I keep farming and farming and farming and *NOTHING*

Ive easily spend at least a hundred Golden Crystals on 1H Sword Gates and I cant for the life of me get a Sword Skill Damage EX Mod to drop. Its the last thing I need to finish my 1H Sword build, but it just won't drop

Ive rolled it for literally every other weapon, including Maces. Does it just not drop for 1H Swords specifically? Is it tied to a specific Gate and Ive just been running the wrong one?

Im losing my mind man. *Literal* insanity

&gt;!Klein!< is the only Partner Im missing, but try as I might I cant trigger the rest of his questline

Ive already completed 'Bride-to-Be'. Based off what Im reading, 'Suspicion' should've automatically trigged upon completion of former. But it just never did

Am I missing something? As far as I know only 'Bride-to-Be' requires a hidden dungeon

Hey everyone. I just rolled credits on EoA finally and went through that whole sequence of >!discovering the Labyrinth underneath Black Iron Palace!<

Now, I know very little about EoA's post game. I know theres a super boss, a true ending, and something called Waystones, and thats about it. My initial plan to conquer the post game was to clean up all the extra goodies from Quest zones then fight the super boss, but the post game seems to have more story than I was anticipating so I have a handgul of questions

1. How does this new Labyrinth work? Ive read that EoA's post game has rouge-lite like elements, is that this or something else?

2. What are the Waystones? How many are there?

3. Ive been putting off doing Golden Gates til I reached max Cardinal Rank so I can get the best possible rewards. Does CR cap out at 6 or is there more? I should note that I haven't attempted a single Golden Gate so I have no real idea on how they work beyond what's said in the little tutorial blurb

4. Without actual narrative spoilers, how does the narrative progress for the post game? If I follow Iori into the Labyrinth will I be locked in into encountering that super boss? Should I go do my do my map clean ups first and prepare more? I want the super boss to be the *absolute last thing I do in this game before the DLC launches*, so I wanna complete *everything else*, and potentially even completely build out my weapons if possible, beforehand

Thats all I wish to know. I appreciate any and all help

I pre-ordered a physical Ultimate Edition for PS5, and while it came with a redeem code for the bonus contents app and starter packs, I dont have anything on the Proto Elucidator weapons

Im reading on other posts that they shouldve been added to my storage upon completing the prologue. I had played the demo when that launched, so Ive already cleared the prologue, and still nothing. My PS5 has a side bar to purchase them for $5, but I'd rather not resort to that if I can help it

❗️SPOILER WARNING❗️I go pretty in depth with just about everything I encountered during my playthrough here, both gameplay and story. If you wish to remain blind, this is your spoiler warning. If not, then continue on

~

I have very, mixed feelings about this game

Like a lot of people, I felt the perceived difficulty after the tutorial was quite rough. The game felt oppressively difficult, to a point where I was questioning the game's positive reception and prestige that game's with bring the most critically acclaimed game of the year (so far). The game was so frustrating that I ended up temporarily dropping it for a couple days

I, of course, eventually learned how to properly approach the game, and things got much better. The difficulty through the intended region order felt a lot more balanced and fair than I originally perceived the game to be

But, that doesn't make Mina a perfect game. I think it still has some notable flaws, particularly in its combat design. Enemies can very easily out maneuver, out range, and out damage you, especially later on in the adventure. I get its the final area, but during Radiant Manor the enemies felt straight up unfair, and I had maxed out stats.

That said, most of my ire resides in standard enemies. Bosses, on the other hand, were largely very fair and appropriate challenges. There were a handful I felt were poorly designed or ridiculously oppressive, which Ill get to later, but more often than not I generally enjoyed Mina's bosses

The healing system also got pretty annoying. On its face needing to attack enemies to regain Plasma is fine, but the fact that you lose Plasma to pit damage got very frustrating, more frustrating than it should have been. It made every tiny mistake during platforming a death sentence because it then meant you'll be easier to kill by enemies later on, since e in order to heal you need Plasma, and in order to get Plasma you need to attack enemies, and doing that while on low health is extremely reckless. I really would've much preferred it if pit damage only depleted health; as it is now it makes every failed jump disproportionately punishing

But those are where my biggest issue lie. Nearly everything else I really enjoyed.

