You receive your first Halomonas weapon early in the game, which truthfully can be used to finish the main campaign and onward into post-game questing if you attend to it immediately. You can choose a branching path on the Halomonas tree then grow and customize your weapon as you see fit. These powerful weapons grow in strength by completing “Orders” sought out during quests. However, Game Arts has newly introduced “Halomonas” weapons, which render any other acquired weapon obsolete. ACE does not abandon the card system for a traditional leveling progression, so repeatedly plowing through enemies to farm for materials and cards – which are equipped into armor slots and grants stat boosts, among other enhancements – is still very much the aim of the game. The game has not lost its love for monster hunting, because there sure is plenty of it. This is especially true when things get tight and enemies crowd up against you, and the only real solution being that you button mash away or flee by jumping and dashing. In this respect, camera concerns are still present. This can get very problematic when having to juggle with the lock-on feature, which feels broken and should be avoided all together, particularly during stages that are flooded with many enemies. Initiating these special skills requires the press of a button combination that is mapped to both the shoulder and face buttons. These skills do a fine job separating class roles more effectively, offering healing skills to Clerics or knockback and launch attacks to Hammersmiths, for example. This time around, the team has removed certain abilities to accommodate for several new job-specific powers called “ACE skills,” which you unlock by progressing through the main campaign. This further overwhelms the repetitive nature of the original game – constantly going toe to toe with the same foes only reinforces the the game’s strength still lies in the gameplay, which is fast, fluid, and generally fun to master. Even with some of the new minions and bosses featured in the expansion, the monster palette still feels all too familiar and much too rehashed. To my severe disappointment, however, many of the dungeon’s enemies are recycled or re-skinned from the main campaign. This is accentuated through randomly generated trials called the “Ordeals of the Valkyries,” which are timed in-game challenges that will honor you with multiplied drop rates, attack, or defense boosts, among other various bestowments if successfully completed. The most notable feature about the dungeon is how rewarding it can be for farming materials. Inside, you’ll tread a few hundred floors with a rest stop on every fifth floor called "The Power Room of Oblivion.” Here you can restock on items or switch to more suitable equipment. Droplets can also be used to purchase rare items through the Norn Exchange. In order to enter the Tower of Yggdrasil, you need “Yggdrasil Droplets.” These can be bought from a new in-game NPC, Norn, or by simply clearing quests in the dungeon itself. The story accounting your voyage into the famed Yggdrasil is largely uninteresting, but thankfully the same cannot be said about the contents contained inside the end-game dungeon – at least not entirely. Surely, many dangers await your arrival, but much like the original game, the expansion story treads shallow waters by also presenting itself through barricades of text that you can’t help but want to skip and trample over. After acing the final chapter of the base story, you learn that a gaping hole has surfaced at the root of the legendary Nordic tree, Yggdrasil. Rather than improving on the game’s original story, Game Arts focused on expanding the post-game narrative by providing a whole new realm of end-game content called the Tower of Yggdrasil.
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