Well, the good news is that I got past 17.2, discovering that the advice given by the guide is, for me at least, actually rather bad advice. Also learned you can follow security carts and shoot them in the back, and they won't turn around.
And after awhile of being stuck on 17.4 - god, that chase is crazy - I'm now stuck on 18.4. Is it just me, or are these flight levels with lots of walls and turbulence just...not fun?
I'd also like to see turbulence not auto-kill you, instead just shaving off a bunch of health (like 5k-10k per shot, at least on normal). There's a part near what I'm hoping like hell is the end of this level where there are like 3-4 turbulences in a small space, and even at the lowest possible speed, I always fail to thread the needle, so to speak. Having to mindlessly blow through the first half or more of the level, destroying energy barriers in the dozens, is just...
Well, this is really driving home a feeling I've had about this game, and so I'm sorta kinda changing the thrust of this topic a bit. Hey, I created it, I can do that.
This game's details are amazing, its sound design is quite good, its enemy AI and bosses are neat...but it's just not grabbing me. There's a lot of repetition, a metric crapton of stuff to unlock but really it just seems like you're going to have to do the same thing over and over and over again. Like for hundreds of hours. And I'm sorry, but when I've played a side-scroller through once, maybe twice, and get to a point where I have strategies that work for me, I may not want to just grind it repeatedly. I don't really relish having to do those security cart levels over again, nor the more complex flight missions, and oh dear god, don't even get me started on Carla.
So I've had sort of a moment, and I'm very strongly considering dropping the game. And no, it's not purely or even mostly because I suck, though I sort of do. It's because the point of the game seems to be "grind for random stuff, use random stuff to get bigger badder guns/weapons, wipe the floor with enemies till they can't hurt you much, then beat the game, increase the difficulty and pull your hair out all over again". My best weapon is the yo-yo currently, and I think my ship has something like 37500HP, but of course that doesn't help when turbulence auto-kills. I can get gold and levels on 18.1, but again, what's it all for? I can't unlock most of the stuff I want to without beating the game, and I can't beat the game without a tremendous amount of slog. And some of these items will require three, four, five or even more times the slog.
So I am not smashing the game. Obviously there are enough of you who enjoy it that it's doing many things right. I'm just...not sold on the whole concept. Would be nice to just auto-skip flight missions, honestly, as I don't find them fun.
Also, how does UFO Catcher work? On the off chance I do decide to come back to this one, what exactly is the point?
Check out my Manamon text walkthrough at the following link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/z8ls3rc3f4mkb … n.txt?dl=1