If you’re eyeballing the Power and Responsibility Trophy in Marvel’s Spider-Man, then you’re considering an Ultimate difficulty playthrough. This is the game’s rarest Trophy (at the time of this writing, anyway, though I really don’t see that changing at all — at least for the PS4 version of the game).
Now, I’ve earned this Trophy myself, so I can give you some pointers.
First of all, you can start a New Game Plus file as soon as you’ve completed the base game. I would recommend, however, that you complete the Platinum Trophy in the base game, and all of the Trophies in the DLC packs first, saving the Power and Responsibility Trophy for absolute last. You can knock out the One More Time Trophy as well (you can get both Trophies on your second playthrough so long as you play a NG+ run on Ultimate difficulty). By this point, you should have unlocked every skill and gadget, and you should have leveled up several times beyond the cap of 50 (any time you level up past 50, you’re given +1 max HP and +1% melee damage, though the level number won’t move beyond 50).
Once you’re ready to start, go to your previous save and change the difficulty to Ultimate (you don’t need to load the game — you can adjust difficulty in the main menu). Use this file to create a NG+ file, which should automatically be an Ultimate difficulty file.
Then just play through the game. You can’t skip every cutscene (many are unskippable), but you can skip most of them. You can also skip any side activities you’d like, but I did all the radio tower missions (so I could view the entire map) and I would occasionally stop to stop a crime when I felt like it. The whole game is much shorter than I thought, taking me about seven hours to complete.
Is there a best loadout for an Ultimate run? Well, this is a matter of opinion, but I definitely think so. Here’s my Ultimate loadout:
I took a bull-in-a-china-shop approach for my Ultimate run, because that seemed a lot faster than meticulously taking out enemies using stealth. I mean, you’re Spider-Man, not Batman. This is Manhattan, not Gotham City (well, sort of).
Anyway, I chose the Vintage Comic Book Suit (which is one of two cel-shaded suits) for this entire run. You can use whichever suit you want, since you can equip the suit power from any suit you’ve unlocked. And at this point, you should have unlocked every suit.
So my suit power is Battle Focus, which is the very first suit power you unlock if I remember correctly. It’s an oldie but a goodie. Whenever your suit is charged, you can press L3 and R3 at the same time to activate a Focus boost, which should give you about two bars of focus. The reason I chose this is because with my aggressive playstyle, I find it best to always have a heal ready in case I need it. Enemies do tons of damage in Ultimate, but you can make this a non-issue if you’re pretty much always healing.
So I paired that with the First Aid, Ballistic Inserts, and Kinetic Power Cells suit mods. First Aid increases the amount of healing you can do via Focus healing, and Kinetic Power Cells increases the rate at which you recharge your Focus. So Battle Focus, First Aid, and Kinetic Power Cells are a trifecta of healing power. With this loadout, you’ll feel invincible. (You’re not actually invincible, though. You’ve just got enough healing power to mitigate the extra damage dealt by your enemies.)
As the icing on the cake, I chose Ballistic Inserts, which reduces the amount of damage you’ll take from bullets. Gunfire was always the game’s biggest challenge for me. Not when it’s just one enemy, because your Spidey Sense will alert you when an enemy is about to fire. But when you’ve got a dozen or so enemies piled up, and half of them are charging you while the other half are keeping their distance and firing at you from afar, it’s easy to get stuck in an attack animation while being fired upon. For those instances, it’s nice to have a little extra protection.
Now, if you want to take a more stealthy approach, you’ll probably want to switch up all of this. This loadout is designed for a speedy playthrough so you can get that Power and Responsibility Trophy as fast as possible. For me, I found that this loadout let me blast through the game at breakneck speeds. I blindly dropped into situations I would have felt out on my previous playthrough, and I took a really, really aggressive approach to combat. I don’t imagine a stealth run being faster than this (those stealth takedown animations alone will add quite a bit of time).
But that’s just me.
If you have any additional advice, or if you’d like to argue for a better loadout, let me know in the comments. I’d be curious to read what other players used in their Ultimate playthroughs of Marvel’s Spider-Man.
