This is something I would have wanted to keep on the backburner until I had completed my video project for the game’s Powers. However, as of when I start writing this, earlier the same day, a mass shooting happened at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. By itself, this is a shaky incident from the involvement of shooting, which is kind of common in a shooter like Kid Icarus Uprising, although you’re at least shooting at military targets at minimum in KIU, FWIW in the midst of being probably more destructive than a hundred Reset Bombs regardless. (Pit, Zamasu basically claimed “I’m fighting evil, it’s totally different, look it up” too and he’s even more of an idiot than you for that. Dragon Ball Super coming out well after Kid Icarus Uprising be immaterial.) What makes the incident REALLY cross the line, however, is when the gunman shot his own grandmother dead before he’d get to doing the mass shooting. At that point, I’d rather not work on the Powers video project, so I’m going to need something better. Fortunately, I do have a secondary idea to work with to either vent or let this blow over, whichever works first, but more importantly, it also has interest in calling out some problems in America’s own social system.
What is StreetPass? How does it concern Kid Icarus Uprising?
StreetPass is a feature on the Nintendo 3DS that allows players of the same game to provide each other in-game benefits, or at least it used to if reports of StreetPass only functioning at certain locations now are any indication. This would happen when the players would pass by each other in real life with their Nintendo 3DSs active with the game on.
In Kid Icarus Uprising, players use StreetPass to create Gems of their weapons, carrying precise modifier stats, to pass to each other. The original weapon is not lost from the original player; the Gems simply provide copies to other players who the original player passes by. The idea behind this system is simply to have players interact with each other in a healthy, meaningful manner with real life interaction.
At least, that’s the idea. In execution, there’s a whole host of problems, not helped by other design issues in Kid Icarus Uprising.
The Rich Get Richer
The first, and immediate obvious, method of exploitation is that a player, if they shell out enough money, can have multiple 3DSs and multiple copies of Kid Icarus Uprising. Pokemon at least gets the excuse of being a phenomenon, but even then, the whole point is supposed to be socialization, so multiple systems for the same game is still messy money expenditure. Kid Icarus Uprising, despite an advertisement campaign, is unfortunately making excuses for control issues such as melee not being its own button. Players should get to be able to get going with just their own 3DS and copy of the game, as long as they have enough skill to overcome mob-based adversity.
You might think that duplicate weapons wouldn’t be so bad, until you realize that some weapons tend to be better material for fusing into min-maxed equipment, and that same material can be duplicated, with multiplicative effectiveness. Theoretically, a player with only a single 3DS and no friends with KIU can catch up, but the effort would be excessive with the randomness in mind, especially when the weapons that are a good amount of the way through the fusion process can themselves be cloned as well.
What are the available options for somebody simply playing through the game with just their one 3DS? Well, beyond the base First Blade at the start of a new file, there’s the shop, which sells random weapons with random modifiers. There’s also getting weapons as drops in either single player as treasures, or multiplayer as participation rewards, but once again, the weapon types and modifiers are random.
And then there’s weapon fusion, which is how players are getting min-maxed setups. People say that this is learnable. I wouldn’t doubt that, as long as people can get past just one little problem.
In case you can’t guess, weapon fusion uses algorithms that has it be seemingly random for its own sake with the results. First, the two weapons’ weapon families determine which weapon family is used for the result, and it involves memorization in its own right to know what will result, even without the exceptions which are even further memorization. Next, the result weapon type is, generally at least (obviously getting into those freaking exceptions), the one with its family offset ID number that is modulo 12 from the sum of the two weapons’ family offset ID numbers. (Fairy Orbitars uses 5, which is obtained from 6 (Ogre Club) + 11 (Hewdraw Club) – 12 (for the modulo 12 part).) And finally, and this is, believe it or not, the most obnoxious part: what modifiers the resulting weapon will get depends on the difference of the two weapons’ Weapon ID numbers.
You can tell how the whole process becomes so confusing. It does not help that this, in combination with how much of an advantage min-maxing is, promotes a lack of participation in the actual gameplay to “improve” rather than, you know, simply playing the game and honing one’s skills with the gameplay that way. Power Grid shape memorization can be argued to involve a similar problem, but at least remembering the shapes and how they can fit with each other in the middle of battle would inevitably take effort, so a better handle on gameplay would still have incentive. Weapon modifiers have no such real Counter Play; you either have better ones or you don’t, and the skill required to overcome the disadvantage is simply excessive.
This problem also favors hackers who can modify their weapons to have these min-maxed setups in the first place, without having to go through the fusion process. I’ll say what I want without second thought about the fusion system and its surrounding elitism for being a case of toxic gatekeeping, but at least the people dealing with it are understanding SOMETHING. Hackers by contrast can create min-maxed weapons in the mid-340s (350 and above actually gets caught by the game and treated as base weapons) or even sub-100, the latter even able to go into negative, without the game catching them. Even forcing them to follow some rules will not stop them from min-maxing V299 weapons, which the game intended to check with Power Regen handling, but the game’s math with as much was actually off. And all the hackers have to do is shell out a little extra money for their equipment that allows them to make this stuff.
