yook fucked around with this message at 06:59 on Oct 13, 2008

• Kinda tutorial stuff, but if you're lying flat and press Y, you go into "stealth mode". This lets you get away with ridiculous amounts of stuff since guards usually won't see you unless they're on top of you.
  
  
• Even if you get an alert about a guard spotting you (white light radial indicator), they haven't positively identified you as a threat unless the game goes into slow-mo. Usually the best option is to just keep moving and take advantage of the distraction from them investigating the spot they originally saw you at.
  
  
• Enemies don't innately see animals as threats, you can use this as a distraction source without real risk to your buddy or even as a way to block traffic.
  
  
• Some missions and side missions are near impossible in broad daylight. You can either pick a specific deployment time from the helicoptor or use the phantom cigar to pass time. Note that some missions have a surprise time component and passing time with the phantom cigar can auto-fail them. Easier to return to the chopper and redeploy.
  
  
• Learn to love fulton extraction. It gets rid of a body/knocked out guy and, once you start expanding the base, the number of openings can out-pace the rate you can fill them so even the lovely soldiers are worth pulling out. Just know ahead of time whether the balloon will get spotted since it's an automatic alert (again, nighttime makes a world of difference) and boot any troublemakers afterward if you start seeing regular med bay admissions alerts.
  
  
• Mid/late game, you'll have quarantine the home base. Everything there runs through the staff management menu, including the core info needed to stall the infection. Alternatively, I've seen people recommend skipping it and trying to knock out the main story missions ASAP before too many soldiers die since the quarantine list gets LONG and the menu interface isn't made for it.
  
  
• Related to the above, neglecting the dispatch missions means some guards start showing up in heavy armor/riot gear. Either rely on close range hand-to-hand take-downs and/or deck Quiet out in the biggest penetration rifle available and let her go to town.
  

yook fucked around with this message at 15:56 on Oct 27, 2017

• The game's not Doom 2016 despite some similar trappings and series origins. The enemies are mostly ranged and use hitscan weapons so charging around in the open will get you killed. There's no invulnerability with melee kills either, so using it on anything but a lone target will usually get you killed during the animation lock. The game has a stealth system to help compensate, but it's pretty shallow and usually you can find the commanders by following the trail of Nazi's with their backs conveniently turned. They're not very aware of dead bodies and often it's best just to axe them as you go along.
  
  
• Axes can be thrown then picked up after for stealth kills. Enemies with body armor might need more than one to kill.
  
  
• If you do get an alert, the AI is pretty dumb and will pretty much sprint directly to your location. This is frustrating when it leads to getting flanked and insta-killed by a conga-line of enemies, but ends up working in your favor if you start sitting back a minute or two while most of the Nazis on the map charge into your crosshairs so you can thin them out. I'm not sure the difference an alive commander makes, but it seems like they'll call in more grunts and some eventually come up to you themselves when enough get cleared out.
  
  
• Pickups are really small and hard to see with the walk over auto-pick up radius being tiny. Run around between fights spamming E and you'll often find health in random dark corners or counter tops. Armored enemies, especially the robots, drop armor pickups all over the place when they die. They look like cosmetic debris at first, but it's really necessary to collect them to keep topped up.
  
  
• The weapons aren't that intuitive from the graphics, but you can sort out which is which from the names on the weapon wheel and journal. They mostly follow usual fps numbering.
  1: Pistol
  2: Submachine gun
  3: Rifle
  4: Shotgun
  5: Sticky bomb Launcher
  6: Grenade Launcher(?, didn't actually realize I had this until the end.)
  
  
• Weapon upgrades that aren't extra ammo capacity tend to be alternate fire modes rather than straight improvements. Toggle with C or Z, usually there'll be a visual cue on the weapon itself.
  
  
• One of the heavy weapons looks like a four barrel machine gun and first place I remember seeing it was a survive/defense section where two of them are on mounts way off on the sides. They're actually heavy shotguns and suck to use on the gun mounts at range. The gun mounts suck in general, but can be used as universal heavy weapon ammo refills by mounting a gun and taking it off.
  
  
• In the latter half of the game, there'll be a choice of contraptions that give you particular abilities. Pick the one that lines up more with the stealth/havoc/tactical mode you want to play in rather than strictly the advertised ability since they also come with passive perks to compliment it. I got way more mileage out of the stealth one allowing me to stay quiet at normal walk and the bullet time window when spotted than the actual active ability.
  
