This creates a streamlined linear experience (completable in under 3 hours), without most of the rpg elements. It also introduces a combo scoring mechanic: you will be awarded money for connecting large combos, and will be penalized when you die (even if you return to hideout). The money serves no purpose other than to measure your performance :)

Disclaimer: Arcade Mode is much harder than Story Mode, I strongly advise you not to skip ahead to Nightmare; try this on Normal first before you decide to move up.

Disclaimer 2: This is untested for online play, so don't play it with strangers online. That being said, if you and a friend who both have it installed want to test it for me, that'd be appreciated. Local coop will work fine.

How this works:

1) Hold F10 while creating a new game to create an Arcade Mode save. You will hear a voice clip, and if you back out to the saves list it will be labeled as "Arcade".

2) The game will be on rails, taking you to only the main story screens. All shops, bus stops, and dojos will be locked permanently. All exits will lock until you finish each screen's objective, then one exit will unlock to skip to your next destination. If you quit and reload the game, leaving Kyoko's house will teleport you back to where you were. The hideout will NOT restore health, unless you got there via death.

3) There will be no XP, no accessories, and no food. Instead you have all moves from the start, a high starting AG and SP, and you will level up at set points throughout the story. These level-ups are your only source of healing other than death.

4) The game will award you money for comboing enemies effectively, and penalize you when you die. The combo payouts are based on how much enemy life was taken away by the combo, not number of hits. Juggling corpses doesn't increase the payout, however it can still be worth doing to keep the combo going so you can group more kills into it. One large combo will score significantly higher than splitting it up into smaller ones.

5) Enemies that are part of infinite spawns will not contribute to combo payout.

6) Some bosses were tuned to be easier on Normal. They all behave normally on Tough and Nightmare. In future versions, Nightmare bosses will have some extra surprises, and correspondingly increased payouts.

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To start, in order to use any mods you have to install MelonLoader, to do so run "MelonLoader.Installer.exe" from https://github.com/LavaGang/MelonLoader/releases and point the installer to your RCG2 executable, this will create a "Mods" folder in your game folder, you can drop any mods you like into this folder some mods have configurable parameters, these will appear in "<GameDirectory>/UserData/MelonPreferences.cfg" after the first time you run the game with that mod installed