I finished getting the plat for Love, Ghostie (Jambeh Games, LLC), and, boy, I wish I had not gone down that road. First of all, here is my post from yesterday on the game in general. The last achievement for the plat was a grind, and even though it was half my fault. I had forgotten that Ghostina’s shop started over from the beginning with every NG cycle. The last achievement I needed was to ‘unlock’ everything in her shop. That wasn’t really the achievement, though, because I had done that before. It was buy every item in her shop in one go–which is far past just unlocking every item.
See, I had done that in NG+, but had not bought all the items. I do wonder had I in the second playthrough bought all the items I hadn’t in the first if that would have counted, but I have no way of knowing, obviously. I’m mostly mad at myself because I had ended NG+ with just one or two items left to get, thinking I could pick them up yin the third run.
In addition, the second-to-last achievement was a frustrating one, too. It was to view every date once. During the first playthrough, I just had two residents date whenever I felt like it. I did it maybe a half-dozen times. I did not know how many there were because that info was not listed anywhere. By the middle of the second playthrough, I was doing the date every day, regardless of if I actually wanted to or not. And if I hhad a pair that I wanted to hook up.
In addition, because I had to try to find all the love tags of each character, I would do the dates or chore if I had a character who for that particular chore, I did not know if they were a match or not. In other words, I was playing for the achievements rather than the story/plot/game, which was not fun.
Side note: I hate plats. I hate that I care about them at all. I did not until I watched Krupa go for the Dark Souls plat, and that made me want to do the same. I should have resisted because I fell into the abyss known as trophy hunting. I did get the Dark Souls plat (ugh) and then the Dark Souls III plat (triple ugh. It wsa so painful that I did not touch the game for several months–and this is a game that I was playing every day for years up until that point). Then, what the hell, might as well get the Dark Souls II plat (another huge pain–)
Let’s talk about it. The Dark Souls plats, I mean. They were so painful to get because they were so fucking tedious. Grindy, having to go into NG++, and more. My unsubstantiated theory is that FromSoft really did not want to include plats and was strong-armed by Bamco into doing so. “Fine!” said Miyazaki. “If it’s a plat you want, then it is a plat you will get.”
The Bloodborne plat isn’t nearly as bad, though there are pockets of extreme bullshittery. EXTREME. I would not have been able to do it without the help of two people in the RKG Discord.
Then came Elden Ring, perhaps the easiest of the From plats. Again, I have an unsupported theory. Because this was the game that FromSoft was trying to bring to the mainstream, they streamlined the plat to match. If the cloudsaves had worked for me, I could have gotten the plat with one playthrough. Since I knew that I was going to play it several times, I wasn’t too upset that I had to play through two more times to get the actual plat.
Back to this game.
I was mad that I had to go into the third playthrough. I’ll be honest. As much as I found the game charming, I did not want to do a third playthrough–especially as I was only focused on getting the one achievement. That’s part of thea reason that I don’t like plats in general–they strip the fun out of the game. For me, anyway. I know there are plat hunters who thrive on that shit, but it ain’t me.
Something that is fun to do when I choose to do it is not as fun or no fun at all when I feel I have to do it. Not that I have to do the plat, but when I was that close, it feels rude not to. By far the best plat that I went for was the Hades (Supergiant Games) one. Because you have to do ten runs to get the true ending and can get more unique dialogue past that point, the game gives you a reason to keep playing it. Not to mention the compulsive ‘just one more run’ feel to it. By the time I felt done with the game, I only had about half-a-dozen acheievements to get. Two of them I thought would be impossible, and yet, they turned out to be fairly easy.
I really think the plat should be based on things you would do during the game, not endless fetch quests/collect thirty of multiple items quests. I don’t mind one or two very specific achievements (in the case of this game, there’s one that makes you place a certain item on the bed of a resident once you unlock the ability to redecorate, which was fine. Except that when I unlocked that ability on that round, I did not get that item for several days. Which was funny because I got it fairly regularly on the first day.
I did like that on the third day, I was able to match any and all of my six residents (six had moved out) from gift to gift just because. This was once I had maxed out one relationship for each, and I did it with the aim for the next run. I’m probably not going to do another run, but it’s nice to know I have a good start on it if I do. 66 endings. That’s so wild!
I love the graphics and the vibes of this game so much. I love each resident, though I will admit, I love some of them more than I love others. But in the end, even the ones I found more difficult grew on me. Because they were all good beings–they were just flawed, vulnerable, and broken. They had their good traits and their bad ones, just like everyone else.
I will say that the day-to-day gets a bit repetitive, especially when I was going for the last few achievements. I will admit to mashing through the dialogue on the third or fourth time I came across it, but that’s only to be expected. I really enjoyed matching up the different personalities and seeing how differently each resident acted around others. And how matching up two very unlikely residents brought out the best in each (or, sometimes, the awkward).
I liked the diversity in the residents and how I could find a piece of myself in almost every one of them. I like that it had a very clear premise that they fulfilled, and I really liked that each run was roughly three hours. Not every game needs to be a sweeping hundred-hour epic (and, yes, I understand that’s hilarious coming from me, given that my favorite game of all time is Elden Ring (FromSoft)), and I much prefer a 3-hour game that doesn’t overstay it’s welcome than a 70-hour experience that is inflated with bloat and filler.
I love the heart of this game and was utterly charmed. I can thoroughly recommend it if you’re someone who likes dating/matchmaking sims, cute and charming graphics, quirky anthropomorphic beings, and just smiling throughout a touching game. I don’t really want to give it a number rating, so I won’t. I’ll just leave it at that.