Video game lessons learned the hard way

Judgment: You can buy better darts at the pawn shop. Don't try to beat Ryan without them, unless you have really good timing or feel like wasting an hour.

Edited by lrrose on Jun 30th 2019 at 1:05:15 PM

Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise: Don't get cocky while doing the Flutterscotch romance maze on the highest difficulty. You will get exploded on, often within a half-second's distance of the partner.

You need to actually find the option to make it so your spellcasting party members in Baldur's Gate stay back and don't run into melee combat instead of manually pulling them back every time they suicidally charge forward with your front combatants.

Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate

• Deviljho's drool drops your defense, and the game does warn you about this. What it does not tell you is it does this passively, you don't take any hitstun or damage from Deviljho's drool so you probably won't notice that you're suffering from a debuff right away.
• Speaking of Deviljho, turns out flying monsters aren't the only ones that'll actively move between areas to flag you down if you're doing an Egg Delivery quest.
• It's hard to notice but Teostra's "the air spontaneously combusts" attack actually telegraphs whether it's targeting near or away from him based on the color of the air. Don't mix them up!
• Kushala Daora will happily hit you with its giant cyclone if you get staggered by its windbox. Be careful approaching it with melee weapons!
• Please stop using Stamina Oil on Hyper monsters why did you think it'd help
• Hyper-boosted attacks will emit a flash and almost always have either more or less startup than their base counterparts. Be mindful of the new timings, especially if a monster starts switching which body parts get the Hyper boost!

Wolfenstein: Young Blood:

• Some weapons need to be heavily upgraded before they gain any usefulness. The Dieselkraftwerk is the best example; in its base state it does poor damage, has a small blast radius, and is generally only useful for blasting open any particular doors or crates associated with it. Best option for increasing its lethality would be to get the blast radius upgrade along with the cluster munitions, along with upgrading the other parts towards damage increases. Accuracy and Ro F are useless on what is essentially a sticky gel grenade launcher.
• The Sturmgewehr assault rifle and Schockhammer shotgun lose most of their usefulness once the more higher leveled enemies begin appearing. Heck, I'd personally advise writing off the shotgun entirely, it just doesn't seem to scale up effectively enough.
• In contrast, the Maschinepistole works great against almost any target, save for the heavy robots. Has surprisingly good range and accuracy too.
• The Laserkraftwerk is every bit as overpowered as it was in The New Colossus. I'd strongly advise completing Brother I Tower at least halfway just for the sake of grabbing it in the detention lockup, then coming back later when you're more prepared, it's that good of a weapon.
• I'm not 100% why, but sometimes if you were to successfully sneak through roughly 75% of an area only to get caught near the end, the AI seems to go apeshit, spawning a ton of enemies at random from all directions. Had this result in a couple of utterly BS "ambushes" in the underground sidequests twice. Think it might be due to the game spawning in all of the "alert state" enemies that you missed in the earlier parts of the mission all at once, which makes for some ridiculous odds.

Puyo Puyo 20th Anniversary:

So I just learned the victory text lines change depending on if the victor character is using their alternate voice pack. I tested it with Ringo and she asks if she's "quieter than usual", which she is, since the ingame shop describes the voice as "docile".

Schezo's alternate voice pack gave me "Disappear...", and given his alt voice is colder and sexier than normal, that might be the last thing you hear before he murders you in cold blood.

Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate

• As a rule of thumb when fighting monsters that necessitate Flash Bomb usage to go smoothly (i.e. Rathalos) bring all the stuff you need to craft more Flash Bombs mid-hunt past the five your inventory caps off at! You can never have too many of them.
• Most quests come G-Rank are both unstable and spawn the unwanted guests in relatively quickly, which means you should pack Dung Bombs. This isn't the thing learned the hard way- no, the thing learned the hard way was adding Dung Bombs onto all my item pouch sets so that I wouldn't accidentally forget them on a hunt.
• Poison (and I'm assuming other statuses like Fireblight) can and will kill you if not dealt with properly, this isn't one of those games where damage over time effects cap you off at the bare minimum HP you're allowed to have.
• Logically, Sonic Bombs affect anything within hearing range while Flash Bombs only affect monsters that are looking in the direction of the flash. Not only should you always chuck a Flash Bomb in front of a monster, but you should make sure they don't move or turn away from it during the split deciseconds it takes to detonate.
• On the "base" quests where you hunt monsters for the first time, they usually have subquests designed to teach you about body parts on the monster that are worth attacking. With this in mind, the subquests for the first Silver Rathalos and Gold Rathian quests (respectively "Ring of the Silver Sol" and "Ring of the Golden Lune") ask that you break their heads. Yes, their heads are hard parts and you'll bounce often attacking them with blademaster weapons... but it turns out what the game is trying to say is that breaking their heads turns them into weak points, similar to Uragaan. You could of sped those hunts up, Nes...

