Part 1: Menus, Powers, and Weapons
Update 3If you want the TL;DR version, Kid Icarus: Uprising does a funnier job explaining (almost) everything I’m about to explain here.
So, for this update I’ll be walking you through the menus, weapon fusion, and abilities to familiarize yourself with all the goodies and mechanics the game has to offer. After this update, we can all finally get to voting on what to do with our weapons – which to sell, which to buy, and which to fuse. Whatever option gets the most votes is what I’ll use for the next two videos, then we start it all over. It’ll probably get a little hectic, but hopefully we can all keep our heads on our shoulders.
Here’s the main menu a second time. Not anything ground breaking or confusing, and you could probably tell what everything is just by reading the names. But the Vault in particular has a bunch of neat stuff that we haven’t yet seen.
Idols are basically little animations of just about every single thing in the game that you can collect over time, along with some flavor information to go along with them. Sakurai loves to do things like this with his games, including the Smash Brothers series and their trophies.
That little camera icon above the L button on the bottom screen means I’ve scanned the AR card of this particular idol. The 1/7 number at the bottom means it is showing the first Idol of the seven I have collected. If you saw that column of cards in DoctorWhat’s video, you can have a rough estimate of just how many Idols there are to collect. It’s pretty intense, but I admire the developer’s tenacity to come up with so many things to talk about when they’re pretty much just relegated to the Kid Icarus universe.
The music gallery is exactly what it says it is. Not really much for me to mention here, other than to keep up with Admiral H. Curtiss’ posts for the music as we come across them. I really appreciate the help!
This is the Power Portrait. Just as the lower screen says, the more powers we acquire, the more of the portrait we’ll unlock. We currently have 7 powers out of 60 total. Some powers actually have more powerful versions of themselves floating around as well, but we only need one unique power for it to count here.
This is the Offering. It does nothing. Nothing. You come here when you have just so much money that you can’t in good conscience hoard it all so you give it back to Palutena. That’s it: you come here if you hate money.
When you donate to Palutena, she takes a few steps towards you. How many steps depends on how many hearts you give to her. The above screenshot is from zero hearts donated…
…and here’s after we donate a thousand. A clear difference, but again, you’re just wasting your hearts. You have to donate a pretty ludicrous sum if you want her to be front-row, too.
This is the Idol Toss. It’s a quirky little minigame where you put the eggs on the right in the bowl, then you flick the bowl from the bottom of the screen to the top. The eggs then have a chance (the percentage is indicated on the lower screen) to become a new Idol.
Different coloured eggs have different chances of becoming an Idol. The hierarchy of worst chance-best chance is white < green < blue < red. You can add more eggs into the bowl to increase the odds of you winning a new Idol.
Be careful, though, because those eggs are very fragile. If you drop one from too high a place and it doesn’t land in the bowl…
It shatters, and you’ve lost that egg for good. What’s more, once you pick an egg up, you can’t set it back down on the ‘shelves’ on the right. But if you pick it up and decide you don’t want to use it, you can just set it down gently and leave the screen, and it’ll be right back where you left it.
Finally, the Records tell you your totals and averages from your playtime with the game, including your favourite weapon; which weapon you have most stocked; how many enemies you’ve defeated; and so on and so forth. Perfect for nourishing the accountant in you.
Oh, good.
Anyway, that’s enough of that. Let’s move on to more important matters: the powers we can equip, for starters!
Every new file comes with one ability pre-equipped for your use: Health Recovery Lv. 3. Most powers can come in tiers of strength, and their level can affect their durability, their potency, how many charges they have, and etc. In this case, Health Recovery recovers the same amount regardless of its level, and the level of the ability refers to how many charges it has.
The goal here is basically to fill the grid with as many powers as you can. The more powers you shove in, the more you’ll be able to use during the land segments of a level. Powers can come in all sorts of shapes and sizes depending on their use, with the higher level/more powerful abilities taking up more space.
You can also rotate the pieces around by 90-degree intervals with the shoulder buttons, to cram more shit in there.
But say you don’t especially care about abilities. Say you just put in what you want, and while you could just leave it at that, you don’t like looking at the empty space of the grid. In that case, just tap the top left corner of the bottom screen and Palutena will help you out.
Since we don’t really have any powers that are worth much to me right now, I’ll just go with what Palutena gives me for now.
That pretty much wraps up the abilities. Finally, let’s finish this update with the thing you’re probably here for: weapons and weapon crafting.
This is the weapon we’ve been using the past two updates. Despite what you may think, the First Blade isn’t necessarily a weak weapon, and with the right crafting, it can in fact be quite formidable. This First Blade, though, has absolutely no perks and no points in either its ranged or melee stats. It has nothing at all going for it and the first weapon you pick up in-game is guaranteed to be superior. So let’s sell it.
The green lettering means the weapon you might be considering to sell is currently set to be used in multiplayer. You can still sell it, but you’ll have to change your loadout.
The red number on the right is how many Hearts the weapon will fetch if you sell it. A better weapon will, of course, fetch a better price. The First Blade is worth a paltry 20 Hearts, while our “best” weapon clocks in at 230. You can select multiple weapons to sell at once, which is a nice detail.
You might notice that, underneath the Ranged and Melee stats of the First Blade, it says it has a Value of 100, yet the price we’re getting for it is 20. Value actually has much more to do with crafting rather than its resale value, so when it comes to selling stuff, it’s better to ignore that number.
Anywho, let’s just go ahead and get rid of that First Blade.
With the dead weight gone, let’s start crafting shit, finally.
