Sometimes I push myself to finish a game and I’m glad I did it. Other times I finish a game and it’s like… meh. Okay so I finished Avalon Code. And? Still, I’m not going to tell anyone contemplating dropping it to keep playing, but if there’s anyone who wants to soldier on regardless, I’m going to share a few tips that helped me make it through the game.

First, though, I’m going to spoil the story for those who want to quit. The world is coming to an end, there’s a Book of Prophecy and it’s your job to record things that should be carried over to the next world. And might I add at this juncture that it seems very foolish to me that you end up filling 70% of the book with monsters and weapons. A few humans, a few flowers, hardly any normal animals or trees or other flora and fauna. What kind of nightmarish world are you creating anyway?

But anyway, you spend some time collecting stuff, then at the end of Chapter 5 your so-called friend Rex steals the Book and gives it to the bad guys. The bad guys use it to destroy half the town. Your chief love interest gets sucked into the book. The king has you arrested for the deed and everyone in town turns against you. If you haven’t played a game where all your allies suddenly turn against you, I could see how that would be devastating. Some of us have played Nora to Toki no Koubou though, so this was just child’s play.

After that, remember the spirits you spent the first half of the game collecting? Well you have to collect them all again, in reverse order. Then the bad guy reveals himself. Kullervo was the last owner of the Book of Prophecy. He created this current world, but humans rebelled against his rule and sealed him under Frannelle Castle using the Great Spear of Mastema. His soul traveled the land causing chaos to hasten the appearance of a new Book, which he planned to use to create a world without humans. Luckily he’s the easiest boss in the game if you know what you’re doing. And so we kill him and live happily ever after.

Now, if you’ve read all that and you still want to finish the game – and actually this isn’t a story-heavy game so a few spoilers don’t make a difference – here are a few tips to help you keep your sanity until the end.

1. The final boss has terrible reach, so you can just stand at the very back of the stage – i.e. the area closest to the screen, and shoot him to death with a gun. Some people recommend having a shield in your other hand to block his attacks, but if you stand that far away only one of his attacks can hit you, and that for only 2 damage, so it’s faster to just let him have it with both barrels.

2. There’s no way to eliminate the frustration of flipping through the Book’s pages, but there are three ways to make things easier. 2a. Use the Spirit Bookmarks. Those Spirit icons at the top aren’t just for finding the Spirits’ pages. You can also drag them to certain pages so you can go there any time you want to. If, for example, you need a code for a certain monster’s page, you can put a bookmark there, go hunting for the codes you need, then tap the bookmark to be right back where you started. It helps a lot.

2b. The second thing to do is to take physical notes of the codes you need to make stuff. Get an actual pencil and a piece of paper and write them down, because there’s nothing more frustrating than going through 50 pages of monster notes looking for X, Y and Z only to return to the start and realize you only got X and Y and forgot the Z. It will happen you to and it can be easily prevented, so get to it.

2c. Create your own sorting system. For example you can put all metal codes – gold, silver, copper, on your humans and put all animal codes on the monsters and all element codes on weapons you don’t use much, etc. Put the biggest/most important pieces on the first item in a category, e.g. the goblin in the humanoid monster category, Orobas in the boss monster category, etc. If you’re the computer type you might even create an Excel sheet with all that info on it, but IMO that would be serious overkill.

3. Are you bad at slider puzzles? Me too! Part of the fun of Avalon Code was supposed to be mixing and matching codes to create all kinds of cool weapons and accessories, but in the second half of the game everything nice is hidden behind a stupid slider puzzle! Well weep no more, fellow puzzle-sucker, here’s how I solved the 3×3 and 4×4 puzzles:

For the 3×3 I used this website: analogbit.com/software/puzzletools. There are a number of sliding puzzle solvers online, but this was the easiest one for me. Just set the pieces anywhere for the initial state then drag them to their correct positions for the final state and then the software calculates the moves and walks you through the solution step by step.

