questions in the game (supposedly 500, and you can only answer five at a time).
    • The extreme legends variant of Dynasty Warriors 7 has even worse variants by obtaining Lu Bu's top title (part and parcel for the overall trophy of getting all allies top title). The first seven titles are cake to obtain, but the last one requires 1000 kills while maintaining 70% of your health and no musou attacks, on a Nightmare difficulty ten-star stage. For the uninitiated, Nightmare difficulty is the realistic experience of what happens when you really try to be a one man army against several hundreds. Your health can easily drop from 200% to damn near 0% in an instant, making this frustrating without the proper setup.


Fighting

  • This page was inspired by the many fruitless attempts to beat the Score Attack mode in BlazBlue: Continuum Shift, not so much to unlock the Unlimited characters as to get the two achievements for doing so. Score Attack in the original BlazBlue was no picnic either, but in CS the CPU's difficulty level is turned up past "Hell" and into "Sadist". Inescapable combos, impossibly fast reaction times, no continues, and four SNK Bosses in a row as the final bosses combine for a hellish experience.
    • In CS2, there's a medal for clearing all of the Boss Rushes in a specific Legion 1.5 stage. On Stage 6, this is a very tall order, as one of those consists of, in order, Unlimited Hakumen, Nu-13, Unlimited Mu-12, Unlimited Hazama and Unlimited Ragna.
    • Arcana Heart 3's Score Attack is no joke either. But the real hell is its Final SNK Boss. Parace L Sia, a boss so famously hard that not only does it put each of the bosses of BlazBlue: Continuum Shift's Score Attack mode to shame, but it might even go on to put SNK Playmore's Entire Boss Library to shame. Unlike Blazblue, you do have unlimited continues for the score attack mode. Thing is, you will NEED THEM in order to get past the last boss.
      • Arc System Works actually toned down the difficulty for the toughest achievement in its most recent fighting games compared to their earlier game, Battle Fantasia. That game still has the dubious honor of possessing their most infamous Achievement requirement (and possibly the single hardest Achievement in the history of fighting games), aptly named "You Want Me To WHAT?!". What does it require you to do? Simple (not)... you must parry all 22 hits of the final boss's Super Move flawlessly, and win the fight at full health. Yes, it's as hideously hard as it sounds. Yes, it means you have to be an absolute parry god and do a perfect match. To put things in perspective, Daigo's infamous EVO comeback only required him to parry Chun Li's Super (15 hits), and he didn't have to win with full health against a SNK Boss with at least two unblockable moves. You do the math.
  • Super Smash Brothers Brawl has its fair share of difficult challenges, the worst of which include clearing the Boss Rush on Intense, clearing 100-Man Brawl with all characters, and probably worst of all, trying to get a set amount of kills on Cruel Brawl. Luckily, there's the Hammers, but even then, they don't work on some of the achievements(In the US version, that is)... and of course, let's not forget the insane amount of time you'll be spending trying to get every sticker in the game.
  • Mortal Kombat 9 Has "Tower Master", "Ladder Master", "You Found Me", "Luck Be A Lady", and "Outstanding". The first 3, all involve plenty of cheating AI's, with skill only MOSTLY helping. Then there's, Luck Be A Lady, which is every bit of a Luck-Based Mission as you'd expect. Finally Outstanding requires winning 10 online matches in a row. While there is/was an exploit, the frequent hotfixing makes that sort of thing unreliable.
    • "My Kung Fu Is Stronger". Simple description: "Gain Mastery of All Fighters." But what does gaining mastery of a character entail? You must 1) spill 10,000 pints of blood (roughly analogous with dealing damage), 2) land 150 X-Ray attacks, 3) land 100 fatalities, 4) win 100 matches, and the worst part, 5) accumulate 24 hours play time. Not counting DLC, there's 27 characters. Nearly a month's effort for a measly 60 gamerscore. Time's a-wastin'!