Something I think the developers really nailed was level/world design. In that regard, this game is quite fantastic. Theres only one region I can say I actively disliked, everything else was superb. Rarely, if at all, did I struggle to read and room or traversal challenge; everything was clear and extremely well communicated

I also really enjoyed Mina's story and characters. Mina herself was a super well realized and likable protagonist, the NPCs were full of Yacht Club's charm, and I liked Lionel as an antagonist and Thorne as a rival turned friend (possibly more?). This game also had impeccable presentation; absolutely gorgeous pixel art that emulated the GBC/GBA era style extremely well

~

From this point on, I want to go over my thoughts on each Generator region and their respective story bosses. I feel this necessary given just how much my opinion of this game wavered during my playthrough

Loner's Landing

Superbly designed tutorial area. Teaches the core mechanics and geberal design language of the game flawlessly

Nether Kraken

Not much to say since its the first boss. I didn't defeat it during my playthrough, tho knowing YCG its likely possible

Thorne

For the majority of my playthrough this aactually reigned supreme as my favorite boss fight. This fight was the perfect blend of challenging, yet manageable; Thorne's patterns were very easy to read and react to

Queensbury Crypt

First Generator of the game and I gotta say it was a very good start. The puzzle design and traversal obstacles were communicated extremely well, making for a really compelling first 'dungeon'

The Duchess

Duchess was disproportionately difficult for when you're intended to first fight her. She's well designed, but felt extremely aggressive and like I wasn't given much time to breathe and heal between her constant bounding across the arena, activating arrow traps, and tentacles erupting from the ground. This is a prime example of Mina's somewhat inverted difficulty curve, especially since by this point you dont have Plasma Funnel and have to deal with the insanely long start up animation for healing

Nox's Bayou

Very solid area, though not anything too special in my opinion. It mostly just amounted to a bunch of platforming and not a whole lot of puzzle solving

Mock Moon

Amazing premise for a boss with great patterns and fun flow. Really dont have a lot to say here to be honest

Nox's Beast

This is one of those bosses where the game's hit boxes feel against you, particularly when beyond the boss. In general this game struggles to properly convey the attack range and clarity of large enemies. Its not bad as some other giant enemies, but still a little annoying

Septemburg

The one area I actively disliked

I enjoyed the lightning rod mechanic, but the wind and ESPECIALLY the Carving Man felt awful to deal with. It didnt help when the three were combined, genuinely who's idea was it to combine two gimmicks that force you to wait out cycles with a giant unkillable enemy gimmick that forces you to constantly be on the move. Theres zero synergy between the three and I hated every second that fuckass scarecrow was on my screen

Mad House

Despite my issues with large enemy hit boxes, Mad House was honestly just, really easy. Now, I'd rather an easy boss compared to a frustrating one, but Mad House just had really simple patterns. If memory serves, this was one of two bosses I didn't die to

Carving Man

Speaking of the Carving Man, he's also far and away my most hated boss fight, purely for the fact that the fight is BROKEN. I used Recall Disc as my Sidearm since its A) provided to you just before the fight, and B) counters Carving Man's sheer size as well as he blocks he spawns in really well, acting as a nice escape route for both. The issue here however is that if you're unlucky and a block drops onto your portal, you're just completely fucked. Nevermind the fact that these blocks can even land on the portals in the first place, but why are you unable to cancel your current portal and place another one??? This feels like such a ridiculous oversight, Im genuinely baffled its in this otherwise extremely polished game

Bone Beach

The juxtaposition of going from the region i hated to my favorite is honestly crazy

I absolutely loved Bone Beach. The way it was structured and paced felt a lot like a traditional 2D Zelda dungeon, with a heavy focus on traversal and puzzle solving. What a fantastic area