For 4×4 puzzles though, it takes a while to set up the puzzle and even longer for the solver to compute it. Often the browser would just hang and I’d lose all my hard work. But then I discovered it’s quite easy to turn a 4×4 puzzle into a 3×3 one by solving the puzzles along the edges. If you have something like this:

XXXX
XXXX
XXXX
X   XX

just struggle and fumble around and move the pieces until you get something like:

OOOO          XXXO
XXXO   or    X   XO
X   XO           XXXO
XXXO           OOOO

Where the O pieces are in the right place. Then ignore the O edges completely and enter the X pieces into the solver as your puzzle. In theory this should work fine for the 5×5 puzzles and 6×6 puzzles too, seeing as most of their edges are made up of blank spaces anyway. I finished the game with weapons from 4×4 puzzles (Dark Star and Chaotic Blunderbuss, to be precise) so I wouldn’t know.

4. Don’t stress out too much about getting gold medals in the dungeons, especially in the early ones. You can always come back and redo them later (just tap on the map), and it’s much easier to get gold when you have more powerful weapons and more useful skills. For that matter, it’s worth grabbing a FAQ and finding out which particular stages will give you a metalize for a gold clear and focusing your efforts on those stages only. To be honest some of the stages are just fun to aim for gold in, but the vast majority are just RRRGGGHHHH.

You might think getting gold is necessary to level the Book up faster, but you don’t get much for leveling the book up. Just at regular points your code grid gets bigger, and you get a few meaningless sidequests and I think you get a tablet for more HP and MP once, that’s it. Don’t beat yourself up over it.

5. Suck at Judgment Link battles? Skip them all! Whatever rewards you would have gotten can be bought from Romanioni’s store once you clear the game. For 3,000 mystic jewels each, but you can just gamble your way to riches if you need to. Or if you’re really good at button-mashing you can just mash X through the link battles, but I’ve never been good at that sort of thing.

6. There are no individual character endings. Why is that a tip? Well just in case you’re forcing yourself to play because you think you’ll get a lovey-dovey ending with Duran or Rex or whoever your poison of choice is. I got a love confession from Anwar and it was really rather sweet (I would definitely ‘date’ him in an otome game) but there seems to be only one ending regardless of all your efforts so I wouldn’t play the whole game just for the romance.

Now then, that’s enough for the tips. I finished Avalon Code in 34 hours, but you could do it in about 25 if you don’t spend as much time fighting and falling and trying to be romantic as I did. Let me finish off with a quick summary of the things I liked and didn’t like about the game:

+ Bright, happy colors
+ Different weapons to use
+ 20-30 hours is a good length for an RPG
+ Using codes to change things is a brilliant idea
+ Meenya is so cute, especially the way she says “I love you.”
+ A few of the dungeon puzzles are seriously fun.
+ There’s a lot for a completionist to do and get.

– I hate dungeon puzzles.
– Having to solve slider puzzles to unlock new recipes is just plain cruel.
– The premise was kind of wasted. They didn’t really do much with the ‘world is ending’ idea.
– The scale of the game was disappointingly small, from the items you can get to the places you can go to the people you can meet.
– The minigames were horrible. I never won even once at Judgment Links or Zeno-9. Is the latter even winnable?
– Having to examine random spots on the map to fill out a page is rather dumb.
– Scrolling through the book is a pain no matter what you do.
– Codes don’t affect as much as I thought they would. E.g. you take the Illness code off Fana and she still spends the rest of the game sitting up in bed. It would be great if you could actually change personalities through codes and have that reflected in the character’s dialog and actions.
– Being able to get presents to townspeople is nice, but at 40-50MP a pop you’ll only be able to give out a few presents before you’ll need to go home to rest. There should at least have been an MP refilling item.
– No romantic character endings.
– Anti-climatic ending was anti-climatic.

And there you have my final thoughts on Avalon Code. I’m not sorry I finished it, but I don’t think it would have made much difference to my life if I had left it where I quit all those years ago. Sorry.