Achievements have been a mainstay across all Xbox systems and titles – practically cementing them as a necessity in modern gaming. Some achievements are pretty achievable. Some are anything but.
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Xbox is stuffed with achievements so devoid of ease that only a mere handful of dedicated gamers have ever heard their unlock sound effect. Achievements that require feats on par with God-like gaming and require immeasurable amounts of skill, patients, and even luck.
10 7 Day Survivor - Dead Rising
This achievement is the bane of every Dead Rising player. Your survival skills are truly tested as, to complete this achievement, you must live past 7 in-game days, which is 14 hours of continuous gameplay in the poorly titled Infinity Mode.
As your health is permanently draining and can only be replenished by a finite amount of food, you cannot take your eye off the ball for a second. You must seek and defeat civilians gone rogue to bolster food supplies, then hunker down until the next lot appear. It's a nightmarish endurance test and was enough to leave this achievement unfinished among players.
9 LASO Master - Halo: The Master Chief Collection
More akin to a masoch*stic gauntlet than an achievement challenge, LASO Master is a lesson in pain endurance. The LASO playlist sets your Halo campaign to the hardest difficulty with every skull turned on – skulls being modifiers that basically aim to make your chances of survival minuscule. And you don’t just have to beat one Halo campaign, you have to clear four of them..
That includes the notoriously punishing Halo 2 campaign. Forget about finishing the fight, you’ll finish off your patience long before you pop this achievement. It's unbelievably brutal, with only a small pocket of the Halo community being successful.
8 Mein leben - Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus
Deathless achievements belong in the grave, the one place they’ll never reach, so is it any surprise that these types of achievements rank among the most difficult to pop? Enter Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus and its Mein leben achievement – where you have to beat it on the hardest difficulty with one life.
Wolfenstein can get really mean in some of its sections. Bullets will mulch you in a blink of an eye and, if you die, it's back to the drawing board. You need to know the campaign inside and out, and those brave enough to attempt this can find some solace in the fact that the story can take just over four hours to beat. But let's be honest, the other one hundred hours were lost to dead runs.
Online achievements are evil. They’re essentially ticking time bombs that always have the possibility of being completely unobtainable. A dead server means a dead achievement, and that graveyard is packed. To avoid this, an online game has to remain popular. Luckily, Elder Scrolls Online is still going. Unluckily, it contains an obscenely difficult achievement.
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You practically have to drop everything and dedicate your life to this one for a bit. You have to be the best player around, and since ESO has been going for a fair while, that feat is becoming more impossible to beat. When an achievement goes from a hearty challenge to a full-on lifestyle change, you know it's not going to come easy.
6 Battle Master - Resident Evil Code: Veronica X
As a franchise, Resident Evil is comfortable offering harsh but fair challenges – mostly requiring you to beat the games quickly. Arguably, Code: Veronica X ranks as one of the harder RE experiences to complete.
Battle Game is a separate mode that gives you five characters to choose from to clear B.O.W.s from a series of rooms. It is also the mode that houses this frustratingly hard achievement.
You’ll need to speedrun this mode with every character in order to get A ranks. Each character has different load-outs, and Wesker is only equipped with a knife, a weapon you must use to kill everything. If luck and speed are on your side, you can discover a magnum which is pretty essential for the boss encounter.
5 Stampers Forever – Rare Replay
The achievement for the most difficult collectibles' achievement has to be handed to Rare Replay. Usually, collectible achievements are a fun, breezy ride, but Stampers Forever tests your collecti-thon abilities and asks you to collect all 330 stamps – across all 30 of its games.
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You can’t pick and choose your favorites from the Rare collection. Be prepared to muster an encyclopedic knowledge of Rare game design by the end of this achievement. The collection is wrought with variety and features notoriously hard games, such as Battletoads, which will be tall roadblocks to get over. Hardly anyone has this one, so if you’re a true stamper, you’re basically a Rare dev now.
4 MR.PERFECT – Mega Man 10
The insufferable cousin of the deathless achievement is the screamingly difficult No Damage achievement. Feats that demand nothing but absolute god of gods-tier gaming where the slightest nick in your health will secure failure. The aptly titled achievement for Mega Man 10 requires you to get the blue bomber (or Proton Man) from start to finish without ever being hit.
Just trying to complete Mega Man 10 normally is hard enough, but to demand such precision is going to pull a few hairs. Unless you’re a gamer content with 8-bit style brutality, you won’t get anywhere near pulling this off, which is why so few have ever heard this achievement’s popping sound.
3 What A Journey It Was… - Hi-Fi Rush
Leaving no stone unturned is the name of the game when it comes to nabbing this achievement in Hi-Fi Rush. But the journey to accomplishing everything the game has to offer is scorched with hardship.
Finishing every difficulty level, every challenge, and acquiring every collectible is a hard medal to wear, but you also have to S rank every stage whilst never being hit by a boss. Oh, and the game is a rhythmic hack and slash, so if your musical ear is untuned, you’re really going to struggle with this difficult achievement.
2 Embrace the Void - Hollow Knight: Voidheart Edition
Hollow Knight is a renowned Metroidvania title. In particular, the boss encounters are memorable whilst being some of the biggest challenges in the game. If you manage to discover the Godhome location, you can participate in the pantheons; boss rush gauntlets that will test every ounce of your combat skills. The achievement in question locks its success behind the final pantheon – a finger-busting boss marathon against 42 bosses straight.
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No continues, bosses set to their highest possible difficulty, bosses taking on newer forms and some fights taking place in harshly altered arenas is all that stands between you and hypothetical victory. The first four pantheons are astronomically hard as it is, but to beat this challenge is going to require hours upon hours of learning.
The endeavor can take up to an hour to even glimpse the final boss, so repeated runs are going to melt your time away.
1 Impossible, Right? - Crypt Of The NecroDancer
A summary of this achievement should read something like, “Beat the game without making a single mistake” because that’s exactly what it's going to take to claim victory. How bad can it be?
You must beat All Zones Mode as Coda, who has virtually no health, uses a weak dagger, and dies the second you miss a beat – a beat that plays at double speed. Oh, and coins kill them instantly too, and since every enemy killed drops coins, death is always one move away. If you have this achievement, you have full permission to gloat as loudly as possible.
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