Board 8 > ITT Lord Embok plays various video games. *spoilers*

(+) Yeah! (+)

tag

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The only way to live a good life is to act on your emotions

demon's souls servers are up for good

they changed their mind

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XS2 is the only good Xenosaga game - Lady Ashe
http://backloggery.com/cwistofu

damn you boacity now i have to actually think about which to play first

you could play xenosaga 2 again

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XS2 is the only good Xenosaga game - Lady Ashe
http://backloggery.com/cwistofu

MGS4

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From: LordEmbok | #001

Demon's Souls

start here, although all of the other games after will be worse.

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I believe there's meaning. No, I believe there's nothing.
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http://www.backloggery.com/Embok

I took your recommendations into consideration and didn't end up buying any of them. Instead I bought:

God of War 3, $20
3D Dot Game Heroes, $20
Metal Gear Solid 4, $20
Dragon Age Origins + Awakening + 7 DLC packs, $20 (I laughed when this was next to a $25 new copy of Awakening. Also when DA2 was $15)
Dark Souls, $40
Demon's Souls, $20
Knights in the Nightmare PSP, comes with downloadable Yggdra Union, $20 (I played this on my DS for a bit, no clue how they're going to make the gameplay work)
Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor 2, $30

Note that I don't know anything about the story of any of these games other than that apparently there are things called nanomachines and that Ocelot hosts a dance party on top of a car, so be careful with spoilers.

Also the dude at EB Games was the same dude from years ago when I last bought games. We talked about obscure jRPGs for a while, hell yeah.

Anyway first up is Demon's Souls because apparently its online is going to disappear soon.

I think I'll go with the traditional method of deciding - reading the instruction manuals.

you don't want to do Dark Souls before Demon's Soul.
Dragon Age and Devil Survivor 2 are very long games and not good starters as a result.
wouldn't say KitN is a good starter either because it's very much so needing a guide to play right. ditto for Yggdra Union.
GOW3 and MGS4 are both short games that are different genres from the rest and work better as in-between fillers.

leaves you with 3D Heroes and Demon's Soul. of those, 1 has a sequel.

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"Maybe it's a tentacle, molesting the planet itself. - Aschen Brodel.

tag

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<Die the death>! <Sentence to death>! <Great equalizer is the death>!!

Well Wang and his lawyer-like 'logic' wins, Demon's Souls it is.

Went with Wanderer.

Got my ass kicked in the tutorial.

The first act, stage, area, zone, whatever, is proceeding fairly smoothly. I died once because there was a hole in the ground for no good reason, but other than that I've managed to hang on. Boulders seem to be my weakness. When I see them coming I still get hit by them. When they're in a container waiting to be rolled at a bunch of enemies I fail to notice them, pull an enemy back, swing at the enemy, end up releasing the boulders, and get hit by them.

Item-wise I keep wasting herbs because for some reason I mix up square with swinging my sword fairly frequently, though never in combat so far - just when destroying barrels and the like. I also wasted all my firebombs trying to aim at explosive barrels from afar. Oh well.

There are a good deal more ghosts, messages, and bloodstains going around than I would have expected given that the sequel has been out for a while. They're useful too, saying things like "If you just started don't go here or you'll get your face kicked in" and "There's a dope ring at the bottom of this spiral staircase. Try not to fall down the middle."

I'm currently at a two path fork. One seems to lead to a grassy area but I haven't taken a look because there's a message saying "You can do this if you're on the black version of this stage" or something along those lines. No clue what that means, but I'm pretty sure I'm on the pure white version. The other path has a bridge filled with archers with a dragon chilling in the vicinity. Both paths say "Beware of the badass monster who will crush your puny skull". Yeah, thanks for the help.

you haven't said if you wanted advice/input or not, so . . . just to be safe; advice in message detail.

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I believe there's meaning. No, I believe there's nothing.
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If it's basic general stuff I don't mind. Which stats are good, which are worthless, what the hell a 'black version' is, etc. I don't want anything specific though.

okay don't read that message then. as far as world tendency goes, you can check it in the menu. basically it starts of neutral and if you kill a boss it gets more 'white', if you die there in your human form it gets more 'black'. if you're going for pure white world tendencies, it's best to kill yourself in the Nexus in your human form and just play as a phantom the whole way through so your world tendencies don't get any darker.

the white world and black worlds will be slightly different in terms of which enemies appear, paths you can go down, etc.

black tendency tends to be harder (yes, the game literally punishes players who don't know any better and die by making the areas they die in even harder)

as far as stats, plan out what you want to do ahead of time otherwise you'll end up wasting a lot of points.

