The Let's Play Archive

Immercenary

by MrDudeManGuy

Part 8: Episode 8: Grinding, Grinding, Grinding...

I'll be taking the Immercenary Safari bus on two large loops through this update. This is primarily to hunt around for items. I'll be killing creatures on the way (Goners and Picassos) to build up our stats. We should end up with a mighty inventory and improved stats!

Loop #1: Through the southwest





I find a our first DFA pretty much right out of the gate.



I also picked up our first new Chaff. We had one at the start of the game, but the game shows us this screen because it's the first we've actually picked up.





Next I grab an Ice. I can't find much to say about most of these items because I rarely use them!



If you look out to the left of the Safari bus, you'll see a very disturbing looking building. No, there's nothing special about it. This is just rather typical of the game.



During a storm and surrounded by a pack of wild Goners, we spot our first Boomerang. By the way, this made me realize that you can find items during a storm, so I've updated my previous synposis on storms.



As you can see, this one uses three "O"/Offense units.



I don't use Boomerang much, but I'll equip it anyway in case we run into something disastrous.



Skulking around in the graveyard for a while. This is only "scary" because the tombstones block your characters' movements, and it's rather irritating when they're only two polygons and wafer-thin when viewed from the side. Urgh.





Found a Pushya.

Pushya is much more awesome than it should be. Sure, you can use it to push enemies back. But, you'll notice that it tells us that it'll push us back as well. We can exploit this big time!



Now by equipping Pushya and spamming it, we can travel backwards at no cost to agility! This is fantastic considering how often we run out of Agility. On top of that, you regain agility while doing it!

For that matter, you even move faster this way! It's a lot like Zelda: Ocarina of time, where if you're really nutty, you'll carve off a few extra seconds from your game by traveling backwards.

I'll be exploiting this for the remainder of the game. But, mainly just when I run out of Agility. Usually I want to see where I'm going for the specific purpose of seeing items.



That completes our southwestern run, I take the Gate back to safety.



We didn't get a lot of interest out of that loop, but we made it back safely.

Loop #2: Through the northwest

Next I take us on an expedition to the Power Plant. I'm hoping to find Nukeya, the most powerful weapon.



On the way, we see some pillars with Perfect 1's avatar posted on them.



Here we are at the power plant. Good music here, in fact! Most of the music is ambient and forgetable.





Got our first Switchya. I'd really have to be stretching to come up with a need for this.



I spotted a garage-looking building with "EA" on it. This game was either funded or created by Electronic Arts, so I'm guessing this is related.





Finally, we find HEX. It's ultimately the only multi-use weapon that's worth using commonly. Hex does plenty of damage, and is also good for killing multiple enemies at once.



Well that's a good enough run. Let's take the Immercenary Safari bus back to base.



The last loop involved mainly meandering around at the power plant. This is where David told us to find Nukeya. I never did find it, so I gave up and went east. However, we did find Hex!



Time to give hex a try...



Bam! Here I am letting it fly. Notice it's hexagonal shape. What a hoot!





Hex has a pretty large explosion radius. It's very easy to kill yourself with it. In fact, this range did damage me a bit.

We only have enough for a single shot of hex right now. So, we stick to the DOASys. We pop out, shoot hex, walk through static fields, and pop back in. I do this for probably 15 minutes.



Finally I go back to the lab to see our final progress over the grinding session. There's no video triggered on our return to the lab, so I suppose we need to trigger something first.

We have almost doubled our stats since we started (I believe we started at 8 Offense, 8 Defense, 10 Agility). It sure is taking a while. Hex has helped considerably, but it's still slow work.

There is one last thing I wanted to point out on this screen. The balls at the bottom of the screen show the items we've collected so far (the black and green blob is the map "item"). The only item that's grayed out is Nukeya which we haven't found yet. Earlier I'd described the differences between single-use items and multi-use items. You might notice now that all the single-use items are striped billiard balls while all the multi-use items are solid billiard balls. This makes it a bit easier to remember their utility as you're equipping them.



Here are the finer statistics. We've performed 227 total Huffmans through all our work. Bleh. Oh well, at least our stats are nearly doubled now.

What's next?

I'm most interested in triggering more lab videos next (since there are a lot of them), although I'm not positive how to do it. I figure I'll just do more grinding now since that's what the game wants us to do.

There are also videos specifically for dying, so maybe we'll give that a go!