  
• You keep any perk progress even if you die, so don't worry about grinding them out since they'll probably get done anyway if you actually need them.

yook fucked around with this message at 07:10 on Dec 31, 2017

• While locked on, tilting the right analog stick is actually for target swapping rather than just swinging around the camera like most games. This works with the game intending shooting stuff to death with bullets and your big gently caress off laser being a valid combat approach rather than just all melee all the time. If the camera's being fucky, back off and use sound cues until it corrects or drop target lock to use it normally.
  
• Light purple bullets can be shot down, dark solid purple bullets can be taken out by melee attacks and this also applies to the flying sections. On the ground, the ranged attack works independently of 2B for the most part, so just spamming the machine gun can give you solid cover for the ranged attacks if you're facing the right way, but the melee ones are more for opening holes with deliberate attacks since wild swings tends to get you hit.
  
• I've heard the game compared to a JRPG with action combat and it feels pretty apt. Do some subquests and explore around rather than running fight to fight like a Bayonetta or MGS: Revengence. Along those lines:
  
  • You can store 99 of various healing items and stocking up on lights/mediums is a good idea.
    
  • Pressing down on the D-pad selects the last item you used. Leaving it on the healing item of your choice seems to be best since fumbling with the list mid-combat leads to pain.
    
  • Do side quests after you unlock fast travel early on since they carry story hints and anything you earn carries through to the other playthroughs after ending A. You eventually unlock a chapter select so don't worry about missing anything, though.
    
  • Upgrade the plug-in chip capacity when you can afford to and tinker with the load out. Customizing is part of the game and, despite what the game says, you'll want to manually change it up eventually since the auto-setting doesn't distinguish times when some character specific chips become irrelevant. You can save 3 loadouts to swap between, so it's still not too bad.
    
• Experiment around with weapons. A lot. I spent way, way too long with the first two swords since they were the most upgraded and listed way higher stat numbers. The numbers don't seem to make nearly the difference it seems like on paper and this is where the game really opened up for me. Weapons behave differently depending on whether they're equipped on light or heavy attacks and what weapon they're paired with so go hog wild. I didn't touch fist weapons for the longest time since they listed 1/5 the damage of the swords, but you put them on light attack and they air juggle enemies, you put them on heavy attack to punt robots across the room and you pair them with a heavy sword to bat them at enemies like a baseball. I was just expecting it to be the bayonetta hands/feet weapon system or something but it's way more elaborate and it's amazing.
  

yook fucked around with this message at 06:48 on Jan 29, 2018

• "Block negates a particular amount of damage taken that turn, then disappears the turn afterward regardless of damage taken.
• "Power" cards can only be played once per fight, but their effects persist every turn. "Exhaust" means it won't go into your discard pile if played and therefore wouldn't show up again in later draws. "Ethereal" won't show up in the discard stack and won't show up again regardless if you play it or not.
• "Stacks" mean different things depending on the buff/debuff and the game seems to assume you know what this means in the card descriptions.
  • Strength adds +1 damage per attack per stack that lasts the remainder of the fight. Multi-hit attacks benefit from this every swing.
  • Weakness reduces attack damage by 25% and the number of stacks is how long it lasts.
  • Vulnerability is the same as weakness, but increases damage taken by 25%.
  • Dexterity is like strength, but it affects defense gained per ability that increases block.
  • Poison is a hybrid, it deals damage equal to the # of stacks, then the stack decreases by 1 each turn.
  • Basically, if you're going to use strength/dexterity cards/potions at all, use them early in the fight. Weakness/vulnerabilty cards can be situational. Poison is great to stack since it adds on itself.
• Adding a card to your deck after every fight isn't necessarily a good idea. Unused discard cards reshuffle back into your draw pile, so if your deck has a gameplan, diluting it with non-synergy cards means not playing your more powerful cards less often. This is mitigated some early game when most of your deck is relatively crappy strike/defend cards or there's a critical buff/debuff card available. If nothing looks good, hit the skip button.
• Each icon can be clicked on for more information. The top right corner of the screen to check map/deck when at a decision point is a little obvious, but you could also click the draw/discard piles in the bottom corners to judge how likely you are to draw a particular card in your next hand. They won't be shown in draw order unless you have a specific relic, however.
• I won as Ironclad by stacking strength and as the Silent by stacking poison, though these aren't necessarily the only ways to win.

• Don't bother grinding with the initial party the game gives you, it'll soon be replaced by characters you make.
  
• An early dungeon navigation skill you get is the ability to break down some walls. These are light brown on the minimap while unbreakable walls are yellow. Some lead to mandatory areas as early as the first dungeon, so fill out every map square you can and don't ignore them as optional.
  
• Gray chests usually have equipment, glowing circles in the game world are items or treasures. An early pace-killing quest requires 10 saltpeter, so don't sell any until after and hit the treasure circles early.
  
