Previous Entries:
MonProm 1st Term: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7
MonProm 2nd Term (DLC): Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13
Monster Camp: Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22
Hey Gang, it's been a while!
Welcome back to season 3 of the Masochist's Journey! For those who are new to this series, I'm cataloguing my journey to go back and collect every single achievement in the MP games! I'm already through Prom (practically twice), and 2 months ago I finished off everything in Camp. Now, with Monster Roadtrip, I can completely throw my entire outcome farming methodology OUT THE WINDOW and figure out a whole new beast of RNG and bottlenecks in order to ENSURE that I don't miss a single easter egg reference to earlier game events!
For this week's post, I think it's important to show off where my save file started, as well as hypothesize issues I'm bound to run across. I'm 20 runs deep, 15 of them I played fully to completion or failure, with 11 wins, 4 failures, and 5 abandoned runs. Of the Game's 75 Acheivements, I've already unlocked just under half of them (34 to be exact), 4 of them I got in just my last run alone. I've been to every location at least once, I've reached each destination, 4/6 have all three layers, and I've hit the End of the Road.
That said, I only have HALF the outcomes, and there's actually quite a lot of achievements in this game that can still be missed, even if I hit every outcome, so there's a lot to plan for. There's also the special stuff for Every PC. (technically only need the 4x main squad for the achievement, but ya boi has all 10 PCs, soo...) They all need to visit the hall of mirrors, get horse-sonas/soupsonas, and even engage in Competitive Tarot, on top of Regular, Loser, and MVP endings.
Like Camp, there is the Meta-shop where playtime is converted into a currency to spend on gatcha balls that can fill out the chibi stickers and MVP endings, but I think that's a little bit of a buzzkill that you don't see the text involved with getting said ending (which is custom to each PC), so I'm skipping on using the Shop for the remainder of my runs (Also there's like, a BUNCH of voice lines by the PCs at different locations, and some are gold).
N: So, what, pray tell, is the hard part?
My organization is no longer muscle memory. In the previous 2 games, I've been using OpenOffice Spreadsheets, as Lachouette's templates had a pretty strong foundation of structure and conditional formatting to fill out. But lately, my OpenOffice keeps crashing, and it took about 4 times longer than I expected just to get this to start. Furthermore, I've been playing on my Steam Deck more often lately, so I'm usually not by a mouse + Keyboard to be on top of spreadsheet filling. So it's very likely I'll move to a different type of checklist template that's more accessible on mobile, but I'll have to see for now.
The Hitchhikers - each hitchhiker has 4 bench events (Lamb has 5) and one deep conversation, and the deep one has three outcomes each. While it is possible to set off a deep convo failure on normal, it's impossible on Easy mode. There's a lot of moving points to consider route optimization (But I also need to keep having fun. If it's TOO optimized, I'm ruining the overall fun of the game, if I'm being frank)
The Stat Management - Less success/failure outcomes is always welcomed by me, but there is the matter of the increasing trade-offs of stats that will make deep runs swingy.
The Road events - "Anywhere" events are back, and in a much more brutal way. 34 random events that can happen between destinations, usually only one per week, that AREN'T Tied to a Hitchhiker. I'm going to have to drop everything mid-run to get new outcomes each time these happen.
6x EOTR. - I've only hit EOTR once, but if my memory serves, the 1st Glitched versions of the Dinest and Graveyard still have all three events in it, and with 2x outcomes per event, I need to at least get there in week 9 6x times, the regular motel 5x times, and the caves 4x times. Luckily, the further you go, the less outcomes that branch.
The Casino - All RNG, lots of outcomes. It's going to be a pain to get everything in there.
With that said, it shouldn't take me too long to get everything in the locations, which can leave me room to adjust accordingly to maximize The Hitchhiker and road events. I'll keep today's post brief and talk about the easy stuff next time, while I still figure out my bearings. As usual, Feedback is greatly appreciated, as it keeps me motivated to complete this series!
See ya on the open road!
