Hades is an Enjoyably Challenging Platinum Trophy
Playing Hades to completion is a challenge that rewards players with some of the best narrative in a video game
The conversation around what game has the best achievement list — or trophy list, for the sake of this article — all boils down to personal preference. Although, there is a consensus that truly completing “100 percent” of what a game has to offer should balance between challenging players while prolonging their enjoyment of a said game.
Trophies should have us play our favorite games in new and interesting ways. Whether that’s by having us fulfil these relatively inconsequential achievements through side missions, unlocking secrets, or urging players to mess around with other aspects of the game, such as trying out different play styles, moral paths, or simply equipping underutilized and/or rare weapons or gear.
To get to my point: Hades, where players take control of Zagreus, the haughty libertine prince of the underworld, was already a fantastic game. Developed by Supergiant Games for the Nintendo Switch, it was a worthy Game of the Year for 2020. But with the introduction of trophies to Hades on PS4 and PS5 this year, the game somehow got better.
Focusing solely on narrative, you can’t fully appreciate Hades by just beating the game once, twice, or even ten times, for that matter. As a rouge-lite, each run of Hades feels like an episode of a television series, as you’re given exposition in piecemeal, then must wait until the next run or several runs to find out how certain plotlines unfold.
And Hades has several profound narrative arcs that run the gamut of what it means for mortals (even immortals) to have a soul; they range from reuniting a daughter with her estranged parents, or making characters realize that love does not end in death, or redeeming a “knave-king” from the sins of his past. These story beats are all tied to in-game achievements known as “prophecies” which require the player to gather scare resources in order to eventually fulfill a prophecy.
I played over 60 hours of Hades on the Switch and somehow missed completing many of these prophecies. This could be because Hades was my first attempt at a difficult rouge-like video game, but mostly because I wasn’t motivated enough to keep grinding for resources after unlocking the ending — which I later discovered still wasn’t the definitive conclusion to the game.
On the PS5, however, I was urged to finish many loose threads that I glossed over. With the inclusion of trophies, it was like the devs at Supergiant were nudging me towards cool things they didn’t want me to miss. And by tying some, but not all, of the prophecies to trophies I was able to optimize what I spent my very hard earned currency on.
The rewards for dispensing nectar and the rarer ambrosia — currencies you
“spend” by gifting them to NPCs — are not only important to gameplay, as they’re exchanged for items that grant various buffs, but they also allow you to wrap up many of the aforementioned story threads. While they’re satisfying to see through as far as game completion goes, these narrative arcs felt more meaningful; they were packed with so much pathos and character development that I felt foolish for missing them the first time around.
It’s not that these story-tied achievements felt impossible on the Switch, but with the added push of Supergiant, in the form of PlayStation trophies, to truly complete Hades, I gained an added level of appreciation for the game. One trophy in particular that required me to reach the epilogue, which is not linked to any count for how many runs I had cleared, essentially held the case to the argument Hades had been trying to make: that family, above all, are the ones you should fight like hell for, no matter how dysfunctional relationships may be.
For Zag, a hero with a serious Oedipus complex, that meant playing Hades long after the credits rolled for him to realize the point of family. I wanted the platinum trophy but I craved the end to Zagreus’ story even more. I eventually achieved the true ending after 40 or so cleared runs and nearly 80 hours of gameplay (not including my time on the Switch, as there are no cross-saves between consoles), and it was all worth it.
Hades is perfect for completion in that sense, as story and challenging gameplay scaled with one another without breaking players’ backs on some absurd difficulty or senseless grinding. That’s all there too for hardcore completionists, but these non-trophy feats, such as earning an obscene amount of “darkness,” another in-game currency, was not necessary to unfolding the narrative. I was able to knock-out most of the trophies just by naturally playing the game, occasionally turning up the “heat,” or adding difficulty modifiers before runs, to gain more resources needed to satisfy any missing requirements.
Farming for resources in Hades was a non-factor in earning the “100%” mark — if completion meant stopping at the platinum trophy, of course — which is a rarity in trophy hunting. But, considering how prevalent tedium is in achievement lists, grinding looks to be an old-timey concept that’s being circled back on in other good trophy lists, such as Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart and Ghost of Tsushima. You can “complete” a game without senselessly having to play/replay it, because, like in Hades, the trophies in theses games are guiding you to things of interest like a fascinating piece of lore or a beautiful locale.
I still spend many meaningless hours grinding and farming for trophies, not even having fun with a game anymore, all for a Platinum (here’s looking at you, Marvel’s Avengers). But Hades is the rare exception, even in a game where repetition is baked into its design, I kept playing, hoping to mend Zagreus’ broken relationship with his father; and uncover the mysteries to why his mother left him; and consequently, reforge his own parents’ relationships with their own kin. And when that Platinum trophy for Hades finally popped, I not only felt satisfied beating a game to its completion but that I closed the book to some Odyssean epic; a true labor of love, blood and darkness.