This is before getting into another issue with weapon fusion that also hurts the poor simply for being poor: to get ANYWHERE with fusion, the player has to be able to isolate the weapon modifiers that they get. What happens is that higher number weapon modifiers, which the game favors, tend to be mixed in with a bunch of low tempo stuff on drops, and more often than not, there’s a guarantee of Mixed Stars additionally being involved. I can cite that Mixed Stars can in fact be removed without losing the intended modifier via certain combinations, by all indications by making the available mixed stars low enough and then fusing with a weapon with isolated low tempo stuff, preferably if the Weapon ID Number difference modulo is 4; but besides the complication and lack of reliable guides with this already, getting the Stars on BOTH categories removed is a different story.
Want to know what particularly gets on my nerves? Well, I should cite that I have a weapon that would allow for getting Overall DEF +8 completely isolated, including from any Stars. Theoretically, I could get lucky and get such a drop. Yeah, well, here’s the weapon in question:
Yes, you are seeing that correctly. The weapon in question is a Treasure Hunt reward, obtainable only once per file. Hades’s Treasure Hunt also requires beating Chapter 25 to even unlock, so if this thing doesn’t get cloned, getting this again inevitably involves wading through the full game, but it’s not like creating a new file would help directly anyway, not when weapons can’t be directly shared between files. The insult is that you would have no real reason to think this thing a special gift from the developers, just a randomly thrown in reward for an equally random achievement. Dear Palutena, and I’m still reeling over how Boss Battles Hard’s achievement reward is a freaking Idol. And OF COURSE this would get cloned to have Overall DEF+, or Speed+ to a surprisingly lesser extent, on weapons with choice of which types of Stars to have. This just confounds me with how inane the CASUAL design becomes toward players who just want to play the game on multiplayer without unacceptable frustration.
I swear my real luck with the Tankscraper was its believe me relatively low Stars, for more reasons than Reflect Barrier.
That brings me to the OTHER side of the coin.
Value 100 weapon obtaining: the shocking nightmare
You might think that obtaining base weapons wouldn’t be so bad to manage. If that was the case, I’d have all 108 on my file. To this day, I am still missing 3 (Cursed Palm, Fairy (Flies) Orbitars, and End-All Arm), and keep in mind that this is with my save file that has been around for the entirety of the 10 years the game has been out, and since I have been doing my share of labbing from the start, I have been on the lookout for V100 weapons too. What happens? Quite simply, random drops are so random that they’ll include ANYTHING that would stop having the base weapon, and only early chapters even have a chance of reliable V100 weapon drops. The shop is also RNG; if I had an idea of how it generated stuff, that would at least be SOMETHING.
The problem is so bad that I become hopeful when I see weapon fusion itself be a potential method for getting the V100 weapons, when certain fusions actually can create the V100 weapons. Most notably, it’s reported that any completely isolated modifier with at least 44 Value when combining with a base weapon will result in simply removing the modifier for a base version of the new weapon type. What would have been the obvious solution to ensuring as much?
This is why I am particularly venting about the fusion system’s problems right now. If it was feasible to replicate the Brawler Claws from the Treasure Hunt, THEN I could just fuse it with a weapon with a fully isolated low value modifier to fully isolate the Overall DEF+8, at which point I just fuse it with a V100 weapon and I get what I want. If I had reliable access to cloning, I could also clone a V100 weapon I could calculate to make the result from this notion into whatever I would want; I have 105 of the weapon types, so something would come up. Obviously, I don’t have good access to cloning, so my complaints still stand.
The Set Weapon glitch would be useful for having a given V100 weapon type available in multiplayer, but it is requiring frame-perfect timing to get right, and it also doesn’t give the new V100 weapon permanently. There is a more consistent method for getting V100 weapon types, namely that there’s a save file floating around that has all 108 V100 weapon types. The problem with this method still lies in needing to use hacking tools, which, besides being legally grey and also something Nintendo has something of a short temper about, has the added issue of, again, needing further IRL equipment. I’d be doing this if my life wasn’t so pushed around by the government and the general state of California wanting to be outright abusive.
This brings me to the underlying issue with getting ANYTHING anywhere.