• Holding down R, A, or B speeds up combat animations. The game's very grindy, so expect to use this a lot.
  
• Most menus, including combat, have multiple displays scrolled through via the right stick.
  
• Troops are organized in covens. The pact used for a coven defines what dronum (magic) is available to them and some spells require specific slots to be filled in order to be usable. Attack spells work off the average dronum power stat of the group's attackers, but support/heal spells don't care. How you fill support slots mostly doesn't matter unless that specific pact gives a boost based on the soldier's stats, though mages have a skill that boosts the coven's dronum power if it's a caster group. XP is shared among a coven, so slots can be left open if you want to focus on specific characters.
  
• Basic damage types are piercing (purple, usually knight, archer), blunt (yellow, usually mage, dancer, gothic once unlocked) or slash (blue, usually tank, rogue (depending on weapon)) and some weapons have secondary spell element effects. The type of damage is designated by a colored square above the unit's portrait. Piercing is generic, though it seems to especially work on armored characters with visible fleshy bits. Slash is good for enemies with unarmored skin and bugs/plants. Blunt is good for stony/rocky enemies and is particularly good in the first few dungeons. The game says Effective if the enemy is vulnerable to that damage type, Mismatch means the character is in the wrong vanguard/rearguard row for their weapon type.
  
• Battle items are only usable with individual commands (Y button, costs 1 reinforcement). It also allows you to swap characters mid-fight or change to off-hand weapons. Dual-wielding is mostly pointless unless it's either a shobishi with their S+ weapon or you want to use this to swap weapon types mid-fight.
  
• Facet-specific
  • Astral knight (knight): jack of all trades, can fight front or back row. There's a super powerful spear in the first dungeon if you follow the events, so try to have at least 1.
    
  • Peer fortress (tank): Has a chance of taking hits in place of another character that's higher if they're using two katars. A little pointless early, but near mandatory starting around the end of the second world. One early pact requires them to be male, while another just requires them to be created with sun stance which is good for them anyway.
    
  • Shinobishi (rogue): They're meant to be dual-wield, but their passive is only for S+ class weapons which means they took moon stance (not recommended since it makes them squishier) or they have sword specialization. Barring those two, just ignore the dual wield and use them as front-line attackers that can handle most weapons. An early attacker oriented pact favors making them women.
    
  • Marginal Maze (mage): One of the better support slot fillers since they have a skill that boosts dronum power. A strong early optional pact requires a woman for the attack slot.
    
  • Mad raptor (archer): Backline attackers, decent dronum power. Not much to say except they're fast if you have healing/support spells you want to trigger early in a turn.
    
  • Theatrical Star (dancer): Backline blunt damage that targets a full group, which is really useful in the early dungeons. They're ok and inflict debuffs mid game.

yook fucked around with this message at 06:10 on Feb 28, 2019

• The character you pick at the start only matters so much as they're locked into your party until you finish their chapter 4 storyline a substantial way into the game. The game is structured so each character's story is mostly independent and you can cherry pick which ones to follow so long as your team is strong enough. You can also do every character's storyline on the same save file if you want and finishing them all (along with some sidequests) unlocks some post-game content.
  
  
• The game has a dash when holding down the B button. The base speed is decently brisk already, but it's still nice for doing side quests in town. The game says it increases encounter rates out in the field, but it's not especially noticeable.
  
  
• Town fast travel works everywhere, so it can be used as a dungeon escape if you get in over your head.
  
  
• The tavern lets you access every character's gear from one screen, which makes it easier to strip gear from idle characters and pool them for your current team.
  
  
• Primrose's chapter 2 town isn't very intuitive to get to. You want to start at the forest town H'aanit starts at far southwest and go north toward Victor's Hollow. You'll see signposts that'll guide you the rest of the way to Stillsnow.
  
  
• Shrines will start showing up on the roads outside the chapter 2 towns. They show as small, short black stone circle on the painted world map if they haven't been discovered yet and the mini-map icon is a horizontal ring with four columns coming out the top. These unlock the secondary jobs for the characters.
  
  
• You don't really need to know all this to start since you can go with whatever character appeals to you the most then recruit the rest later and it'll still work out. These are just my takes.
  
  Path actions: Things the character can do to interact with townspeople. Some are "noble", which mostly just means they work via a minimum level requirement for a given townsperson. Tressa is an exception who buys items with money and has a chance of getting a "haggle" discount afterward. "Rogue" path actions have no level requirement, but have a % chance to fail based on the character's level. You can fail a rogue action 5 times in a given town, which locks out path actions there until you pay a modest amount of money to the tavern barkeep to reset it.
  Talents: Unique abilities for the character.
  Job: Character's combat class that defines what weapons and skills they can use. A character has a primary job that never changes, though they can pick up each other's jobs as secondaries to mix and match with.
  