First-Person Shooter

  • Some of the achievements in the Half-Life games are obviously created by some sadistic Valve employee with too much free time.
    • Half-Life 2 has "Zombie Chopper", requiring the player to pass through Ravenholm using only the Gravity Gun (even a single swing of the crowbar invalidates the achievement). This might not seem so bad, at first, because there's a lot a random crap to use as ammunition, but it is hell inside the mines or when roof-hopping. More entertainingly, it's possible to use the developer console to enable the Dark Energy Gravity Gun without turning on cheats, letting you get the achievement that way.
      • Or you can bring Dog's rollermine "ball" with you and let zombies "play" with it.
    • Episode One has "The One Free Bullet", requiring the player to complete the entire game firing only a single bullet (needed to open a lock). You do get free use of explosives and the crowbar, but those are not plentiful. You'll be falling back on the gravity gun a lot.
    • Episode Two has two of these: "Little Rocket Man" and "Get Some Grub". The latter requires squishing 333 Antlion grubs, some of which are deviously hidden. 333 is a lot, and they're stretched over several sections. "Little Rocket Man" requires you bring a gnome found in the communication shed (which is itself not immediately visible in the first place) all the way to the rocket in the last section. This isn't so bad at first. You can leave it by an elevator for most of the Antlion section, and it's possible to fling it all the way to the exit when you are trying to get to the car. After that, driving through vast stretches of mountain in a car with no trunk (you have to physically wedge the little gnome into part of the car then drive at half-speed to keep it there), and finding yourself in scripted events which will outright erase the gnome, it becomes downright infuriating.
  • Portal, also by Valve, has the suicide-inducing "Transmission Received". This not only requires that 26 tiny radios be discovered and grabbed, and not only that each of them are taken to a single spot in the entire level, specific for each radio, so their red light changes to green, but none of this is in the achievement description, reading only "...?..." (as if Valve haven't trolled their customers enough).
    • Another difficult Portal achievement is "Aperture Science". This requires you to get a gold medal in every challenge. The 'least portals' challenges are fairly easy, as they just require you to think about the right places to put your portals (although you do have to get perfect portal placement in some cases). The 'least steps' challenges are much harder. You have to jump out of the elevator as far as possible in every chamber, put your portals in exactly the right places and pull off very difficult feats in order to get those portals in the right places (in mid-air, most of the time). Not to mention that in some levels, you have to hop around and get as much height as possible from every single hop. But the worst are the 'least time' challenges. For the gold medals, you don't just have to do things a bit faster; you have to do absolutely everything in one fluid movement, never check to make sure that you've done something right and NEVER SCREW UP. Good luck!
    • Portal 2 has "Professor Portal", which requires you to play co-op with someone you've befriended who's never played before. This may have been easy when the game first launched, but good luck finding someone who hasn't played co-op at least once after a month or two. It doesn't count for random players, either. You have to invite a friend. Then there's the moderately less difficult but still frustrating "Still Alive". It requires you to beat Course 4 without either player dying once. Easy in theory, but in practice it you'll be somewhat hard-pressed to find a partner with the necessary coordination and skill to accomplish this, especially in the final chambers. And of course, there's always human error when it comes to portal placement. Finally, there's "Portal Conservation Society", which requires you to beat chamber 3 of course 3 using only five portals between you and your partner. This requires some annoying exploitation of angles and object straddling to see walls which you normally can't, and you can't die or misplace a single portal (dying resets your portals). It's like they made it to test speed runners.
  • Beat Veteran on ANY Call of Duty game. You're just slightly more hardy than a One-Hit-Point Wonder, and thus need to seek cover regularly. The enemy knows this and will herd you away from cover with liberal use of grenades, which can kill you if you're within their blast radius. And your invincible allies? Your squad leader may be "Alpha Male of the Human Race", but he has no clue how to work the sights on his gun.
    • World At War is the worst. One level pits you against an omnipotent Nazi sniper with a quick trigger finger, god-like accuracy, and bullets that are apparently made of super-radiation that can kill you if they so much as touch any part of you. Oh, and he takes 3 bullets to kill (no, lodging a single round in his brain stem will not kill him. It's 3 shots, PERIOD).
    • Another hair-tearing achievement in World At War, from the very same level, is Gunslinger, which requires you to kill a Nazi general with a pistol shot. Mind you, this shot is intended for a sniper rifle, since you're on a rooftop a couple hundred meters away from him and pistol ironsights are minuscule. To put the cherry on top, he ducks under the automobile he rides in on the second you fire a shot, so you essentially have to do this on your first try, and it's not entirely obvious where the sole guaranteed pistol in the level is (hint: it's not at the spot you snipe the general from). Be prepared for a LOT of checkpoint reverting.
    • Another achievement required you to kill 3 enemies with one shot.
    • Arguably one of the worst is 'The Sum of All Zeros', which requires you to shoot down 50 Zero fighters on the mission 'Black Cats'. You are expected to do this in the middle of a chaotic sea-to-air battle while simultaneously rescuing sailors. Worse still, many of the Zeros are kamikaze attackers, meaning that you have a very limited timeframe to shoot them down before they plow into friendly ships. Have fun!
  • Transformers: War for Cybertron: "Wait! I Still Function!" can only be obtained in Co-Op Campaign or Escalation mode. To get it you must lose all of your health and destroy three enemies in the ten-second "System Failure" mode before you blow up. The problem with this is that you lose your targeting reticule, rendering it almost impossible to aim correctly, you can't move to get more ammo should you run out, any damage you receive while downed cuts down on said ten-second time limit, and it's near-impossible for your online teammates to tell when you're going for this achievement/trophy so they won't run over and revive you.
  • Although later achievements have become considerably easier to obtain, the first achievement packs in Team Fortress 2 were pretty hard and/or counterintuitive to obtain, particularly the Medic's, which included a lot of fighting for a class whose main purpose is healing.
    • "Placebo Effect", "You'll Feel a Little Prick", and "Does It Hurt When I Do This?" are among the ones that make players cringe the most. "Placebo Effect" requires the player to kill 2 enemies with a full but undeployed Ubercharge (it used to be 5 kills), but is nearly impossible to stage, let alone obtain in battle. "You'll Feel a Little Prick" requires the completely counter-intuitive strategy of obtaining 3 kills with an Ubercharged Scout (which is one of the least desirable and usable targets). "Does it Hurt When I Do This?" requires that 50 Scouts be killed with the syringe guns—which translates to "kill an almost impossible-to-hit enemy with an weak weapon with slow projectiles". The difficulty of the Medic's achievements have been cited as one of the major reasons of the change from achievement-based unlocks to the item drop system (as all of the Medic's achivements were required to earn his unlockable melee weapon).
    • Then there's "Division of Labor" and "Big Pharma", which require a Heavy/Medic duo to earn 10 kills without dying. It's still imposing, even after the kill requirement was halved! Yes, it used to be 20 kills without dying. And since there's two achievements for the same thing... you have to pull off this feat twice.[1]
    • Pyromancer: Deal 1,000,000 points of fire damage as a Pyro. That's basically 5,000 Soldiers. There are career Pyros out there that still don't have this one, never mind that Steam's achievement system sometimes forgets progress on progressive achievements such as this one. "Tartan Spartan" is pretty much the same way, as you must deal 1,000,000 points of explosive damage as a Demoman which, unlike Pyromancer, has a glitch that causes it to erase all points gotten and make you start over.
