The best strategy I've found for this game is to concentrate your efforts around more firepower(early on, with more party members, and later through better weapons). Although it can cost a lot to upgrade weapons, they are more effective than the passive defenses since they eliminate bad guys immediately rather than just lowering the damage they do. Money and experience become more important later on, but mostly because they limit how much you can upgrade weapons.
This game has some horrible coding. The tutorialization is pretty bad(but at least there is some documentation) and it leaks memory every time you load a level, causing the game to majorly slow down after just a few minutes of play.
Tolrick: you don't solve that one by clicking fast, you have to wait before firing your lower left cannon so that your other two have a chance to recharge.
Once I got used to the controls I was having a good time. The "race" mechanic is a bit silly with the penalties, it should just be a fixed amount of time... and easy mode difficulty ramps up too much from tracks 4-5-6. But cool overall.
It looks like the optimal money strategy is to spend all your money in the early stages on potions, cause they're cheaper and you don't take as much damage then. Then later only spend for armor/bows?
Guide: Choose middle class with cash from court. Spend all money on magic or combat classes with reserve for resting. Clear the first 2 dungeons. Take no jobs until age 15. Early on allocate most of your money towards classes: going into town is best stress/cash/time ratio. At age 15 learn the night guard job(for phys defense/constitution) to 100 and use the earnings to study your attack skill to 100. Now you have money so always rest with the forest holiday; it saves time and gives the most stat bonuses. Then clear every dungeon. Never work again, you earn more from fights.
There are two specific things about the controls that I think are the source of most complaints. The first is that jumps have a very fast arc and this puts undue stress on the player to control it - shift+jump is really a bandaid to the underlying problem of precise jump control and it comes at the cost of adding another button. The other thing is that ladder grabs are difficult to execute and here, again, the game punishes you for not following a trite rule of holding up as you execute the jump. Is there a single place in the game where you would NOT want to grab a ladder as you jump?
I really, really liked the first Raider and played it hundreds of times, but this one just went over the top for me. The game doesn't deliver on the promise implicit in the main character having fighting as well as platforming abilities - it's just a cornucopia of rooms where the entire environment is a spike/lava death trap. The enemies, in contrast, are embarrassing pushovers and desperately need more challenging behaviors. So while it's harder than the first episode, it's less rewarding because all the elements are old. *** I went back to the first game and checked; no lag. Something about the engine changed between this one and the first one to make it stutter frequently.
Started playing in FF, saw some lag, thought IE might do better, but when I ran it in IE the page spawned endless referral link windows. aaagh...back to FF it is, I guess. (I blame Kong for all of it :P )
There are two glitches with enemies that I've found very hard to reproduce in a verifiable way: One is that enemy movement patterns are sometimes desynchronized based on scrolling(If I scroll ghosts onscreen then they move faster, I think, then if I wait and then scroll). That one hasn't affected my speedruns much. The other is that enemies sometimes hitreact but do not take damage. This second one happens all the time in 1-2 because I'll jump and shoot from offscreen to hit the last walker enemy and not waste frames slashing or jumping over him. Between 5-10% of the time I'll see three shots run into him and then still have to blast him another two times for a kill. That one is very annoying.
articuno: I've been having that problem entering the fig room. I don't reach that part of the run often(always playing on hard, still screwing up a ton) but it seems like the lowest ledge is unreliable, the higher ones are better. Worse comes to worse, you could always take a hit and then jump through the spikes during the invincibility timer.
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