  • Tressa (Merchant): Can buy items from villagers at a discount compared to the shops and she gets a small but notable amount of gold sometimes when traveling between screens. Job is merchant, which is a bit of an all rounder with some offense abilities and unique non-heal/buff support. Can steal money from opponents in combat, which is substantial on bosses.
    
  • Therion (Thief): Steals items from villagers, also lets you open purple chests in the world that usually have pretty good items in them. Compared to Tressa, he can collect a ton of smaller items for free but struggles on taking the high-end equipment. Job is thief, which has some nice physical debuffs and steals SP they can then funnel into friendly party members for their spells. Can steal items in combat, though stealing gold is done by the merchant job instead.
    
  • Olberic (Warrior): Can challenge villagers to 1v1 duels, usually used to get them out of the way of doors with chests or NPCs behind them. Can also boost his defend action, which seems a bit pointless. Job is warrior, which is mostly damage abilities and hits fewer weapon/magic vulnerabilities than most. He basically hits like a truck when things line up but can be painfully inflexible when they don't.
    
  • H'aanit (Hunter): Can provoke villagers to fight them like Olberic, though she can only use beast summons to attack. She can capture beasts during battle and use them as attacks, each having 3-7 uses before running away depending on what type it is. This gives her some extremely potent and varied attack potential no one else can really match, though building a stable of strong monsters can a fair amount of extra work since the success rate on capture for the more powerful monsters is pretty low. Job is hunter, which is similar to warrior, but has some major utility in the leghold trap that causes bosses to act last on a given turn.
    
  • Ophillia (Cleric): Can recruit townsfolk, later summoning them in battle. Each summon lasts a few turns and basically acts on its own as an extra uncontrollable party member, sometimes bringing really useful buffs or weapon types. Job is Cleric, which is basically a white mage with spammable group healing and some moderate light element offensive spells.
    
  • Primrose (Dancer): Can recruit townsfolk like Ophillia, but she has the rogue version which gives her a higher ceiling if you're willing to gamble a bit and some of them can be on par with the playable characters power-wise. Job is dancer, which buffs party members and has some offensive dark magic.
    
  • Alfyn (Alchemist): Can talk to townsfolk for information, netting some background info on them and sometimes minor bonuses like find-able items, inn discounts or expanded shop selections. Concoct lets him combine certain items found after battle and in shops to do different effects. As long as his supplies hold out, it gives him some insane utility being able to multi-hit with every element type to break defenses or group heal/cure debuffs. Job is alchemist, which is the second healing job. It has single-target healing, which makes it less raw output than cleric, but more flexible since it can remove debuffs and can poison enemies for okish damage.
    
  • Cyrus (Scholar): Talks to people for information like Alfyn, but it's the rogue version so it has a chance to fail. It's a bit rough since most townsfolk can be questioned even if they don't provide rewards and, unlike the other rogue path abilities, there's no preview to judge if the gamble is worth it. On the other hand, his talent reveals one unknown enemy vulnerability at the start of each fight and, combined with the scholar job, makes him one of the best to have along when grinding through road or dungeon fights on the way from point A to B. Job is scholar, which is basically a black mage, lots of screenwide elemental damage.

• For shards, rank is the thing that improves with upgrades at the alchemist. Grade improves the shard's power and improves by holding on to multiple copies of the same shard.
  
  
• A middling way into the game at the underground sorcery lab toward the bottom right of the map (where you get the reflector ray, there are green faries with a chance to drop the healing shard. It comes at a high mana cost, but it's one of the few sources of perpetual free healing in the game. In most cases it'll still be more efficient killing enemies using mana on other shards to avoid taking damage in the first place.
  
  
• Look up techniques under the "journal" selection instead of "techniques" to see the list of weapons that can use it if it hasn't been mastered yet.

yook fucked around with this message at 17:09 on Sep 9, 2019

• The first caves have some light colored rock clusters. Graphically, I read these as being destructible for bombs or some such later on, but they're actually just regular overworld blocks that can sometimes be pushed.
  
• Magic powder can be used to light torches though it's only really required at the start of the first dungeon.
  
• There's an item trading sub-quest that spans most of the game starting with a yoshi doll from the claw game. You can get it as far as the banana step early on, but that won't be required until after the second dungeon. The monkey at the beach is a red herring, you'll run into where you need the banana while progressing to the next area.
  
• A ways into the game there'll be an obstacle you'll be told you need Maron to help clear. Supposedly, the kid by the rooster statue should tell you to look for her at the beach, but he didn't in my game.

