Update: Just beat Ancient Labyrinth with no-option, no-cross. Yikes! That is a tough boss battle. As predicted, the big difference is that I have 3 cross emblems ready at start of fighting Guardian Beast, with 2 cross emblems side by side ready for a mass attack. Hi, AppUnwrapper, I have found your guide tremendously helpful, not as a cheat but as a check to make sure that I am not missing skillz (or emblems) that are otherwise not obtainable by another path. Did not like this element of the game in which certain rewards can be unknowingly missed because the game gives no clues to their whereabouts. About Ancient Labyrinth, there are some major differences in my build. 1. I am attempting to stress the build using a no-potion, no-cross run. Up to Ancient Labyrinth, I can confirm that this build is entirely doable and viable to level up. 2. No grind. No backtracking, except the need to return to a shop even time when I have enough gold to upgrade an emblem or skillz. I found this "rule" very helpful as there are just enough random encounters to help you to elevate up without feeling like a grind. 3. At the labyrinth, my characters are only Level 15-16 and 3 of 4 characters are at Tier 4 emblem and 1 at Tier 3 emblem. Thus, compared to your build, I am severely underpowered, likely because of lack of grind. 4. Your run had a double cross-emblem attack. I, too, find this often a battle-turning event. In my previous runs, I had not had such a run and am trying to win it without resorting to this "prep". I guess this is necessary to beat this boss. Questions: About this side quest against Rajal, how did you trigger it? I never had it. Instead, I got the Super Freezing Punch from a gnome from a random encounter on the way to the labyrinth. I can't find Arctic Land. In Ancient Labyrinth, I took path B twice, but the gnome I battled never dropped anything. Is this random? What did I miss?
Not sure if this has been mentioned but I noticed that if, when traveling, I keep clicking my destination right before my guys get to the next dot, and click travel to destination again, I do not run into mobs. Maybe I am just really lucky? This has been useful when backtracking. Like I said..maybe I am just getting lucky but it sure seems to work.
I just verified that this works. Nice find. It's easy enough to skip fighting random battles anyway if you want, by just hitting the pause menu when one starts and hitting the exit button (the farthest left button). But your way saves time. Most of the time I don't want to skip random battles, since usually when I play I just want to do some match 3 gaming and don't care too much about which battles I'm fighting. But occasionally I really do just want to get to some particular point, so this is handy.
That Ancient Labyrinth video is from my second playthrough, which had no grinding other than going through dungeons again to pick up missed loot. Sometimes it's not even possible to get all loot in one run (multiple paths each with loot), so I don't consider that grinding. I agree, I got pretty lucky there to have so many S. skill emblems. I don't remember if that was my first attempt or not. But on my second run, I never grinded when I failed a battle -- I just started over until I won. And I agree, the one aspect I don't like is that you can permanently miss things you don't know about. That's why I started the new game. I hope there's nothing like that in the new content they add, but at least now we'll know to be careful and try to Heist from all bosses. As for the Rajal side quest, I think it was a random encounter type thing? There was a reason I wasn't recording -- I didn't expect him, I think. So I started the recording mid-battle. But it was between the haunted forest (after visiting the witch again) and the Cave of Illusion. I don't remember much else, sorry!
AppUnwrapper, Your description of how you got to the Rajal side quest being a random encounter is in line with my recall of how I got the new skill. However, I don't ever recall reading any dialog mentioning this at all being a side quest, nor I remember any dialog element about some gnome working against Rajal.
Any level suggestions for Cave of Conch? I can barely make it past the first part -- all of my party is level 25 with the level 5 emblems. I have lightning on Elsa, vampiric sword on Howard (because I keep losing so much health), Purify on Trista. I have heist ready for boss fight but I'm getting slaughtered just trying to get there. Do I just need to grind several more levels before attempting?
I don't remember what skills I had equipped there, but I know my characters were all a bit lower than level 25. I do remember that I tried beating it before I had visited Sanctus Port and just got my ass whupped. I then visited Sanctus and went through whatever story mode stuff I was supposed to do there, and bought new emblems for Alston and maybe Trista at the shop on Sanctus, and then I was able to beat Cave of the Conch. One tip in case you don't already know: when you attack enemies with skill attacks, you'll often see a message pop up over the enemy saying "Weak Point", or "Guard" I think. If it says "Weak Point" it means those enemies are especially weak to that type of attack, and if it says "Guard" it means they are resistant to that type of attack. You can use this as a trial and error way of discovering which skills are good to equip for a particular area. For instance you might discover some enemies are weak to lightning, in which case you should consider equipping any lightning skills you have.
One general gameplay elements that I found frustrating and challenging is how fragile your state is going from wave to wave. Regardless how skilled you are and your character levels, I found that many of the later battles are most always hanging on by a thread, in that a few bad tile allocation will instantly doom you, since you can usually withstand only 2-3 hits at most without some ways to block or replenish your health. The extremely narrow of margin of error seems may turn off a large part of the target audience who are not used to this stringent level of match-3 games.
My personal preference for buying is PALADIN > HEALER > WARRIOR > MAGE based on their overall usefulness.
Thanks for the tips re: Cave of Conch. I'm noticing the Poseidon's Island seems easier... maybe I'm just luckier this time around. I may keep trying Poseidon's Island so I can get the red chest and heist the boss for those T6 emblems, then circle back to CoC.
