Okay, we're back, and trying to earn as much as we can, with as little time / effort as possible.

Like the last two games, I assume ‘days spent’ will be some sort of score at the end, so it makes sense to try and optimize them.





The car stacking job doesn't give us much in the way of payment in the easy tiers and it takes a really long time (in real life) to do the advanced tiers that have higher payouts, so it's not really worth the trouble in my opinion.

You can do multiple garages in a day, so in some ways you might get a decent in-game days to money earning ratio, but the amount of real time and brain power needed to do it is horrendous. I ain't got the patience to sit through hours of those animations.





‘Working’ the Mahjong Parlour is the easiest way to earn cash. You can get a cool 42,700 yen every time you visit, just clicking through a few dialogue prompts. Each time you visit is another day though, so you're racking up a lot of ‘days spent’

I suppose you could probably earn even more cash by actually playing Mahjong, but that would involve understanding it in the first place.





The street races are a really good option for making money. The rate we get paid (and the initial wager / opponent ) have been increasing the higher we get in the group races. At the moment, for a wager of 26,000 yen, it's possible to earn 78,000 yen. That’s a 52,000 yen profit if we win.

If I swap our car and all the parts back onto Mouthbreather, she'll handily win most races for us at the moment, since Brap Brap isn't competitive yet.

It lets you do something like 10 races in a row on a day, so that's 520,000 yen up for grabs, and it doesn't take that long to sit through 10 races. So the the amount of player effort vs days return is quite high.

But the most interesting money maker is grinding the RPG mode.

As you battle and explore, each character levels up and gains more equipment and magic powers, so it becomes easier over time to defeat enemies. Especially when you don't choose Silver Ball Dad in your party.

Since there's no time limit, you can keep grinding lower levels for long periods of time, for a really high game-days to earned cash ratio.

I've typically been earning about 1 mill at a time, by putting everything on frameskip / fast forward and just grinding through battles for a good 10 minutes or so at a time.





However, if like me, you hate grinding, and you’re driven to see what sort of bat-shit enemies the game is going to throw at you, so you keep tackling the upper levels which are much more difficult.

At the time of writing I'm currently at level 11 of 18 or so, and we've met some interesting characters here in the walled city.





You may have noticed in the video the Conga girls, whose special attack is shaking their boobs at you.





We also saw the Ronin - who is here from another time. His attacks are very strong and he's hard to hit because he dodges most physical attacks. The best bet is to use magic on him





But you should be mostly wary if ‘The Gel’ - which seems to be a sentient blob that bounces around, attacking people.





And of course, we have the literal manifestation of the death, Skeletons - aka grim reaper(s)





The higher we go, it starts to get a little medieval with The Knight





And, uh… some... other enemies…





I’d love to know the story of how all these characters ended up being gangs in Kowloon Walled City.

Finally, we’re squared off against a giant stone giant.





Interestingly I discovered that Silver Ball Dad, who this entire time has been utterly useless, has FINALLY got a new sort of attack that does more than one digit of damage. But being who he is, it’s a ‘gambling attack’





What happens, is he punches, and you see the standard three digit ‘damage dealt’ indicator appear - but each digit cycles through its possible options, one after another, like a poker machine - until all three have been randomly selected, then it administrates the damage.

Quite a clever idea really - but Silver Ball Dad still doesn’t dish out much damage most of the time, and doesn’t have much health regardless.

Once… just once however, I must have hit a jackpot. Literally. There was a jackpot sound effect, and the entire soundtrack changed to cheerful music and Silver Ball Dad knocked the enemy out of with the first hit.

I really didn’t see what happened since I was frame-skipping at the time, and sadly wasn’t able to record it. I’ve tried to recreate this many times since, even save scumming the same move again and again hoping to trigger it randomly - with no luck.

I also discovered another thing he can be used for. If Taro is knocked out in a battle, but others survive - you'll see them in the overworld instead of Taro. Since his only 'magic' move is 'pretend to be dead' - this means he's most likely to survive if every one else is knocked out, which means you can enjoy his waddling animation, and leg it back to the elevator to end the level without as bad a penalty.