• Looking at enemies with the Iris (+) shows you their health bar and it'll stay after you swap back to normal view.
  
• Weapon upgrades are in the room across the hall from the training room fast travel point in the HQ.
  
• Legion upgrades are in the map/system menu (-). There's also mini objectives here you need to manually claim the rewards to get and clicking the right analog stick sorts the finished ones to the top of the list.
  
• Near death enemies will have a 'finish' prompt to push the A button and doing this refills your health bar.
  
• The AED referenced in a couple items and legatus upgrades is the system that revives your character after death, it's essentially your extra lives.

yook fucked around with this message at 22:57 on Nov 24, 2019

• Movement in this game is based on a radius from the character's starting position, not squares traveled. As long as you don't leave the circle, you can move as many squares as you want to do dash attacks or run around obstacles. It's worth taking some time to internalize, as a character that intuitively should barely reach you (and end up exposed if they tried) suddenly travels 4x that distance by going around a pit, punching mario in the face, then doubling back into cover at a spot even further away from you than they started. The good news is you can do the same thing back to the CPU once you get the hang of it.
  
  
• The point about movement being radius based also applies to traveling through pipes. A character with 3 movement on leaving a pipe will have those 3 squares regardless if they moved 1 square or 8 getting there. Sometimes this means it's better to avoid taking a pipe even if it means going the long way around. This also makes them a pseudo movement reset so hopping out of one pipe into the next can be chained endlessly so long as there's a new pipe close enough to hop into. The game plays with both dynamics, forcing you to make due with poor movement by taking a pipe up to favorable terrain or by making pipe daisy chains that let characters cross an entire map in a single turn.
  
  
• When selecting a spot to move to, the game will show a % for enemies, including ones off the edge of the screen. This is the chance to hit from that square and it's always worth checking before committing to a move since it's not always clear whether an enemy is considered in cover or out of sight/range at a given spot.
  
  
• Skill points can always be reset and reassigned, but coins spent on weapons are lost forever. The game unlocks upgraded weapon tiers after each boss and mini-boss, so you'll usually want to avoid buying anything you won't use right away. Mostly I would always upgrade Mario's blaster and Rabbid Peach's weapons since both get a lot of use. If you want to use a specialist for a particular level, you can just buy their weapon at the pre-mission prep screen.
  
  
• Starting team notes:
  
  • Mario's the only one that can land on an enemy after a team jump.
    
  • Rabbid Luigi's vamp dash effect lingers afterward, so other characters can regain health by shooting a target after he dashes through it.
    
  • Rabbid Peach's sentry can draw away fire and will explode if an enemy runs by it, so tossing one out isn't a bad idea even if it's out of range.
  
  
• Smashers, the big melee dudes that get a free move when hit by weapons, were my first real roadblock.
  
  • Dash attacks don't trigger their special ability. Their health is such that you'll want to bait them in with weapons one at a time, then wear them down with dash attacks before finishing them off. Trying to take them down from range with weapons only early on will usually end with one in your face ready to one-shot somebody.
    
  • Mario's hero sight ability can be triggered at the start of his turn and triggers off of any enemy movement, not just on their turn. This means he can double tap a smasher when it moves after getting shot or even a regular enemy hit by a bounce effect. This is super risky early on and I'd generally avoid using hero sight around smashers at all starting out, but it can work in a pinch and gets really useful once you have Luigi and the skill's been upgraded a couple times.

• The game lets you slam around ghosts that are being vacuumed. These slams will also hurt any other ghosts you hit with it, so it's easy to clear a crowded room now.
  
• The butt blast thing that knocks Luigi in the air has a few uses besides just making space that make it worth remembering. There's one enemy that grabs you that can be knocked off with it and another that it'll knock off their protection.
  
• Critters can be vacuumed up, but also taken out by blasting them with the flashlight. The latter is a bit faster and there's an early puzzle with a mouse that's inexplicably immune to the vacuum where you'll need to use the flashlight.

• The game's unlike most beat 'em ups in that you're not really expected to clear every room and enemies will keep respawning in if you hang around. If there's no chains around the screen, you can bail out if things look too difficult. Just don't skip every fight since you still want money and xp.
  
• The characters don't share xp or unlocked moves, but they do share in money pick ups to help get them up to speed. Just be careful to spend it right away if you opt to switch later on since dying takes away a chunk of money and you'd be running around as a lvl 1 with no unlocked moves and a fat wallet for a bit. You can swap characters by doing a Save&quit then reloading the save file. The characters aren't wildly different, Kyoko's specials move her around more and is a bit easier to combo with while Misako is more bruiser.
  
