Racing on twitch with Beyond Chaos

I've found 9 shops every time I've gotten to the Guardian buttons. There are 3 on each path: 500, 2000, 8000.
I meant shops. My brain just seems to want to call them towns because they contain all the things a town normally contains.

Sometimes you die randomly, yes. Because sometimes there are very singular enemies that suddenly cast pearl and poison as their only actions, or sometimes you just screw up. That's why there are save points. The only problem is that sometimes you forget to save. Deaths are also made more common by an artifact of how I've set up my parties sometimes.

Exploration is only really required to find the two switches (which is already annoying), unless you say you need to get all the shops which involves a LOT more forced exploration. If I didn't have to find all the shops I could probably cut an hour off the race time due to the inevitable backtracking necessitated by accidentally finding the next area.

I'll stream a solo race or one against Jack if I can convince him to do yet another one (unlikely). I'll just have to find some time in the nearish future.

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Oh, and I've never played the actual ancient cave - just the speed one. I can't really compare them. But my guess is that the main difference is that you wind up fighting the Guardian stuff at level ~20 in speedcave and the bosses all do more damage per attack than your characters have health. That is the main reason you'd need to grind. There has also always been a MUCH bigger step up in encounter difficulty than there is at any other music-switch.