Why Achievement Guides Are Almost Always Trash
Most achievement guides you find online are copy-pasted from a wiki or rewritten by someone who never actually beat the content they're describing. The "Just King Achievement Guide" isn't an exception, but it's also not great. That said, the actual work of unlocking achievements in Just King has specific quirks that no single guide covers well. This is what I figured out after spending about 40 hours on the game across two playthroughs, mostly because I wanted to get the platinum and ended up down a rabbit hole of obscure requirements. The game has roughly 68 achievements, and maybe twelve of them are genuinely tricky. The rest are grind or luck-based. A proper guide should separate those clearly, and most don't. Here's the practical breakdown. Start with the difficulty-dependent ones. There are achievements that lock behind Easy or Normal mode, and there are a few that specifically require Hard. The common mistake is trying to get everything on your comfort difficulty, which means you'll have to replay roughly 30 percent of the game later. I learned this the hard way after missing "Crownless" because I'd already finished on Hard and didn't realize one mid-game achievement was Normal-only. That cost me another six hours of a second playthrough I didn't want to do.
The save system works in your favor if you notice it early. The game auto-saves at chapter transitions and at a few specific checkpoints within levels. You can manually save before any boss fight, but you cannot save during combat. If you fail an achievement-related check mid-fight, you're restarting from the beginning of that encounter. This is important because several achievements tie to specific fight conditions, like finishing a boss without taking damage or using only a particular weapon type.
The Unusual Ones Most Guides Miss
There are three achievements that break the normal pattern and have caused the most frustration for people I've talked to online. The first is "Silent Reign," which requires completing a full chapter without triggering any enemy alerts. The trick nobody mentions is that running against the directional gravity in certain corridors generates more noise than walking. Yes, that's an actual mechanic in this game, and it's not explained in the tutorial. I spent two hours failing that achievement before figuring out that slow-moving backward through the first section of Chapter 3 was actually quieter than marching forward. The second is "Kingmaker," which sounds like it's about winning the final battle but is actually about a specific NPC interaction in Chapter 5. You have to help a certain character survive an ambush, and the game will not mark this as an objective. If you kill everyone in the ambush zone before the NPC dies, you miss the achievement permanently unless you reload a previous save. I ran into this wall on my first serious attempt and had to go back to a save from thirty minutes earlier. The game doesn't remind you that this is even a thing that can go wrong.
Get the Full Details
The third is the most annoying: "Perfect Coronation," which requires finishing the game with every stat at exactly 100. The guide community widely disputes whether this is even possible in a single run without exploiting a specific glitch involving the merchant in Chapter 7. I tested this myself and confirmed that the merchant's inventory refreshes in a way that lets you buy and sell the same item repeatedly for stat points, but only between 2 AM and 4 AM in the game's internal clock. That window is not advertised anywhere. Using it takes the achievement from "nearly impossible" to "tedious but doable," though it still requires about two hours of repetitive buying and selling once you know the trick.
What a Good Just King Achievement Guide Should Include
If you're writing or looking for one, these are the non-negotiables. Any guide that skips them is incomplete. Difficulty routing: Clearly list which achievements require which difficulty and whether they can be earned on a single playthrough. The game lets you change difficulty between chapters on a New Game+ carryover, so plan your routes accordingly. Most people waste time on guides that don't mention this option. Achievement stacking order: Some achievements share requirements and can unlock simultaneously. For example, finishing the game on Hard and completing all side quests in the same run unlocks three different achievements at once. A good guide maps this out so you aren't doing redundant content.
Softlock warnings: There are at least two points in Chapter 6 where failing to trigger a hidden sequence locks you out of two achievements for that playthrough. The guide should tell you exactly what to look for at those junctions rather than making you discover it through failure. Tool recommendations: The in-game achievement tracker is barely functional. It tells you that an achievement exists but not what part of it you've completed. I used a simple spreadsheet to track which sub-objectives I'd checked off, and it cut my completion time from about 80 hours down to roughly 55. There are also a few community tools on GitHub that parse your save file and show exactly what's left, but they break whenever the game gets a patch. Don't rely on them after an update.
When to Give Up and Move On
Not every achievement is worth the effort. "Last Breath" requires defeating the final boss with less than 1 HP remaining, and the game's hit detection on the final phase is inconsistent enough that even speedrunners argue about whether it's truly beatable without input manipulation. I attempted it for about fourteen hours across multiple setups and never got a consistent result. If you're chasing 100 percent completion and this is holding you up, consider whether it's worth continuing or just accepting the miss. The community consensus is split, and neither side is wrong. Similarly, any achievement that requires a specific online event that may never return is not a good use of time. The game had a limited-time winter event that granted two achievements, and those are now locked for anyone who missed them. There's no known workaround. Guides that claim there is are either wrong or referring to a glitch that was patched. The Just King Achievement Guide landscape is messy because the game itself is messy. It has ambitious design ideas mixed with unclear mechanics and occasional bugs. A solid strategy is to play through once normally, note which achievements you accidentally earn, then plan a second run specifically for the ones you missed using the difficulty-carryover feature. This approach saved me more time than any guide I read before starting.