• Each type of food gives a minor permanent stat buff the first time a character eats it, then just healing after that. Video games and toys work this way while you’re in the shopping district.
  
• Vending machines drop an apple for a small heal when destroyed and show up as early as the first few rooms in the school. They don't respawn when destroyed.
  
• Try to spend down your money and stock up on higher end healing items before a boss fight since dying removes a chunk of cash. Try to only use the items if it’s a good run and it’ll push the fight to a win since the item stays gone if you use it then die.
  
• Misc. combat tips:
  
  • Enemies sometimes take a free swing the moment they get up. Easiest thing to do is just block while an enemy is getting up but you can also move behind them since they'll swing in the same direction they were facing when knocked down.
    
  • Usually you want to throw/knock groups of enemies into one big pile, ideally against a wall. Not only does each attack hit multiple enemies this way, they bounce off each other and the wall which juggles them so they get hit by more attacks.
    
  • Keep an eye out for running/jumping enemies as it's almost always a lead in for an attack.
    
  • Later bosses, or early bosses on later phases, will block and counter after 2-3 hits. Just stick to 1-2 hits then heavy/super attack for them.
    

yook fucked around with this message at 18:09 on Jan 20, 2020

yook fucked around with this message at 17:05 on Feb 12, 2020

• The left and right arrows on the D-pad seem to swap between tools based on their relative position in the inventory rather than the tool ring, so pressing it will move from the current tool to one left or right of it in your pocket. I mostly found it useful to link the axe and net in case I ran into wasps while chopping trees, but maybe there's other combos. Pressing and holding A while floating the cursor over an inventory item will let you move it around.
  
  
• The */10 that shows up when you eat a fruit is a bank of fruit-specific actions you can do, which seems to consist solely of digging up grown trees with the shovel or breaking up rocks. It's handy while moving trees since normal actions like weeding won't waste your fruit, but if you want to avoid breaking rocks for better yields as in an earlier tip, the easiest way to zero it out will likely be to dig up and re-plant the same tree over and over.
  
  
• Holding B allows you to run. It does make you likely to scare away nearby fish and insects, so consider when to use it.
  
  
• Holding A while the net is equipped locks you to sneaking speed without having to worry about tilting the joystick too far.

• The game actively wants you to be aggressive, the only way to lose is failing to pick up batteries in time or killing enemies too slowly for the batteries to drop. You have infinite health and, while losing weapon upgrades from getting knocked down is really bad, it's still pretty recoverable as long as you killed a clump of enemies in the process and pick up a power-up or upgrade orbs afterward. You can also tank a couple smaller bullet hits before getting knocked down and those will heal up after a few seconds.
  
  
• The speed/stun/orb temporary power ups don't disappear and will slowly rotate through the different types, so you can leave them for later if they aren't immediately useful.
  
  
• Swapping to/from the secondary weapon does a split second dodge that'll let you pass through bullets and lasers without getting hit which is extremely useful in a few spots. You do need to have at least a little secondary weapon energy banked to swap to it.
  
  
• Don't forget you can swap androids between levels. It's pretty easy to just cruise through the swarm levels as a single character, but some boss phases can be extremely rough with the wrong weapon type.
  
  
• The first boss on campaign+ is especially tough even when compared to the later bosses, but you can skip past him on the stage select screen if you want. I suspect this works in the regular campaign too if you get stuck, but I never tried it.

yook fucked around with this message at 05:46 on Jun 10, 2020

• The game treats heat resistance and flame resistance as two independent stats. Heat resistance won't help you on death mountain and flame resist won't help in the desert.
  
• Link's image in the pause screen shows active buffs from clothing. There's actually 2 levels to the fire/cold protection you'll want to finish bosses in their regions, a single clothing piece or elixir isn't enough on its own.
  
• Keep your clothing's defense rating in mind, an enemy you traded hits with before may just suddenly one-shot you in weaker environmental protection gear.
  
• For cooking:
  
  • Insects/critters go with monster parts for elixirs, food items are separate.
    
  • Cooked items can only provide one type of buff at a time. Multiples of ingredients providing the same buff will make it stronger and some ingredients are much more potent than others.
    
  • Cooked items that add temporary yellow health/stamina also fully restore health/stamina, respectively. Whether it's better to load them into one big buffer item or split them into multiple recovery items varies a bit throughout the game, but either way it's a waste to load them up with generic meat/fish/shrooms.
    
  • Don't neglect keeping a stock of buff-less basic food too. Since you can only have one buff at a time, it sucks having to replace a useful one with a pointless one just to recover a couple hearts.

