Started out fun but the grind became real
Beyond: Two Souls is an interactive cinematic game released by Quantic Dream in 2013 following the same distinct style as their previous titles: Heavy Rain, Fahrenheit and more recently Detroit: Become Human.
This game has been on my list to go back and platinum for quite some time, but I have long since lost my original game save and quite a few of the trophies I have left require a full playthrough so I kept putting it off. It’s also one of those where you need to spend a bit of time up front to work out what trophies you already have and how to make the best use of your time.
This game has been on my list to go back and platinum for quite some time, but I have long since lost my original game save and quite a few of the trophies I have left require a full playthrough so I kept putting it off. It’s also one of those where you need to spend a bit of time up front to work out what trophies you already have and how to make the best use of your time.
I wrote out all the trophies and ticked off the ones that I already had. I then split them into chapter specific trophies, those which can be obtained for doing a specific activity in a specific chapter, these are less important in the overall plan as you can use the chapter select to get these. The other trophies are the ones where you need to do a series of actions in one playthrough in order to get it. I needed to plan out the first playthrough to get as many of these as I could in one go.
Playthrough 1
My first playthrough would focus on getting all the collectables, taking every opportunity to do evil actions, finish the game in two player mode and to save every character’s life. This would get me Explorer, Uncontrollable, Together Till The End and Saved All. It was also good just to replay the game after so long and experience it again. The Uncontrollable trophy was particularly painful because it goes against my natural instinct to be good in games. I had to pick all of the horrible options including intentionally setting a house on fire, but this is part of the fun of trophy hunting - getting you to do things you otherwise wouldn’t do.
Along the way I managed to tick off some of the chapter specific trophies I was missing. The trophy Teammates was a fun little one where you had to steal some cookies amongst other things as well as Aiden’s Apocalypse where you have to wreak havoc on a small town exploding gas stations and destroying helicopters. The worst part is that the chapter specific trophies don’t pop until the loading screen after the chapter is complete. This can be an agonizing wait as you can never be sure you got it until the end of the chapter.
Playthrough 1 - Extras
The most complicated trophy is the All Endings trophy. There are about 7 different endings depending on how you want to split it. At the end of this playthrough I had kept everyone alive and I chose the option to enter the Infraworld. Then I was able to simply reload the final chapter again and choose to live. This did mean replaying the ending chapter Black Sun which is quite time consuming. After choosing to live, you unlock the Epilogue where there are a number of different choices on who Jodie can live with. I replayed this 4 times choosing the other endings but each time you have to watch the ending credits, it’s simple but painfully slow and each time there is only one small ending video based on your choice, the rest of the ending is all the same. The illusion of choice in these branching story games start to break apart when you keep replaying them over and over.
Playthrough 2
At this point the trophies I had left to get were for finding all the collectables (I had missed two from the first playthrough, though they can be attained by simply replaying the chapter), three chapter specific trophies I couldn’t get at the time as they would have invalidated some of the longer running trophies I was working on and then the trophies for letting everyone die and getting the other endings.
The grind is real now. I need to replay the game from the chapter Homeless and make sure I kill all the characters along the way from this point in the game until the end. The Homeless chapter is the first point in the story where your decisions affect the critical characters and whether they live or die. Then it is a case of reloading the Epilogue a few times again until you are done.
Up until now it was a real fun trophy hunt. I was enjoying playing the game all the way through again, the collectables were easy to attain and they unlocked the behind the scenes features. But now that I have to replay half of the game it’s not great. Ideally this is where I should put the game down and come back in 6 months and replay it but I just want to get it finished at this point.
Cleanup
So after finally getting to the end a second time I managed to get All Endings and a Better world. I then just had to round it up by doing a few chapter specific trophies that I still hadn’t got.
Was it worth it?
This is a really tough one. I think if I hadn’t lost my original game save file things would have been better but ultimately you really shouldn’t play this game with a guide as your first playthrough, you should just play it and make your own decisions. This is likely to lead you to an ending where some characters are alive and some are dead. This means it’s likely you will have to replay the game, at least from the Homeless chapter, to make sure they all survive and then the same to make sure they all die. So it’s just a really grindy experience at the end. If it’s a game you are passionate about I’d recommend spacing out these chunks, maybe just keep a note in the game box and come back to the multiple playthroughs over time.