Castle Crashers

Please tell me that someone else here besides me is playing this game. If I could find people to play this with all the time, I would forsake my entire life for this shit. Too fun.

Me and my buddy beat it one sitting
Haven’t unlocked much though

The style is… awesome

I agree - Castle Crashers is quite amazing. I’ve been playing it on my friend’s 360 and it is way sweet. (Currently lv 19 Red)

This game is kickass. I bought it the day it came out and have played it half an hour every day, if I can that is.

----Sinistral----

My GF and I and my friends have played this game to hell and back and probably intend on playing it more. I’ve played through the game with the Blue Knight and the Green Knight up to now so I’ve unlocked those 2 classes and I have also unlocked the Thief (anus face), the barbarian, the wedding knight’s minion and gotten all but 1-2 of the pets. Poison is soooo overpowered as a skill. Not enough games have offline coop.

Aside: Had more games offline coop, I’d buy them. So fuck you ubisoft! FUCK YOU with Armored Core. IF I buy it, I’m getting it used in the bargain bin so you don’t get a fucking penny. The same applies to a few others, like ACTIVISION with fucking CoD. FUCK YOU ALL.

Yeah, me and Green_Mage have been playing the hell out of it, too. I’ve beat the game with the Blue Knight and the Industrialist (who you get for beating the game with the Blue Knight). Now, I’m going through it as the Red Knight.

Anyone have any philosophies and building a character through Lv. 20?

Personally, I think that the best way to build a character is to get their magic jump asap, and then get maybe up to 6 ranks in everything, then start specializing in something depending on your character; if you use magic like crazy, then max out magic, strength if you like physical attacks, and agility if you favor bows.

  • I think Agility is the most important stat to raise in the game (for purposes of evasion), but you don’t actually need a lot; I think it’s just crucial to have a certain amount.

The only reason you would ever need incredibly high Agility is if you want to specialize in Bows, because Bows absolutely suck until your Agility stat is near maxed out. Even still, Bows kind of suck in the end for a variety of reasons; they knock down enemies really often, making it hard to do a lot of damage at once OR gain experience; you can only fire arrows quickly when you’re on the ground; and, they don’t do enough damage to be effective by the end of the game.

Lastly on Agility, I have a theory that they facilitate air combos, which is by and large the easiest ‘legit’ way to level up in this game.

Magic is the next important stat, and I think it’s the most important one to raise really high. Magic Jumps are broke as hell - high damage, low cost (you get all your MP back by the time you land!), and it’s unblockable. It’s perfect for getting out of a pinch. Beyond that, it’s useful to be able to spam your splash magic attack for some characters (the Industrialist for example).

Strength is the next important thing. You can go either way with STR; if you like killing shit fast, then high Strength will of course do the trick. Personally, I like getting Strength about halfway at most; you can kill pretty much anything in the game, and you won’t obliterate enemies too fast to gain good experience.

Defense is easily the least important thing in this game. I beat the game easily with a character that had only 3 ranks in Defense; Green Mage beat the game with a character who had 0 ranks (as in, you always start with 1 rank, and he had a weapon that lowered it even more). I personally put about 5-7 ranks in defense and just use a weapon/animal that augments defense.

The reason I say this is because your defense rarely increases; I had about 10 in defense once, and GreenMage had max defense +10 (from his weapon and animal boosts combined); I took 11 damage from an enemy, while he took 9. Defense is waaaay more about raising HP than actual defense, but if you are good at evasion (where a small amount of Agility comes in), you won’t really need that much HP.

I will say, though, that max Defense plus the Troll Animal (regenerates HP) is pretty rad; you pretty much never have less than max HP this way. Still, that’s an awful lot of levels to put into something for that, and if you get swarmed pretty bad, you’re still not gonna be in good shape.

I played the demo and its fun but pretty formulaic. Refreshing step backwards though - but I think the next XBLA thing I buy is gonna be Mega Man 9.

I develop str and def evenly until they’re both maxed.