      • Makin' Bacon: Kill 50 Heavies with your flamethrower. Not only do Heavies completely outclass the Pyro's damage output at close range, but they have absurd amounts of health, the Sandvich and Medics to combat afterburn damage as well, so you can't even rely on hit-and-run or posthumous kills. You'll be hard-pressed to make any progress on this one without the Backburner or Phlogistinator.
    • Even more: The Scout's "A Year to Remember." Most lifetime class achievements involve getting 1,000 kills. This one requires you to get 2,004 kills. Also "Retire the Runner"; good luck finding another Scout that actually uses a Crit-a-Cola (or a Heavy who actually uses the Buffalo Steak Sandvich's main ability).
    • To top all these lifetime kill achievements? The Engineer's "The Best Little Slaughterhouse in Texas". 5,000 kills with sentries. There's basically no way to get this one outside of serious grinding.
    • All of these are nothing compared to "Local Cinema Star", "Indie Film Sensation" and Blockbuster". These achievements require you to make a replay, post it on YouTube, and then get 1,000, 10,000, and 100,000 views, respectively. The worst part is, while all the previously mentioned achievements have at least some kind of a strategy for you to do them, there is literally no strategy in these three. You just have to make something a bunch of people will find. There's a reason these three achievements are among the least-earned in the entire game.
    • "The Crucible": Win 137 games of Foundry. Even if you play on a single player-only server with the Scout, it takes so much time it's pure tedium. Even if you play online, it doesn't help that Foundry is a stalemate-heavy map. It's currently the least-earned achievement of TF2.
  • Halo games usually have one achievement that is an absolute nightmare to earn.
    • Halo 3 had ones such as "Overkill", which required you to kill 4 players within 4 seconds of each other on a ranked free-for-all game, which only had 6 players in each match. You either got really lucky or depending on the game mode, you would have to camp somewhere and hope 4 people would appear at once that you could kill before they killed each other. Other ones included trying to get a double kill with a spartan laser in the same game mode.
    • Halo: Reach had "If They Came To Hear Me Beg", which had you trying to survive a fatal drop by assassinating an Elite, which came down to finding an Elite by a high enough cliff, getting lucky to fall directly behind him and then pressing the buttons at just the right time to trigger the assassination. This inspired wave after wave of thread on the Bungie.net forums with people unable to get the achievement despite trying again and again and again.
    • "A Monument to All Your Sins." At least in 3, you could get the achievement for beating Legendary campaign in multiplayer, or even in splitscreen using a second controller solely as a respawn mule. This Reach achievement requires you to beat Legendary solo.
    • Then there are the Vidmaster Challenges which rewarded the much desired Recon armour to anyone able to beat them all. Some were easy, like finding skulls on DLC maps, getting 50exp in a playlist, getting 7 exp on the 7th of the month. Then you had one for doing a level on legendary without firing a shot or throwing a grenade. two of the harder ones were clearing the last levels on Halo 3 and ODST on legendary, with Iron on and in Ghosts or Mongooses although with good players this can be done in 30 minutes. The absolute bane of anyone getting to Recon was the "Endure" Vidmaster, which required you to survive 4 waves of enemies in ODST Firefight on Heroic in 4 player co-op. You were under threat fron the enemies, the ever increasing difficulty, incompetant players or someone lagging out and ending the game. It takes two hours to do as well, so make sure nothing interupts you. It was voted the hardest Vidmaster to get as a result.
      • Even better is the fact that the game semi-regularly sends out waves of Fire grenade invisi-Brutes.Shielded drones outdo them in the sheer danger factor,(Those alone excluded the whole enemy class from Reach) but the game has a hard time rendering fire and relaying it across the connection.You can imagine the lag when there's a dozen of the pricks amok.
  • In BioShock (series), you have 'Brass Balls', which requires that you beat the game on the hardest difficulty without ever using any Vita-Chambers. Beating Bioshock on Hard is difficult enough, but if you accidentally use a Vita-Chamber somehow, you'll have to restart from the beginning.
    • The last bit was made a non-issue when a "Turn off Vita-chambers" option was patched in, so you'll never accidentally use one if you're gunning for the achievement.
  • In BioShock (series) 2, there's 'Master Protector'. This achievement can only be obtained through getting a Little Sister through a Gather without ever taking any damage or anyone getting to the Little Sister. If someone grabs the Little Sister, or you get shot even once, be prepared to start all over again.
  • Left 4 Dead has the Nothing Special achievement, where you must not be damaged by any special infected for the entire campaign from start to finish. Just to clarify what you will be facing against, Hunters can leap off buildings to pounce on you, Smokers can grab and drag you away, Boomers can puke on you to summon hordes of zombies on you, and Tanks can punch you clear across or hurl rocks at you. Tight teamwork and having people constantly watch your back, on top of extreme luck, is the only way you will succeed in getting this achievement.
    • Left 4 Dead 2 ups the ante of achievements that are near impossible to get. Strength in Numbers requires for you and your friends to team up in a Team VS/Team Scavenge game and beat another team of friends. The problem here is that if the other team quits the game, you won't earn the achievement and rage quitting is commonplace in the game.
    • Wedding Crasher (earned in The Passing campaign) is also quite difficult to pull off since the achievement requires that A) a Charger to be in play and B) having said Charger grab a survivor and plow through 8 chairs at the wedding scene in the park. Not only the infected team is down one player if the person who is the Charger is trying to earn the achievement (since the Charger has to wait until the survivors arrive at the park), but if the charge angle is just slightly off or if the survivor target isn't lined up properly, you will miss your chance at the achievement since the chairs only appear in one spot and most survivor players actively try to avoid hanging around the chairs, making the achievement near impossible to get legitimately.
  • Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter has possibly the hardest achievements ever: Reach #1 on the Multiplayer leaderboards (Solo, Team, and Universal). Even if the X-Box leaderboards weren't infested with cheaters, the only way to get this is to literally be the best GR:AW player in the world.
  • Deus Ex Human Revolution actually has two of these: "The Foxiest of Hounds" and "Pacifist".
    • The "Foxiest of Hounds" achievement involves setting off zero alarms for the entire campaign; whilst this may seem simple enough through Save Scumming, note that alarms aren't always noticeable (as they sometimes only happen in a specific area as opposed to the entire base), which can mean an entire campaign restart if a body is found several areas back and you don't realize.
    • Whilst the pacifist run seems simple enough (i.e. only lethal weapons and takedowns, bosses can be killed lethally), it means that, unless you're willing to clutter your inventory with stronger weapons you can never use, the boss fights (read: nigh indestructible cyborgs with overpowered weapons) will be unbelievably hard. This is made worse by Malik's potential death; not only is the situation difficult enough it is, but failing to save her in time results in her being killed, only to appear again as a corpse dissected for augments to resell (which has became infamous for causing players to quit their pacifist run for a Roaring Rampage of Revenge).
  • Battlefield 3 has "You can be my wingman anytime," which requires a perfect flying run (meaning you can't get hit once and every missile you launch has to make a kill). While it's not too bad since the dogfights are mostly scripted in how the bogeys launch their missiles and flares, if you mess up even once, you can't just revert to the last checkpoint. No, you have to restart the mission from the very beginning and watch the five-minute intro cutscene every time. Better get comfortable.
  • In the past, the Gears of War games had the "Seriously" achievements (which necessitated grinding to get a lot of kills - 10,000 in the first game, 100,000 in the second). "Seriously 3.0" necessitates getting to Level 100 and obtaining every Onyx (special) medal - that means playing somewhere in the neighbourhood of 18,000 matches to get all of them (which includes, but isn't limited to, getting 6000 executions, 4000 headshots, playing 2500 "perfect games", getting 5000 assists, 6000 kills with each weapon, etc). This can be mitigated (somewhat) by setting up private matches with bots, but it's still going to take weeks to get this legally.