Well here's a little tidbit. I did beat (or rather get through) them before beating whatever the mission at Sanctus Port was, and guess what. No bosses! I had to go back afterwards to do my boss battles and emblem heists! I've now got two of the tier 9 emblems (after having to seriously grind for the second) and I just cannot beat any of the final gate levels for anything! Closest I got was having three (three!) double crosses in place for the Sun Gate boss and still dying with him having a sliver of health left because I could not clear two of those f'ing things that attack you each round until you drop them. Aghhhh! I'm accounting for boss weaknesses etc. but I just can't do it with any gate, after having little trouble with the rest of the game. I feel like I have to grind one or two more tier 9 emblems and at 100 a pop that's a seriously depressing thought...
The only grinding I did in my second run was for the last emblem (maybe 2?). I just kept doing Sun Gate over -- you get a lot of gold from a single run. Shouldnt really take long to get those last emblems.
Yes, I imagine it's a bit less painful if you can grind a gate, but I can't beat any of them never mind grind them. It's bizarre after being able to get through the rest of the game without much pain.
Having just (and finally) finished beating the Spoiler Red Dragon boss in Ancient Mausoleum (no potions and no crosses used), I have a lot of respects for individuals like AppUnwrapper who managed to beat the game. For me, despite the otherwise superb production values of the game and super addicting gameplay, I feel increasingly that there is very little "casual" aspect of this so-called casual JRPG. Rather, I found the boss fights to be increasingly brutally difficult, to the point that they now broader on absurdness in what is needed to beat the game. A good example of this is the boss in in Ancient Mausoleum. After beating the boss myself, I watched AppUnwrapper's walkthrough video battling the same boss. In his run, he had a TOTAL OF 11 (SERIOUSLY!) CROSS-EMBLEMS and used 9 of them for a SINGLE BOSS. I also found this to be true in my own run. Here is a screenshot showing the near terminal part of the fight. In all, I had to create a TOTAL of 7 CROSS-EMBLEMS (with 3 of them already created by the start of the fight) and used 5 of them. Again, this is all for a SINGLE BOSS. I am not at all convinced that this is considered "fair" play. Even if you manage to play the game with skills, I feel that this level is basically unwinnable unless you somehow had a good run of randomly allocated tiles to form a bunch of CROSS-EMBLEMS. Even you resort to using consumables, they will unlikely be enough to help you enough to survive the fight. To me, the overriding aspect of chance over skills soured the tone of the game entirely compared to the gameplay in the early parts of the game. Even when batting regular waves, I found the game to be very unforgiving. Almost all enemies can almost wipe out your entire HP and DP in 1-2 turns, especially when multiple of them attack at the same time. This means even if you play the game optimally, you are very prone to die if you can't secure good matches on nearly every turn. The lack of a "buffer" is very discouraging, as it means that your "high level" characters are no more safer than your "low level" characters. This goes against the fundamental mechanics of a RPG in which the player should truly benefit from an advancement of skills in overcoming any bad random elements. Here are 2 even better examples of utterly broken AI check in basic match-3 mechanics: The absurdly and utterly broken AI does not play fair and aggressively targets all heart tiles into stone and then ice key tiles without realizing that such combination essentially locks the player out of any escape because there is no possible way to move the eye down the column or restore enough HP (without using consumables) to continue. The AI should be smart enough to check for basic deadend conditions such as this that is basically a no-escape kill. Even the most basic match-3 games have condition checks to prevent the new fallen tiles from making the board unsolvable (and automatically reset it if it turns out to be). Amateur design. The game is turning into Candy Crush Saga, in which you are simply at the mercy of the "random" drops, no matter how good you are. Once again, a great start of a match-3 JRPG that turned into a mess of slot-machine driven gameplay that punishes rather than rewards the player for leveling up. What's the point for making a game this way? Game utterly broken when it is stressed properly. The developer tries to make the game "hardcore" by making it difficult but for all of the wrong reasons and methods.
i just finished moon gate/black dragon. about 45 hrs played and all lvl 32. got all 8th tier emblems and one 9th tier emblem so far. i agree the later stages are more about luck than skills sometimes. other than grinding for gold, i think they should have made lvl progression more meaningful. getting 20 or more hp per lvl when monsters are hitting for 400+ is kind of meaningless. i don't mind power lvling a bit if that will make my characters stronger. not sure if i have the patience to grind for 100K gold each for the last three 9th tier emblems.
Newsflash: video game has unfair final boss or bosses! I think I've been hearing this for about 30 years now... lol It IS too bad that this game also seems to suffer from this as most of the progression seems so promising. I don't think I see myself making eleven multi crosses in a single match in this lifetime :-(
I can deal with multiple cross emblems needed to beat a boss fight, but I will argue that the game is unreasonably made difficult against the player if the enemies can dash out debuffs that render the board entirely unplayable (as shown in my previous screenshots). Any match-three game should have enough intelligence to check the board status at any time to make sure that an AI response would leave behind a playable board. This, in turn, forces the player to adopt a very strict style of play (using consumable crosses to debuff, for example) and misinforms the player that skillz matters in the game when in reality it is basically chance that drives whether or not you can succeed. The entire character level up system then becomes superfluous and moot.
I got 9 in my last Sun Gate run yesterday, including 4 doubles I believe it was. All ready to go at the start of the boss level. STILL lost because two of those damn things zapped me to death when I couldn't clear them from the second to last row... sitting side by side. It's ridiculous. Haven't played since. I'm sure I'll be back at it but am not paying nearly as much.