Major Miner

Probably the most forgettable boss in the game for me. He's not particularly great nor particularly bad; just aggressively average with nothing that really stood out to me

Mined Mind

This fight felt like a lot on first attempt, but once I realized you could destroy the bone spires it became much easier to handle. Pretty cool boss with good challenge I'd say

Coltrane Peak

I'll fully admit, I used the Steady Soles for this region. That said, I liked it quite a bit. I found the puzzle solving, traversal, and platforming to be really fun. I'm a huge sucker for rail related stuff, so this was a pretty satisfying entry in the rail dungeon archetype

Unfortunately though, this is where the game started getting really annoying with its enemies. Theres giant mice with the throwing stars, as well as the long ass wolves which are only vulnerable on the head. Not only are they annoying in a vacuum, but they were placed in extremely tight platforming sections, which got really frustrating really quick. I dont want to dock the fun level design for annoying enemy design though

Thorne 2

Still a fun boss, but its fundamentally worst than the first since he's airborne now and this game really struggles with aerial combat

Frozen Horror

Largely okay miniboss but that final desperation attack after killing it was so bull. I didn't die to it, but its the principal of the matter

Locomotress Agnes

Not the hardest, but easily the most tedious boss in the game. Her constant floating made the fight such a slog to get through since you'd have barely any time to attack. Her attacks aren't even hard to dodge once you get the pattern down, its just that your attack window is tiny for 75% of the battle

Astral Orrery

Just barely misses being my favorite area in the game. A massive puzzle gauntlet yet an extremely fun one; the team decided to get really crazy with the puzzle mechanics here, befitting for the otherworldly location. My one issue with it is that the heavily reliance on platforming makes Plasma quite sparse in this region, which in turn makes healing more limited

Lumenarks

Just an overall really tedious fight for me. I have no idea if I was just doing something wrong, but the fight felt like it went on forever

The Congealed

Fantastic fight with adequate challenge. The surprise third phase got my ass good on first attempt lmao

Radiant Manor

Really fantastic puzzles and traversal that remixes all the unique mechanics from throughout the game in a tightly designed and super fun final dungeon. This one specifically reminded me of Lorule Castle in that regard, which is high praise from me cause that's probably my favorite 2D Zelda dungeon

But...

The enemies here SUCK bro. I was at MAX STATS and they still out maneuvered, out ranged, and out damaged me like crazy. Specifically the guys in the ballroom were really annoying, and the two mimics in the basement. I kept falling into a negative feedback loop with these assholes; every time I returned to hub and popped into the Underlab to refresh my resources, Id then have to deal with these fuckers in the foyer and potentially waste more resources on just them before I could actually continue with the dungeon. These guys were absurdly tanky and hard hittding for no good reason, AND THAT ASSHOLE LION KNIGHT WOULD CAMP THE SHIT OUT OF ME TOO. And OF COURSE I couldn't close the gap because the floor is fucking glass and you cant burrow on glass. God I fucking HATE this one room so much, near killed my enjoyment of the endgame singlehandedly

Thorne???

The most heartbreaking boss in the game. A really fun evolution of Thorne's prior two fights, but fighting this mutated Thorne was genuinely so sad

Furgus

Alright miniboss. His reach was a bit absurd but besides that it was fine

Barron Lionel

Far and away my favorite boss in the game. Everything about it was absolutely incredible. Just a no bullshit straight duel with perfect difficulty and amazing narrative weight and atmosphere

Radiant Lionel

Thorne swooping in to save Mina was fucking CINEMA dude holy FUCK what an incredible finale. The fight can feel like a bit much at points, but man I dont care that shit was awesome

And now a quick lightning round for optional bosses

Midden

He stinky p u

Armad

Cool that you had to weaken him with lava flow

Erva the Undying

Bullshit ass boss I hate you why the FUCK do you deal 66% of my health on a single hit and why the FUCK do you spawn in so many enemies