Survival Horror

  • Dead Space 2 has Hard to the Core, an achievement that requires completing the game in Hard Core difficulty, the hardest difficulty in the game. Aside from lowered ammunition per drop, stronger enemies and taking more damage, all checkpoints are disabled. If you die, you have to reload from your last save file. This doesn't sound so bad... untill you realize that you are allowed to save three times total throughout the entire game. This can easily lead to hours of lost progress due to even a slight mishap.
    • The original Dead Space has a frustrating one in 'Don't get cocky, kid', which requires you to survive Chapter 4's turret section with more than 50% hull integrity remaining. This one has driven many players to frustration, given the somewhat wonky turret controls and the random spawning of the asteroids. For added fun, no matter what difficulty level you are on you automatically start at 85% hull integrity. Victory generally requires very steady nerves, firing single shots with both barrels so as not to overheat, and praying that the asteroids spawn in an easy pattern.
  • Dead Island has the "Oh No You Don't" achivement. To get it you have to kill a Ram with a tackle. Dispite sounding simple, it is probably the hardest achivement in the game unless you use a guide. In order to obtain it you have to first play as Sam B. since he is the only character who even gets the tackle skill. Then, you have to whittle a Ram's health down without killing it some other way or you'll have to find another. Lastly, this is a secret achivement, which means the game gives you ABSOLUTELY NO CLUE that you need to do this! You either get extremely lucky and discover it by accident or find out about it from an online guide.


MMO

  • A meta-achievement in the original Guild Wars requires a character to max out 30 title tracks. There are about 40 potential tracks to max, but only 31 of these (two of which are mutually exclusive) are character-specific; the rest are account-wide and much more time-consuming to obtain. Most folks, therefore, will aim to complete all the character-based titles... which would be fine, were it not for survivor. Survivor requires a character to gain 1,337,500xp without dying: if they do, even once, they must restart that character entirely from scratch.
    • And honorable mention must go to the Defenders of Ascalon achievement. The only reason Arena-net isn't on trial for crimes against humanity for that one is that they only put in the achievement after some players already started doing it. It is the notorious achievement of reaching the level-cap in the the tutorial area of the original game. Since the enemies are too low level to get xp from after level 15-16, you must lure a group of enemies to a resurrection point, let them kill you over and over so they level up and then kill them for the xp. That's right, you must Level Grind your enemies so you can Level Grind on them.
      • To be fair, both Legendary Defender of Ascalon and Survivor have been made easier. Nowadays, there is a daily quest in Pre-Searing that gives XP based on level, and it entirely eliminates the need to do the whole monster Level Grinding thing if you are patient enough. Survivor is now based on how much XP you gain since you last died. This also means you can get both of these titles on the same character.
  • In Kingdom of Loathing, aside from the Trophies that are now impossible to obtain (be there for the rollout of ascension, beat up 10 reindeer) there is also 'Septuple Platinum," record all 7 possible Accordion Thief buffs at a special location. The problem comes from the songs themselves. 5 are obtained from Hobopolis, which requires your clan to go there and let you get the songs; one comes from underwater, a place that is intended for players that are too strong for the rest of the Kingdom; and one that you need to get from the Travelling Trader, who no longer sells them. While it is possible to get this trophy now, it will take a lot of resources.
    • Two more infamous examples are "Bouquet of Hippies" and "Awwww, Yeah" [sic]. The first one requires eating 420 herb brownies, while the second on requires killing 240 Black Puddings, which have a 1/3 chance of being alive when you try to eat them. Given the game's Anti-Poopsocking method of limiting how much you can eat per day, those are likely to take 60 days and 90 days respectively. Hope you like eating lots and lots of crappy foods!
    • And coming up is "Moving Target". This trophy is unlocked by obtaining 12-sided dice (if you attended a real-life KoL con or do business with someone who did, you can slowly summon them; otherwise, they'll need to be bought from other players) and using multiples of them, and by rolling a higher total than that of the last person who got the trophy. This isn't that hard yet, but give it a few years...
      • Also, you can to roll EXACTLY one higher than the last person.
  • This is starting to crop up in Star Trek Online. Several of the "Kill" accolades involve defeating up to 1,000 members of each enemy faction; the problem is that while some are very easy due to the existence of Fleet actions, where the ground is covered in hundreds of enemies at a time, several of the factions only appear in 2 or 3 missions. The best mission to hunt Nausicaans only has 25 enemies, and it's the only mission you can choose, meaning it has to be replayed about 40 times! This isn't even getting into cases where the enemies appear to be a member of the faction, but won't actually count towards the Accolade (looking at you, Kuvah'magh mission). Combine this with the fact that most players have a... distaste for ground combat, and you hear a lot of complaints. On the "Space" side of the accolades, there's the "Breen Capital Punishment" one, which requires you to, naturally, defeat 3 Breen Capital ships. The problem here is that the ships spawn very, very rarely, and typically wander through the maps far outside the mission area in each Daily's location. Keep in mind these are SPACE missions, which means that it's hard to tell exactly where you are in the map (Space is mostly empty, after all.) and so you could easily waste a lot of time wandering around looking for something that's not there. Since, unlike the other missions, this one can only be done once a day, this is the worst combination of Luck-Based Mission and forced waiting in the game. The only upside is that missions are instanced, so there's no chance of anyone interfering in the kills.
  • World of Warcraft
    • "What a Long Strange Trip it's Been" is a meta achievement for completing all the achievements for the in game Holidays. Most of which involve at least one Luck-Based Mission and are only available for a few weeks before being gone till the next year. And with no guarantee that you'll be playing the same class for the whole year, this one slips through a lot of people's fingers over and over again.
    • Some of the luck based missions have since been removed as requirements for the events, such as the requirement to get a black dress in Love is in the Air, but "School of Hard Knocks" is not only quite difficult for people who don't PVP often (the other PVP-based holiday achievements only require honorable kills, which do not require the achievement seeker to get the killing blow), but also results in battlegrounds being full of people who want the achievement and who don't know how to PVP, thus angering many regular PVPers.
    • Herald of the Titans requires that players defeat Algalon the Observer in Ulduar without any gear that is higher level than what is available in the 10 man version of Ulduar. Not only is this quite difficult on its own, but it's also impossible to outgear, and virtually impossible to find people who are willing to do it.
      • In theory, level 85s could have gone back and done it with the basic crafted gear, but unlike a lot of other achievements, Blizzard preserved this one by making it unobtainable by level 81+ characters.
    • Cataclysm also gives us an achievement so insanely difficult to obtain, guilds have been pulling their hair out over it for months: "I Can't Hear You Over the Sound of How Awesome I Am". The criteria? Beat Sinestra. On your first try. With not a single death at any point in the battle. If someone has earned this, props are very much deserved.
    • Headed South is considered one of the most difficult Cataclysm dungeon achievements. You need three stacks of a debuff on you at the time, of Siamat's death, but 1)The buff is collected from adds in the first phase and Siamat only takes full damage in the second; even with the trick, you need high DPS, 2)The debuff also increases damage taken, and thus the strain on the healer, and 3)Only the people with three stacks get it; if a group is having trouble with 2), they might have to decide who gets it.
    • "World Explorer" is the achievement you get for gaining all the other Explorer achievements, meaning you have to explore every single square inch of Azeroth, including the Northend, Pandaria, Broken Isles, Outland, Draenor, and Battle for Azeroth zones. Worst thing about this achievement is, it gets harder each time they introduce a new expansion, as each new expansion means more maps.
  • Billy vs. SNAKEMAN has a couple contenders among its Trophies. "Scrapbook Hero" requires you to beat Candyween six times. To get "Let It Ride", you bet a valuable item on 1:36 odds and win. For "Tiny Three", you need three different variants of a very infrequently found item. "Enough Already" takes a month of Season grinding beyond what has any other purpose.
  • Maple Story has the Quest Specialist Medal, which gives a higher stat bonus than any other medals with the exception of ones that come from events, but it requires you to complete 800 quests. Each step in multi-step quests counts towards the goal, so it's not as bad as it could be, but many of them are long and would mean slowing down your Level Grinding.
  • La Tale has DotNuri, a mini-game Shout-Out to Super Mario Bros., except with any feature that might make your life any easier being removed. No Goomba Stomp, Super Mushrooms or Checkpoints for you, and just touching any enemy sends you to the start of the level! When you combine the Nintendo Hard with the fact that all the enemies move completely randomly it makes even the easiest level nigh impossible for most people. And then if you do somehow manage to finish it, guess what? You need to do each stage twenty times to get its bonus! The prizes themselves range from a useless title to a permanent critical rate boost, but good luck running across anybody who's actually won those prizes.
  • Spiral Knights has "Master Miner" (deposit 10000 minerals into a gate) and "Dauntless Delver" (go from 0-29 without dying). The latter is made easier if you have a buddy to take the hits for you and if you pick simpler levels, but still requires a considerable chunk of time and Crystal Energy (or an elevator pass). The former is simply tedious; assuming best conditions (4 maximum sized minerals on every level, and 4 players to carry them all up) which lets face it, isn't going to happen, it still takes a bare minimum of 625 levels to do.