• You can undo multiple moves during the pre-fight puzzle phase as long as you don't confirm the final move. Usually the more elaborate 3 move puzzles make more sense if you take a few experimental moves then reset back to the starting position after.
  
• You can get the healing or hint bonuses from the toad cheers with only around 200 coins most of the time, only cap it out to 999 if you really need it or can afford to splurge.
  
• Some of the toads you rescue out in the world require backtracking from later areas, so don't get gung-ho on trying to 100% them on the first pass. There's at least 1 that won't show on the toad detectors at all and requires a missable optional item from a later area to show up.
  
• There's an audio cue when the pre-fight puzzle timer runs low and you can refill it as many times as you want, so don't sweat checking it while figuring out the slide puzzle. It may even be a good idea to screen shot the controls during the phase to check them since it took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize clicking the R stick puts the view vertically.
  
• The game's not Thousand Year Door and very much isn't trying to be. The world exploration and puzzle-based battling isn't for everyone, but the design does make an internal sense, so try to take it at face value. I see a lot of TTYD comparisons online and they seem to drag down enjoying the game for not following conventions that don't match the type of game this actually is.

yook fucked around with this message at 06:44 on Aug 8, 2020

• It's a good idea to start on easy difficulty. The game's still no pushover until you get a grip on the systems and it gives you extra currency (scrap) so you're more free to experiment with different upgrades. It also isn't too bad an idea to leave advanced mode disabled until you've beaten the game once.
  
• Try mousing over everything, the game's pretty good about providing info. The ship upgrade screen has extra tabs if you want to review what bonuses your crew gets due to their species or more detailed descriptions on your weapons.
  
• If the enemy ship has shields, it's usually better to manually fire your weapons so they land simultaneously rather than shooting them asap or letting them auto-fire. Ion weapons can be an exception if you're using them to lock down shields and you may want to tweak the timing for things like missiles that you'd prefer to land first.
  
• It's pretty hard to outright kill ship boarders with asphyxiation until the ship doors are well upgraded. You can still use it to weaken them and boarders will avoid low O2 areas which can be used to funnel them in/out of key areas. Usually the best option to fight in is the medbay since friendly crew can still be healed while fighting and even lvl1 makes them near immortal. There's some early impossible-seeming boarding events that can be solved just by sending all the crew to medbay, venting the rest of the ship, then intentionally letting the attackers into the medbay room with the crew and closing the door behind them.
  
• Drones tend to be a bit mediocre, but one notable superstar is the defense drone I, which targets incoming missiles. Missiles penetrate shields, so they're always a concern but the drone's an easy counter. It'll also shoot down boarding drones, making them an overall godsend in the last sector.

yook fucked around with this message at 08:44 on Nov 30, 2020

yook fucked around with this message at 01:21 on Dec 22, 2020

• If you select a configurable object, there's a Copy Settings button on the bottom right you can click then select an area to apply settings to everything in it. It's a huge convenience when setting up rows of storage lockers or farm tiles.
  
• The smaller buttons in the bottom right are for giving Duplicates direct orders. The one to know about is the sweep liquids command for cleaning up spills, the rest will show as options when you select anything relevant to them or happen automatically.
  
• Learn how ranching works. While the game presents it as a food source, most of its value is in the materials critters can generate. Hatches (the ones that look like headcrabs with teeth) are the easiest to start with, dreckos are good but take some setting up to make full use out of.
  
• WASD scrolls the screen. I mostly prefer to navigate using the mouse, but holding mouse click then keyboard scrolling is great for laying down the big multiscreen pipelines.
  
• The piping system doesn't always quite work as you'd expect for a pressurized system. Often it behaves a bit more like if the game sees the pipes as one-way roads, uses connected sources/sinks to assign directions to each section, then the gas/liquid squares act as individual cars driving along those roads. This isn't something to worry about too much, especially early on, but as your system gets more sprawling and convoluted you may run into weird things like mid-pipe clogs or junctions where one leg is empty but the others are stuck/full. A good practice to help fix these is to avoid routing pipelines directly through source/sink squares. Instead, route the pipeline alongside it and connect each one with its own single small side branch. That way the tile is only interacting with the larger system as a single pipe source or a sink rather than simultaneously trying to be both and sometimes confusing it.
  
  On a circulating closed loop cooling system this behavior also means leaving air in the pipe actually helps it flow better. A full pipe starts to seize because no individual water square can move until the one in front of it does so they eventually all get locked up.
  
• Dig aggressively, especially early on. The cracked looking blocks hide objects, which can be things like plant seeds or critters that help jump start production. You'll start needing new biomes and geysers by the time your initial water reservoirs start running out and digging's how you find them.
  
