Red Dead Redemption 2is one of the greatest open-world games ever made. Everything’s so well crafted, but behind all of that perfectly executed beauty sits its brutal Platinum Trophy.
It has to be in the top three hardestRockstartitles for completionists, andunlike Grand Theft Auto 4, which was held back by its fiendishly difficult multiplayer, single-player is the real issue in Red Dead 2. The story missions, 100 percenting absolutely everything, and hoovering up collectibles is an exhausting process, and not for the faint-hearted.
By far, the hardest part of the whole platinum journey is earning 70 gold medals on individual story missions. In previous Rockstar games, getting gold medals wasn’t too bad, since you didn’t have to finish all the objectives in a single playthrough, and in GTA 5, side missions counted towards your total as well.
Red Dead 2 throws away both of those elements. Getting 70 gold medals in one run, often without restarting a checkpoint, is already bad enough, but across the entire game there are only 104 story missions. That means you’re able to only skip 34 of them that end up giving you trouble. Keep skipping missions that give you a hard time and the 34 optional ones will whittle down fast, and you’ll just have to saddle up and do the tough ones no matter what.
Some objectives can also glitch out on you, and certain missions have a problem where if you skip a cutscene, you’ll automatically fail the gold medal requirements for some unknown reason. There’s also a nasty bug with this achievement on Xbox concerning the epilogue, so it’s best to look up the glitch pitfalls before jumping head-first into the grind. Given that Rockstar doesn’t seem interested in returning to or supporting Red Dead 2 anymore, good luck seeing this issue get patched.
The number of collectibles is staggering, and most of them are a massive pain to find. You’ll have to kill a ton of birds for their unique plumes as part of the Exotics questline which takesforever. You’re best off collecting all the bird plumes before you’re even given the objective by Algernon.
Fishing, Hunting, And Pluming Will Ruin Your Life
Then there are the animals required as part of the Hunting Requests Trophy, and while some can be spotted during normal traversal, others are very rare. Bats would be one, but you may have spotted them during your treasure-hunting venture into the Elysian Pool caves. However, if you blast an arrow at them when idle at night, they’ll be unreachable to pick up. This feels terrible, and you’re best off collecting them in the ruined house by Moonstone Pond instead. Unless you’re a veteran player, even a lot of the things I’m mentioning here will go totally over your head. Like I said, it’s not for the faint-hearted.
Red Dead 2’s challenges are equally brutal. They’re tedious at best and rage-inducing at worst, and one of the best examples of this is Survivalist 9. When you unlock this challenge, you better still have legendary fish you need to catch. If you’ve already caught them all, you’ll have a hell of a time catching a normal 19-pound fish to see it through. You’ll try a lot of suggested locations just to catch 18-and-a-half-pound fish over and over.
It’s so frustrating, and the same applies to Survivalist 10. This challenge forces you to catch every fish type in the game. Even if you’re in the right spot, it can take quite a while to catch the fish you’re looking for. You’ll sometimes fail to catch a fish, then finally catch a big one, only for it to not be the one you want. Get ready for ample trial and error as you spend several hours standing by a random lake.
After 100 percent completion though, you’ll still need to skin and study every animal type. This has to be the most frustrating part of the Platinum. There are many rare, tough-to-spawn animals, and most of the methods you’ll see online don’t work. Take the Western Bull Moose, for example. People will give a location for it and suggest you reload that area over and over until it appears. This is not my idea of a good time.
If you do that, you’ll waste countless hours. What you should do is check each of the suggested areas listed, and if a moose spawns there, that’s the golden spot. For me, that was an out-of-bounds area up in the mountains northeast of Donner Falls. A moose appeared there the first time I looked. I reloaded an earlier save, and this time, a Western Bull Moose spawned. It’s all about gaming the game, or in this case, the animals you’re hunting.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is a great game, but people need to know how frustrating and time-consuming it is to get the Platinum. Finding these rare animals is about as fun as trying to do it in real life. Getting a Platinum in such an acclaimed game is a desirable goal, but you should seriously reconsider that before you start the grind. You may regret it.
Red Dead Redemption 2
WHERE TO PLAY
As a prequel to the original game, Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption 2 sees you take the role of Arthur Morgan - an outlaw looking for redemption - as he and the Van der Linde gang are on the run, in a time where the Wild West is diminishing.
