When the PoNR looms over your head (or at least you assume it is), going trophy hunting by attempting to complete all side quests might be a must for you.
Except these side quests can be quite frustrating. Half of them are kill quests, and half are collection. And I’ll be talking about the collection side quests.
‘Book of the Dead’ and ‘Sticks and Stones’. Both require you to find nodes scattered in the entire game. Some are easy to find (seen in plain sight), or hiding behind something. There’s even some that require you to work for it, or are inaccessible to reach ’till you get later in the game’s campaign.
But what makes these quite annoying, is how they were structured. Instead of showing you got this and that one, you have to look online and find videos showing the locations of these nodes.. and painstakingly backtrack to verify you got these.
Even with these super helpful videos, a lot of folks are missing those last two nodes to complete the quest (and get the trophy). This is the super annoying part, especially when you’re absolutely positive you got this or that node. Unfortunately, you cannot confirm until you check yourself (and then realize it’s one of the two you needed).
I’m not sure why they chose this style when it came to collection quests. It’s garbage. And the percentage of others that went through the same hell you did to complete the damn thing, speaks volumes. An example is the 1.2% ‘Ultra Rare’ trophy of gathering all 40 pages of the Book of the Dead. Thankfully collecting the pages rewards more than two trophies. Finding 10 in each level and turning them in to the quest giver, gives you a special key that you can unlock a ‘Death Tomb’, filled with goodies (weapons, armor, and coins). Managed to get a few Possessed weapons from the 3rd one.
Sticks and Stones is a bit worse, requiring you to find 69 small stones of three types: In total, there’s 34 ‘Stone of Mystics’, 25 ‘Stone of Power’ and 10 ‘Stone of Resistance’. These stones have a distinct sound when you’re close, but to find the small pieces of shit is another thing. I’m 67/69 currently. I know where one is, but I cannot get to it at this moment (as it’s in a multi-leveled maze.. and you know how much I love mazes). The other one is highly eluding me. It’s quite frustrating, after I had just done a thorough sweep a few days ago.
Managed to find several I didn’t get, but not enough to get the one that’s eluding me. Now I’m forced to do another thorough sweep. This is ridiculous!