Fallout New Vegas

• Melee playthroughs are for chumps

Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled: Even with a turning character, you're not guaranteed to set a good time on Cortex Castle because you are bad at video games.

Final Fantasy XIV: Hallowed Ground tends to be a bit... unreliable when it comes to protecting you from damage incurred by Covering another player.

Stellaris: The only first move worth doing is to grab a second alloy forge pronto. You'll always need alloys for maintaining and building your fleet, and in the early game you'll go through 100 of them at a time just expanding your borders to grab more resources.

Chrono Trigger: don't waste your G on a Lode/Silver Sword from Melchior. you get two of them for free if you just wait a bit.

Dicey Dungeons:

• The witch's "throw dice" cannot be used to "waste" an enemy's dodge.
  • On the plus side, it cannot be dodged. And you can safely throw burning dice.
• Don't put the good spells on 6, especially not Hall of Mirrors (nor Magic Missile). Since your only dice-altering spell is Nudge, slot 6 is the only one that has a truly 1/6 chance rather than 2/6 with Nudge.
• Check the enemy moves before deciding to freeze their dice.

Lessons learned the easy way (by watching a streamer learn them the hard way):

• Unupgraded boomerang = Bad Idea. In terms of damage inflicted versus received, it's just 1d6 (like a sword), and your HP is more precious than the enemy's.
  • Even the upgraded boomerang sounds like a bad idea if you don't have at least one healing item.

Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle

• The "automatically shoot enemies that move within view" abilities on Mushroom Kingdom characters will trigger the Smasher's extra turn ability, since it counts as an attack. This will stack on top of their normal turn, effectively doubling their movement distance and in worst case scenarios letting them attack twice in one turn.
• Related to the above, the AI's not dumb by any means and Smashers will gladly go out of their way to ram into your Sentries (i.e. bombs on wheels that track enemies every turn) just to get an extra turn and more movement distance.
• AoE attacks will inflict damage to teammates, needless to say.
• Rabbid Mario's Magnet Dance ability won't always pull enemies in range all the way, make sure you're close enough that you can at least get the point-blank Boomshot shot afterwards if not a melee strike.
• Peach's Defender ability transfers the damage her teammates take to her. It is not a straight-up shield.
• Bucklers will actually turn to face you after a successful shot at them, so mind that you didn't move everyone to the same side before deciding to unload.

Grim Dawn: If you're doing a co-op playthrough, make sure everyone chooses the same faction to ally with! (Not a game ender, but hella inconvenient)

CTR:NF yet again: Don't even bother trying to get the "platinum on Coco Park" Pro Challenge. You can't do it even on easy because A. floating time boxes suck and B. you are terrible at this game. PERSEVERANCE IS THE GODDAMN KEY. All Pro Challenges done!

Edited by ReikoKazama on Sep 23rd 2019 at 7:37:05 PM

Dragon Quest XI Actual real-life casinos, probably

• Casinos by design make you forget how much time you've spent there.
• The bonus modes on slot machines are also meant to distract you from remembering you're gambling by giving the money you put in a "goal" of some kind to overcome, even though it's all luck.
• When you decide you want to save and quit the game will decide to give you five Slime Times in a row with three Feeding Frenzies peppered in, just to make winning feel exhausting and draining.

So, in summary, I learned about a few tricks real-life casinos probably employ and also learned that Sidetracked By The Golden Saucer is a very nauseating thing to experience once you manage to un-sidetrack yourself.

Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon: When doing the wormhole minigame, don't worry about collecting every single speed boost you come across, but focus on avoiding the obstacles. Hitting one of those will slow you down a lot more than missing a boost.

