Zwei: The Arges Adventure
So I beat the game. Again. This time it took me less than 5 hours to bulldoze through the dungeons to the final boss.
This time, I started to do the extra content. One thing in this game is that you collect 50 Aluminum Tabs that are found in the main dungeons, with each 10 unlocking a special piece of armour. They each have a specific spot, like a specific pot on a specific floor. I think I got 48 in my first playthrough, and of course there was no way I was going to go through each dungeon and try to narrow down the two I missed. This time, I just kept track of how many I found in each dungeon playing through and compared to a guide to get all 50.
Next, I was able to get myself levelled up to Level 30, which is the max level, fairly quick. I mentioned in my first post on this game that you get experience by eating food, but you can trade 10 pieces of food in for a better food that awards 1.5x the experience. This scales up 4 tiers, so tier 1 can be traded in for tier 2 then tier 3 and finally tier 4, such that tier 4 is worth 1,000 * 1.5 * 1.5 * 1.5 tier 1 foods. But this becomes a lot easier at higher levels when I was able to roll over the enemies more easily.
So then I cleared the main optional dungeons. There's I think 12-14 optional bosses in the game depending on what you count as a boss. 4 of them are dragons, which are the easiest. It's actually kind of interesting, because they hit you with flame breath attacks that move quick. If I move in a cardinal direction, I always get hit, but if I move diagonally, I usually can avoid it. I wonder if this was the devs trying to make people realise that they absolutely must move diagonally in this game for better speed?
The next set of 4 bosses are elemental bosses. The first 3 are alright, with some tricky movements to get used to, but nothing too bad. The last one, however, is a complete and utter fucking bitch. Its name is Beelzebub, and it is a pain in the rear end. In fact, I looked it up. YouTube has almost nothing for this game, but it has two videos of players fighting it. This is the better one:
There's a specific set-up that I was able to use, but even still, it took me probably close to 20 tries to finally defeat it. Part of it is that you have to constantly be moving while it's moving, and it likes spamming attacks that have little room to dodge. I had to pause several times because I was playing on keyboard, and my thumb was strained from holding down the button used to run for so long. Auto-dash and auto-fire are toggle-on features in this game, but an absolute must in this fight.
After that, there are four 'repeating' levels where you have to go through a randomly-generated floor sixteen times to complete the level, and every four floors you fight the same boss, only it gets stronger every time. Easy the first few times, very frustrating by the last iteration, but more a grind than anything else. Much easier compared to Beelzebub.
I also collected all of the in-game collectibles, which are a bunch of music CDs and bromides (character artwork). Most of these you get by trading in food to a 5th tier. Some are monster drops, and a select few are dropped by certain bosses or found in obscure places. However, two of the monster drops were ridiculously frustrating. After not getting any drops from the two monsters, I started counting. I killed probably a combined total of 350 of the two monsters to get both their drops. Not very impressed with that drop rate.
However, I think I'm ready to call it quits with this game. I've completed most of the content, but the last few bits are beyond me. One of the Steam Achievements is to get a Gold Medal on every level of every dungeon. While there is no time limit requirement for Gold, it requires you to go through the level, destroy _every_ destructible object, kill _every_ monster, and take 5 damage or less. Monsters in the earlier levels only deal 1 damage to me when I'm at Level 30, so it's easy to grab Gold. In later levels, however, I have to be extremely careful, and there's just simply too many goddamn monsters with teleportation or bullshit projectile spam. I don't have the patience or the desire to grind for another 30 hours to try obtaining Gold when I could play other games. I got 21 out of 40, and that's enough.
A few more Steam Achievements are to beat 3 mini-games put in an arcade within the game on their Hard Mode setting. One of them is a standard horizontal-scrolling shoot-em-up. I'm decently good at shmups, so I was able to do this. Another one is Ys Typing, literally a typing game with a Ys theme. There are either 7 or 8 levels. I got through the first 5 easily, had to repeat the 6th level once or twice, had to repeat the 7th level several times, and then ran into Level 8. If you lose a level, it will always let you repeat the level with no penalty until you outright quit the mini-game, but even with that, aarrrrrggh! I consider myself an extremely good, quick typist, and I still struggled! No wonder only 1% of players have this achievement.
The last game is a Tetris-type game with a character mascot. I tried several times but couldn't get anywhere. I looked at a youtube video of somebody clearing this, and I wasn't even a fourth of the way to winning. So nope.
Now, would I recommend this game? Probably. There's doubtlessly several similar games of superior polish and design, but this was enjoyable. However, some of the post-game content is just outright aggravating. There
is a sequel game to this where the storyline is about 99% unrelated to the first game, so that would probably be better to play for greater polish.