This guide is for those looking for bit of help before going for a perfect playthrough, especially English-speaking players. Usage of more comprehensive guides out there recommended, this guide will only patch in some information otherwise often missing.
Contents
Tips to Complete Achievement Walkthrough
All credit goes to 辻斬り!
Introduction
This guide is spoiler-free.
It is mostly aimed at helping English-speaking players, as players speaking Chinese will be able to understand the game contents better and also have wealth of various comprehensive guides more readily at their disposal.
I recommend checking this guide before your playthrough just to be aware of the things, and mostly reference the proper walkthrough guides during your playthrough.
If you have already completed one playthrough, you are likely already familiar with a lot of the general things mentioned here.
Some achievements come from the DLC, but since the DLC is free and the fan localizations typically require having it anyways, it should not end up being an unpleasant surprise to anyone.
The contents base on my own experience with the game, things I missed first time around and/or hoped I knew beforehand.
If you have questions or comments, leave them down below, and I may hopefully see them at some point.
Good luck and have fun!
General Tips and Information
General gameplay
Carefully read everything the game gives you. This is stylistically more of an old-school game, where hand-holding is fairly minimal, and you are required to understand and find things on your own. This becomes even more important with the lacking localization (see below for more).
Postpone going for objectives that progress main story until you are done with all the other possible things you can do at the moment, like exploration and side quests etc. This should be pretty common way of playing these kind of games to begin with I suppose.
Interacting
The game will tell you during some battle tutorials that you can switch targets in battle by pressing right joystick. Unsure what button is with keyboard+mouse -configuration, but the tutorial will probably tell you if that’s what you use.
What the game does not tell you however – as far as I can remember – is that you can also use the same button to change your focus of interactions. This is incredibly important and useful, since without this the interaction system is downright insufferable at times, making some targets impossible to interact with when there are several possible targets around.
Localization
There is no official localization, but you can get couple different fanmade ones from the Steam forums of the game.
The quality is frankly bad unfortunately, at least with the one I got. Perhaps some of them would be better instead. In any case, this makes carefully reading (and having some reading comprehension) ever more important for success. The quality is not only broken English, but also will have inconsistencies and some terminology might be scuffed.
English text will take different space than Chinese. This means that a lot of time, parts of the English text will be cut off, meaning you miss out on information. Notably this will happen with a lot of rumours. Since the relevant rumour information will still typically fit the dialogue where it is given, it is important to take note of the information in case it will not be properly visible in the rumour tab anymore.
While this space issue may be different depending on which fan localization you picked, I doubt any of them fix this, since that would mean a lot more work than just pure translation.
Specific Tips and Information
Xiaoxi Village Quests
A lot of the things in the game are missable, but most of them aren’t on particularly tight schedule with it, so if you follow guides, you are likely to catch most things after the world opens up.
Few of the most missable things happen in the starting village in the beginning. Make sure to avoid the objectives throughout the beginning sequence, and push all possible side objective and exploration first. After returning to Kaifeng again with free exploration, couple of the intro side quests get locked out.
Fortunately, none of these are particularly important reward- or story-wise to my knowledge and will not lock you out of achievements, but perfectionists will suffer.
Speaking of early Xiaoxi and the intro, if you win that second big boss battle early on that you are supposedly expected to lose, you get massive amount of bonus training points. This according to the internet, I did not personally do it.
Gathering martial arts routines
Most of the martial arts routines are not particularly missable if you just follow decent guides, you get them from various side quests. One of the fist martial arts I found to be quite missable though, as I missed it the first time around even as I progressed fairly carefully with the game.
Relatively early on, plot will bring you to meet an old man that will teach you “sleeping”. From that point on, dying will also bring you to this old man, there will be bit of dialogue, and he will give you something. This only happens couple of times though, after that dying becomes “business as usual”.
To put it short, avoid dying early as much as you can. The old man will give you this fist martial arts routine in one of the visits to him (maybe the second time after the plot one or so). Catch is though, that he will only give the martial arts to you if you have filled all triagram segments to at least first floor (level 3), otherwise you will get training points instead. Can’t confirm exact numbers though, read that on the internet.
Personally during my first playthrough I died couple of times to one relatively early boss fight after the first meeting with the old man, and got training points instead of the martial arts. No matter how many times I tried dying later in the game, he would not give the fist routine to me anymore.
Triagram
Fully completing the triagram requires a mostly perfect playthrough. Personally I only know one task that I missed that could potentially give some triagram points, yet I only completed my triagram in the very last sequence in the burning city. I ended up with about 30 surplus points, with the last area having given me 45. You will only get 30 instead of 45 from the last area if you are unable to complete the “prodigal son of the abyss” -side quest in the area.
Luoyang jars
There are side quests for each city that require you to break jars around the map. Your mileage may vary, but I personally struggled a lot with Luoyang quest with one jar left. It turned out that one jar in western Luoyang (next to theatre people) seems very buggy, and I had thought it just another environmental jar instead of interactable one. It will be shown in any guides showing the jars though, so shouldn’t be too missable if following any guide.
In any case, it might end up requiring lots of fiddling around the spot to finally get the interaction to pop up and complete. This issue might be related to the theatre fella appearing near the spot, as most guides I saw for the jar were taken prior to him appearing. So, if you go for the jar right away early on as you get access to Luoyang, you might have better luck with it.
Accumulating money
One achievement requires accumulating 100k money. For me personally, relatively perfect playthrough resulted in roughly 120-150k money accumulated, so if you don’t spend too wastefully, this will come on its own.
Additionally, if you want to max out all 17 heart methods, training points will be the bottleneck, and while grinding for those, you will amass fair bit of money as well. For reference, I had about 30k money after the money given by the playthrough, yet I had over 150k after finishing my grind for training points.
If you pick up the habit of completing bounties as you run around the cities, you will slowly accumulate both money and training points alongside all other activities.
All in all, no need to worry about the money.
Accumulating miscellaneous pickups
One achievement requires picking up 1000 items. This does not seem missable, since couple areas have pickups that regenerate at times (most notably that township with the old doc).
The unfortunate part is that you will likely need to rely on said regeneration. Exact numbers are impossible to guess, but I would estimate basing on when the 500 one opened that a regular meticulous playthrough will give maybe 800 pickups. This means there’s unholy number of repetitions waiting for you if you don’t manage to get whole bunch more from somewhere.
As such, I recommend constantly visiting the places with regrowing pickups, so you slowly accumulate them alongside other activities. Since regrowing also requires some time or activities in-between, you are a lot better off not leaving it to the end as a singular activity.
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