Rivals of Aether II (Patch 1.1.3) - Arcade Mode "Tag Out" Bug, Unlock Abyss Palettes With Your Main!
6The post-Genesis X2 patch dropped for Rivals of Aether II, and as part of that, the devs made a few single player additions and changes. Among them was making the requirement for the Abyss Palettes easier, by making an Abyssal Medal on Medium count for the palette. They also added the ability to play Target Test stand alone.
I'm going to guess that at least one of those changes had something to do with this crazy bug though, which I'm dubbing the "Tag Out" bug. Essentially, if you simply pause and quit a Target Test stage during an Arcade Mode run, and select your character again to start a new run, you will be loaded back into the Target Test stage with the same time on the clock as before you quit.
However, where it gets interesting is when you select a DIFFERENT character to the one you started with. If you do this, you will load into your new character's Target Test stage, with the same time on the clock as before. If you clear this stage, you will then move on to the ORIGINAL character's next stage and continue the first character's Arcade Route with the new character. In this example, I started with Loxodont's Arcade Route, made it to the Target Test stage, quit the run, and then selected Clairen. I then loaded into Clairen's Target Test stage, completed it, and the next stage was against Wrastor, who is the opponent after Loxodont's Target Test in his Arcade Route. I then proceeded to complete the remainder of Loxodont's Arcade Route as Clairen.
There are also some interesting interactions at play if you change the difficulty between your tag out as well. If you start the first character's run on Easy difficulty, and switch to Medium for the second character's, you will continue the run on Medium AI opponents, but with the 5 stocks from Easy if you still had them.
However, the most insane part of this bug is that you can actually unlock Abyss Palettes with the wrong character. If you choose at least Medium Difficulty on both halves of your run, you will unlock the Abyssal Palette for the FIRST character chosen if you complete the run in 4:30 minutes! This essentially means you could switch to your best character on all Arcade Routes to unlock everyone's Abyss Palettes, making it easier to unlock all of them. The new palette may not show up in your inventory immediately, but it should show up when you reboot the game, as the game will do a check for "unclaimed items" and give you any you don't have.
This will probably be patched pretty soon, so take advantage of it while you can! I'm also not sure if they will let me keep the Abyssal Loxodont palette I received from this. Since cosmetics are server side, they may be able to tell it was unlocked in a weird way and may revoke it. But this was just really funny to discover, and if nothing else, it's fun to try Arcade routes with the wrong characters!
As a disclaimer, the Abyssal Medals and Palettes I own for Clairen and Kragg are legitimate. I have a video of my Clairen run which was done on Hard difficulty before they made Medium runs eligible, and my Medium Kragg run from when I started playing the game was already under 4:30, so I got it retroactively in this patch.
I probably won't cheese the other palettes like this as I expect they will revoke them anyway, and I kinda want to do it legit anyway. I just did this one for science.
As a bonus, you may also notice that they broke the Horde Battles - they now spawn in on respawn platforms with full invincibility, but they are supposed to just fall in from the sky with only a few frames of invincibility. Sometimes they even camp on the respawn platfrom now. Perhaps that makes cheesing the run a bit more fair right now? :P
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