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All Trophies in One Playthrough


MrMinderbinder

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I'm surprised nobody has bothered to emphasize this strategy (to save a signficant amount of time on skipping the second playthrough):

 

1) Start the game in Hard Mode.

2) Play through, making positive choices whenever given the choice (and making manual saves at the below-mentioned points) - it is important that your overall karma is good, as the final boss is much easier in Hard Mode with positive karma grenades. DO NOT complete ANY karma-based (blue or red circle) optional missions, but feel free to complete all other yellow optional missions. You'll need to save these until the end of the game in order to beat them all as good (for True Hero), then load and beat them all as evil (these missions are very short, and represent very little replay).

3) DO NOT upgrade! When you get to the end of the game, you'll need all XP to get True Hero, then load and spend the same XP on Evil to the Core. Recommended exceptions would be: upgrade your Shield (need full size shield on Hard Mode), upgrade your Drain power (need to draw power from sliding), and maybe upgrade your grenades and basic zap once each.

4) Make a manual save before the missions where you get a karma decision trophy (Good/Evil Eats, Good/Evil Train, etc. - all listed below), and play the mission twice to get both trophies consecutively. The only mission where this presents a bit of a challenge is the mission where you transport the bus with Trish - you actually have to have good/evil karma here to get the two trophies. When you make the manual save, use Bio-Leech to bring your karma down to Thug level, beat the mission, then load your manual save and beat again with good karma. You also have to do this for the mission The Rescue (train), but your karma is so close to neutral at this point that lowering it to negative is too quick to mention. It is important that you always get the evil karma-choice trophy first and the good trophy second, as you'll be progressing on a good karma track and you won't want to replay key missions a third time.

5) When you get to the final mission, you'll make your final branching manual save. First, with max karma, beat all 15 karma-based optional missions (blue circles) as a good guy. Spend all XP on upgrading all good powers, netting you True Hero. Beat Kessler with maxed out good grenades on Hard Mode. After you get the Hard Finish trophy, load up your final branching save. Reduce your karma to Thug with Bio-Leech, then complete all 15 karma-based optional missions (red circles) as Evil. Spend all XP on upgrading all evil powers, and you're all set with Evil to the Core. Reduce difficulty to Easy, beat Kessler, and you're done.

 

Though this does represent about 3-5 hours of replay on your first playthrough, it will be your only playthrough, saving you much more time than you invested.

 

EDIT:

 

The missions where you have to manual save and play the mission twice are:

1) First Glimpse (Good/Evil Eats)

2) The Escape (Good/Evil Riot)

3) The Rescue (Good/Evil Train) - need good/evil karma; lower karma by harming/leeching pedestrians

4) Zeke's Request (Good/Evil Exposure)

5) Anything for Trish (Back with Trish/Confirmed Bachelor) - need good/evil karma; lower karma like before

6) The Price (Good/Evil Intentions)

7) End of the Road (Good/Evil Sphere)

8) The Truth (Good/Evil Finish)

Edited by MrMinderbinder
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So what do you do about the bus mission with Trish? Your plan seems solid but would hate to miss a trophy along the way & ruin the whole thing for myself.

 

The only mission where this presents a bit of a challenge is the mission where you transport the bus with Trish - you actually have to have good/evil karma here to get the two trophies. When you make the manual save, use Bio-Leech to bring your karma down to Thug level, beat the mission, then load your manual save and beat again with good karma.

 

I explicitly addressed how to handle this in the description.

 

You save before the bus mission with good karma. It takes about 5 minutes to drop your karma back to Thug level. You quickly beat the mission to get the bad karma result. You load up your save file to when you had good karma, then you beat it again and move on.

Edited by MrMinderbinder
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I guess that for the karmic decisions trophy you can choice the evil outcome and then load the save to do the good one and then continue with the game.

 

But honestly it seems too much trouble save, load and keep like just to grind the evilness in the end but again, do 2 runs can be considered worse for some people.

 

It is important that you always get the evil karma-choice trophy first and the good trophy second, as you'll be progressing on a good karma track and you won't want to replay key missions a third time.

