r/RetroAchievements

Long story short, while not recommended (seriously just use nook codes), if anyone wants to try this themselves, it can be done in under a year:

- Start on July 4th for the fan items. They are only obtained there, and only have a 1/3 chance of being sold each year. the other 2 choices of inventory have alternate means to obtain.

- Prepare to have 15 characters across 2 towns minimum for the station models on Hometown Day (random day in July), they are one per character. Doing the event next year will not get you a second one (so prepare for a day of Mr Resetti as well to avoid duplicates) so you're either evicting people or having 4 towns. Based on my number of resets, it could be done comfortably in 2 days (i.e. 2 towns with two separate hometown days)

- Similarly, flower models on Groundhog Day require 9 characters to get them all.

- You need both a boy and a girl to obtain everything due to Toy Day rewards being gender-specific.

- Wisp is very important, since when you help him and request an item, he defaults to something not in your catalogue yet until you have everything possible from him. A massive portion of the game was played past midnight as a result.

- Don't sleep on the potential of the island, i.e. don't wait until the very end for the island-exclusive items. Bury random furniture, send the island to the gba, feed the villager several of the fruits they like (trial and error), and give them the shovel (no clue if golden is required, but i gave them that) so they swap items out to fill the catalog quickly even beyond the rare-island exclusives. if they swap a gyroid out, it will always be with a different gyroid, so no need to wait for a bunch of rainy days/wisp. you can also get all of the foreign fruit through the gba.

- The e-reader exclusives and glitched dummy item are not required for mastery (but i got them anyways. e-reader on dolphin is a pain to set up)

-Clear your town of everything when it's time for bellionaire, you need as much space as possible to buy turnips from Joan. I should have done the perfect town first, but oh well.

- I did not use the dupe glitch for bellionaire, but you can manipulate Nook's prices to be a spike, and even have it spike on a specific day. I started without it, but after changing jobs halfway through the run and no longer being work from home, I knew I wouldn't have every day to play the stalk market and decided it wasn't worth hoping for spikes only on fridays or saturdays.

MOST IMPORTANTLY THOUGH: Seriously just enjoy the game how you see fit and don't let anyone tell you that changing the date is cheating. gatekeeping a 20+ year old offline game is weird. this game was never meant to be 100%, let alone legitimately. Most people will enjoy casually playing until they're bored, and then they may or may not nook code the rest. that's perfectly fine.

On a final note. No, I will absolutely not do this for another animal crossing ever again lmao. When it's time for Wild World/City Folk year from now, i'm using every exploit available. Video coming maybe next year, I need a break before scripting this project.

50 masteries completed!

The idea was to do all sets of the first Metal Slug but I just got tired of it. I was hoping it would be easier since I already beat it in 1CC a few years ago in the Steam version, that until I discovered that both versions (and I think Saturn as well) asks you to do so with no deaths at all. They give you infinite ammo for special weapons and you can keep whatever amount of granades you had between levels which makes it fun, but still, quite a challenge.

If I had to pick a set it would probably be the PS1 one, mostly because the controls are better, in NGCD the game has like an input lag or something like that that makes doing multiple inputs at the same time hard, I died a lot because Marco didn't want to jump while shooting. The sets are more or less the same so it's whatever from that aspect.

Good sets overall.

I'm a huge Final Fantasy fan so this was a must to eventually for me. I put it off so much because of the Low Level achievements in the list. After doing this set, it was much easier than I had initially thought it would be. There were only two major road blocks and I'm throwing the word "Major" in pretty loosely. Those would be the Demon Wall and The Carry Armor. Carry Armor took me several tries (Maybe 10 or so?) I just had to wait for the stars to align in my favor for that fight honestly. Do I think these achievements need to be in the set? I dunno, I get why people complain about them. But I didn't find them to be that difficult. It's worth noting, I think that I have platinumed the game on Playstation before. So I'm already pretty familiar with the game.

