My 10th platinum was 3D Dot Game Heroes, a game that has been praised and criticized at the same time. The reason? Pretty simple: It looks and plays too much like NES & SNES Zelda games. As a person who loved those games (especially A Link to the Past) this game was a must play! And it didn’t disappoint in my opinion, call it a tribute, a rip-off, a mere copy or whatever, it’s a very fun game with lots of content. It has a bunch of mini-games, collectible swords, key items, side quests, etc to keep you entertained for a while.
Guess who’s the character?
Some of the mini-games may be a pain in the ass sometimes though, especially the Dash Circuit one. Thankfully, times to achieve were reduced by 5 seconds thanks to an online patch the game received back in September (if I’m not mistaken). But still, even with the patch applied that mini-game can give you Angry Video Game Nerd moments. The other mini-games are less stressful and more fun at least, but you have to achieve perfect scores if you want their bonus prizes.
Just like Zelda you have a life bar (represented with hearts) and a magic bar (represented with green potion-like bottles), and different magics (one obtained after each dungeon). And you also have secondary weapons (which are not really that useful when not required). The one thing that stands on its own and differentiates this game from Zelda is that you can upgrade your swords, and there’s also more than 10 swords to collect. Also, swords have different things to upgrade, like size, width, piercing properties, spin, and strength which makes them more useful, especially when you make your sword huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugeeeeeee.
Yes, all that gray area is the sword.
And while beating the game is not really that difficult, keeping up with all side quests and not missing them (some are time-sensitive) can be a challenge. One of the swords actually requires you to have all key items (and some of them are acquired through side quests), so you have to be a completionist if you don’t want to miss trophies.
Now, getting all the trophies can be really challenging. And you have to play the game 3 times at minimum to get them all.
I personally recommend getting all the swords on your first playthrough because the swords bought with small blocks are carried over on next gameplays, which can be really helpful at the beginning on more challenging difficulties. Because of that, level up the most useful ones you think you may need on your next playthroughs (Excalibur, Hero Sword, Giga Sword and Magic sword are my personal recommendations), as not only special swords are carried over but the stats of the swords that don’t are as soon as you get them again (so you won’t have to spend money on them again).
I also recommend booking all the monsters on normal difficulty since enemies will do more damage on other difficulties, and some of the monsters (and bosses) can be a pain in the ass to book (some of them require more than 30 hits!). I also recommend equipping the wood sword when booking monsters, so you won’t kill them by mistake before being recorded.
Also, save often and don’t use continues nor save after dying. If you die, reload and play again so you’ll get a trophy for not dying once during a playthrough.
For the second playthrough I went straight to Spelunker difficulty, which is a difficulty setting honoring an old school game called Spelunker in which everything pretty much killed you. In this difficulty a single hit of any enemy attack will kill you no matter how many hearts you have, and it doesn’t matter either if you have a protection ring. Due to the nature of this difficulty you’ll naturally get the trophies for beating bosses without receiving damage so leave those for this difficulty if you want. Also playing on this difficulty for 10 hours gives you another trophy, so… take your time.
Third playthrough was on hard difficulty (which is called FROM mode). On this difficulty enemies do more damage and the number of enemies on a single screen can get ridiculous. It helps if you got the Excalibur sword in here since it’ll kill pretty much everything with one swing (at least on the beginning of the game). But well… at least you don’t die with one hit!
Now one complain about this game is that most of the trophies are hidden, and I can’t show them off easily :<. Also a bunch of them are missable so you should take a look at the list of trophies because of that and also because some of them are simply weird or unusual.
Not as weird as this “sword” though.
Get this game if you want a retro revival experience or a challenge. It is a very charming and fun game that’s worth the dollars, but don’t expect it to be a walk in the park if you’re a completionist though.
For a more in-depth trophy guide go to PS3trophies’s forum guide of the game.
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