Agility doesn’t help you evade. It makes you shoot your ineffective-ass arrows and run through levels faster. And that doesn’t help evasion because even at your slowest, there’s nothing too fast for you to dodge.

Str will contribute more to your effectiveness than agility by a lot. And def will keep you alive long enough to keep killing.

Magic is slow and clumsy. If you want to kill shit really fast, boost str and go crazy with air combos. But you already know that.

My philosophy on levelling to 20: Get the experience boosting giraffe dude and hack away at anything that hits back.

I don’t agree about 0 Agility, but I also don’t like getting much of it.

I mostly prefer magic to strength because you get way more experience by doing air combos and NOT killing enemies (EXP is gained not by enemies killed or damage done, but by how many times you HIT something). I like having as little STR as I can manage while still being able to kill enemies at a reasonable pace with physical attacks.

Magic, depending on your character, will likely be a better way of dealing damage. The Splash Magic for some characters is fucking unreal (The Industrialist for example, can kill just about any boss in like two or three well-placed attacks with magic, and the Red Knight’s lightning is brutal against normal enemies), projectiles are like GOOD arrows, and Magic Jumps are the most ridiculously overpowered shit in the game (besides air combos).

Why exactly do you like Defense? It seems lke when I play, that’s the one thing that I can either do without, or go “Man, I really wish I hadn’t got this much Defense.”

—Sinistral----

I found STR to be useful to bash things but…

MAGIC is the most powerful stat for me, especially with my poison character. I just annihilated everything. It was completely ridiculous.

The DEF stat I agree is all about HP.

I don’t care about AGL because dodge is worthless when you play with 4 people and there is always someone around to res ppl.

My philosophy is to pump a few points into STR, a few more into DEF and an assload into MAG. Air combos I agree are really powerful. I used them a lot more with my Blue Knight who did less damage than my Green Knight. He also had more STR. They are different but effective playstyles.

Edit: I’ve tried making a thief/anus face with high agility to see how he’d do with a bow and his attacks don’t nearly compare to my Green Knight.

(EXP is gained not by enemies killed or damage done, but by how many times you HIT something)
You realize you can just do levels over, right? Kill frequency won’t stop you from hitting things.

The Red Knight’s lightning is good, but… that (or more) is what I’m doing ALL the time with normal air attacks, and most magic doesn’t compare to the ridiculosity of lightning anyway.

I think you’re looking at defense the wrong way. The same amount of extra defense that’ll take an 11 damage hit down to 9 will take a 100 damage hit down to 20 or 30, I’ve found. The extra HP it gives you is more significant though. I neglected defense for a long time, but after actually developing it a bit, I realize it’s something I don’t want to go without, even though I can (this isn’t a hard game no matter how you build your guys).

I’m beginning to jump into the “Agility isn’t that useful” boat; I’m doing an experiment right now to see if there’s anything I can’t air combo with default Agility. If everything goes fine, I’ll probably never put anything into Agility ever again, lol.

With that being said, I’m still trying to decide if it’s better to just go all out in STR and MAG, or to do high magic (at least enough to get Magic Jump), and then some combination of STR and DEF.

Also, just cos it sounds like we’re playing in drastically different settings, my findings are based on playing usually 2 players, sometimes 1 player, and I tend not to go back and repeat levels (I don’t like to grind…The first time I beat the game my guy was only at level 23).

—Sinistral----

The number of people you play with drastically influences your play style. You really don’t need a lot of HP if you’re playing 4P because of the probability someone can res you. Even then, you don’t need tons if you want to buy potions often. HP is really useful when you do arenas though to unlock chars. I have yet to complete the peasant and ice anus arenas. Let us know how the trip down AGI lane went. I tried it with one of my chars and I wasn’t impressed.

– SG Update –

So far, the no AGI experiment is going wonderfully. There is no enemy that I can’t infinite with an air combo, except for enemies that are too heavy to launch anyways, or characters like the fire demons who don’t bounce off the ground when they land. The only enemies I need to test are the ones in the last dungeon.