Pokemon Ruby:

• Don't use your starter pokemon for every battle and neglect your other caught pokemon. You are going to shoot yourself in the foot when you get to a gym leader, or even a regular trainer, that can one shot you with your type weakness, or just power through your hits enough to KO your over leveled starter and make mincemeat with the rest of your team of under leveled Silcoon, Zigzagoon, Skitty, and what have you.
• It is totally possible to skip Dewford Gym and go through Granite cave without flash, if you are stubborn enough. Lesson number 1 is how I learned that.
• Don't give HM Moves to your starter/battle pokemon. HM Moves cannot be easily forgotten, and you're seriously wasting a spot in your limited move set for a move that could be much more worthwhile down the line. Catch an HM slave. Zigzagoon works well for the beginning HM Moves(And if you have one with the ability Pick Up, you will profit greatly from free Revives, Gold nuggets, Rare candies, etc.)
• For the love of Arceus, do not just stick the EXP Share on one pokemon and never take it off. Especially if you haven't learned lesson number 1 yet. Instead of one over leveled pokemon you always use, you have that and the other over leveled pokemon you never use. Also, be sure to take off the EXP share before you put the pokemon in the box. You WILL spend HOURS looking for it in a panic before you remember your stupid mistake.
• Please, PLEASE learn Type Advantages and Weaknesses. Memorize that sheet already, god damn it. It will save you a fuck ton of frustration.
• Breeding does not work if both pokemon are the same sex. No matter how much you think those pokemon should make an egg, gay breeding is not a thing.

i can't remember if it's in RSE or not, but later games let you put the PC in item mode so you can just see what all your guys are holding without having to manually check.

Pokemon gen 3 pc boxes certainly did not have that feature. It might have been added later and then used in ORAS. But back then, if you didn't check if your pokemon didn't have any items before putting them in, you'd likely not see that item for a long, looong time.

Alliance Alive

Since the HD version just came out (or will be by the end of the week, if you're not in North America), I figured I'd give some tips from my time with the 3DS version.

-Focus your TP spending; the better stuff costs a lot, and it's helpful if you only have two or three weapon/spell types to pour TP into, alongside the generic talents.

-Levels don't exist, so stat boosts will all be coming from equipment or temporary buffs. The only things that come directly from fighting enemies are increased maximum HP and SP, and new skills via Awakenings.

-On armor, pay attention to weakness and resistances in addition to the other stats, as higher resists might be worth more than a few points of defense.

-Weapons largely only care about attack power, but Sigilmancy focused characters will want an Etheract (a yellow plus on the weapon icon), and Tiggy very much cares about the extra Arts on her cannons.

-You'll only enough recruits to max out one or two guild per playthrough, so decide which ones early and focus on them; due to the way the recruits system works, you'll likely still level up the other guilds some anyways.

-99% of the time when the game gives you a choice between being greedy/ruthless and not being so, not doing it gives better long term rewards (often in the form of more guild recruits). There is a major exception to this rule, but it's rather obvious when it happens.

CTR:NF yet again: Don't expect to be able to beat Oxide's ghost on Oxide Station with this many distractions. You need to be alone to be able to do it.

• Etrian Odyssey Nexus:
  • If you're planning to have multiple members from different classes on your party, make it so you replace one of the current members with another each time you reach a new floor in a dungeon. This will prevent the unusued members to remain too underleveled next time you require their services (even when you're using the disappointingly incompetent Memory Conch). I had a very difficult time defeating Shellbeast in the Southern Shrine for this reason — the Protector was only at level 24 whereas the other active members were at 33-34 because I only changed my party upon reaching a new full labyrinth!
  • A neat trick to accelerate an underleveled character's level is by making it so they're the only member with you when you're reporting a completed request. A bit cruel for the other party members but, damn, the poor underdog needsa those experience points badly!
  • I miss Training Orb from Beyond the Myth.

EDIT: Kvasir is already becoming my favorite bartender in the series. Also, Charis and Rob rock ^u^

Edited by MyFinalEdits on Oct 11th 2019 at 8:46:46 AM

Broforce:

Don't assume that a level will be quickly over when it's time to go to bed. Sometimes that level you think won't take long is the final level of the game and will take an hour to complete.

Edited by Resileafs on Oct 16th 2019 at 7:28:45 AM