From this grid, you can determine which weapons can be combined with which other weapons to create something new. There are no limits, and it’s absolutely possible to craft everything with everything. While, in this screenshot, it says here we can’t merge the First Blade with the Sagittarius Bow, that’s just because we haven’t unlocked the resulting weapon yet (like, for instance, another Zodiac weapon). We can, alternatively, fuse the blade with the Fortune Bow, and this would be the result:
The fact that the resulting weapon is a “Palm” isn’t a coincidence: if a sword can merge with a bow, it will always always always be a palm. Here’s a handy guide explaining what weapon will always turn into what if they were to fuse, courtesy of the Internet:
When crafting a weapon, the resulting weapon can have attributes from both the two weapons it came from into the final product. For instance, in the First Blade + Fortune Bow mix, the resulting Burning Palm will keep the bow’s one attribute (Speed +1) while keeping three of the blades (Shot defense, etc) while tossing two (Speed +1 and Heart Bonus +2). The Palm will have a 1.5 in Ranged, 0 in Melee, and have a value of 180.
To determine what weapon keeps what attribute and what stat will be what is pretty mind boggling: the guide to it on GameFAQs is very extensive and gets down into the very core of the mechanics. There’s a whole lot to it! If you’ve ever tried to breed and raise Pokemon competitively, then you have a rough idea on just how intense weapon fusing in Kid Icarus: Uprising can be. That guide can explain the whole thing way better than I ever could, but here are the basics:
- Every weapon has a base Value of 100.
- Values are determined by a weapon’s Ranged and Melee stats as well as its attributes. A weapon’s value cannot exceed 342 (or, if it can, it’s never been done).
- Every weapon has a bias towards either Ranged or Melee. Every weapon, not every type, which is how Blades, which are supposed to be perfectly balanced, can be biased.
- Having a whole new attribute raises the Value of a weapon higher than having a whole lot of one. This, in turn, punishes having six +1 attributes over having one attribute in +7. This is mostly only important if you intend to fuse the resulting weapon down further.
- When fusing two weapons, the game averages out their Ranged and Melee stats to get the final result – with a small multiplier depending on the bias of the weapon with the higher attribute.
So, what I’m trying to say is, the best way to fuse weapons in this game is to throw shit at the wall and see what sticks.
There are 9 categories of weapons, and while we’ve only found five in this LP so far, for the purpose of this update, the nine categories are Blade, Staff, Bow, Club, Arm, Palm, Orbitars, Claws, and Staff. They all come with their own strengths and weaknesses and their usefulness mostly depends on the situation, but of course, you can have your own personal favourites. In my first file, I crafted myself a Silver Bow and ran with it for half the game.
Blade:
The most basic weapon-type and is the most user-friendly. Every blade is well-rounded, without any glaring strengths or weaknesses, and can be used well at any range.
Staff:
Better used at a range, these weapons excel at distance combat and typically have the most powerful charged shots of all the weapons. Some charged shots can even grow in strength the farther they go. Some staffs also come with a magical property that can further hinder enemies, such as trapping them in force fields. Their melee damage is usually very poor, however, and unlike every other weapon, their charged shots do not home in.
Claws:
Polar opposites of the staffs, the claws are far better at melee attacks and short range than they are at long range. They’re capable of continuous fire, much like the blades, and their melee attacks come in combos of five as opposed to the usual three. They have powerful charged attacks that work up to medium range as well. Personally, they’re my favourite type of weapon.
Bow:
Pit’s most iconic weapon, and what he was equipped with for his previous two games. Bows work at all ranges but are best for medium-ranged attacks, with no special attributes at long range or melee-range. They’re roughly as balanced as the blades, though at range they sacrifice rate of fire for slightly more power.
Palm:
Club:
As you can probably guess, they excel incredibly at melee range and suck everywhere else. One swing from a club can put quite the dent on even the strongest of enemies. With all that strength, though, comes with a huge cost in speed. Their swing can deflect projectiles, and while they’re designed for melee combat, they at least have some ranged combat and can fire projectiles with charged shots. Last I played, the Black Club seemed to be a crowd favourite in multiplayer.
Cannon:
Something of a gimmicky weapon, the cannons work equally well at every range and their shots neither gain nor lose strength as they travel. Some weapons have shots that can rebound off floors and walls to hit enemies around corners. It’s best used against groups of enemies, though the splash damage can make fighting a single opponent a bit easier. Because of their clunky size, they slow Pit’s running speed considerably.
Orbitars:
These weapons work best at long ranges, since their shots gain power the longer they travel, and they excel over the staffs in that their shots can still home in. Because they always come in pairs, they are best used against two enemies at once. They have really finicky melee attacks, though. The red-headed stepchild of the weapons, nobody really seems to like the orbitars.
Arm:
Like the clubs, the arms are best used at melee attacks, and specialize best at dash shots. The properties of the arms vary the most between their individual weapons, with some featuring multiple-hit charged-shots and others naturally increasing Pit’s running speed.
Finally, if all that just doesn’t tickle your fancy enough, you can just buy your weapon of choice from the store.
Here’s a short video detailing what we can buy, and what we can fuse.
For anyone playing at home, say you want to muck around in Weapon Fusion but you don’t like whatever it is you got, or maybe you don’t want to keep any of your results and you want to try again. Kid Icarus uses a redundant saving system, where the game saves every time you enter a different screen on the menu.
That little yellow square in the top left corner of the upper screen is the “saving” icon. The game saves so often mostly to prevent you from scumming for weapons – exactly what you’re trying to do. The only solution to that is–
– take out the cart before leaving the Weapon Fusion screen. Nothing more to it.
And that should be that! The fate of the next two update’s rest on your shoulders. Vote on what we should do with our current stockpile of weapons! We can sell them all except for one; we can fuse weapon A with weapon B to get weapon C, then (potentially) fuse weapon C with weapon D; we can just use one of the weapons we have now; whatever! Voting ends Monday, February 11, at 12:00 PM Atlantic (11:00 AM Eastern)