Platinum Difficulty Rating - 5/10Truth be told, if you copy and pasted the FIFA 16 review into here, you wouldn't actually be that far off from being able to give an accurate assessment of the FIFA 17 trophy list too.
FIFA games have always been guilty of duplication of trophies, especially within more recent times, but the FIFA 17 list is mostly a direct lift from the FIFA 16 one. There is one key difference to mention, but not to the point where it matters to the difficulty rating being any different to the previous game.
Ultimate Team, Pro Clubs, Online Seasons, Womens football (which returns for the second straight year) are all accounted for again, as are the same straight-forward tasks and, quite honestly, dull trophies that have made up these lists for a number of years now.
The one big difference, is the latest addition to the series, which is the new Journey Mode, a story based narrative that sees you take control of Alex Hunter, who begins a quest to realise the dream of making it as a professional footballer. The game is played from the Be A Pro perspective and you start from the bottom, trying out at an open day, to being signed by a Premier League side and breaking into the first team, and the list is accommodating to this mode with a small handful of trophies.
The "The best is yet to come" trophy, awarded for finishing the journey, rewards you for reaching the end of the season. The game mode takes you through an entire league season, and it's difficult to say how many games this is, due to a few scripted events that occur throughout the story, which require you to play on loan in another league for a different club, along with appearances in the domestic cup competitions. It is a fairly lengthy mode as a consequence of this though, and it gets boring quickly, thus becoming grindy. Despite being given a facelift, through the fact it has a fully fledged story with cutscene animations, it is really just the old-fashioned Be A Pro mode at it's core, and you just end up doing the same thing over and over, which is just playing games from the Pro perspective, without any real incentive to become more immersed in the experience because the story itself is a bit uneventful and dry.
You can also have the season cut short impromptu, through a handful of quality measures, such as too many consistently poor performances, and a poor social media following/bad manager opinion as a direct consequence of aforementioned poor performances, so there is still an element of skill required to make sure the game doesn't end prematurely, otherwise you'll have to start over.
The "Hard to get" trophy, awarded for Achieving a transfer value of £8,000,000 in The Journey, is also tied into this game mode, and is technically a missable trophy.
Consistently good performances will cause Alex Hunter's transfer value to increase, as will good training reports, so you need to have hit this value at any point during the story. You don't have to end the Journey on this value, and the trophy will trigger as soon as you hit this total, which also means it doesn't matter if you fall below this transfer value thereafter, but you do have to put in alot of good performances to reach £8,000,000, and poor performances will also set you back, so you might have to accept you'll need to graft hard to make sure you're steadily accumulating this figure as the season goes on.
It actually ties into the "The best is yet to come" trophy anyway, because, even though you can't simulate through the Journey if you don't want to have to play through every single game to reach the end, games that end in poor performances won't increase your transfer value, so you'll need to make sure you're playing well regularly enough so you don't miss the "Hard to get" trophy, or hit a dreaded game over screen too soon.
I wouldn't exactly call The Journey difficult, especially so when you can play through the mode on any difficulty setting you like, which can make the game criminally easy if you so choose, it's just a bit laborious. Even though it is technically a new game mode, under the hood, this is just Be A Pro with a face-lift, and I've always believed FIFA shines in an Online environment, so my personal level of boredom hit it's peak across what is ultimately an unskippable 40+ game season.
However for the second year running, the FIFA Ultimate Team Online draft steals the show, and carries this game into the middle regions of the difficulty scale yet again.
The "Trial of Power" trophy, awarded for Winning all 4 matches in an Online FUT draft session in FIFA Ultimate Team, is back again, and the same rules apply as before. There is nothing about this trophy that hasn't already been said in terms of the challenges faced from FIFA 16. There is still an extortionate buy-in value to compete in the draft, it is still an extremely competitive game mode and it's also the most challenging trophy by some distance within this list.
I struggled this time round with the draft almost as much as I did with it in FIFA 16, completing it within 12 attempts, albeit a very slight improvement from the 14 attempts it took me in FIFA 16, but still difficult enough to the point I was plowing real money back into the game to be able to afford the buy-in without having to accumulate the 15,000 coins it takes to enter without having to resort to purchasing FIFA points with real currency.
The "Half a Century" trophy, awarded for having a player score their 50th goal at the club in FIFA Ultimate Team, also returns in the exact same capacity as "FUT 50" did in FIFA 16. I'll spare the detail, for the sake of not wanting to tread over too much old ground, but same rules apply as before here too.
Thankfully, it's quite rare that games take a copy and paste approach to the trophy lists within their series, but even in the odd example where they do, you could potentially talk and compare other aspects of the challenge, such as length of the game, or difficulty of the gameplay, both of which aren't really relevant to mention more than once for a game like FIFA.
As for the overall justification of the difficulty rating, there isn't really much to suggest it should be any different for FIFA 17 than it was for FIFA 16. The return of the Online FIFA Ultimate Team draft session propels the difficulty from what would have probably been somewhere in the region of 3/10, though it is important to mention that the addition of a fairly grindy Journey mode does give a very slightly different complex to this list than FIFA 16, but nothing drastic to the point where it changes much in terms of an overall difficulty rating.
I always try to make these reviews as detailed as possible, but when you're effectively reviewing the same trophy list back-to-back, there's only so much you can say the second time round until you get to the point when you just end up repeating yourself. At least I'm officially up-to-date with my FIFA titles now though, albeit until FIFA 19.
Notable Trophies -
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| The best is yet to come - Finish The Journey Hard to get - Achieve a transfer value of £8,000,000 in The Journey Trial of Power - Win all 4 matches in an Online FUT Draft session in FIFA Ultimate Team Half a Century - Have a player score their 50th goal at the club in FIFA Ultimate Team |
Trial of Power
Win all 4 matches in an Online FUT Draft session in FIFA Ultimate Team
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