Now, this one was interesting. I actually had an emotional rollercoaster on this one: excited, disappointed, annoyed, infuriated, entertained, and ultimately, satisfied.
Let me get a couple of things out of the way here:
One, this is the third new ET in a row where the gameplay has been tweaked to have some kind of annoying/complicated/difficult mechanic that comes out of nowhere. With Valiant, it was the starting undercover and surprise clone targets aspects. With Le Chiffre, it was the card game and the poisoning. And now with this ET, well, you’ve all been talking about it for almost a week now, so you know the issues. And I gotta say, IOI needs to cut this shit out. If you’re gonna do things like that, it needs to be a regular mission, not time-limited, one-try-only, online exclusive content that has insta-fail features and takes an excessive amount of time to complete when played as intended.
And two, I flatly refuse to consider this a Celebrity ET, also for two reasons.
- No celebrity is actually involved. Bruce Lee is dead; that is neither his motion capture movements being used, nor his voice. It is simply his likeness, in which he is not the first character in the series to be directly based off another person, this time just happens to use the full name of the person for the character.
- Bruce Lee is not the target. He’s a supporting character, but since he’s not the target, this turns out to just be a regular ET with a “guest” appearance in it.
And to any who may believe I should still refer to it as a Celebrity ET despite those reasons because it is meant to represent an actual celebrity, despite not actually having one involved, fine; I’ll change my position as soon as IOI starts referring to Holiday Hoarders as a Celebrity Special Assignment.
Now, after a lot of trial and error in Arcade Mode, I finally found my method and adhered to the HPP in the process. Bringing in a durian and stashing the Sieker, I climbed the pipe to the top floor, met with Lee, waited for Roland to leave his office and stepped in before the door closed, messed with his laptop, and when he was done, I threw a coin next to the open window from my hiding spot behind his desk. One push and he was done.
Next, I dropped the durian next to Zen, followed him to the bathroom and drowned him, taking his antidote in case something went wrong, and made sure his body was discovered so it could be moved.
Then, I went upstairs to the suites to get a banana round up here, then used the Sieker on the lady in the exercise area where Xiao hangs out. Before she got to the bathroom I put the banana in front of the toilet so she wouldn’t bother me later. I waited until Xiao had her first match, which is when she goes to lift weights. When the guy who is normally there walked away, I stepped in to spot her and killed her with the weights.
Then I just sat and waited for Lee to do the rest, then walked out. In the second round of the Arcade version, I brought a Kalmer instead and used it on Roland and Zen, took their poisons and antidote so they’d be no threat to Lee, then when Xiao poisoned Lee I gave him the antidote and let it take its course.
A fun, if frustrating, mission. I’ll have more to say on this later, as this one opens a lot of interesting possibilities with the timeline and the lore, but I’ll save that for another post.