 

Yes... thank you for speculating on precisely what I already said. Very specifically.:rolleyes:

 

While I acknowledge that this is a little bit of trouble, it is not really any more difficult than following any trophy roadmap at PS3T. Trophies are inherently a load of trouble. However, this method takes less trouble and time than playing the game twice. One of the primary reasons people use PS3T roadmaps and trophy guides is to get the trophies in the most efficient possible way. Playing the game twice requires slightly less planning, but far more work.

 

For a very similar example, consider the roadmap/trophy guide for Heavy Rain. You could very easily play the game 7 times (you need to play at least this many times if you choose not to use branching saves). Or, you could follow the guide, use strategically chosen load points, and only actually play the entire game once (plus branches). The latter is, again, more complicated but less work.

Edited by MrMinderbinder
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  • 1 month later...

I used this strategy to get all trophies in a single playthrough, and it works perfectly. Just cleaning up shards and dead drops and I'll be done.

 

Thanks very much for posting, it seems like a solid method and is significantly faster than 2 separate playthroughs since you only have to repeat 8 missions instead of the whole game. It really should be in the Trophy Guide although since the game is 5 years old that probably won't happen.

 

One additional hint. If you save your Evil game after karma mission 7 (End of the Road), before reloading your save to get the mission done on Good, you'll automatically be Infamous because you used the Ray Sphere and can reload this save afterwards to finish off the rest of the Evil trophies without having to drop your reputation all the way from Hero to Infamous. This makes it even easier.

 

Basically I followed the one-playthrough strategy playing as Good until I got to End of the Road. I made a save before starting the mission and them played it selecting the Evil choice (use the Ray Sphere). I immediately became Infamous and made a new game save at that point. I then reloaded my Good save, completed End of the Road again, this time selecting the Good choice (destroy the Ray Sphere). After that I continued to follow the strategy, completing all 15 good side missions, defeating Kessler on Hard, then dropping the difficulty to Easy to do trophy cleanup. I then reloaded my Evil save, dropped the difficulty to Easy, did the 15 evil side missions, and then defeated Kessler again. Now I'm post-game cleaning up miscellaneous trophies on my Good save file on Easy.

 

So glad I found this tip. It was a fun game but I don't know if I'd want to play the whole thing through twice.

Edited by swotam
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  • 3 weeks later...

I used this method and it saved me a lot of time. swotam also has some good advice -- save your game after using the Ray Sphere because you are automatically infamous. I'm really happy I found this post because I had no desire to go back through the game from the beginning after finishing all of the side missions and finding the blast shards.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I found it to be no trouble at all, and it saves you a huge amount of time vs playing the whole game twice. Even the missions where you need to drop your karma before starting don't really take that long to accomplish.

 

I'd definitely recommend this strategy if you don't really feel like doing 2 playthroughs to get the Platinum.

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  • 1 month later...

Probably a daft question but does the game have its own "auto save" slot because i have saved at the correct points but not done the evil trophy, i plan to do them all quickly after my initial play through and want to be sure it doesn't save over my evil back up saves?

 

Incase anyone wonders you can make lots of individual saves and go back and unlock the opposite trophy fine.

 

Also thanks for mini guide minder.

Edited by TiNnYzEuS
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Save the trouble and enjoy this great game, don't most of us want more for our monies? Enjoy the game focusing on one karma, play some other games, enjoy this great game again focusing on different karma.

 

I guess there are a whole bunch of people that only play games for their trophies, and only play the games that can be platted in about 8 hours or less.

This is something I still cannot fathom..

 

Heavy rain is in my backlog, if it takes 7 playthroughs, Ill play it 7 times, heck I do not even remember how many times I played Silent Hill 2 HD before finally getting all the endings and that damn 10 star run, but I sure am proud of it.

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  • 3 months later...
  • 2 weeks later...

Seems like it would be a lot of work having to keep getting your karma from good to evil then back over and over plus wouldn't be able to upgrade very much would you? Also would need to max it out both ways for two trophies. Ive never tried this so I don't know, would be a lot of grinding but I guess a little faster than a second play through. I think I'll just run through the story missions again.

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  • 4 weeks later...

In theory, your idea sounds good. But all that grinding for both XP branches makes me sick (and I usually don't have a problem with grinding). Also, you have to grind for good / evil karma a lot as well, which is another problem. Also, since I have OCD, I kind of like "symmetry", if you will, so I like to have 1 Good save file and 1 Evil save file (this not applying to most people, however).