Based on this, I think the best way to level through 20 is:

+19 ranks to magic (just enough to magic jump)

  • >= 9 in both STR and DEF
  • 1 in whatever the fuck

Of course, whatever the +1 will be in depends on your specialization. For characters like Industrialist, Fencer, Red Knight, Green Knight etc. it’s best to max out magic. For characters with less impressive magic, or the Blue Knight, whose splash attack’s cost goes up proportionally with his magic rank (wtf?), it’s probably better to specialize in something else.

I haven’t gotten this far yet, but…what’s probably an exception to all this are the guys you can unlock that have the tornado attack, because the tornado attack is a spell that deals damage based on STR. I have no idea what’s a good build for them, cos I haven’t unlocked either of them yet. :confused: If I had to guess, though, I’d say +19 in magic, +19 in strength, and give them animals/weapons that raise defense as much as possible.

Btw, if you use the Industrialist/Fencer, the Peasant Arena is a joke. Learn to spam the sawblade spells effectively and you can mop them up. Still can’t beat the ice arena yet :confused:

Magic jump isn’t worth 19 points unless you’re gonna be using magic exclusively, or you’ve already maxed everything else.

In terms of “I want to kick the shit out of this game as fast as possible,” strength will contribute more to your goals than magic, unless you’re the poison knight, apparently. It might not be able to wreck bosses in 2 or 3 hits like you’re telling me some of the better splash spells can, but the raw damage over time is far more with strength than I’ve seen any spell come close to. You hit more guys at once, you do it faster, and each individual hit does more damage. That’s been my experience.

When I play it’s usually with one other guy. And he tends to go pure magic, which is how I’ve been able to compare.

Has anyone else used Alien Hominid yet?

—Sin—

How is Alien Hominid the video game? Should I buy it if I like CC? And I disagree the Blue Knight’s magic is not powerful. The crowd control it offers is ridiculous. I actually completed the thief and lava arenas thanks to the fact I could freeze people in place repeatedly by raining ice spikes repeatedly over large areas to avoid being swarmed.

I agree that there are certainly a lot of characters who aren’t better in magic, but Magic Jump is just a very useful thing to have in a lot of situations; on top of that, for enemies that you can’t infinite (all two or three of them :/), or enemies who have a tendency to fly too far away over time, magic projectile is absolutely the raddest combo finisher, since it does more damage than a normal sword slash.

My AGL experiment is almost done. The only thing I need to do is check if enemies that fly too far away are during air combos are easier to air combos with high AGL characters. If not, then Agility is useless in any multiplayer situation.

My new take on Agility: You need SOMETHING to evade on 1-player mode (I also don’t use potions much; this, I admit, is purely idiosyncratic). There’s two ways to make your character competent at evasion:

  1. Magic Jump, or

  2. A few ranks in Agility.

If you’re not getting magic, get a little bit of AGL (hardly ANY). Otherwise, Agility is probably the most useless stat (unless the last part of my experiment yields results - I think it won’t). This is all null and void in 2+ player games.

I definitely still retain that Magic is very useful. Actually, Sinistral, I do agree that Blue Knight’s magic is good, I just think it’s not necessarily useful to max it out. My first character was Blue Knight and I def used his magic. It helped me beat that Necromancer guy at a really low level, heh.

As for Alien Hominid…I feel conflicted. I really hated Alien Hominid when I played it. On the other hand, I love Castle Crashers, and I would love to have a unique character in my repertoire. I wonder if the gun is effective? If someone gets the Alien, they should say how he is on here.

I think the AH game is more for kids, but I haven’t played it, only watched others.

As a character, I’d say he’s definitely a magic user. He can’t use any weapons because he’s always holding his gun, which is his “magic.”

His gun shoots two kinds of blasts. One’s a weak rapidfire type move, the other’s a big x-buster type blast that I think hits multiple enemies. I never boosted his magic though, and he felt pretty weak to me as a physical attacker, so someone should try going crazy with his gun.