Mirren

I one tried it lmao

~

Rankings

Generators

1. Bone Beach

2. Astral Orrery

3. Radiant Manor

4. Coltrane Peak

5. Queensbury Crypt

6. Nox's Bayou

7. Septemburg

Bosses

1. Barron Lionel

2. Radiant Lionel

3. Thorne???

4. Thorne 1

5. Mock Moon

6. Thorne 2

7. The Congealed

8. Furgus

9. The Duchess

10. Mined Mind

11. Nox's Beast

12. Mirren

13. Major Miner

14. Armad

15. Mad House

16. Maxi

17. Midden

18. Frozen Horror

19. Locomotress Agnes

20. Lumenarks

21. Erva the Undying

22. Carving Man

~

In all, I generally really enjoyed my time with Mina the Hollower. Its not a bad game at all. But, its fairly flawed, particularly in how it presents its difficulty, and as such I didnt quite love it as much as I wish I did

I hope future playthroughs, particularly through NG+, I have a smoother time and as such can grow to truly love this game

I dont have a microSD Express card yet so I cant save my Replays right now. My game's still on 1.3.2 but I dont know if updating to 1.3.3 will kill them

Does it happem after *every* update, or only major version changes (1.1, 1.2, 1.3, etc)? If I update to 1.3.3 will my Replays remain intact or will I losr them

~

I'm sure this'll be moot on this sub, but still just in case some of yall haven't completed it already I want to give a spoiler warning for Road Trip, as I touch upon both endings and its big reward

I also wanna warn yall about the absolute yap that is this post

~

I got Air Riders about a week ago and have been making my way through the game and trying to get acquainted with it

I never had the opportunity to play the original release on GameCube, but I knew how beloved it was so I always wanted to. I was extremely excited when the sequel was announced in the big Switch 2 Direct and followed the pre-release marketing pretty closely. I didn't get Air Riders at launch, Age of Imprisonment took priority for me that month and since then I have been working on my backlog, but I found a gap in my 'schedule' so I decided to pick up Air Riders. All this to say that I was extremely hyped for the game and wanted to love it

After some tutorials, I jumped straight into Road Trip, since I knew that was the story mode of the game. I cant say I enjoyed it very much. Maybe it was just a really bad first impression, but for the entirety of the playthrough I just could not click with the game. It felt like in Sakurai's effort to make a 'simple' racing game, he made a needlessly complex, chaotic, and unintuitive one. Air Riders felt like it was trying too hard to be like Smash, a party-fighter, but didn't really succeed at being both that and a racing game. The only part I had really enjoyed on a gameplay front was that final race against Noir Dedede; it felt like the game was actually allowing me to breathe

My main issue with Road Trip really were the minigame like stages. Anything that required me to go head to head with the CPUs felt awful and borderline rigged against the player. The Button Rush, non-linear Gourmet Races, box/pillar breaking, and arena battles felt awful. The controls just feel way too imprecise and I found myself struggling to actually properly plan a route, adapt to the CPU behavior, and, well, control my character. I used Kirby/Warp Star for most of the run too, so I could get as much of a vanilla experience as possible.

For the arena battles in particular, specifically against proper drivers, it felt like they were given ridiculous attack priority. I had to rely purely on projectile Copy Abilities for the Meta Knight fight in Farthest Reach because Sword, Needle, and Fighter literally would not come out regardless of my distance and Meta Knight always got to attack first

For what its worth tho, I quite enjoyed the story itself. I found Zorah's tale to be pretty compelling and the way the twist completely reframed the narrative near single-handedly gave me the resolve to see Road Trip through to the end just so I could see how the story concluded

Overall though, I came off Road Trip really down on the game as a whole. That Noir Dedede race was a highlight, but I didnt really enjoy my time with Air Riders up to that point much at all

