Sunday, October 30, 2011

Farming Big Plays

I love my shiny new Nintendo 3DS, because it lets me do lots of Zelda related things, which I wanted to do for a while now. For example farming Big Plays in Phantom Hourglass. You could say that until this point I never had a 100% savegame of Phantom Hourglass, because I never got the 16 Big Plays (those are awards you earn in multiplayer). The multiplayer isn't much fun, so I never really played it online. And tracking someone down, who also wants to farm Big Plays, is somehow inconvenient. And I never really thought that Big Plays count as something that you have to do for a 100% completion anyway. Scoring all Big Plays in multiplayer adds four treasure chests to the house on Cannon Island. All of them include golden ship parts, which is awesome, but you can easily get them on other means. And since I already got all golden ship parts, I never really cared about the Big Plays. But of course you could say that I never got all treasure chests or just count the Big Plays theirselves as part of your completion level.

But now I did it anyway. If you have two DS systems you can easily do it yourself. But you'll need a second copy of the game, because you can't earn any Big Plays if your opponent uses Download Play. So, I went back to the video store and rented Phantom Hourglass again. I already did the same earlier this year to replay the game, because I didn't want to erase one of my two 100% savegames. Funny enough my old file on the rented game was still there. And no one created a second savegame. It seems like I'm the only idiot, who's renting this game. But thanks to that I could now transfer all the golden ship parts, which I got during my replay session, to one of my old files using the Contact Mode. You never can have enough of those shiny gold pieces.

Using a second DS and a second copy of the game also has the advantage, that you don't have to lose to someone. If you farm Big Plays online, you will need to let your partner win multiple times as well, which then counts against your win percentage. Unless of course you use two savegames, your actual one and a dummy. But that's even more incovenient and in my case I have two fully beaten savegames, which I wanted to keep.


I farmed all 16 Big Plays in both of my savegames. So, it did the whole thing twice. Here's the list of what you have to do:

  • No Items: Win without taking a single item.
  • No Dribble: Win, but don't drop Force Gems outside bases or safe zones.
  • Limit: Win a match, felling Link in the last 20 sec. of two turns.
  • Solo: Defeat Link in any one turn using only one Phantom.
  • Break: Break 10 or more of your opponent's helpful items.
  • Take: Pick up 10 or more of your own helpful items.
  • Perfect Master: Complete a Perfect and Limit at the same time.
  • Quick: Win a match, felling Link in the first 20 sec. of two turns.
  • Miracle: Win 1-0.
  • Get Everything: Win, turning all the Force Gems your color.
  • Guardian: Win without letting your opponent score any points.
  • Perfect: Complete both the Get Everything and Guardian together.
  • No Miss: Win without being taken down once as Link.
  • Guard King: Take Link down three times as the Phantoms.
  • Master: Complete a No Miss and Guardian at the same time.
  • Battle Master: Complete a Limit and Master at the same time.

Some of these goals are conflicting, for example you can't do Limit and Quick at the same time. But you can make it easily in three games. First focus on Quick and Get Everything, ignore all items. In the second game focus on the Perfect Master. In the last game go for Miracle. This is the perfect opportunity to get No Dribble, as well as Break and Take.

After scoring four Big Plays you will get a letter that a prize is awaiting you at Cannon Island. So, you get four letters in total. Talk to Fuzo, Eddo's apprentice, on Cannon Island and he will add a treasure chest to his room. The prizes seem to be fixed:

4 Big Plays: Golden Chimney
8 Big Plays: Golden Handrail
12 Big Plays: Golden Cannon
16 Big Plays: Golden Hull

I also used this opportunity to take a good look at all eight stages. Stages 1 and 4 are probably most suitable for farming Big Plays.

Well, that's it. After beating both versions of Four Swords, beating Ocarina of Time 3D and now farming all the Big Plays I can now claim that I have fully beaten all Zelda games with a 100% completion rate. That is until Skyward Sword appears in 19 days. But still this was one of my longtime goals and I'm really happy that I finally achieved that.

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