The overdesign around Japan…but also problems with America itself
When I was talking about my grievances with the fusion system with long time friend MarioMastar on instant messaging, eventually I remarked how it’s frustrating to have nobody local to play KIU with (I had somebody, a then staff member, at the disabilities daycare center I went to before but they weren’t available after some time), and MM responded how Nintendo “loves to assume that we all live in a yellow submarine.” That brings up a point: Nintendo is stationed in Japan, where people EASILY communicate with each other in real life and everything, which is the big explanation for Smash Bros.’s online getting increasingly worse from what I have heard, when Nintendo has no reason to care to see what worked before, or rather, they have no reason to care when they are subscribing to tribalism. Japan won’t issue many complaints about these problems. Things become different in America; say what you want about Japan having issues with the way it treats women, and we should in the midst of its anti-individualism messages, but I’d take an overabundance of affection over an environment that forces people to fight for scraps any day of the week. I’d still have reason to really want to stay sharp in the former, but Palutena knows how much it would be for healthier reasons.
I will still fault Kid Icarus Uprising’s design as it stands for expecting players to pay more to “improve” in a game they already paid for. What I need to point out is when the reason that happens is because the surrounding community itself, predominantly American, is still a disconnected mess. Think about it: a certain Kid Icarus Uprising multiplayer group who has become popular is actively racist to the point where they’ll use the N word with casual malice, and not only that, but you can’t challenge them reasonably in fair matches because if you stall out their Libra/Aries, an aggravating combination to begin with, with the least mobile weapon type in the game and no Speed+ modifiers, they’ll just complain about you stalling them out obviously with your limited charges Powers, call in their friends who have their own min-maxed setups, stack unfair odds against you, and then claim that YOU suck for trying to communicate with the God awful teammate that they shoved down your throat to blatantly sabotage any of your potential countermeasures beyond recognition.
Oh, that’s an important point that people, especially in America, need to learn: communication. And it’s reason enough to want to promote the V100 Competitive community. But even that becomes difficult. I should cite that the user Hextator had created a fusion calculator that is accurate, but there are difficulties using it (such as having to rely on typing and hoping the thing registers what you want to check), and he is not willing to share the source code after his experiences with the Fire Emblem community being exploitative and having hit him with as much. Let me make my points about the Fire Emblem community: it has morality problems in its own right, BLATANTLY at that, and this includes some out-of-hand lewdness even before Fire Emblem Awakening was a twinkle in the eye of that game’s creator. It got to the point where they celebrated a certain Fire Emblem YouTuber, one who carried no skill and proved himself morally bankrupt even well before July 2020 brought points to light, and yes, I’m referring to the same one who I was mocking when talking about Ogre Club in my previous post. Even to this day, the scummy FE YouTuber has over 100K subs, not helped by the involvement of Advance Wars Re-Boot Camp, which involves its own community pulling outrageous behaviors all over the place.
But I’m here to talk about about Hextator’s motivation, more interested in clarifying that I understand with active empathy about what he went through. There’s no reason to try to force him to change his tune or anything about this, but what I DO want to call out is when the Kid Icarus Uprising community is still too small to expect surrounding support until the KIU general community decides to grow up. I have some capability with hacking, but it’s not nearly enough due to active reliance on intuition. That still displays the problem all the same: insufficient methods for creating OR providing V100 weapons. KIU would have particularly benefited from online-viable StreetPass, which would have allowed for passing around things like the Treasure Hunt Brawler Claws for material for making the V100 weapons, or the V100 weapons themselves in the first place. What we have with the general KIU community (again, this excludes the V100 community) instead is elitists who promote min-maxing and having to learn about a counterintuitive system to be “competent.” I can believe the fusion system was intentionally counterintuitive in the interest of staggering min-maxing without friend support to promote community, but it’s so forceful about as much, rather than encouraging the individuals who would be the inevitable makeup of the community to evolve in a cleaner manner via creativity like the Power system does in its ability to provide unpredictability.
Closing
Kid Icarus Uprising is far from blameless in the problems it has with how players who don’t want to spend more money on a game they already paid for, or try to learn the ever nonsensical fusion system, can expect way too much to be forced to use mish-mash modifier setups that have the best they can hope for still not stack up in the least to min-maxed Evasion+ abuse, or even min-maxed abuse involving Shot Range+ or any of the Speed+ mods, and if it’s going with “the army you got” logic, it should be making V100 weapons more consistent to obtain from the start, since those would have to wade through as much especially in single player anyway.
Nevertheless, the problems I complain about, particularly the inability to do a viable online version of StreetPass, one that would not require hacking knowledge that gets complicated fast, showcase how America’s system is so dysfunctional about the handling of communication and why that is a bad thing. I’m obviously talking about how this happens with one game, but if people wish to complain about that notion, then perhaps they’d be interested in hearing me talk for the umpteenth time about the problems I have had with getting my parents’ house cleaned up because politics has made getting the needed proper support for as much a nightmare.
Bottom line, America: Kid Icarus Uprising is, shocker of the century that you need to tell me, not perfect. That is no excuse for you to think that your broken communication handling is fine in your blatant hubris.
Warriors Uprising 