No, for me, the hardest achievements wasn't beating Emerald or Ruby Weapons without cheesing Knights of the Round. No, it was the fucking mini games. Lol The one I had most difficult with was the Speed ride shooter thing where you had to get 5,000 points. Most people seem to have the most difficulty with the Snowboarding achievements (And the point value on one of them suggest it should be the hardest) But I only had a fair amount of trouble with them. Maybe I got lucky. The 50 point snowboarding achievement took me maybe an hour compared to a few with the shooting game.

I did this set in two runs. I did my 100% run on one playthrough and saved my Low Level run for the second.

Another hard aspect of this set is just keeping track of all the missables. Thankfully, I was able to only miss like 2 achievements in my 100% run, and they were ones that I could easily pick up in my Low Level run. Like talking to the guy in Don Corneo's weird sex dungeon for some lore and getting the extra scene with Tifa towards the end of the game.

I really liked the set, but I understand how it can seem overwhelming. I had never done a low level run before and I have always wanted to. So now I can say that I have and it was a rather generous low level run. Plenty of room for error. Just keep multiple saves on the off chance you mess up. I did, but I didn't really need to go back to any of them. My highest level character was 31. So I would've failed the previous version of the challenge when it was level 28. Though if I did it again, I'm sure I could get it below 28.

Happy (b-late) birthday Sonic <3

Shame to see NetherSX2 get delisted as a valid emulator for HC achievements. It still gets better performance for me at the same level of compatibility as ARMSX2 with significantly better battery life(to the point I've barely touched ArmSX2)

I think its super disingenuous for the admin to act like people raising legitimate complaints of issues with ArmSX2 (Achievements popping randomly in a few games, plus tons of complaints of worse performance + battery life issues) is somehow 'spreading misinformation'. It undermines the actual reasoning of swapping emulators, and only serves to suppress dissent.

Classic game, which I played for the first time. I did two runs. In the first one, I didn’t catch any Pokémon because I didn’t know I had to. Lol, but I really enjoyed it.

After 8 failed playthroughs, I got it to work and swept right on through this. I can confidently say this is the weakest in the trilogy but is still decent. Only difficulty came from no hitting bosses.

I might throw two games in before I continue my Spyro marathon.

This was fairly quick and easy, nothing to troubling. The only hard parts were the three stealth infiltration, as the controls are a bit janky. Overall, it's a pretty fun game.

What do you think about this ?

I've been a member of this community since 2017 and am very familiar with the site's motto: “To master the game means to complete absolutely everything in it, plus a couple extra hardcore challenges". I've never shared this belief and still think that sets should cover only the game itself, but this set has shown me another perspective - perspective of players who believe in RA's motto.

I'm a huge fan of GTA 3, so I was really excited when this set came out. But all my excitement vanished the moment I saw the achievements. So I just shrugged and went to play other games. Two years later, I decided to come back and play this set because by now it has earned a reputation as one of the brutal sets on the site. And oh boy, this reputation is well-earned.

I had so much fun with this set. I learned how to fly Dodo, I saw the famous Ghost Town, I won a race with top down camera and played many missions in ways I would never even thought of in my normal playthrough. Since majority of achievements are focused on missions, and missions in this games are relatively short, I've almost never experienced frustration with this set.

But what impressed me the most is the feel of community. Almost every hard achievement has a ton of comments of people sharing their strategy, tips, and experience. Those two years since the set release and the difficulty of these achievements have brought fans of this game together to solve the challenge. And that alone makes this set absolutely amazing experience.

Now I understand the idea behind site's motto and this set for me is 9 out of 10. It's just not for everybody, but for the hardcore fans who want to get a little bit more out of their favorite game.

NetherSX2 will drop Hardcore support on Thursday, July 16th. To me this seems a very short notice period. I wish this can be extended until the end of the year to allow ARMSX2 to mature a bit more.

Official forum thread: https://retroachievements.org/forums/topic/36517

I had such a great time getting all of these achievements. Very cool to learn new things (like hidden items in the ground, and all the warp barrel locations) about a game I've played through countless times.