Platformer

  • Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Untouchable. Making it through the final Boss Rush stage plus defeating That One Boss at the end without taking ANY damage. God help you if you get hit by Eggman's suicide attack.
  • Sonic Unleashed: All of the hot dog vendor achievements count, but Hard Boiled takes the already Nintendo Hard Marathon Level Eggmanland and forces you to complete it three times with a decreasing time limit. The actual time isn't much of a problem compared to the fact that losing a life forces you to start all over, in a level that force-fed you extra lives just to make it managable.
  • Sonic Generations: Can't Touch This. Making it through the Final Boss (also That One Boss) without taking any damage.
  • The achievements for beating the vehicle levels without dying in Lego Star Wars II. The standard levels can be fudged by being the invincible ghost characters, but the vehicle ones are pure skill.
  • Mega Man 9 and 10 both have the Mr./Ms. Perfect achievement. You may be good; but are you good enough to beat the entire game without taking a single hit?
    • In 10 it is even worse. 9's could be done with Save Scumming, exploiting Game Breaker weapons, and practicing Wily's castle. 10 has no Game Breakers, has more shit flying across every screen, and has longer levels. Lots of luck with that one.
  • Super Meat Boy has "Impossible Boy" achievement. To get this, you have to complete every Cotton Alley (which is a Brutal Bonus Chapter and can take more than a thousand tries to complete it) level in a row without dying. And that with a Dark World variations of levels, majority which are harder than the Light World ones.
  • Ratchet and Clank A Crack in Time has the "My Blaster Runs Really Hot" achievement, which requires the player to get 10,000 points in the arcade game. Far harder than it sounds but easily exploitable when you find out that playing it with two people combines your score, so you only need to get a total of 10,000 points between the two of you. Which is, of course, a case of Guide Dang It, since that's not mentioned anywhere in the game.
  • Alan Wake has the "Night Life in Bright Falls," "No Punctuation" and "Run On Sentence" achievements, each of which require you to clear an episode of the game without dying. Each of them has something that qualifies them: Night Life in Bright Falls is the longest, Run On Sentence has the toughest combat sections, and No Punctuation has platforming sections (though mercifully, they are all near the start).
  • In Super Mario Galaxy 2, "The Perfect Run" is an achievement where you have to cross an entire area full of mines and Bullet Bills by having Yoshi grab onto some flowers with his tongue, turn several blue tiles yellow without being hit by any lasers, cross an electric maze with the Cloud Flower, cross an entire path full of tiles that either flip back and forth or disappear while dodging enemies that fire either lasers or coconuts, cross another electric maze (only this time with the pull stars), and finally past these Hammer Bros. and kill the Boomerang Bros. at the end to beat the game, all with only one health point and no checkpoints!
  • In Jak II Renegade in the Jak and Daxter Collection, "The Collectationator!" is a really nasty one, as it requires you to collect all 286 of the game's Precursor Orbs. This means that you not only have to complete a host of sidequests, many of which could qualify as That One Sidequest with a helping of Luck-Based Mission for dessert, but you also have to find the 94 orbs just sitting out in the open in the various areas around the city. There's no way in-game to tell exactly which of these 94 orbs you haven't found yet, so you may need to revisit every area, some of which are a real Guide Dang It to revisit. Worst of all, 7 of these orbs are in the last area of the game (and some are fairly well hidden), and once you beat the last boss you can never return to the area. So, if you've suffered through all the ring challenges, races, gun courses, and scavenger hunts, but you missed that one stinking orb hidden in the ruined tank near the Metal Head Nest? Better start the whole game over again if you want that last trophy.
  • Alice: Madness Returns has the bothersome "Seasoned Campaigner", which requires that you pepper all the snouts in the game. Some of them are well-hidden, and though there is an indicator of how many you've found in a chapter, and things only get worse if you miss one during your first playthrough. Though there is an indicator showing how many snouts remain in each chapter, there is no way of knowing which snouts in a chapter you have already peppered (and for extra tedium, the snouts you've already triggered reappear when you play a level again, so simply hunting for the ones you missed becomes even more of a chore.
    • "That's Using Your Head" is another painful one. You have to complete the Off With Her Head 2 portion of Chapter 5 in under 6 minutes. Not only is it an Unexpected Gameplay Change with lots of perfectly angled shots required, but the cannons are finicky, and the "ball" you control handles like a severed head (because that's basically what it is). Fortunately, the 6 minute time limit is rather generous, so you have some leeway for mistakes.
  • VVVVVV's trinkets were tough to get in general, but two in particular are of note.
    • "Doing Things The Hard Way", also known as "Veni Vidi Vici", is the most notorious. You must fly upwards through a very spiky and twisty tunnel, land on a disappearing platform, flip over, go back down the same tunnel in reverse, and land on the other side of a wall that is one block high.
    • "Prize for the Reckless". You have to navigate a series of rooms to break a disappearing platform which lets a moving platform move, then kill yourself to respawn, flip onto the moving platform, and grab the trinket, without touching any of a number of inconveniently placed checkpoints or dying in between.
    • There's also the trophy "Master of the Universe". How do you get it? By completing the game. In No Death Mode. In a Nintendo Hard platformer starring a One-Hit-Point Wonder. Without saving. Have "fun".
  • In Earthworm Jim HD there's an achievement for going through the whole game without dying.
  • The Math is Hard achievement in the Steam version of Psychonauts. Getting to rank 101 requires completing all stages of the target mini-game in Basic Braining, which is frustratingly difficult.
  • Limbo Has the "No Point In Dying" achivement. You have to survive the whole game in one sitting... with 5 or less deaths.


