YMMV / Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction

• Complete Monster: Emperor Percival Tachyon, the diminutive, tyrannical dictator of the Polaris Galaxy, is one of the most personal foes Ratchet ever faced. A Cragmite who was found and taken in by the Lombax people, Tachyon repaid their years of compassion and care by tricking them into giving him an arsenal, which he used to carry out a bloody genocide against the very people who raised him. Hundreds of Lombaxes died at Tachyon's hands in his purge, with the survivors forced to flee to another dimension. As he ruthlessly conquered the Polaris Galaxy by staging brutal invasions and enslavements of entire planets, Tachyon instituted Gladiator Games and repurposed Zordoom Prison into his own personal torture and execution station for any rebels. Regularly threatening his minions with death for the slightest of failures, Tachyon schemes to tear open dimensional gateways and recreate the Great Cragmite Empire under his banner so he can conquer all dimensions. Though sometimes amusing in his villainy, Tachyon is a merciless, self-absorbed, and psychopathic despot whose greatest moment of cruelty comes when he sadistically mocks Ratchet over his parents' deaths at Tachyon's hands.
• Fanon: The time period the Great War takes place is never stated in this game, nor any other one. However, due to Azimuth's actions in A Crack in Time being motivated by the galaxy's safety after the Great War, many fans assumed that it was recent enough for him and Ratchet's father to participate in it. This was debunked by a single line of dialogue in the comic saying it was ended "100 years ago", but due to the comic's obscurity, many fans still go with the original approach (sometimes intentionally).
• Game-Breaker:
  • The R.Y.N.O. IV. Even in its base form, it is able to kill any enemy in one blast, and its capable of beating Tachyon in less than a minute! Even further still is the fact that if you know where to look (or, y'know, just look up a guide) you can actually obtain it on your first playthrough (for free, no less) as opposed to requiring a Challenge Mode playthrough to be able to afford it.
  • The Alpha Disruptor/Cannon is no slouch, either. It has the single highest per-shot damage of any weapon in the entire game, beaten only by the R.Y.N.O. IV above, and is obtained for free on Sargasso, to boot. The price you pay for such power, however, is an abysmally low ammo pool, but until you get all those Holoplans, this is the best there is.
  • The Gold Groovitron. While it's only available in Challenge Mode and costs a staggering 2,000,000 Raritanium, the reward is infinite ammo for the Groovitron. Mind you, the device already turns every enemy and boss in the game into sitting ducks, so removing the one handicap of it—its pathetically low ammo—turns it into a weapon that utterly destroys whatever difficulty the game has.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • You can use the Razor Claws to climb up walls!
  • Ejecting the disc a certain way ^How?  Open the XMB menu by pressing the PS Button, wait a bit and take out the disc. Just in case, don't keep the game paused on the background when attempting this causes the game to glitch out. While the game becomes more prone to crashing, it can be used to get certain items way early. By utilizing this glitch, you can get the RYNO IV and Golden Groovitron on your first visit to Cobalia, as they just float next to the Smuggler and the Devices Vendor, respectively. (The video shows Rykan V, but it works anywhere you can find the Smuggler, though it might take a few attempts.)
  • The skill point "Can't Touch This" requires going through the Verdigris Black Hole without taking any damage prior to the boss, and as such is generally regarded as That One Achievement. However, there is a very simple exploit to get around this: If you die on the boss, the game will reset you to the last checkpoint (which is right as the boss fight starts) with full health. Because of this, the game believes that you hadn't taken any damage in the level regardless of if you actually did, earning you the skill point upon the boss' death.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Let's see. Ratchet ends up in another world, is targeted by the main villain because of what he is, learns about his race and that they were purged, allies with someone who later backstabs him (but in a different game), finds out what happened to his missing father, and after defeating the villain, loses someone who is very close to him. That's quite identical to TRON: Legacy, though Ratchet has more in common with Quorra than with Sam Flynn.
  • Upgrading the Shock Ravager to Level 5 renames it the Lightning Ravager.
