Dear Gauls!
To celebrate the release of Asterix & Friends Remastered, we would like to introduce the new features in separate posts!
This time, we tackle the new minigame “Journeys”! If it’s too long for you to read: No worries, “Journeys” is quite self-explanatory as soon as you try it out and there are in-game help texts as well.
— An adventure in 45 chapters —
Asterix & Friends Remastered contains three journeys: Corsica, Britain, and Hispania – more will follow. Each journey represents a longer adventure that your chosen heroes experience in other countries and consists of 45 chapters. These are divided into 5 reputation stages with 9 chapters each: Neutral, Friendly, Trusted, Beloved, Heroes.
A new chapter will be unlocked, when you completed the previous chapter successfully. Once you advance to the next reputation stage, you will gain access to the first chapter of the new stage. All unlocked chapters of the current reputation stage can be started and completed as often as you like.
— What you need for a chapter —
For starting a chapter, you need a secret message of the respective country. Secret messages can be found by hunting boars and by fishing or in the respective country shop. With the secret message, you can unlock a chapter for a period of time (depending on the chapter’s duration). Be sure to send your villagers out in this chapter before the timer runs out.
To be able to complete a chapter, you need a free boat. You start with one boat. More boats can be purchased permanently but can also be rented for a certain period of time.
–The chance of success —
A chapter’s successful completion depends on the “chance of success” and a bit of luck. The “chance of success” is the chance to successfully complete a chapter. There are several ways to increase this chance.
The chance is highly influenced by the villagers you select to staff the boat. They all have a unique strength, defence and health stat, which increases with the level of the villager. Every chapter displays the importance of those three stats through bars. For example, when the strength bar is more filled than the other two, the strength of the villagers you choose is more important than defence and health. Picking a villager with a high strength stat is therefore recommended in this example.
Each villager also has 5 traits. To send out a boat, at least one villager with the required trait needs to be selected. Additionally, there are bonus traits in every chapter. Choosing villagers that match the bonus traits increases your chance of success. The more bonus traits your selected villagers match, the higher is the bonus.
Furthermore, you can equip items. Different stats will get boosted for a fixed number of points, depending on which items you choose and in which slot you equip them. The chosen items are consumed after completing the chapter.
Finally, you can also activate the “Toutatis blessing”. This grants you a fixed bonus of 15% to the chance of success. After using the blessing, you can wait until you can use it again or skip the timer to use the blessing in the next chapter.
— Sending out a boat —
After you activated the chapter with a secret message and selected the villagers (and optionally items and/or Toutatis bonus), you send off the boat with your adventurers. For this, you use a permanently available boat or rent one. Now you’re waiting for the return of the boat or you skip the timer. Early chapters don’t need much time to complete, later ones much longer. Therefore, you may want to keep the character’s traits and the chapter duration in mind when selecting characters.
After the time ran down or after skipping the timer, you earn several rewards.
When you complete a chapter successfully, you receive “victory rewards”: Reputation points, which you need to increase your reputation stage, and the respective country currency of the journey (Corsican chestnuts, British toast or Hispanic herb wine), which you can use to buy items and beautifications in the respective country shop.
You also gain one or more of the “possible rewards”, which are displayed in the journey window. If your journey fails, you will only get a small reward. If you are successful, you will receive one or more items out of the “possible rewards” and you have a chance to receive a random “rare reward” (symbolized by the question mark in the list of possible rewards).
— Reputation stages —
The reputation points are needed to build up the reputation in the respective country. Reaching new reputation stages unlocks new chapters with better rewards, which continue the story.
When you reach a new reputation stage in a country for the first time, you gain extra rewards like Roman helmets, food, and resistance points. You’ll receive the biggest one-time rewards when reaching 100% reputation on the “Heroes” stage.
The reputation you have gained in a country will decrease if you don’t play any chapters in that country for a period of time. The reputation can fall back to “neutral”.
— The country shops –
The country currency can be redeemed in the respective country shop. Each shop has a unique selection of items that can be bought in the shop. The higher your reputation, the bigger the selection of items. The shops offer additional secret messages, rare collectables, strong weapons and potions.
The shop also includes different variants of the new beautifications. When you’ve gained 100% reputation on the “Heroes” stage, you can buy new, shop-exclusive equipment like the Corsican click spear!
— Beautifications —
With the beautification, you can decorate different parts like the palisades around your village, put waterlilies on the river or add an archway. In each country, you unlock two “basic beautifications” – when reaching the reputation stages “Friendly” and “Beloved”. Once unlocked, these basic beautifications will be permanently available for you.
In addition, you can buy further variants with the respective country currency in the country shops. These variants remain active for two weeks from the time you activate them in the beautification menu.
We hope this summary of Journeys can serve you as a quick guide when going on your first journeys!
One last quick tip: Click on the blue “?” boxes in the right upper corner to access explanations about the beautifications and the Journey minigame in-game!
Your Asterix & Friends team