Puzzle

  • Bejeweled 2 has an achievement for completing 280 levels in Endless Mode. Endless Mode is simply Classic Mode with no timer and a guaranteed match. What makes this a trope example is not just the Level Grinding involved - most people seem to get this achievement in 160 to 320 hours of game play! - but that there is a combination of a bug and poor design in the game that affects saved games. You can only have one saved game per mode: when you resume play, the saved game is deleted, and when you stop, a new save is created. However, Endless Mode is only available to people with the paid version of the game, and that's determined by checking with Microsoft's servers prior to saving your progress. If you lose your Xbox Live connection during the game, then the game can't verify that you own it, and it will assume that you own the trial version and thus can't save your progress ... and because your previous save was deleted, you either have to pause the game until Xbox Live is running again or lose all your progress!


Racing

  • Wipeout HD (and by extension, Fury) has an achievement called "Beat Zico". This requires you to beat a lap time of 30.92 in Anulpha Pass on Venom using the Piranha. Even though the Piranha has the best top speed in the game, this is much more difficult than it sounds, partially because Venom is the slowest speed class.
    • Bling Brigade, mainly for the sheer Guide Dang It factor. You have to unlock the chrome skin, which is done through clearing HD Campaign, and then using it in a race with 7 other people using that skin. Now, this might not seem so bad, but it's a hidden trophy, meaning you have no way of knowing how to get it until you do unlock it.
    • Zone Zeus also deserves a mention. It's a tremendous endurance race where you must reach zone 75 on any track. The problem is, you're far more likely to have a seizure from concentrating so much on the track with all its psychedelic lights than you are of actually reaching Zone 75, especially since after every Zone the car's speed increases, eventually making it some sort of uncontrollable missile. You need unreal levels of focus and timing for this one.


Rhythm

  • Rock Band gets points in this trope for requiring proprietary instrument controllers for a good deal of their achievements, especially in the third game with its specifically customized guitar and keyboard, but it started as far back as requiring the use of solo buttons in the earlier renditions.
    • Ant then, there is the trope-naming Bladder of Steel.
    • Lego Rock Band has The Final Countdown, which requires one to 100% the guitar solo on that song, on Expert. It's a fast solo by regular Rock Band standards.
    • It's hard to choose in Rock Band 3, but there are three training-mode ones that require pretty high ability on pro guitar, pro keys, and drums. Each of these requires a full combo on each of many small segments. No doubt at least one of those will be a lot of trouble to any player, even after purchasing the instrument controllers necessary. Fortunately, the very hardest goals (get 5 stars on every song on Expert Pro Guitar!) are not achievements.
  • Guitar Hero 3 had one for scoring 750,000 points in one song. Two choices: buy a DLC song that is really long, or do nearly perfect on Through The Fire and the Flames Expert. It took months for a single person to do it the second way.


