User blog comment:Stormjay Rider/3DS game/@comment-5698069-20130716183510/@comment-5698069-20130717140630

Good point. Anyways, Kid Icarus has a unique way of adjusting difficulty. When you start aa level, you can choose to drop hearts (the game's currency) into what they call the Fiend's Cauldron, which increases the intensity of the level. Intensity ranges from 0.0 (no effort at all) to 9.0 (nearly impossible). Players are encouraged to play at higher difficulty levels because the higher the intensity, the more hearts you can acquire by defeating enemies and the better the weapons you get will be. Basically, you bet hearts to increase the difficulty. When you die, a few hearts will spill out of the Fiend's Cauldron, automatically lowering the difficulty a little, also lowering the value of the weapons you gained and such. This is a little like a fail-safe, in case you bite off more than you can chew, but later on it also provides a fun though sometimes annoying chalenge: If you want to beat the level at a certain difficulty, you either have to start at a higher one, or make it through with no deaths at all. On 9.0, this is a rare feat.

The multiplayer is also surprisingly good for a handheld game. There are two modes: Free-for-All, and Light Vs. Dark. In Free-for-All, as the name implies, it's just a timed battle to see who can gain the most kills with the fewest deaths fighting other players. In Light Vs. Dark, you have 6 players: three Light and three Dark. In addition to each player's individual health bar, each team has its own collective health bar. When a player dies, health is subtracted from the team's health bar according to the value of the weapon he's using (i.e.: more powerful weapons will subtract more health when the player dies). When the team's health bar is reduced to zero, the last player to die becomes an angel, with a randomly selected weapon (at this point the otehr team members have unlimitted respawns). The first team to eliminate the other team's angel wins. Players must work together in this mode to target the other team's angel. In addition, it's possible to play both multiplayer modes alone, with CPUs filling player slots. These CPUs aren't your run-of-the-mill idiot AIs by the way; they actually do provide a decent challenge to fight.

Now, going back to weapons themselves, which are the bread and butter of the game, they determine EVERYTHING about how you play the game. The weapon he's holding not only affects Pit's attack strategies, but his speed, stamina, health, defenses, recovery speed, and evasion as well. Finding a perfect weapon is by far one of the greatest quests for discoery you can find in a video game. Anyways, there are nine basic types of weapons: Blades, Bows, Claws, Clubs, Staffs, Arms, Canons, Orbitars, Palms. I will explain each in brief. Blades are your basic, all-around weapons; the have rapid continuous fire and decent melee. Bows lean more towards ranged attacks, firing concentrated bursts with above-average homing. Claws sacrifice range for a 5-hit melee combo that just looks darn awesome. Clubs are generally giant slabs usually way bigger than Pit himself; they have no continuous ranged attacks, instead swinging back and forth, deflecting enemy shots; their charge shots, however, send massive shockwaves through the ground, and in terms of raw physical power they are unparalled. Staffs are just the opposite; they're basically sniper rifles. Arms are generally short-ranged, high-power weapons which excel at melee attacks. Canons are frenzy weapons with slow-moving but explosive shots. Orbitars are an interesting type of weapon; they generally consist of two floating spherical things hovering in the air around pit, that fire at his telepathic command. Palms are what they sound like; they are worn like a glove/tatoo, allowing Pit to shoot rapid-fire homing shots from the palm of his hand, without hindering his speed.

So there you have a run-down of the nine basic weapon types. There are dozens of each kind of weapon, and each one has a unique set of properties that set it apart, so finding the right one for you is a lengthy but fun and worthwile endeavor.

Overall, this game is an ESSENTIAL addition to any 3DS owner's collection. Combining fast-paced action and easy pick-up-and-play mechanism with a surprising ammount of depth, this game is a unique experience that halmarks the best of Nintendo: easy to learn, challenging to master, and the freedom to play the game the way you want to play it. And, with the ability to find more and more new kinds of weapons and the higher difficulties to tackle in every level, it boasts nearly infinite replayability (provided you don't try to do it all at once). I wholeheartedly recommend this game with every fiber of my being!