Wanted Dead’s platinum trophy isn’t just hard — it’s ‘Japanese Hard’

We spoke with Wanted Dead's creative director on how hard the PS5 and PS4 game's platinum trophy will be to earn, and it's good news for fans of challenging hack-and-slash games.

Wanted Dead trophies will be no walk in the park but might be just the ticket for fans of the game's Ninja Gaiden legacy. Speaking with Sergei Kolobashkin, creative director of Wanted Dead and one of the key figures behind the game's cyberpunk aesthetic, we learned that in order to earn Wanted Dead's platinum trophy, you'll need to beat the game on its unlockable 'Japanese Hard' mode.

Wanted Dead's platinum trophy won't come easy.

Wanted Dead platinum trophy unlocks after "true Ninja Gaiden" experience

We previewed Wanted Dead and spoke with Kolobashkin at Gamescom 2022, where naturally we got onto the subject of PlayStation trophies. From Ninja Gaiden to the platinum trophies in the Devil May Cry series, the hack-and-slash genre has quite the reputation for going hard on its trophy hunters. As we would expect, Kolobashkin did not guise the fact that taking home Wanted Dead's platinum trophy was going to be a herculean ordeal.

"Okay, let me put it this way," Kolobashkin said. "It will be tricky to get the [Wanted Dead] platinum on PlayStation, I promise you that. It’s gonna get tricky and some of the trophies will require the player to put a lot of time into actually mastering the game in order to get these."

This piqued our curiosity, so we pressed further and asked Kolobashkin if there was any specific hurdle which would make Wanted Dead trophies difficult to obtain. As it happens, there was a reason Kolobashkin hadn't initially gone into more detail — 110 Industries was planning to reveal 'Japanese Hard' mode at Tokyo Game Show 2022, and he was wary of spoiling the reveal. Ultimately, he did let us in on the secret at Gamescom — we just promised not to spoil it until after TGS.

"Well, let me put it this way," Kolobashkin said, letting us in on the secret. "The game features three difficulty modes, and the fourth difficulty mode is hidden. The final difficulty mode is 'Japanese Hard.' Japanese Hard is your true Ninja Gaiden get-your-ass-kicked experience. You will have to beat it to get [the platinum]."

When discussing Wanted Dead's connection to the Ninja Gaiden series via the ex-Team Ninja alumni working at the game's co-developer Soleil, Kolobashkin had stated that as well as being entirely its own thing, he hoped Wanted Dead would be "a new experience that at the same time feels like a game that always existed." With Japanese Hard mode, we can see 110 Industries tipping the hat, acknowledging to those who make it through their new spin on this classic video game genre that its roots lie firmly in the work of classic Japanese developers, while also demanding from the player mastery of that new spin with a run which will force the player to truly come to terms with Wanted Dead's mechanics.

That Ninja Gaiden legacy emerges once more.

Of course, that hat tip has left much of us with a game that will certainly prove quite punishing to platinum, and that's a fact that Kolobashkin clearly takes a lot of pride in: "Trophies — it was all me. I'm not really a trophy hunter myself; I mean, I wish I had more time to put into playing games... but at the same time when we started working on the trophies, I was like 'stand the fuck back — I got this.'"

Well, we know what's going to be jumping onto the hardest PS Plus Extra and Premium trophies list should Wanted Dead ever make the jump to Sony's subscription service. Let us know in the comments how hard you'd prefer the platinum for this game to be, and let's hope it's the kind of revelatory experience that lands Wanted Dead on our best PS5 games list when it drops next year.

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Written by Lee Brady

Staff Writer Lee loves writing about the game design of classic PS Plus Premium games and upcoming PS5 games like Marvel's Spider-Man 2 and Final Fantasy XVI. He's a big proponent of video games as an evolving artistic medium, though he's also a fan of Sonic the Hedgehog games, so the medium might want to keep looking for a better spokesperson.