Haven’t been playing TOO much games lately. But have been playing Jump King, and also just got Tales of Arise which I plan on playing through this weekend. As far as Jump King goes, I absolutely love it. I love super difficult games, especially when the gameplay and concept is actually rather simple. I found the secret passage way to the snow cave alternate route (not hard to find) and I spent a lot of time trying to progress that way. But it’s super tedious and I decided to save that route for a run after I beat the game the “normal” way. That said, I did acquire one of the side items, the secret big boots. There’s actually a lot of items you can get in this game, just about all of them are “secret items” that you have to do sort of a “sidequest” to obtain. For the secret big boots, there’s a bird/crow that you have to jump onto. Once you make contact with it, it flies up to another location. You have to do this like 12 times. The final time it drops a gold coin. Then you have to purposely fall ALL THE WAY DOWN back to where the NPC was asking for a gold coin for the boots. So I did that. It’s super difficult to get all the way up to where the gold coin was, so it took me forever to actually get back up there.
Anyway, I’m really close to the end. I’ve seen snippets of runs (didn’t want to watch a full run because I wanted to figure everything out myself. Only thing I “looked up” was how to get the gold coin for the boots). So since I’ve seen a few clips here and there, I knew that once you get to the shaking tower, you’re close to the end. I’m at the bottom/beginning of the shaking tower. All of the things I did, including as I said the detour in the snow cave and getting the boots, I’m currently around 8 hours of in game time. So I feel like I’ve progressed pretty well considering it seems a lot of people have put anywhere from 40 hours to 100 hours to reach the top. And that’s not including them doing what I did with taking detours or going for items. I honestly do believe that coming from a competitive gaming background, mainly fighting games, has helped me with this game. That and playing hard games like I Wanna Be The Guy and Cuphead. You naturally learn from every mistake in just about any game, but definitely in Jump King. Most people won’t be able to be persistent enough to keep trying and failing over and over, especially in Jump King where a single mistake can wipe out hrs of progress. However. The great thing about it is that it can take you an hour to get from point A to point B. But since you failed so many times in that hour, if you fall back down to point A, you’re going to reach point B WAAAY quicker than you did before. But yeah, the game can be super punishing. So my competitive FG mindset has helped me a lot to stay calm and learn from my falls (mistakes).
Anyway, I definitely recommend Jump King. I’m playing it on a controller on console. Jump King 2 is currently not available on console, so I might just wait for it to come to console before I get it. I’ve heard it’s much more difficult than the first one.
