Part 91: Bonus - New Game Plus

This won't be very complex, since New Game Plus doesn't add too much.



When you beat the game, you get a chance to save. These save files will have music notes to indicate this is a New Game Plus savefile.



When you load it, you repick the area you live in and your artifact placement.



Let's talk about what stays and what goes when you start New Game Plus:

+ Stats and items stay. All your levels, equipment, and random junk all stay with you.
+ All home upgrades stay. This includes Trent and the three workshops.
+ All pets and golems stay. They're available to you from the moment you restart the game and keep their levels.
+ All Li'l Cactus diaries and any other books you've collected are available.

- Most quests are reset. The exceptions are the five to do with home upgrades (pets, Trent, and the three workshop ones). The rest you have/get to do again.
- All artifacts are reset. This gives you a chance to reset things to get obscure pets/quests in case you played blind or whatever.
- All available NPCs are reset. To unlock them again, you have to do the quests that make them available at that point.
- Any quest choices you make are reset, of course. This means if you sided with Daena in the Faerie Quest, now you can side with Escad if you wanted to. You know, if you like siding with xenophobic faerie murderers.

New Game Plus lets you replay the game with the same character progression. It gives you a second chance to get quests or Li'l Cactus entries you may have missed. That's...pretty much it, as there's really only one thing that's actually new to New Game Plus.



When you beat the game, you gain The Forbidden Tome in your library. This sets your difficulty mode.



Yes leads to Normal Mode, which is the first playthrough. No leads to...



If you pick Yes here, you unlock Nightmare Mode, which adds roughly 20 or 30 levels to enemies. This way, you can have challenge when replaying if you want it. Of course, that still may not be enough for most people, so pick No again, and...



... just brings you back to the library. No unlocks No Future mode, where all enemies are L99 and take forever to kill. See, this is where the ridiculous amount of time you spend farming for materials and learning how to use the fucking forge pay off, as the game gives you a chance to actually use that stuff to slay powerful monsters. Of course, the boosted enemy levels also mean they'll drop better items usually, which makes it easier to farm the strongest materials for forging.

This is the only thing New Game Plus adds. No secret characters, no alternate endings, no new quest where you get to push Niccolo off a cliff. Still, it's a nice addition if you want to relive certain quests again and just want to breeze through the game, plus it adds challenge to justify forging.