While playing Demon Tides, you’ll find a few different opportunities to purchase more Talismans, which function like Badges in Paper Mario. Each one gives you a unique attribute, or something far sillier, but for the ones in the shop on the ship, you’ll need to spend your limited funds.
You can’t exactly farm money in this game, as every Island contains only a limited amount of Eyetems, and it can take a while to get a lot of them. That said, these purchasable Talismans are absolutely your best bet for spending your hard-earned cash, and can help a ton with exploration.
I’ll be going over some of the best talismans in the game, all of which are purchasable in the shop, and ordered by how early you can and should get them.
Bat Booster
While the other Bat abilities are decent and can certainly help you cross large gaps in a pinch, Bat Booster is absolutely the GOAT. Using this thing, I could skip getting into both the portals in Lokitana, skip a ton of “required” platforming, and speed through any section with verticality.
It’s cheap, it’s available early game, and it’ll give your double jump such a big boost that it can completely trivialize a ton of challenges. This is especially potent when used in combination with other talismans, and has synergy with Cannonball Leap or Bat Dasher if you’d rather go for distance.
Snake Boating
A solid chunk of this game is spent in snake form, gliding across the ocean at a moderate speed. Luckily, you can grab the Snake Boating Talisman to significantly increase the speed of your Snake form, making it much easier to navigate to new islands or clear out all the unseen map space.
That said, you should probably keep this one on an alternate loadout, as the times when you want to be in snake form are split into separate chunks from most of the other gameplay. There are a few exceptions to that, but having a speed build and a height build never hurt.
Spincopter
This Talisman takes quite a bit of getting used to, but once you’ve had Spincopter on for a while, you can never go back. It increases your vertical distance by a massive amount and is crucial for pulling off skips, getting to high-up areas before you’re supposed to, and cheesing platforming.
I was able to climb up the entirety of the massive tower in Shiverbeaks by abusing the huge vertical this talisman grants. With a bit of persistence and a willingness to sacrifice a little horizontal distance, this thing becomes helpful in every situation.
Health Plus
While the bosses in this game aren’t usually challenging, having an extra pill of health from the Health Plus Talisman comes in far more useful than you’d think. A ton of platforming sections have platforms with spikes adorning them, and this allows you to jump right on them and damage boost to victory.
Getting hit resets most of your moves and is especially good in the Not Time Rifts, where there aren’t any checkpoints allowed. Getting an extra hit of leniency in these challenges can make the difference between replaying a level for twenty minutes and getting it all done on your first try.
Longer Spin
As much as I love Spincopter, the Longer Spin talisman doesn’t work with it, but it does give you a hell of a lot of horizontal distance. There are a few times the game will present you with a seemingly impassable gap to try to block off access to an area, and this can completely trivialize that.
Take this one on your speed loadout and never look back. Chaining together a dash jump, long spin, and then jumping out of it can cover damn near any distance in the game. It’s great for cheese, great for saving yourself after flubbing a jump, and just a great option in general.
Item Arrow Tracker
Once you get to the point where you’re allowed to purchase the Item Arrow Tracker talisman, you’re probably at the point where you want to be mopping up collectibles anyway. This allows you to have the arrow that appears when you press B at all times.
This means no more slowing down, stopping, and waiting for the arrow to come up, instead letting you run directly towards all the eyetems in the map with lots of joy and whimsy. These Eyetems are usually placed near the other collectibles, too, so it can be helpful for 100% no matter what.
Also Read
Demon Tides Review
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