I still wanted to stick with the game tho and see if hopefully things will actually start clicking, so I decided to just do some standard Air Ride races, still with Kirby/Warp Star. And it was actually incredibly fun. Standard races are much less chaotic than in Road Trip and it felt like I was actually acclimating with the game's central gimmicks and course design. CPUs also felt more fair, even on higher levels. I still feel like they're a tad bit overturned, some courses it feels like a complete shot in the dark on if I'll be able to beat 7-9s, but overall they felt way less aggressive and prioritized than in Road Trip

That said, I don't think a few of the 'retro' courses fare well, or I guess 'Nostalgic' will be Air Riders's equivalent. Fantasy Meadows feels like it's *way* too much of a frontrunner track, so much to the point that catching up feels borderline impossible. Even with lvl1 CPUs, I struggled to catch up because I was left with absolutely nothing; no enemies to defeat for speed boosts and no Copy Abilities to obtain. I only managed to actually pull ahead cause I popped my Special at an opportune moment. But then on the flip side you have courses like Frozen Hillside and Sky Sands, which had brief segments of turns that felt really awkward and like they don't fit the game's controls and physics well. Nebula Belt is also quite boring and barren.

But I did enjoy just about every 'nitro' track for what it's worth, and the Nostalgic courses I didnt mention it don't have much issue with

I also played everything in Top Ride, especially since I wanted to unlock Starman. Not much to say here tho to be honest. I also did them with Kirby/Warp Star and completely blew past even lvl9s. When I first encountered Top Ride via Road Trip I found the controls to feel a bit slippery and imprecise but Ive gotten used to them by now

After a couple days of just running Air Ride on loop (highkey got addicted), I decided to do NG+ on Road Trip and get the true ending so I could see the full conclusion to the story and unlock Noir Dedede. I dont know what it was this time around, but my second Road Trip run was actually incredibly fun. Theres still a couple isolated challenges I took some issue with for one reason or another, but the majority of my NG+ run was a blast

The finale was quite incredible too. I'm a bit sad that we skip over that final race with Noir, but the boss rush was super fun and Noir actively teaming up with Kirby to take down Galactic Nova was genuinely hype. The actual fight against Galactic Nova himself wasn't anything too special, but thats alright

Also, I'd be remiss to not bring up Air Rider's presentation. This game is absolutely gorgeous man. The visuals, UI, and style are all stellar, and the soundtrack is quite great as well. The Sakurais and their team cooked a delicious five star gourmet meal here

For as much as Ive come around on Air Riders, I don't think its without fault. I still have minor issues with the controls, namely the Quick Spin input. I really dislike that it *requires* flicking the stick and that there's no option to assign it to a button input. My hands are fairly shaky, and as such I'd keep accidentally inputting Quick Spin when simply just trying to swerve because of how high the sensitivity is normally. Ive since decreased it to Hard, but now there's a new problem in that Quick Spinning in a multi-lane rail is a hassle since I'll end up switching rails before the spin registers. I'd much rather that than constantly slowing down on standard road, but still, *both* issues could be very easily eliminated if we could just assign it to a button

All that said, that's about where I'm at with Air Riders. Since unlocking Noir, Ive genuinely soul mained him with Wheelie Bike, even made a custom variant of the latter in My Machine to match my favorite rider. I also have Meta Knight/Transform Star and Starman/Warp Star as seconsaries for when I feel like mixing things up, but Noir/Wheelie handles perfectly for me, even with the inability to take glide paths, and looks so sick that I'm perfectly content with just using him lmao

I haven't tried out City Trial proper yet. I'll give it a couple runs some time in the future but to honest Air Ride is much more my vibe

I started off thinking Air Riders was my least favorite of the big three 2025 kart racers, honestly the only one I had more negative feelings for than posotive, but by this point I think it might actually have my favorite moment to moment gameplay. Each of the three scratch different itches for me, but in Air Riders's case Ive grown to love how involved it feels, how nearly every action you take rewards you in the race by giving you a burst of speed. There was a bit of steep learning curve but once everything started clicking its been impossible to put the game down because of how addicting that core feedback loop is