Hardest and Most Annoying JRPG Achievements of All Time

Truth be told, I adore JRPGs, and I also enjoy a good achievement. One thing I absolutely do not enjoy is being made to feel like a corporate lawyer reviewing the terms and conditions of my own misery. I have spent hundreds of hours in a wide variety of games, from various Final Fantasy titles to more obscure games, but I tend to enjoy them most when they respect my time instead of wasting it.

The achievements on this list fall squarely into the second category. Some of them are grinds, some of them are missable traps, some of them are simply the developers deciding that your time has no value. All of them have inspired genuine suffering in people who attempted them, and I'm speaking from experience here, because I have tried my hand and succeeded on a fair few.

10 Unchanging Armor — Kingdom Hearts

Whacking Heartless With Basically a Wooden Sword, Forever

For this achievement, you are not allowed to change weapons or accessories on Sora, Donald, or Goofy for the entire game. It is doable, especially on Beginner Mode, but it is also incredibly tedious in a way that compounds steadily as the game goes on. By the late game, you are essentially whacking your way through some of the toughest Heartless encounters in the game with equipment that made sense thirty hours ago and makes very little sense now.

The problem isn't necessarily the difficulty spike exactly – it's the relentless repetition of the same rotation against enemies that require a lot of attention to deal with, when you know full well that the equipment sitting in your menu would make this significantly more manageable. No amount of Ether makes this feel like a valid choice. It is technically achievable. It is also a genuine test of patience that most people will not find enjoyable.

9 Golden Finger — Persona 5

Power Intuition Will Test You

Persona 5 includes a collection of in-game video games that you can play at various points throughout the year, each of which requires button inputs to progress. Reading the book Game Secrets, purchasable at the Shinjuku bookstore, makes the inputs slightly easier. The achievement for completing all of them sounds straightforward on paper, and most of them are. And then there's Power Intuition.

The timing window on Power Intuition is genuinely unforgiving, even with Game Secrets read and the assists applied. Save before you attempt it, because you will need to reload. The achievement doesn't respect that you've been managing Confidants, running dungeons, working part-time jobs, and carefully rationing your in-game days across an entire playthrough. It asks you to do a difficult timing-based minigame until you succeed, and it does not care how many attempts that takes.

8 Pro Gamer — Shin Megami Tensei 3: Nocturne

The Hardest Part of Nocturne is a Puzzle Game

When people warn you that Nocturne is hard, they are often thinking of Matador, or the late-game dungeons, or building a Press Turn team capable of handling the final boss. They are usually not thinking about Puzzle Boy, which is a tragedy, because Puzzle Boy is genuinely the most difficult thing in the game.

To get this achievement, you have to complete all 20 stages of a block-pushing puzzle minigame found in Asakusa, and you have to do all 20 in a single run. Even with a guide, this is a gruelling process. Some of the later puzzles require spatial reasoning that takes sustained concentration to get right, and starting the entire gauntlet over because you made a mistake on Stage 17 is the kind of experience that will make you rage. Nobody talks about Puzzle Boy when they talk about Nocturne's difficulty. They should.

7 The Last Level — Tales of Berseria

Level 200 in a New Game Plus, With Reduced Stats

The maximum level in Tales of Berseria is 200, which already sounds excessive. The catch is that you would be wise to reach for it in New Game Plus – a fresh run will probably not get you there without experience multipliers. The experience gains from levelling also start reducing at level 60, reduce further at level 100, and by the later stretch of that grind, the returns have diminished to a point that makes every session feel like pushing a boulder uphill.

The practical solution is the 6x experience boost available through the Grade Shop, which softens the grind considerably. It doesn't make the achievement fun. It makes it survivable, which is a different thing.

6 Dedicated Follower of Fashion — Dragon Quest XI

Casino, Superbosses, and Crafting, All for Costumes

The name of this achievement sounds like something you'd earn by going shopping. The reality is that getting every costume in Dragon Quest XI requires completing obscure sidequests, defeating superbosses, tracking down specific items across the game world, acquiring recipes, crafting the costumes those recipes unlock, and – as a personal favorite touch – gambling at the casino. It is one of the more comprehensive collection achievements in any JRPG.

