<< BACK

scraps of game advice

Mass Effect 1

Farming Paragon / Renegade points

This is a well known glitch and it's present in the Legendary edition too. Go to Noveria and progress normally through it until you find Lorik Qui'in. Help him out and get the evidence but don't hand it over to him just yet. Go talk to Gianna first, who will tell you to convince Lorik to testify in court. Do that, picking either of the charm/intimidate option and you'll get a big boost to reputation. Then speak to him again, pick a random topick, go back to "Another question", and you'll get the option of asking him to testify in court again. Rinse and repeat until you've maxed out both morality meters, and enjoy not being locked out of any dialogue options anymore (seriously why does that one other cunt in Noveria require ELEVEN points in either skill to convince? He's just Asshole McSidequest, he's not a plot-important character. Fuck that guy).

Yakuza 0

Making money

This shouldn't be an issue since the whole game is all about getting money and you have a side game for each character that is really good for getting money, but if you're desperate for cash, you can exploit Shakedown and basically multiply all of your money. What you need is every bonus that causes Shakedown to carry more money on him, and then go fight him, and LOSE to him on purpose. He'll take all of your money. Then go find him again and this time beat his ass (Zap Guns if you're not confident). You'll get all of your money back + an extra percentage on top from the bonuses. Repeat ad nauseam until you're in the trillions.

Yakuza Kiwami

Rapid fire pistols

This is much easier to do with the golden pistol, but there's a glitch with all pistols as a whole where you can fire insanely fast with them - the way it works is that you cancel the firing animation by moving to then be able to fire again. On controller, that would mean holding RB/R1 to aim/lock on, pressing X/Square to shoot, letting go of RB/R1, moving a step forward with LS, then repeating quickly. It has some weird timing but you can get away with just repeatedly spamming RB+X/R1+Square and pushing LS for a split second constantly as you do. With the golden pistol you can just fucking demolish everyone using this glitch.

Making money

You have a few ways here. Doing every Coliseum tournament gives you a healthy chunk of money from first clears. Then there's a particular weapon you can sell for 1 million (Legendary Shintogo I believe). Burning GP is easy because you can grab-spam enemies to death. Alternatively you can use casino cheat items as usual to get a load of plates with. Or, you can savescum Roulette. Substories, people on the street, Nouveau Riche enemies all give you either decent chunks of money or plates you can sell for a lot.

Yakuza Kiwami 2

Making money

The hostess club is undoubtedly the easiest way to earn cash in this game. It'll take a bit to progress in it but you'll make a fuckton in it.

Yakuza 3

Darts minigame

So I know this is the case for 4 and 5, it might also be the case for 3, but there's a slight trick to figuring out where the hell your dart is gonna land. This is entirely assuming you're using a controller, and throwing at max strength - hopefully this is also the case for KB+M - but basically, if you shoot dead center with the tip of the dart aiming at the bullseye, at max strength, you will hit that bullseye 99% of the time. Simple enough, right, but sometimes you wanna get 180s. Or you're playing one of the other Darts gamemodes for completion. The way the game handles the dart trajectory is that, the more you aim in a certain direction, the further in that direction the dart will land. I don't quite know how to explain this properly. It's like.. exponential or something?

So how I aim is, I pull the stick back fully. Then, I aim using the tip of the dart. Dead center gets you a bullseye simple enough. For the triple 20, you want to aim with the tip slightly above that triple zone - like about the middle between the tip and the thicker part of the dart. Other locations are trickier to figure out, but basically: from the center (bullseye) to about halfway in any direction, your dart will go LESS further in that direction; from the halfway point to off the board, your dart will go FURTHER in that direction.

My explanation might make absolutely no sense and I may be talking out of my ass - I need to play the darts minigame again in 5 to refresh my memory but I know for a fact that once I figured this shit out, I was easily destroying even the highest difficulty CPUs without effort in any game mode.

Making money

Hitman missions give you a nice chunk of money. Again, you've got casino cheat items to use as well.

Yakuza 4

Making money

Tanimura has a substory that gives out 3 million and his Police Scanner fights give out pretty good money, too. Casino cheat items are there too.