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I believe there's meaning. No, I believe there's nothing.
http://i.imgur.com/RYunc.png

I eventually want to do the spear/shield + bow combo the dude in the Dark Soul's quick look was using, but my trusty starting sword is doing a pretty good job with its one or two hit kills so far.

If you're going for a melee class over a ranged/magic class (which is the most fun way to play DS), Endurance is extremely important. It lets you equip better equipment while still keeping the fast roll, and lets you take more actions in battle.

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

the main thing is that between the two of Str and Dex, you're going to want to decide on one early. figure out the requirements for the weapon you want to use and never put any more points into either Str or Dex than the min requirement for holding that weapon is, then put all of the points into the other stat (like say you want to use a sword that requires 10 Dex and 14 Str, just set your Dex at 10 and put points into Str and your other stats from that point on). also make sure that the weapon in question can be upgraded to either a pure Str or pure Dex (whichever you're going for) weapon.

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I believe there's meaning. No, I believe there's nothing.
http://i.imgur.com/RYunc.png

Yeah. Str and Dex on their own aren't very good, it's all about combining them with weapons that scale damage based on that stat.

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

By the way, unless you're going for a full-blown tank build, keep your equip burden at 1/2 or less of your max Endurance. This lets you keep the fast roll, which is very important for a melee class.

Also be conservative with your healing items. The game throws a million of them at you early on and then starts pulling the plug. You can buy more but it's best not to get overly dependent on them.

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Yeah I like being fast. The whole reason I went Wanderer is because it starts with like, 15 dex.

Dex doesn't actually affect your speed, although weapons that scale off of Dex (like the Scimitar, most fun weapon type in the game) tend to be close-ranged and fast.

Nothing in-game affects your actual movement speed outside of equipment build vs. Endurance and environmental hazards, I believe.

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Yeah, I always made it a huge point to stay below 1/2 equip burden, even if it meant going without any armor at all on places. The roll's got invincibility frames and goes pretty far for dodging.

Definitely get a good shield too, preferably one that has 100% damage reduction against physical attacks. I usually have one to be safe even as a mage, though the main thing to learn about it is your stamina regenerates slower while you have the shield up, so letting up on guarding between attacks instead of keeping it up the whole time helps a ton.

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I have no idea who you are, but I thank you for arousing me. - Beruga
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I liked fast weapons like swords/etc. when I first got into the series too, but ultimately I ended up loving polearm type weapons. they are easily the most fun to use, in my opinion. and as long as you watch your equip burden you can still roll around like crazy and play evasive; with the polearm style weapon though you can go two handed and have a massive thrust range that just makes you unstoppable. it's awesome to rush at enemies and be able to just impale them with a two-handed thrust without having to worry about them even getting close.

From: KJH | #023

Definitely get a good shield too, preferably one that has 100% damage reduction against physical attacks.

IIRC the blacksmith starts selling a Kite Shield with 100% damage reduction from the very beginning or right after you beat the first level. yeah, you want to get this as soon as possible and only replace it later in the game once you find a really good shield that also has 100% reduction but maybe better magic/fire reduction or something.

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I believe there's meaning. No, I believe there's nothing.
http://i.imgur.com/RYunc.png

I like to keep scimitars for most encounters and spears for narrow hallways, where sweeping weapons like scimitars get dicked over. This can hurt your equipment burden but it's totally worth it.

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

After testing things like how long I can run for, how long the dragon takes to arrive, etc, my strategy was this - run forward, run back as the dragon roasts everyone, run forward to bait the soldiers who didn't get roasted, run back, kill them, run straight past the remaining archers. It seemed to work, and from there I made it through the remainder of the level with minimal difficulties.

I appreciate how after a decent amount of progress there's always a lever of some sort to create a shortcut. Starting from the beginning of a level is fine and all, but with the ever-present risk of losing all your exp, it's nice that there's some form of permanent progress.

Phalanx. First death was because I needed to pause except y'know, there's no pausing. I freaked out when my bloodstain wasn't outside the boss room like I had seen in the Dark Souls quick look, since that's the only reason I went to fight him before levelling up at all. Second death was flailing wildly trying to figure something out. Third death I was gradually killing the blob things but got killed when I thought I was safe behind a pillar. Got him on the fourth try.

