[Click here to start from the first progress log]

Okay, I’ve now reached the end both in story mode and arcade mode in addition to unlocking every character and item, which took about 9 and a half hours. Overall, I’d say that the experience has been really positive despite a small handful of things that I could complain about, and the way it makes the bullet hell genre (which I’d more or less written off) seem like the kind of thing that I could actually get into is one of its more appealing aspects. There’s still quite a lot of grinding required if you want to unlock the best character who has all of the passive abilities of the others, and there’s really no way of knowing what to unlock first because there are no descriptions for the two non-character upgrades you can buy, but I still had fun.

Let’s talk about grinding

Once you unlock Liery and make it to stage 4, grinding can be sped up quite a bit. Until then, however, survival mode is your best bet, and you might consider it prudent to unlock and level up Cloe instead of Liery under the assumption that her magnetism that draws money (but not power-ups) to her will lead to a similar end result. That’s a wildly incorrect assumption, though, and doing things that way can require an hour of soulless grinding to get her to level 20. Honestly, the smartest thing to do would be to unlock Liery as early as possible, max out her level as early as possible, and then unlock/upgrade the MK1000 Machine—which supplements your damage output and can make a huge difference—as far as you can.

I actually tried a bunch of different grinding methods before settling on a run through stages 4 and 5. Turrets are something that I unlocked before the MK1000 Machine (which is another incredibly bad idea—it’s way less useful), so I spent some time starting stage 5, laying down the turret—which you get one of each time you die and restart a stage—to help take out enemies, and wandering around to pick up as much money as possible. This is pretty fast, but it also doesn’t take long to become boring.

The goal of all of this grinding is to unlock Erika, the best character in the game. Doing so requires bringing Cloe, Liery, and Fael to level 20, which is why focusing on obtaining Liery first for double money is something I can’t recommend enough. Anyway, Erika is decently powerful in addition to getting double money, money magnetism, and double life. Those things can all make a huge difference in arcade mode, as well as potentially helping out during stage 6 (which, unlike other stages, can’t be selected after dying; the only way to reach it is to start from stage 5 and continue into 6). Of course, the combination of double money and money magnetism allows you to obtain huge sums of money quickly by running through stages 4 and 5, but you’re likely to have most things unlocked by the time you can use her anyway.

Upgrades aren’t created equal

I regret wasting early money on turrets instead of the MK1000 upgrade; not only can you only bring one into levels, but the damage output isn’t great and adding your own projectiles makes it that much harder to avoid those launched by enemies (especially if you have money magnetism, which adds yet more things flying around). Granted, your projectiles are yellow and hazards are pink, but there’s enough confusion to deal with already. For example, I find it incredibly difficult to differentiate between enemies on fire and gold, and the power-up that slows time looks a lot like one of the enemies. Even when using that power-up and freezing everything in place for a short time, I’ve still found myself walking into enemies an embarrassing number of times. Long story short, turrets are very situational.

[Click here to go to Riddled Corpses EX log #1]

The post Riddled Corpses EX: Progress Log #2 [END] appeared first on Killa Penguin.