 

Also, Good being easier for the boss fights? What the heck? I prefer Good over Evil, but Arc Lightning makes the Kessler fight MUCH easier.

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  • 4 weeks later...
Seems like it would be a lot of work having to keep getting your karma from good to evil then back over and over plus wouldn't be able to upgrade very much would you?

 

It isn't a lot to lower your karma. Killing civilians lowers your karma very, very quickly. As well, you don't have to raise your karma back up. That's why the branching saves - you load the game save you made before you started killing civilians.

 

You wouldn't believe how much less grinding this method entails. Even though you have to be conservative on the upgrades early in the game... you don't have to grind your way to enough XP to max yourself out twice. As well, much of your XP comes from shards. Do you really want to collect shards (even just a majority of them) twice?

 

I've actually done a time-run on the two methods, and the branching-save one-playthough method will save you well over 10 hours. Of course, it's up to the individual gamer. They can play casually, enjoy the game, and grind out max powers twice. However, this site is loaded with people who want to play efficiently. They'd rather plan through their first playthrough than casually enjoy the first playthrough and hate every repeated minute of the second. To each their own.

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  • 2 months later...
I wish I saw this when I started the game :( But I also wasn't familiar enough with the game in the beginning to know what all of this meant.

 

Dental plan!

 

No, but seriously... I get that. Before your first playthrough, most of this will sound like mysterious nonsense. Just start at the beginning and take the guide slow - you will understand it more and more as the game wears on. Watch the numbering of the main story missions, and you'll know when to make a branching save.

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  • 1 month later...

Did it this way and it worked great. Thanks a ton for this. I would not have wanted play through all the missions and side missions again, especially now that the game is over 5 years old.

 

On the mission End of the Road, I branched my final two saves from this point, because you can use the sphere to go from pure good to evil taking the evil choice of this mission. The end is so close from here that it just seemed easy to continue the evil game from there. This allowed me to choose how I wanted to fight hard-mode Kessler with, good powers or evil powers. And it allowed me to finally spend the majority of my points as well once I made that choice.

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  • 1 year later...

Late to this game and not too far in at the moment so I haven't unlocked all the abilities yet.

 

I was wondering, is the "Shield" mentioned in the OP directions referring to the "Reduce Damage" ability, or is there an actual "Shield" ability I am yet to unlock?

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  • 2 months later...
Late to this game and not too far in at the moment so I haven't unlocked all the abilities yet.

 

I was wondering, is the "Shield" mentioned in the OP directions referring to the "Reduce Damage" ability, or is there an actual "Shield" ability I am yet to unlock?

 

I believe the "Shield" is the "Polarity Wall" power.

 

I've played this game when it was released. So I had some of the trophies. Now i'm back playing it for the Plat.

 

Thanks to the OP for this method. Saves a lot of time!

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  • 3 weeks later...

To someone like myself just starting this game, having never played it before, the OP's guide would've been better off written in Chinese because maybe I would've understood it better... I don't understand the Chinese language, LOL!

 

It sounds sooo confusing!

 

*UPDATE*

 

Okay so it's not so confusing anymore. I do have to say that although yes, it makes the game shorter (by how much though???), it also makes the game a lot harder than it needs to be due to the fact that you can't upgrade anything until the end of the game. To be honest I really don't know which is the less of two evils here: use this guide without upgrades or play through it twice able to upgrade??? :shrugs:

 

*UPDATE*

 

I mean no disrespect to the author but after playing through this game on Hard difficulty following this method I honestly wouldn't recommend doing it this way because it makes you play through several irritating missions not once but twice on this difficulty and overall it makes the game a lot harder than it needs to be.

 

I mean think about it, as you progress through any game what happens? The enemies get tougher, right? But what makes it easier? Upgrades to your abilities. Seeing how you have to go through the entire game without upgrades (unless you feel like doing some heavy grinding to get enough experience to max out both good and evil abilities) than yeah, it makes it more difficult.

 

Once I was at the end the game and was finally able to upgrade I noticed quite a difference when it came to defeating enemies quicker.

Edited by TacoNinja
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