How To Get Rid Of Crabs
Posted on | December 17, 2008 at 8:33 pm | 4 Comments
Tenacity: That’s how.
Regular readers will notice that I’ve been playing the Nintendo DS game Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia a lot lately. In fact, I’ve been neglecting my PlayStation 3 because of it. The reason is because I was stuck on one particular stage, and became obsessed with defeating it. Well, today during my lunch hour, I finally defeated that stage. I feel immense relief. And a soreness in my right arm and shoulder.
First, a little background. You may remember about how addicted I am to the Castlevania series of games, especially the ones on Nintendo’s handheld systems. I recently finally finished Portrait of Ruin after playing it for like two years. At that time, I said I was going to rush out and buy the next game, Order of Ecclesia. But then I started researching it. The reviews were almost unanimous that the game was interesting and somewhat different from the other CV games, but that it was also punishingly hard. And if the reviewers, who are hardcore players, are saying it’s too hard, then it must be impossible for us more casual players. But the lure was too strong and I gave in and bought it.
And the reviewers are right. I don’t remember ever playing a CV game this hard, except maybe some of the ones on the old original 8-bit Nintendo system. The enemies and obstacles are formidable and the AI actually shows some signs of intelligence. The game doesn’t give anything away – you have to work hard for every inch of progress. In past CV games, if you had trouble getting through a certain area or defeating a certain boss, you could always backtrack and build up your experience level (known as “grinding”) until you reached a level where you were powerful enough and had enough maximum health points to bull through whatever the game throws at you. In Ecclesia, it’s harder to grind. And going up a level or two doesn’t always help you. The game is very spare with providing you with health restoring potions and items. Expect to die a lot. There’s one early level where you’re forced to go through a forest and these flying cyclops octopus things swoop down on you, where they latch onto your head, and lift you up in the air and suck out your life force. They are difficult to avoid and to hit, at least until you acquire the axe weapon. There are swarms of them, and at the same time you’re trying to avoid and/or kill other enemies, including axe-throwing armor guys and arrow-firing skeletons. It’s incredibly frustrating, but also satisfying when you finally make it through.
The bosses in the game are also extremely difficult to defeat. They often appear at the beginning or middle of an area instead of the traditional end. There’s a giant skeleton in the Prison Island level that can only be defeated by carefully hanging out at a strategic spot using a magic sling/tether thing and tediously lobbing axes at it for several minutes until your fingers cramp up or bleed. But that’s nothing compared to the giant crab at the beginning of the Lighthouse area. OMG! That’s the thing took me so long to finally defeat. Normally in a case like this, I would just continually grind until I got to a high enough attack/defense level. And/or I would buy enough health restoring items, in order to take my hits and just mash at the thing until it dies. But extra health doesn’t really seem to help much with Crabby Boy. In fact, it’s pretty easy to learn his patterns early on and avoid taking damage. The problem is that the boss fight occurs in multiple vertical-scrolling stages inside a tower. Between stages, you have to leap up platforms in order to escape the pursuing crab. If it just involved leaping, it wouldn’t be so bad. But this stage of the game requires you to master a play mechanic (the aforementioned sling/tether thing, aka “Magnes”) that is extremely wonky and difficult to control. Most of the time, I ended up accidentally flinging myself into the crab instead of away from him. That means almost instant death.
I did have to end up doing some grinding in order to defeat the crab. I rose up a couple of experience levels in order to increase my health meter. I figured out how to get the shopkeeper to finally sell me health potions, and stocked up on those and meat (which also restores some health). So then, instead of relying on my magic Magnes slinging abilities, I was able to actually get the crab to “push” me up the tower in the final stage of the battle. Every time I fell into him, I would lose a lot of health. But by constantly restoring my health and not dying, the crab’s body ended up propelling me within range of the platforms I had to reach without having to engage the stupid Magnes. Then I just had to drop an elevator on his butt and I was done.
That doesn’t mean I’m done with the game. In fact, I’ve completed a very low percentage of it. From reading the reactions of other players on various forums, it appears that the crab battle is where most people who bail on the game give up. It’s kind of like those introductory engineering classes in college where they try to weed out the people who think they’re fit for an engineering career but really aren’t. I don’t envision clear sailing from here on out, but at least I feel more comfortable in the boat. I’m feeling less frustrated and I think I may have a chance with the rest of the game.
I’m just not looking forward to the inevitable level where you must scale a different tower, one with moving platforms and turning gears, while Medusa Heads try to knock you back down and/or turn you to stone. There’s one of those in every CV game and they’ve nearly made me explode with frustration and anger in the past.
I apologize for the long video game digression, which I’m sure bores and/or mystifies most of my gentle readers. But y’know, there’s few things in life more important than Castlevania!
Next: More Batman.
Latre.
Pet Peeve of the Day: How a certain commonly searched-for phrase in Google leads to a post of mine even though not all the words in the phrase appear in the post. And my post is #1 under the search results! I don’t like this because 1) this search term is not necessarily how I want people to arrive at my blog, and 2) there are so many instances of the term in my statcounter statistics that it ends up pushing other phrases off the results (statcounter only saves the last 500 pageloads unless you upgrade to a paid account). Hint: The target post title has “swindle” in it.
Poignant Search Term Of The Day That Led To This Blog: I don’t have one, since the good phrases keep getting pushed off.
Videogame(s) Played Recently: Guess.
Comments
4 Responses to “How To Get Rid Of Crabs”
December 17th, 2008 @ 9:20 pm
Maybe you need to change the name of that post to “Spicy C***** W*** Supreme.”
December 17th, 2008 @ 9:59 pm
> I did have to end up doing some grinding in order to defeat the crab.
Isn’t this what I’ve been saying to you ALL ALONG?
December 17th, 2008 @ 11:19 pm
Maybe you need to change the name of that post to “Spicy C***** W*** Supreme.”
It wouldn’t help, since that’s not the major search term that’s landing on the page. The actual search term is three words, “T*** B**** c***pons”. The second word doesn’t even appear in the post or the comments or the links!
(I excised all occurrences of it months ago, which worked for awhile. But now the traffic is back.)
December 19th, 2008 @ 4:27 am
Amazing what Google sometimes finds to be the most relevant site. I once typed in Norweigian Forest Cat and it returned a bunch of sites that Sister Mary wouldn’t have approved of. And I did type cat, not the synonym that starts with the letter P.