Back at the Nexus, I forgot to buy a better shield and repair equipment. Instead I blew all my souls levelling to 15 - primarily pumping endurance(which I would have even without your advice just by looking at the associated stats) with a little vitality and dexterity on the side. I was short less than 100 souls for the last level and didn't want to run around with 1300 souls in an unfamiliar environment, so I grinded the early area of the first stage for a couple minutes - and ended up falling in the same hole my first death was in. Whoops.

Now I'm not sure what to do - it seems all the other areas are available now too. Do I want to continue the first area, or move on to the second - and how will I even know which one is the second? Decisions.

Also I tried attacking the blind chick to see what would happen. Thank god she didn't get killed in one hit.

if you kill someone they disappear forever and you lose their services. so yeah, don't do that!

people recommend 1-1, 2-1, 3-1, 4-1, 5-1, 1-2, 2-2, etc. in that order but really you can play the stages in any order you want. it's a good idea to go to the Altar of Storms (4-1, I think) as soon as you unlock it and mess around a bit in there. there's enemies that seem difficult at first but give a great amount of souls, so you can grind on them for souls once you get the hang of fighting them. additionally, there's some nice gear that can be picked up in that place too.

myself I usually save the third world and fifth world for last once I'm a high enough level because the fifth is sort of annoying with all the poison/plague stuff and the third world legitimately creeps me out so I don't want to go in there without knowing I can go toe to toe with the enemies there.

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I believe there's meaning. No, I believe there's nothing.
http://i.imgur.com/RYunc.png

From: LordEmbok | #026

I was short less than 100 souls for the last level and didn't want to run around with 1300 souls in an unfamiliar environment, so I grinded the early area of the first stage for a couple minutes - and ended up falling in the same hole my first death was in. Whoops.

when this happens check your inventory for items like 'soul of a lost soldier' or something along those lines. those are basically souls in item form that you won't lose when you die, and you can 'use' them to cash in on the souls if you need to tip the balance toward gaining a new level or to purchase arrows or repair equipment when your souls are down to 0.

one thing you don't want to do is 'use' the souls that you get from bosses. hold onto them. they can be used to forge unique gear and learn special spells/miracles. except for one, which you give to the blacksmith so he can forge your weapons better.

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I believe there's meaning. No, I believe there's nothing.
http://i.imgur.com/RYunc.png

Well I already used Phalanx's soul so welp.

Also I got my first trophy ever. Can't wait to ruin my life getting all of them in everything I play - http://us.playstation.com/publictrophy/index.htm?onlinename=LordEmbok

Don't think Phalanx's soul gives you anything particularly good, but yeah, save boss souls.

4-1 has an amazing early scimitar you can find pretty early in the level with a little exploring.

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Started 1-2 and struggled against the slimes for some reason - I blame the darker environment + obstacles getting in the way. Then there was another dragon who running didn't work against - oops. So I gave up on that. Went to try the 'beginners shouldn't go here' area thinking nine levels should be enough. Nope.

Then I went to what I assume is 2-1 and nearly died to the first room of miner zombies. Man the 1-1 grunts were making me feel god tier, what is with this all of a sudden?

At some point during all this I upgraded my falchion to a +1 since it gives me a free repair. I also wandered the Nexus and found a dude who presumably teaches divine magic and is mad at me because I can remember 0 divine spells, but I can't find the guy who teaches arcane magic anywhere, which sucks because I want to learn a ranged spell to help me deal with the tough guy in 1-1 (speaking of ranged - I've still failed to find a bow).

For now I'm going to play some Dragon Age since it is supposedly going to be a giant time commitment. Tomorrow I will brave the area up the elevator in 2-1, but if that fails, I will try to not get beaten up by miner zombies again.

Ended up watching Sony's conference instead - Assassin's Creed looked good, God of War was God of War, and The Last of Us was fantastic. Guess I'll be picking up AC and Uncharted next.

AC and Uncharted both have iffy first games and pretty great sequels. Haven't played past AC2 though.

And yeah Demon's Souls get harder after 1-1. It's actually probably the hardest part of the game as you're still learning everything and your character is weak.

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

on my first playthrough I wasted a lot of time trying over and over again to clear one certain area, but after doing that so much and realizing I wasn't getting anywhere I decided to just venture around all of the different areas. seeing how far I could get and still return with a decent amount of souls, picking up gear along the way, etc.

by the time I had enough of a feel for all the initial stages to decide which one I wanted to do, my soul level was a bit higher and I actually had decent gear.