RPG

  • The first Mass Effect has the "_____ Ally" achievements. Each of them requires you to have a particular character in your party for the majority of the game. They're not difficult (although the "Asari Ally" achievement may be a minor Guide Dang It)...but getting all six of them requires playing through the entire game, sidequests and all, a minimum of three times. And you need to have the same character(s) in your party for 40-50 missions. They're despised by the fandom not for being challenging, but for being tedious.
    • Mass Effect 2 has a pretty nasty one (at least in the Play Station 3 version) in "Insanity" which requires that one beat the game on the Insanity difficulty. This was tough enough on its own, but the true difficulty was due to a nasty glitch. If at any time during your insanity playthrough you loaded a savegame from a lower difficulty (even one belonging to a different character), the game counted it as changing your difficulty and locked you out of the achievement, forcing you to start over. Quite a nasty surprise, getting all the way to the final mission on Insanity only to lose 20+ hours of trophy progress because your roommate played for 15 minutes on Normal.
    • The Arrival DLC also gave us the skull-cracking 'Last Stand'. You have to survive five waves of enemies in a small room with bad cover. Among the enemies are Engineers, which can throw incinerates at you to knock you out of cover, and Pyros, which are fully capable of stunlocking you with their flamethrowers. The soldiers themselves will constantly advance on you, working to knock you out of cover and destroy your shields. Oh, and you have to fight off an YMIR mech at the very end. Good luck getting through this as any class other than the Sentinel.
  • Final Fantasy XIII has the "Treasure Hunter" achievement. To get this, you must possess or have possessed every single possible weapon and accessory available in the game, though not necessarily all at the same time. Doing this requires insane amounts of grinding for money, ore, and other materials. Also, if you happen to have sold any of the unique accessories that can be upgraded into other unique accessories, without upgrading them first, this achievement becomes unobtainable.
    • There's also "L'Cie Paragon." What does this achievement require? A five-star rank on every single Cie'th Stone mission on Pulse. Every single one. Including the one with Vercingetorix. Yep. Have fun!
    • "Floraphobe": You have to beat a Gigantuar. He spams 10,000 needles which takes off 10,000 health, and said attacks cause pain and fog, barring attackers. Not helping matters is the insanely short target time for the mission, which means that you'll have to use RIC to get it.
    • Final Fantasy XII had worse: One thing requires getting everything in the game, including more than one extremely difficult boss and more than one Marathon Boss. Yeah.
    • Final Fantasy XIII-2 also has its share of annoying achievements; Finishing Fragmented (getting all fragments) meant fighting a number of monsters that appeared only in very specific circumstances that no-one would ever encounter unless they where looking for them to get one of the fragments that requires you to get every enemy in your bestiary: this also includes a boss with multiple forms, all of which can only be fought if you exhaust the entire Dialogue Tree between each battle before you pick the one that stops him from respawning and advances the story, and a very specific encounter in the final dungeon that can contain 1 or 2 different monsters, all 3 of which you need to fight and none of which respawn, forcing you to do the entire platforming puzzle-ridden dungeon at very least twice. Then there's Clock Stopper, which is easy but tedious, and has an annoying habit of the smaller monsters going under the attack you needed for a pre-emptive strike and thus breaking your chain, although thankfully you can save as often as you want between battles and can also repeat the same battle by selecting Retry to eliminate the chance of spawning enemies that attack you as soon as they spawn. Lastly, there's Giant's Fist, which can be difficult to get if you're aiming for it specifically and aren't fully aware of all the gameplay elements, but chances are that you'll get it without trying when trying to get any of the achievements involving any of the stronger enemies you need to kill.
  • Yakuza 3 has the aptly named Minigame Master. To get this, you need to meet the clear conditions in all the minigames. The game has 16 minigames in the western version and 20 in the Japanese one. Clear conditions go from 'easy as pie' for some gambling minigames to 'The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard' for some of the skill minigames, like darts and pool where you have to beat in ALL sub-games all computer players. Including the one able to hit double-bull (or any other point of the dartboard) with over 90% accuracy, and the guy able to bunk with distance of an inch and completing the minigame without missing a shot (or even on the first one). It's a very long, very hard, very varied endurance test. In a game that's basically a sandbox brawler.
  • Star Ocean: The Last Hope has achievements for getting certain percentages of available Battle Trophies, including one for getting 100% of them. Taking even just a quick look at this list of the Battle Trophies (warning: some spoilers) reveals how utterly insane the 100% (or, for that matter, even the 50%) achievement is.
    • Star Ocean the Second Story had another one, which was in some ways much more painful, and that was the Voices. To achieve 100% completion of the voice board, you had to obtain every character, use every possible skill every character could learn, and have every single character obtain high enough relationship values with every other character that they would shout their names upon dying. You can only obtain six optional characters per game. Getting certain characters makes it impossible to get others. Playing with one main character means certain characters won't join. Yeah, getting 100% involves playing through the entire game many times, and worse still, you have to actually listen to the voices.
  • Fable III has an achievement called "You can't bring me down", which requires you to go through the entire game without once being knocked out by any enemy. If you're playing the game before you travel to Aurora and are thinking, "Ha! I've managed it up to now!", wait until you encounter a Sentinel, big enemies with the power to use the darkness against you in the form of demon shadows and crows spurting from the ground.. And there's no way to avoid fighting one, because they appear at the point where Walter Beck goes blind. and on the bridge in Bowerstone Market during the fight against the crawler.
  • Trinity Universe's trophies aren't exactly that hard to complete. Except for that 1,000,000 Evaluation Points Trophy where you have to walk through dungeons, over and over again just so you can clear out the debris. It would not be so bad, if it weren't for the fact that each dungeon clear you do (includes destroying the gravity core, defeating the boss, and defeating the Lurker) only nets you 3000 evaluation points.
  • In numerous Tales Of games, trying to get every single title feels like this because it means 100% completion, often involving multiple playthroughs. Especially in the most recent games which actually have an achievement/trophy system.
  • For quite a while, "Oblivion Walker" in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (awarded for getting all fifteen daedric artifacts) required Save Scumming, "Fus Ro Dah", and luck, because of an otherwise quest-breaking pathfinding bug in Vaermina's quest. Early in the quest, your companion Erandur would go halfway up a staircase and get stuck. The only way to get him unstuck was to use your Unrelenting Force shout to blow him the rest of the way up the stairs and hope he lands in the correct position to open a Plot Lock. As of the 1.5 patch, this bug finally seems to be fixed.
  • Fallout 3 has the "Alien Archivist" achivement. You have to find all the alien recordings aboard Mothership Zeta in one go. Missing even one means its Lost Forever and you'll have to start over from scratch.