Yakuza 5

Making money

We actually have other ways besides the casino to get rich now! Kiryu has his taxi missions which give a lot of money just from doing them all, you'll eventually run out but you'll have a healthy amount by the end. Saejima has hunting, which is an endlessly profitable way of making money - just keep progressing through the side story, doing everything that's available, and once you can hunt in all areas freely, just keep killing bears and golden deer whenever you find them, and sell all of the stuff they drop. You'll have more money than you know what to do with, and you won't have to worry about money with other characters once you can share. Haruka's idol missions give out an okay amount as well. Akiyama... well he feels more like an afterthought in this game so he's got nothing really going for him. Shinada's whole deal is being poor as shit, so no surprise there that you won't necessarily be able to make a lot of money with him if you're not going out of your way to do every substory and stuff.

The vs. 100 Tournament is also a good way of making money. There are 20 waves of 5 nearly identical enemies, and each defeat gives you money instantly. Each wave gives more and more money - I got 2 million extra from the 2 attempts I did... so I'd say you get about one million yen for each clear, which shouldn't take more than 15 minutes.

Weapon Master coliseum tournament

The only reasonable choices for weapons in this tournament are the hammer, knuckles, and knife. Tested with all 4 characters.
The spear is garbage incarnate, the katana is underpowered, the tonfa has a decently useful stun attack but can't follow up on it, the nunchaku also have a stun move but can't make the cut, the kali sticks have limited usability.. there's probably another weapon I'm forgetting but it sucks anyway since I didn't mention it.
The hammer is awesome if you want a brainless victory, you can just repeatedly spam light attacks on your opponent over and over, super armoring through most attacks. The knuckles are fast and deal a ton of damage, highly reliable. The knife is a bit harder to use but the reason I recommend it is because you can stucklock a few opponents with it.

Ranking up quickly in the Coliseum

The rank system is a bit weird but basically, you get more rank points for defeating opponents who are of a higher rank. This is most easily exploitable for the tournaments where you only fight one single guy - you can keep backing out of the screen that shows who you'll be fighting until you get someone at the very top. This is usually Raiden, Akira Yamaoka, Ivan Ibrahimovic, Sotaro Komaki, etc. The only "single guy" tournaments are the Heat Bomber SP and Breakout SP, the latter of which is only unlocked after getting Rank 30. Heat Bomber can be a little risky because those bombs can and WILL fuck you up, but really the meat of that tournament is to just bait your enemy into being near bombs that are flashing red. Actually slugging it out is too dangerous. You can wholly avoid explosion damage with your dodge moves but it's not very consistent. Once you unlock Breakout SP just keep doing that one because it's easy as shit - break the wall behind you, grab your enemy and knock them down (the first grab on any enemy almost always succeeds), and push their body over to the newly created gap and watch them plummet. Rinse and repeat with high-rank opponents until you unlock Limited Berserk.

The rest of the tournaments

Yakuza 6

Making money

You've got a few different ways here. Clan Creator and spearfishing are both good ways to grind out money, if not all that exciting. This code - KP56VFA9MX2B7LH - will also give you a 1 million headstart if you input it into the safe on Serena's roof.

Yakuza 7 / Like a Dragon

Making money

The company management sidegame is undoubtedly the best way to earn cash in this one. Just keep progressing in it until you've more or less reached the end then just keep playing it afterwards until you've got all the money you want.

Cyberpunk 2077

Nomad intro

So I don't know if this is exclusive to the 2.0 update but if you are playing on Hard/Very Hard, the car chase for the Nomad's intro mission is nigh impossible to do. You take damage at seemingly random set intervals, enough to kill you at always the same spot. All I can say is to try and ignore the first car that comes after you initially and focus down the second one. And don't shoot the cars themselves, kill the gunners. It fucking sucks but with enough tries you'll get through it.

Powerlevelling

This seems kind of a given in games like these but, even though the game locks you to Watson until the start of Act 2, there's enough side jobs, gigs, and NCPD fights that you can get yourself REALLY geared up. If nothing else, you'll be filthy rich to the point where you wonder why you're even doing the big heist at all. I was level 21 after doing all the NCPD mini quests and all of Regina's gigs, with Tier 2 cyberware installed in all slots, and about 400k to my name, and that was all before even getting the Flathead. Now that literally the entire map is open to me after Act 2, I can see myself hitting the level cap before I even bother talking to Takemura...

It's also worth mentioning that some seemingly random enemies will have shit like Cyberware Capacity shards on them.