• The game has a sandbox mode, you enable it in options -> Game then click the Sandbox button to turn it on. There can be a surprising amount of design and engineering in the game, so sometimes making a dummy game to figure out a solution to implement in your real one is the best way to go.

yook fucked around with this message at 06:33 on Jan 1, 2021

yook fucked around with this message at 08:10 on Feb 22, 2021

yook fucked around with this message at 08:55 on Mar 1, 2021

• The game says you can only dash 3 times in a row, but it's actually pretty hard to trigger the limit unintentionally because of how quickly it resets, so just play as if the dash was infinite. That said, experiment around with evading attacks in different ways. Some telegraphed attacks need to be dodged with specific timing, some are easier to avoid with just normal running and some will take multiple dodges chained together to fully avoid. Also don't neglect blocking, a surprising number of attacks get their damage negated entirely and it can open up counterattack opportunities, especially on some of the more gimmicky enemies that need to be hit at a particular time or from a specific angle.
  
• Any item drops will fly into your pocket even if you leave the screen before they get there. There's no need to hang around after beating enemies and you can harvest plants from a distance just by shooting them.
  
• Holding open the quick menu will show enemy levels. It'll also highlight any points of interest for quests that mention searching using your analyzer without having to actually select and open the analyzer itself every time.
  
• When eavesdropping on a conversation, the ! and red arrows means there's an opportunity window for Lea to talk to the characters.
  
• Lea does less damage while in a party, so you're not hamstringing yourself by being solo, though you do miss out on dialog.
  
• Equipment is the main driver of your stats, so make sure to keep them up do date. Usually when entering a new area, you'll be able to buy basic equipment with money after finding the town and get better equipment from the traders at the zone entrance once you've been around a while and got some local resources.
  
• The game's pretty good about capping quest chains with unique bosses/dungeons that can make them worth checking out even if you're no longer interested in the reward.

• The puzzles in this game aren't too brain busting or mechanically demanding, but it does sometimes miss on communicating critical information. If you get stuck more than a few minutes, I wouldn't be too shy about having a walkthrough readily available. YMMV, but once an area flipped to being more frustrating than scary for me, it was better to look it up and move on than stick it out and get even more annoyed when it turned out to be something dumb.
  
  
• Some particular problem spots I got stuck way too long at and may be worth knowing ahead of time:
  
  
  • There's actually 2 running speeds, one when the run starts and full speed after running a little more than one body length. The difference is subtle and mostly negligible, but it does have a big impact on horizontal jump length. There's a couple of these jumps in the first chapter, but there's specifically one at the start of chapter 2 where you're jumping from a small platform and therefore need to know to give yourself running room otherwise it just looks impossible.
    
    
  • There's a simple mechanics teaching puzzle at start of chapter 3 where you move a fuse from one power box to the other. You need to hold the grab button while you're a small ways away from the fuse then walk up to it to pull it out. If you press the grab button while already standing next to it, it doesn't seem to register that you can interact with it.
    
    
  • A ways into chapter 3 is an enemy that freezes when the flashlight is shined on them. On controllers, the right control stick has 2 control modes, normal mode will tilt the flashlight vertically such that pressing up will point it at the ceiling and there's a chase mode that keeps it horizontal so pressing up aims it toward the background instead. The first room where you run into these enemies uses the first control scheme and seems intended for you to just run by through without relying heavily on the flashlight, it's in a later room where there's a lot more of them that it swaps to the second control scheme and expects you to use the mechanic. I've also seen some references online to clicking the right control stick or pressing R to enable a lock on enemies mode, but it's not something I've tried or needed to get through the section.
    
    
  • When you're sneaking around the chapter 3 boss in the cadaver room, linger around the vent on the left wall and your partner will give you a boost. This can technically also apply to any vent that's not obviously accessible via a ladder or platform, but it was only an issue for this particular room where the partner can fall behind since they're sneaking around and the vent looks too high to boost to when it actually isn't.

• Using dodge roll while in Cloud's punisher stance will automatically put him back into his default operator stance. If you keep getting confused what stance you're in, this can be both the cause and the solution.
  
• Melee characters can attack flying enemies. If you press the attack button while underneath, they'll anime jump up to take a swing. The tracking on it is pretty bad and you're usually still better off trying to knock them down with something else, but it's an option.
  
• Unlike some 3D brawlers, enemies will attack you from off-screen. If it's something meatier like a spell or special attack, the ability name will show up on the edge of the screen in the direction it's coming from.
  
• If you want to use a bunch of smaller items in bulk to top off between fights, you can press and hold L1 while using them. This will let you use several in a row without having to navigate the menu again for each one individually.

yook fucked around with this message at 07:38 on Aug 18, 2022