I hear there’s one weapon you can swap out with him, but I don’t remember what it is. It’s useful to do that, because it lets you put the Alien Ray Gun in your weapon rack.

I beat the Ice Arena finally, that shit was fucking ridic. Here’s how I did it:

Character: Fencer
LV:37
STR: 17+0
MAG: 25+2
DEF: 16+12
AGL: 1 (-5, but you can’t go below 1 anyways)
Weapon: The one you get for beating the necromancer boss near the end (+2 MAG, +7 DEF)
Animal: The Snail (+5 DEF, -5 AGL)

The trick is to not even try to air combo. It’s way too hard on slippery icy shit. Just spam the Y, Y, Y, X combo as much as possible. Magic Jumps are especially useful in getting out of gangbang situations, and Splash Magic was good for my character. You’ll probably need way better STR and DEF if you have a character whose splash Magic isn’t good enough crowd control.

By the way, anyone played insane mode yet?

So, here’s the final result of my no AGL test:

  • Agility really does help you air combo; in fact, it makes air combos even better. I didn’t know for sure until I played one of my other characters which has really high Agility, but having high AGL actually affects the speed of your jump.

Here are the practical implications of this, from least to most important:

  1. You can now get cheap, quick air combos on characters that aren’t able to be juggled (only a like two of them, but still).

  2. You can move forward in the air while shooting diagonal magic projectiles.

  3. You can now infinite enemies that don’t bounce (fire demons, Those green knights you find in the forest, and those guys in the final dungeon), and it’s much easier to infinite light enemies that tend to fly out of your reach (the anus guys).

  4. Air combos are, in general, much easier to extend and infinite midscreen. I’ll give you an example…

  • My character with 0 Agility is locked into this combo:

a. Jump xx {Y -> Y (wait), X} xN

Basically, you do two quick attacks, and wait a second for the enemy to bounce off the floor, and then hit them with the power attack. You can repeat over and over again. This guy can probably do a few more reps of Y -> Y, but the only consistent way to

  • My character with 15 Agility can do quite a few variations on this:

a. Jump xx {Y -> Y x4 (wait), X} xN
b. Jump xx (Y -> Y x2-3, Y -> X) xN
c. Jump xx {Y -> X, Y -> Y, Y -> X -> Y (turn around) xN}

The first combo on the list is the same one that my 0 Agility character does, but he can get 3 - 5 reps of Y -> Y because bouncing the enemy with X.

The second combo is roughly the same; however, if you press X after an odd number of Y attacks, your character uppercuts. The 0 Agility character has a very hard time utilizing the uppercut, probably because uppercut combos usually require you to do a lot of turning around.

The last combo would be incredibly hard to do, if at all, with a 0 AGL character: You do the uppercut combo immediately, 1 rep of Y -> Y, do the uppercut combo again and finish it with the somersault attack. This combo is especially for enemies that don’t bounce much.

So, here’s my newest theory on Agility: Some Agility facilitates and even improves air combos by allowing you to do easier infinites, longer reps, and better combos. However, incredibly high Agility is not necesary, and might even make Air Combos more difficult.

So now, I have to run a new experiment, probably not until much later: Does having too much Agility make air combos difficult to do, by way of making your jump speed faster than the reeling speed of your enemy? Too much science. I stopped taking science classes for a reason :confused: Speaking of which, thanks for helping my pass Chemistry that one time, Sinistral :smiley: I still think that’s the hardest class I’ve ever taken in college :confused:

So it makes things easier, but does it make killing faster? I dunno mang, I dunno

Faster? You get INFINITE COMBOS, and take it from me (I’ve done games with characters who had like 2-4 ranks in STR), you don’t even meet people who take long to kill until the final stretch of the game. If anything, this makes air comboing better, more fun, and more plausible against the more difficult people to air combo.

In any case, I used the grind exploit to make someone with full Agility, and I’ll post the results tomorrow. I think they’re pretty excellent.