Castlevania: Harmony of Despair

The other post was removed so im updating mine to reflect that.

This achievement only requires you to obtain 300 different items in your item compendium. You DO NOT have to have all 300 on hand so sell them for gold if you want to help you get the million gold achievement faster as you will need the gold to buy some extra items to help you get too the 300 item mark. Before i got the achieve i had sold a bunch of items. I got scared that i may need to keep them on hand so i stopped selling. When the achievement popped i had exactly 247 items in my inventory and 314 items in my compendium. Im not sure what doesnt count but since my compendium was at 314 im guessing some sort of magic or soul items with the magic users didn't count. If anyone can shed light on what doesnt count please post here and let others know.

To speed up the achievement progress i recomend you use multiple characters to get items that other characters cant get. I got around 260 items in my compendium from using Alucard alone. It may also be possible you dont have to use others characters its your choice. After i got a ton of items with alucard i had a friend run me through each chapter with the different characters on each difficulty so i could grab stuff i didn't have. I also went through after i got the 1,000,000 gold achieve and bought any items in the shop that had a 0 by it wether or not i knew that i had purchased it before to be safe.

I counted my items down in the compendium a few times over the course of my play. Going in the compendium and counting down each column is the only way to keep a total of your compendium items.

If you feel any info here is inaccurate please let me know. Also i apologize to the other guy who posted his soloution. I just felt more time should of been involved in checking the facts. I hope this helps someone.

If you plan to play this game a lot and just enjoy it, don't bother with this achievement, it will pop naturally over the course of the game if you use more than one character.

But if you want to speed up the process and get it as soon as possible, here are a few tips that may help :

- Using multiple characters help as there are items that some chars can or can't use, and chars can't drop items they can't use. So you'll get different items using various characters.

- About that : male characters and female characters have many specific armors for them, so use at least one of each. Whip users share pretty much everything, so you don't need to use more than one. Soma has the most unique weapons of all characters, and he can also collect souls from every ennemy in the game, so he is easily the best character to use to go for this achievement.
credit to Xpearl for confirmation on souls counting toward the achievement.

- Remember to buy one of each items from the shop, most of them don't drop anywhere, so it's all good. There is also an hidden item in each stage that you can get with anyone if you know what you're doing. They are easy to collect and count toward your compendium. Here is a link to a wonderfull and illustrated FAQ for them.
credit to Paul Acevedo, aka segacon from IGN, for the guide.

- Hard mode has virtually an entirelly new inventory, so once you've spent enough time on Normal and can't get new items any more, start playing Hard Mode.

- Pretty much the same goes for DLC chapters, specially the last two. If you don't mind spending extra bucks in the game, go for those two 8-bit levels, they are less expensive and got many new Retro items. Be warned as they are really harder than the main game, even in Normal.

- Knowing all of the above, the last important thing is : when someone open a chest in Co-op multiplayer mode, everyone get an item from it. So if you want to go as fast as possible, play exclusively online 6 players map and most of the job will be done by other players. It will not makes you better at the game, but you will get the achievement in no time.

I just wanted to share a couple of sites I used to help me track down some of these items due to there being some locked behind having to play certain characters, the different difficulties, chapters and whatnot.

https://castlevania.fandom.com/wiki/Harmony_of_Despair_Inven...

You can use this wiki to see every single item in the game. You can use this list to try to look for an item you do not have and also if you need a specific character for the item to drop. I find some items that you get from chests on the stage, such as Cutall for example, they don't really tell you what chapter/difficulty to be playing on. So this is where the other site comes in;

http://www.harmonyofdespair.com/chapters/

You can select a chapter, hit Ctrl+F, and search the item you are looking for to see if it is on that chapter. This site has a page for each chapter and when you click on it will pull up a page with the map showing all the chests, and below that it will have a drop table for each type of chest and the difficulty. So you can use this to find which chapter/difficulty you need to be on and which type of chest you need to be opening to find the item, although it may be more useful to just open them all regardless as you may get some other items you don't have along the way. I just liked knowing for sure where I could find at least one new item so I wasn't wasting my time.

All credit goes to any people that contributed information to the list of the wiki page and Carlmundo for creating the loot table website, as well as firedraco2 whom Carlmundo got the loot information from to go about making the site.