Whew. We finally got there. It was a bit of a slog, but the Platinum trophy for Persona 5 is mine. As with my last post on Sekiro, I’ll be talking a bit about my road to the Platinum and some of the final trophies that I had to pick up. This Platinum took me 2-ish playthroughs (I didn’t fight the final boss in NG+), and clocked in at around 190 hours. Of course, this post will contain spoilers for Persona 5. And unfortunately, as I mentioned in my review, Atlus does not allow screenshots to be taken during play, so I don’t have many pictures to share. Sigh.

Mask Collector – Complete the Persona Compendium

While not inherently difficult, this trophy is a bit of a time sink, and you need a lot – like, A LOT – of money to complete this. I’m sure I didn’t do it in the most efficient way possible (there are probably guides out there for this) but I used almost 2 million yen fusing/summoning high level Personas that I needed. Some of the ‘group’ guillotine options will be a particular drain on your resources – Personas like Satanael, Lucifer or Michael take several other high-level Personas to fuse, which means you either have to summon them with money (some are 50,000 or more to summon), or wait until the very end of the game to find them in Mementos. I chose to summon them, and it’s a good thing I’d been hoarding money my entire playthrough; having started with around 3.5 million yen, I finished with around 1.6 after completing the compendium. This trophy just meant staying on top of Persona recruiting/fusion throughout the game, and then committing to an hour or so at the end in the Velvet Room, fusing the ones I was still missing. Despite seeing all the high-level ones I missed on my first playthrough, I think Alice is still my favourite Persona.

Great Phantom Thieves Convene – Max out all Confidants

Again, this trophy wasn’t too difficult, but it did take two playthroughs to complete. It means spending enough time with the 15 regular confidants to max out their relationships, and completing most of the playthrough to max out the ones that advance arbitrarily, based on your progress in the story. Having a Persona in your inventory that matches the arcana of the confidant you are spending time with (i.e. having a Chariot Persona before hanging out with Ryuji) is massively helpful in advancing relationships more quickly. I also found Chihaya (the Fortune confidant) and her Affinity Readings absolutely essential. Each Affinity Reading that she does for you (which doesn’t take up an entire afternoon/evening of time) basically replaces a session with a confidant of your choice. So instead of having to hang out with a confidant multiple times when your relationship won’t advance, you can get a reading from Chihaya, and do something else instead (like work on reading all the books, or playing all the videogames for those other trophies). The next time you hang out with the confidant you chose, you’ll probably advance the relationship, without having to waste the extra day getting to that point. It was a huge time saver, and being able to do this much earlier in the calendar year in NG+ was also helpful. I managed to max out all my confidants by the first week of December (Haru being the last), which gave me the entire month to grind in Mementos, and tie up some other loose ends. Ryuji is still the best confidant, don’t @ me.

Beyond Rehabilitation – Defeat the twins

The twins (the Strength arcana confidants, in the Velvet Room) are a special boss in NG+ and are easily the most difficult boss in the game. I actually had to do some research for this one – I was struggling to beat them. I did some Reaper grinding in Mementos during the flu season in December (I got my characters up to level 95, in order to fuse the Personas I still needed) to better prepare for them. I ended up fusing a very specific version of the Persona Yoshistune (look it up here if you’re interested) that carried me through the fight. It essentially drains/repels/resists all types of damage, and has an extremely powerful physical attack, able to chip away at the twins health at the same time. It’s necessary for you to bring their health down at an equal rate; if you knock one out before the other, they will simply revive each other. This fight is quite intricate, requiring you to do specific amounts of damage by certain points, as well as avoiding the twins’ All Out Attack – if all of your party members are knocked down, the fight is over immediately, as they will insta-kill you. I used Makoto, Haru, and Ryuji to help with this fight – for healing, extra damage, and buffs to support. With the Yoshistune build, I found this fight a lot more manageable – I also got fairly lucky with my teammates surviving longer than they probably should have. Ryuji was dodging Wind attacks like it was his day job. I managed to beat this boss, but I honestly don’t think I’d ever want to do it again.

Legendary Phantom Thief

The rest of the trophies were fairly simple to pick up with good time management (for the “read all books” and “complete all video games” ones) and ensuring that you’re staying on top of tasks (like the Mementos requests/confidant link ones). Overall, this Platinum wasn’t too bad to get – just a bit of a time sink. Since I’m not playing anything major until Pokemon drops, I didn’t mind it too much. I’m not sure if I’ll go for the Platinum trophy when Persona 5: the Royal drops next year, but we’ll see. I’m a bit burnt out on this game for now, but I’m sure by the time March next year rolls around, I’ll be ready to jump back into the world of the Phantom Thieves.