The Ninja Gaiden series is notorious for its difficulty but, according to the masochists who have attempted to force themselves through the challenge, one specific entry in the series is far harder to complete than any other game in the franchise: the PlayStation Vita port of Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2. Yet thirteen years after its release, someone has finally managed to legitimately earn the game’s platinum trophy–although it did take a 10-hour-long live stream and a fortuitous glitch to pull it off.
As confirmed by PSNProfiles, PlayStation user Tqvry is the first person to have verifiably 100-percent completed Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2+ and earned its Platinum. Also, based on the stats tracked on the site, it took Tqvry a whopping 20 months to achieve it. But why exactly is the PS Vita port of the game considered so impossible to Platinum, as opposed to its PlayStation 3 counterpart?
The trophy Dynamic Duo, which requires you to beat all of Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2’s missions on Turbo difficulty with a co-op partner, is the culprit. The problem is that Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 on the PlayStation 3 (as well as the port of the game in the Ninja Gaiden: Master Collection for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC) allows you to go online and find a real, human partner to complete this challenge with. Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2+ on the PSVita instead saddles you with a computer-controlled partner.
As you can see in Tqvry’s livestreamed video of the challenge, the AI-controlled co-op partner is infuriatingly terrible, to the point that most of their attempts open with their partner getting immediately dogwalked within the first five seconds. I should also note that the 10-hour-long video isn’t the entire challenge; that’s just one mission. Said mission requires you to fight three bosses at once, which essentially means that it’s a three-on-one as soon as your co-op buddy dies.
The funny thing is that this was seemingly only possible for Tqvry due to the fact that one of the three bosses bugs out and gets stuck in terrain for part of the fight. To clarify, this doesn’t appear to be a bug that Tqvry intentionally triggered. It was just dumb luck…which I think is extremely deserved, all things considered.
Also, you may notice on PSNProfiles’ website, by hovering over the trophy’s completion percentage, that supposedly 7.3 percent of players have actually unlocked Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2+’s Platinum. This is because PSNProfiles will display all of the non-legitimate trophy unlocks when you hover over the true percentage. In addition to this, two other people have apparently unlocked the Platinum in the past, but Tqvry is the only one to outright prove they’ve done so by livestreaming their attempt.