Each individual part of it is manageable enough in isolation. The problem is how many parts there are, and how spread across the game they become once you're deep into the completion run. Some costumes are tucked behind content you'd never find without a guide. Some require materials that don't appear until late in the postgame. The achievement is, in a technical sense, fair. It does not feel fair.

5 Reverse Pirates! Everything is Mine! — Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice

You Have Three Turns and a Very Long List

The Item World in Disgaea games is already a substantial time investment for any serious player. Pirate ships, which you earn by defeating pirate groups in legendary items on floors 31 and above, open up reverse pirating – and the achievement for this requires you to move all innocents, level spheres, and treasure chests onto your ship within roughly three turns.

The mechanical demands here are significant. You need characters with high movement and throwing stats, ideally with Cheerleaders supporting both. You cannot kill the enemies on the map, because dead enemies mean the floor ends early, and your remaining turns evaporate with it. The planning required per attempt is real, and the execution needs to match the plan closely. It is the kind of achievement where a single suboptimal move in turn one can cascade into a failed run by turn three, which means a lot of restarting.

4 Treasure Hunter — Final Fantasy XIII

Collect Everything, Upgrade Everything, Miss Nothing

Final Fantasy XIII's Treasure Hunter requires you to have held every weapon and accessory in the game at some point – not equipped, just held. That sounds more forgiving than it is, because the actual requirement is that every item must have been upgraded to its most powerful tier, and you must craft at least one ultimate weapon – the sixth ATB slot variety – for every character in the party.

The deeper problem is what happens if you sell, dismantle, or miss certain accessories that exist in limited quantities. Some items cannot be replaced. If you weren't tracking your inventory carefully, or if you made a decision early in the game that seemed reasonable at the time, the achievement can become permanently unattainable without starting over. It is a long grind even when executed correctly and with foreknowledge. It is a full restart when executed carelessly. Few JRPGs punish uninformed play quite this harshly.

3 Gold Medal — White Knight Chronicles

An Online Achievement in a Game With Dead Servers

White Knight Chronicles had a guild mission system that required players to complete specific online cooperative missions with an S-rank time. At its peak, doing those missions with a full group of four players meant the time requirements were entirely manageable. When the servers shut down and the achievement became a solo challenge – or at best a reduced group – the calculus changed dramatically.

The game was reportedly tweaked after the server closure to make the achievement still technically attainable, but the time required without a coordinated group ballooned, and the grind without the social element became something most players describe as deeply unfun. It stands as a reminder that achievements tied to online infrastructure are always a ticking clock, and the clock ran out here without much warning.

2 Overwhelming Peon Ball, GO! — Mugen Souls

The Biggest Test of Willpower on This List

Mugen Souls has a Peon system where you convert enemies into Peons, and the achievement for collecting enough of them is the kind of grind that tests something beyond patience – it tests your actual desire to keep playing. The RNG involved in obtaining specific Peons compounds the time requirement in the worst way, because a bad streak doesn't just slow you down, it actively makes each session feel like it's working against you.

People who have completed this describe it as the biggest grind they have ever faced in a JRPG, which is a meaningful statement in a genre not known for being gentle with its time demands. The game itself is apparently fun. The grind is not. Those two things can coexist, and in Mugen Souls they do, which makes it all the more frustrating.

1 Magnus Maestro — Baten Kaitos

Real-Time Item Decay and a 1,000+ Magnus Checklist

Magnus Maestro requires you to collect every magnus in Baten Kaitos, of which there are over 1,000. That alone would make it one of the most demanding collection achievements in the genre. The thing that elevates it into a category of its own is the real-time aging system.

Magnus in Baten Kaitos transform or disappear based on real-world time. The Forbidden Fruit becomes Rotten Fruit in 30 minutes. Yell cards level up every five hours – and if you leave the game idling overnight before getting all six Yell levels registered, you will permanently miss those intermediate stages. The game only registers a magnus transformation when you open the deck editing screen or enter a battle, which means you cannot simply set an alarm and hope for the best.

You have to be actively present and attentive during specific real-world windows, across a checklist that also includes missable drops from specific minigame sequences, one-chance encounters, and items tied to quests that can be permanently failed if approached in the wrong order. It is, in its own deeply specific way, a masterpiece of unforgiving game design.