Shenkuu Warrior II: Grappling Your Way to the Top

Hello, everyone, and welcome to this edition of Nighters' Trophy Tales, where I will give you lots of tips to help you grapple and climb your way to a beautiful Shenkuu Warrior II trophy! I know, it's shiny, it's on Neopian lookups (including my own), and with this guide, it could be on your user lookup too!

A note to all of my new Neofriends reading this guide: if you do not have a mouse, or tablet, or something other than a laptop track pad, this game will be painfully frustrating! I'm not discouraging you, I'm just saying this is a game where clicking requires some more accuracy. I will cover games that do not require track pad/mouse usage in order to let you get in on the Nighters' Trophy Tales action! :)

First off, we're going to start with an ideal goal score, assuming we are going for the trophy during the first week of the Neopian month, where scores are lowest. Our ideal goal score is 300,000 points. This might seem incredibly scary, but fear not! Data from an old reset score table (this could be found on the /~old_reset_scores petpage) shows that this score of 300k on any given first of the month should be a bronze trophy. I would obviously recommend to aim higher if you possibly could considering this is a guide to get the trophy rather than to teach you game play, but it's a good mental goal you should have while you climb every mountain the princess has to conquer!

Shenkuu Warrior II has two modes of play: Training and Zen Master. I believe it is possible to get a trophy using both modes, but I recommend you do Training – it sets up a larger safety net for when we get to what I call the "endless mountain", meaning you have to amass fewer points at the endless mountain, thus putting less pressure on yourself, even though you have to beat the other three levels first. Zen Master just starts off at the endless mountain. If you can get 300,000 points in one climb of the endless mountain, be my guest, but you will save yourself a lot of stress with Training mode.

Training mode has three levels as mentioned earlier, and then you will hit the endless mountain – the tree level, the dirt mountain, and the snowy mountain. The goal during these three mountains is to collect as many points as you can so you have less work to do at the endless mountain.

The tree level is complete when you hit an altitude of about 28,000, and in this level you should try to collect as many crests as possible to add some bonus points. Definitely try to get the bonuses from the lines of bronze crests. If you miss, it's okay, this is only the first level and timing wise it doesn't take more than about a minute. As tempting as the kite power ups look, try to avoid them at this point in the game as you will bypass points you need this early on in your adventure.

The dirt mountain introduces silver crests, and you should still be collecting and hit an altitude of about 48,000 to move onto the ice mountain. Once again, try to collect crests, not waste too much time, and do not risk your life for the bonus lines of crests if you could help it!

The ice mountain is the hardest one of these three, requiring you to reach an altitude of about 70,000. This level introduces the gold crests, and formations involving silver and gold crests. Although the bonus from collecting everything in this formations is rather large (total of 7200 points per giant formation assuming you earn the bonus!), the risk is not worth it considering you have to climb 70,000 feet. There are plenty of crests along the way to give you a higher score. This is also the level where breakable platforms are introduced, and you will need to grapple multiple times. These are very, very frustrating, not going to lie. Stay calm and patient. Remember if you do fail, you are not given a game over and could try as many times as you wish.

When you reach the top of the ice mountain (finally, I know!), you have made it to the endless mountain. I'm hoping your combined score is between 180,000 – 200,000, as this means much less work and pressure for you as we tackle the endless mountain and ascend into the skies of Shenkuu! If your score is lower than this, it's okay, just prepare to climb higher than if your score was higher. As you begin your first 10,000 feet ascension into infinity, you will come across some balloon power-ups, which we will save for later on, and very few crests. These are pretty much the only crests you will see for the entire climb, so grab them! If you're lucky, there will be the Kazeriu petpet waiting to help you and grab all the crests automatically while taking you up, up and away. In this level there are dark clouds that are like the breakable platforms from the ice mountain, and the kite power-ups are much more common. We will use every kite power-up we see to our advantage as it gives us lots of points with minimal effort. Sometimes you get several thousand feet in altitude covered by one kite, so we will be kite hopping until our hands sweat from clicking. Our goal is one run should be at least 150,000 on this level; the highest climb I ever achieved was 200k but higher is definitely possible.

If you can climb these mountains and collect those crests and not lose your patience, congratulations on grappling your way to a shiny new trophy for your user lookup! Feel free to drop me a message if you have any questions – until then, I'll be grappling away trying to get my Shenkuu Warrior II trophy to become gold!