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I believe there's meaning. No, I believe there's nothing.
http://i.imgur.com/RYunc.png

I just beat my head against a wall until I somehow beat 1-2 with my low-level loser. I didn't know that the levels could be done sort-of out of order so I wanted to...do everything in order.

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

I played Dragon Age up until I unlocked the world map. I'm vaguely interested in seeing where the story goes but the gameplay is not so hot - possibly because I'm a generic human fighter, but after Demon's Souls that seems like a pretty bad excuse! Mostly it makes me want to play FF13.

Back to the zombie mines later.

Dragon Age 1 or 2?

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Wait did you really leave this page open for eleven hours before responding? I thought I was the only one who did that.

Anyway I ended up watching the Game of Thrones finale instead of playing Demon's Souls, which reminded me that I forgot to mention how much Dragon Age seems to be ripping off GoT. I should have named my character Jon instead of going with the default.

World 5 is actually pretty easy! Just bring the antidote herbs that I believe you get from world 3. 2-1 is a pretty ideal place to finish first, since that unlocks a superior blacksmith (though to bring out his full potential you need to beat 2-2 as well, which is a little difficult), but yeah, you're on the right track. You seem to have already figured out that Luck is a useless stat to level up as well, so that's good. One of the biggest mistakes I did on my first run through of Demon's Souls was not upgrading my weapons. I seriously do not remember how I made it through the game without doing that, but it's a godsend in Dark Souls.

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~KF~

LordEmbok posted...

Wait did you really leave this page open for eleven hours before responding?

All the time!

If you're playing DA2 I can't really comment as I never played it. Haven't heard really anything good about it though. If it's DA1, there's no real reason to play as a Warrior over a Rogue or a Mage. Rogues have fun skills and are the most difficult class. Mages have fun skills that are broken as hell. Warriors are just sort of...there.

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

It's DA1. I'm just so used to all the hilarious DA2 hate threads on LL that I accidentally called it 2 instead.

I went with Warrior under the logic I'm going to have to replay it several times anyway so I might as well go with the basics the first time around to get used to it.

Back to 2-1. Upstairs there was a spellcaster who caught me off guard and dropped almost all of my HP at once. After the initial surprise his magic was pretty easy to avoid with the roll, and he gives a pretty decent bit of exp. I got the axe that was up there but I'm not sure I want to use it. I like my sword. I took this opportunity to pick up the 100% damage reduction shield. It's great.

Heading back in, the zombies were a lot easier this time. In 1-1 my strategy was pretty much just dodge roll, strong slash, dead. Here however the zombies don't go down so easily. Repeated light slashes followed by a backroll seems to be the way to go against them.

Unfortunately the zombies give barely any souls and there are a ton of them, while there's only a few spellcasters. Not really efficient for grinding, so I have no choice but to proceed. Which goes smoothly until another spellcaster shows up, except this time with a large distance between me and him and no straight line to get there. Since I don't have any ranged weapons or spells yet, I've got no real option but to blindly rush at him and hope there's nothing in the way.

After I dropped to barely any HP again, I put down a message saying 'watch out for this dude's spells' and logged out. Now to play Dragon Age for a bit. Hopefully I'll get a recommendation while I'm at it, otherwise I'll head back to the Nexus and maybe give 3-1 a shot.

Demon's Souls message system was ruined by everyone just putting down "I'm in danger, please recommend this message." It's half of what I see these days. It's still a good idea to check messages because a decent amount will still be useful, especially near places like cliffs where there's sometimes a treasure if you jump down and you never would've dreamed of doing it otherwise.

And yeah, learning proper rolling is like 70% of how to win in melee combat in DS.

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

In Dragon Age I did the first town after getting the World Map. Yeah, not much to talk about there. Menial quests and fairly simple RPG combat don't make for a lot to talk about compared to Demon's Souls where I can go on and on about obstacles I face and my strategies to overcome them. This might explain why I've only ever finished one playthrough topic before - Shadow Hearts, where I spent a good deal of time discussing bosses that gave me difficulty.

Back to Demon's Souls. I did get one recommendation. I'm going to assume KP generously hopped on to heal me up.

I ran out along the path and sure enough there was nothing else in the area to kill me. I was stuck for a bit until I noticed the bridge to the spellcaster in the dark, which was kind enough to collapse. There was a bit of a scare when I was in a fairly tight area with five zombies coming at me, but a few of them were slow enough that I managed to wipe out the others before they arrived. Other than that, the giant room proved no further challenge.

