Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night (Post-Release)

[isiolia]

They did give the shortcuts for different shard/gear setups. I just manually toggled stuff though. Felt like they offered a lot more than was actually needed, but I guess that's not necessarily a bad thing. Agree though, some of them are just sort of tedious even if they're neat.

I finished with 99.5% of the map, not sure if that just doesn't include the final boss room(s) - like maybe losing first will get it to 100%? Did the optional one too (very easy locking down with Bolide Blast).

[Xeogred]

@Ziggy587: Get the High Jump upgrade crafted dude... won't need that "ability" much anymore for your second nitpick.

Probably easy to miss the High Jump, it's just something you can craft eventually but a pretty key movement ability for late game exploration and fun. As anyone might be guessing, it pretty much is the infinite jump in SoTN.

I guess I just didn't have any issues with the water area. I got the jet blast ability right away which obviously prevented me from having any annoyance there, but after that I don't recall having to switch shards much while exploring underwater. I think I used the jet blast to explore everything I could then just went back later to get all the chests and stuff.

[noiseredux]

I'm way behind the rest of you guys, but... I did finally get a shard for a familiar (the flying sword one). I also did the side-quest that lets Marian get a 'haircut.' Now she's a redhead. Oh, and the super embarrassing thing... it took me about three hours of playing to realize that LB did a back-jump. This was literally game-changing!

[Ziggy]

@Ziggy587: Get the High Jump upgrade crafted dude... won't need that "ability" much anymore for your second nitpick.

Thanks for the tip! I've upgraded a couple of abilities and didn't notice any change, so I gave up on it. I didn't realize you have to upgrade it all the way. Well, I guess I'll be hunting for some item drops then!

[MrPopo]

@Ziggy587: Get the High Jump upgrade crafted dude... won't need that "ability" much anymore for your second nitpick.

Thanks for the tip! I've upgraded a couple of abilities and didn't notice any change, so I gave up on it. I didn't realize you have to upgrade it all the way. Well, I guess I'll be hunting for some item drops then!

So there's crafting new shards out of old ones (like the one he mentioned). Once you have High Jump you can spam it like in the old games, and all you need your nitpick for is certain gaps that you have to slide through. Then there's upgrading. As it turns out, upgrading is AMAZING for passive shards. When you upgrade a passive shard to rank 9 you no longer need to equip it for the benefit. There's nothing in the game that makes this obvious; I thought my copy was bugged when I burned some materials on the regeneration and see invis shards and then I was getting the effects without them. For non-passives the upgrades tend to be hit and miss; it's always nice to have more copies for the higher grade (which directly increases what they do), but the upgrade you craft is sometimes noticable (the shard off of one of the optional bosses comes to mind) and sometimes not.

[Ziggy]

When you upgrade a passive shard to rank 9 you no longer need to equip it for the benefit.

AH! Thanks for the tip. I've just upgraded a few of them. At rank 9, they appear to the right where you can toggle them on/off.

The past few sessions I've had with this game, I've actually done nothing but crafting and upgrading shards. Occasionally that means I have to go farm a few items, but mostly I'd just rub back and forth between the store and the craft rooms.

My map completion is at 99.40% right now. I've checked, you can't warp from the final boss room so I know that room isn't counting against me. That means I have a random room or two somewhere that I'll probably never find. Most likely behind a breakable wall. Which, thanks to Popo, now I have the shard that identifies breakable walls at level 9 so it's on full time.

[Xeogred]

Or the dreaded rare breakable ceilings.

[Ziggy]

Or the dreaded rare breakable ceilings.

Now that I have the detector thing on full time, I'm finding a couple of breakable walls here and there that I've missed. Ceilings make up most of the ones that I've missed.

[Ziggy]

So I'm sure I'm not the only one to figure out this easy potion farming method, but check this out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCDyg8B4t_A

I have Augment LCK and Augment Gold leveled up fully, so those stats are both applied. Luck helps item drops, and the Augment Gold helps to gain more money when gold drops instead of an item. Any luck boosting equipment will help as well. I have a somewhat leveled up Shuriken conjure shard, and somewhat leveled Accelerator manipulative shard. These two shards really help speed up the process, as you can see.

Basically, you wanna pick up small webbing and melting bones to make potions, and then 4 potions makes a High Potion. But with the Augment Gold shard you will gain a little money as well. And any other items that are dropped, or shards collected, can be sold for even more cash (if you have no use for them). I sped up portions at 10x speed just to get to the point, but this entire segment only took about 5 minutes real time. And that's including going back to the save point once to refill the MP. The Accelerator shard really helps!

[Ziggy]

Yes! 100% map completion!

I've also rolled the credits for the good ending. And with that, I think I'm gonna put this game down for a while so I can get on to playing Mario Maker 2! I would like to come back to it at some point though, I have the same compulsion I do with SOTN to get item drops and whatnot. I see there's a bosh rush mode. Are there any other modes? I know about the DLC, but I don't know if I wanna pay for it. Should I?