Shoot Em Ups

  • Raiden Fighters Aces has the 100 million point achievement (point as in in-game score, not gamerscore), attained by getting 100,000,000 points. The only game in the compilation on which this is possible is Raiden Fighters Jet, and even then it's an achievement that only the most dedicated players will be able to get. The 1-credit clear achievements can be BS'ed by simply putting the difficulty on Practice, but you simply cannot BS getting a 9-digit score.
  • Death Smiles has an achievement for beating the True Final Boss Bloody Jitterbug. Why does this one stand out so much? Because it explicitly requires non-arrange Black Label mode. You have to be on Rank 999, take NO damage up to Tyrannosatan (while also beating Rank 999 Ice Palace and Gorge, in that order), and beat Tyrannosatan on your first credit. This achievement is the bane of many people on BOTH sides of the pacific ocean aiming to get 100% on the game.
    • The sequel has the 6 billion point achievement, which isn't quite as hard but does require the player to have figured out the mechanics of the scoring system and memorized the timings of when to enter super mode. Suffice it to say that if you haven't figured out how to get over 300 million in stage one, you will be hurting for this one.
  • Smash TV on the 360 has an achievement that is literally impossible to get - Game Master. It should pop if you beat the game without using a single continue on default settings, but since there's a bug what most likely will not be fixed, does not. What a great reward for this incredibly difficult task!
  • Robotron: 2084 on the 360 has an achievement for reaching Wave 100 - in a game where merely getting to Wave 10 is a pretty fair accomplishment. (Not to mention that the second hardest achievement is for reaching Wave 30.)


Simulation

  • The gold medal achievements in Chrome Hounds. To get these achievements, your squad has to be number 1 on the leaderboards. Normally, that wouldn't be hard to do, except for the fact that there are squads whose only goal is to boost their way to the top. So, it's close to impossible to get the achievements legitimately. And, now Sega/From software have shut down the multiplayer servers, so those achievements are now impossible.
  • The Naval Ops series gives out rewards for sinking 999 of each category of ship (submarines, battleships, etc.). In each game, battlecarriers only appear in small numbers in one or two missions. Superweapons also only appear one or two at a time, but turn up in larger numbers over the course of a campaign.
  • X3 Terran Conflict has the achievement "Resourceful" for completing the Hub quest line. Which takes weeks of real time grinding just to get the resources needed for it. Not to mention the credits needed to afford the factories needed to manufacturer those resources. Plus this quest line is needed before you can complete several other quest lines for their achievements. Top it off with the ultimate achievement, "Die-Hard," which requires completing all nine quest lines in Dead is Dead mode.


Sports

  • Poker Night At the Inventory has an achievement for getting a straight flush. Naturally only 2.1% of all people who own the game have this achievement. The odds of getting a straight flush in any given hand are slightly above 1 in 100,000.
  • The "Beating Tough Competition" achievement from NHL 08 requires playing (and beating) one of the Top 50 ranked players on the game's servers. Not only is this a ridiculous feat in itself (as anyone who's gotten to that point has likely mastered the game), and not only is it nigh-impossible to randomly be paired up with a Top 50 player, but (according to reports) hordes of players spam the inboxes of the Top 50 players asking if they can beat them to earn the achievement, which means they likely won't play you voluntarily. As of 2011, the achievement is also unobtainable (as the servers were shut down).
  • Rumble Roses XX has a couple of really terrible ones for getting all of the costumes, and buying all of the items from the shop. It would appear that some can unlock everything in 30 hours. Due to the requirements for said Achievements being ridiculously specific, it can take up to 200 hours for the less lucky among us. They were so bad, that they caused one of the first leading Gamerscore achievers to quit Achievement grinding altogether.
  • Nearly all of Dead or Alive Xtreme 2's achievements are based on collecting every swimsuit for all nine girls. While they're obtainable with copious amounts of tedious grinding (with some possible Save Scumming with the help of a Good Bad Bug), the crown jewel achievement has to be the "Complete Item Collection" achievement; not only does every girl need every single swimsuit in every girl's collection, but every accessory, knicknack, volleyball, jet ski, and other miscellaneous items, some of which require sheer luck to get.

Strategy

  • "The Book of Honor" achievement in Dawn of War II requires a simultaneous full score on Fury, Resilience and Speed ratings. Resilience is easy, as it only requires keeping characters from being incapacitated, but Fury is scored by how many enemies are killed, which requires time and lowers the Speed rating, making the two almost mutually exclusive.
  • Getting all three medals for "Nests Destroyed" in Advance Wars: Days of Ruin. There's only one "Nest" in the game: Owl's Nest, Caulder's base. You destroy that in the final mission, "Sunrise". So to get these medals, you have to complete "Sunrise" ten times. Did we forget to mention "Sunrise" is one of the most hated levels in the game?
  • The "Demonic Streak" achievement in Elibian Nights requires you to win a Hopeless Boss Fight where you only have one character available, who is outclassed in every stat by the boss, and said boss also carries the Iron Rune, making it impossible to land a Critical Hit on him.


Web Comics


Wide Open Sandbox

  • Prototype has Pt (earn platinum times in all events), Streetwise (collect all 200 landmark collectables), and Revenge Revisted (beat hard mode). For the first, the problem is obvious for those familiar with trying to get high scores and incredible time records. There are some platinum medals that are not hard, but quite a few require impeccable skill. The 2nd isn't literally hard per se, but it is easy to miss just one, even with a guide, and not know which it is (reportedly a glitch can make one temporarily not appear, making it even worse). And finally Hard mode would not be so bad if not for the fact that the game has a series of Escort Missions, but it does, and they are all a pain in the ass on Hard Mode.
  • The Saints Row games have mostly easy achivements, but each has at least one that is a nightmare to get:
    • Saints Row 2 has the "Blue Collar" achivement. Most of the other minigames are easy with a little practice, but the tow truck one will have gamers pulling their hair out as one tiny bit of bad luck near the end sends them all the way back to the start. The controls and time limit don't help matters much either.
    • Saints Row The Third has the "You're My Hero" achivement. You have to 100% all the challanges in the game, some of which can become Unwinnable if not completed before the end of the game. Even if it the player avoids this they'll still have a hard time with a few other challanges if they don't complete them by the end of the game.
  • Minecraft has "On a Rail." The goal: "travel 1,000 meters by minecart from your starting point." It's not that hard, but the engineering and resources required are insane. One minecart costs 5 Iron Ingots. 16 meters worth of minecart tracks is 6 Iron Ingots. That's 378 Iron Ingots, right there. Of course, the carts won't travel forever, so you'll need boosters. That's 6 Gold Ingots and one Redstone for 6 rails. Then there's the items needed to activate the rails, which is more resources. And after all of that, you have to build the whole track, which involves lots of excavation, clearing, placing, and testing the whole thing to make sure it actually works. But on the bright side, as long as the track is still active, it'll work if the achievement happens to be cleared. Thankfully, in the Xbox 360 version, the distance requirement is halved.
  1. ↑ This is the same with most Ubercharge-related achievements
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