The salamanders wrecked me at first - I used more herbs against them than I want to admit. Then I remembered I have a pickaxe and suddenly they were easy mode. Or at least, relatively easy mode. Due to my low strength I couldn't use my glorious 100% shield on them. Speaking of which, the very next enemies threw me off a bit too since they used piercing weapons. Then I started dodging again and everything was right in the world.

Skipped the fancy fog room since I figured I was coming up on the elevator near the start of the dungeon, and sure enough I was. I activated it and headed back to the Nexus to level up endurance since slightly more fire resistance may prevent me from dying instantly against the giant salamander the crazy old shopkeeper was talking about.

Fancy fog room wasn't a boss, but a path leading to a lever that let me put out the fire that leads to the actual boss fog. Not much to say about the path itself - no difficulties at all. Then I met Queen Gohma and got destroyed near instantly. Literally no idea what I'm supposed to do. A message said not to enter without magic but I have no idea where to get any.

Headed back and upgraded my weapon and shield to +3 each. Apparently the bottom of the elevator has the better blacksmith kf mentioned. There were a few options to upgrade my weapon to *adjective* Falchion +1, but I didn't take any of them. Would someone please explain the upgrade system a bit?

Anyway I went back to the Nexus put another point in endurance because god damn that fire hurt. I'll give 3-1 a shot next since I'm still too depressed about that beating I took to try Gohma again.

In Dragon Age I defended Redcliffe. Castle is next.

I wanted to feel like a badass for a bit so I played a little bit of God of War 3. Didn't work out so well! Apparently I'm out of practice when it comes to QTEs. In any case I beat the first boss and caused global warming.

Then it was off to 3-1. I saw the start of this stage in the Giant Bomb quick look. By start, I really mean start - they died multiple times to the very first enemy and gave up. Which meant I was rather surprised when I managed to kill it by just running up to it and slashing a few times. They give a *ton* of souls for being so easy to kill (and so frequent - they're pretty much the only enemies who aren't locked up, so if I was in a grinding mood I could rush from one to the next no problem).

The atmosphere in this stage is the best so far. I can definitely see why you might want to avoid it. Though they're not difficult as long as I get the jump on them, the monsters are indeed creepy as hell when they ring their bells. The moaning and the arms reaching out of prison cells certainly don't hurt the mood either.

Anyway I'm currently in an area with a bunch of closed doors. Presumably only one of them will open and I'll need to use it to get the keys to open the rest of them. For some reason I don't like this method of progression as much as opening shortcuts or activating elevators in 1-1 and 2-1 respectively, even though it doesn't actually make any real difference.

there's a bow in 1-2 that you can go grab if you can get past the dragon (you just need to run fast and then travel under the bridge to get from tower 1 to tower 2 where the bow is)

with that bow you can defeat the spider boss as long as you use the walls for cover while shooting at her and stay far enough back (make sure to bring plenty of arrows!)

the weapon upgrade system. . . you'll want to use the blacksmith at the bottom of the elevator you activated (there's actually three levels - where you start out when you enter 2-1, the blacksmith which is below that, and then you can ride the elevator up to the shortcut area that you unlocked which leads to where the boss is), once you beat the boss of 2-2 you can give this blacksmith his soul and he'll be able to forge special weapons. don't upgrade your weapons to 'Quality _____' at whichever + value you have access to that. Quality is a trait that balances the stat gain from Str and Dex equally which is NOT what you want. if you're using a Dex weapon you want to get your weapon up to +7 and then leave it there until you have access to the upgraded smith, where he'll offer to upgrade your weapon to a version that seems to have less base damage but draws it's damage primarily from Dex. as you upgrade this tree, you'll eventually get to a point where you're drawing all of your damage from the Dex stat and you'll be doing tons of damage as that will be your primary stat (hence the reason I said to just focus on one stat)

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I believe there's meaning. No, I believe there's nothing.
http://i.imgur.com/RYunc.png

Interesting that you figured out the spellcasters so quickly. When I first encountered them I pretty much just exclusively used ranged attacks since oh my god they were dangerous at close range. They're really easy once you figure out their attack pattern though.

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http://i.imgur.com/GKwQi.gif
~KF~

what happened to no specifics! i'll just keep going through all the -1s like i have been for now.

wrt to the upgrade system - is there a reason i want to go to 7 instead of upgrading immediately at 3? i'm thinking tearing for the falchion and sharp if i ever find a spear. iirc i need one of each type to get the platinum trophy.