• Moral Event Horizon: While all Cragmites are born far beyond this line, it's clear that Tachyon joins his race when he wages genocide on the Lombaxes. In the game, all of Tachyon's actions push him even further across, whether it be onscreen (invading Metropolis) or even offscreen (the racist propaganda in Cobalia) but bringing back the Cragmites and attacking Meridian City with the intent of torturing the inhabitants and blowing the planet up with no survivors, an action that makes Drek, Nefarious, and Vox look tame, solidifies Tachyon as an irredeemable monster.
• Scrappy Weapon:
  • The Buzz Blades. They're a poor mans Disc Blade Launcher that deal truly abysmal damage, even if you spam the hell out of them, and while it's a passable weapon in cramped areas with huge clusters of enemies, its a borderline Joke Weapon when used on individual enemies in open environments since due to the lack of walls for the blades to bounce off of. And forget about using them in boss battles—even a suction cup dart would whittle their health down faster.
  • A good amount of weapons (early-game ones in particular such as the Combuster and Shard Reaper) become this towards the end of the game and especially in Challenge Mode, as they begin to do pitiful amounts of damage towards enemies such as the Kerchu, later variations of the Space Pirates, and the Cragmites. Dispatching these enemies with these weapons does grant a lot of XP making it easier to level them up, but it takes a decent amount of time to do so with there being a good chance you won't have enough ammo to actually kill them, even with ammo crate drops.
• Signature Scene: The opening and prologue in Metropolis. It's easy to take for granted in the present, but back when this game debuted in 2007, it made an incredible first impressions not just in visual fidelity, but also in tonal shift and presentation. Ratchet & Clank making the generational jump from the PlayStation 2 to the PlayStation 3 while being a showcase of the latter's capabilities rightfully cemented it as Killer App for the PS3.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The music for the pirate levels contains a very Pirates of the Caribbean-esque riff.
• That One Achievement:
  • "Everybody Dance Now" requires you to make all characters in the game dance using the Groovitron. No progress on the Skill Point is tracked, the Groovitron only has three max ammo and its ammo is hard to find, there are lots of similar enemies that count individually, and this also includes bosses and NPCs that appear only once or twice and obscure ones like the six types of penguins created by the Transmorpher and the GrummelNet vendors. You can buy the infinite-ammo Golden Groovitron to help out, but it costs 2 million Raritanium.
  • "Wrench Ninja 3" on Kortog, but only under certain circumstances. It requires you to get to the Robo-Wings segment while only using the wrench for combat. On a first playthrough its not too bad, but if you skip it and try it on Challenge Mode, it becomes a pain in the ass to get.
  • "Fast and Fiery-Ous" on Mukow is a frustrating skill point where have to use the charge boots to cross the bridge to the arena without being burned. Not only is it extremely easy to get the timing wrong, if you screw it up, a force field pops up that keeps you from trying again right away.
  • "Can't Touch This", which requires you to beat the Verdigris Black Hole without taking a single hit prior to facing the boss. There is an exploit that makes it far easier to obtain, however.
  • "No, Up YOUR Arsenal" requires you fully leveling up all 15 weapons in the game to the maximum level of 10. This requires a lot of grinding and potentially multiple Challenge Mode playthroughs if you wish to get the most XP possible. And, in grand Ratchet & Clank tradition, a lot of weapons become borderline useless in the late-game and Challenge Mode, making them especially annoying to level up.
• That One Boss: Although Tools of Destruction only has three boss battles (excluding the minor ones with the Leviathans and large pirates), all of them will have a lot of HP and will not provide the player with needed ammunition, making these battles almost unwinnable if you run out of ammo.
• That One Level: Planet Viceron, aka, Zordoom Prison, especially during the "Escape from Zordoom" mission.
• That One Sidequest: Getting the Gold Groovitron in Challenge Mode. It costs a whopping 2,000,000 Raritanium. While the multiplier and upgrades can make it easier to stack up on it, it still takes a long time and a lot of grinding. Fortunately, the reward is absolutely worth the effort.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Similar to Ryū ga Gotoku Kenzan!, despite being released early on into the PS3's lifecycle, Tools of Destruction is nothing short of a visual marvel. Everything from the presentation to the attention to detail in the environments and animation basically make this game as close as you can get to a playable Pixar film.
• Woolseyism: A minor one. The Finnish version switches the "repeat in a different language" option on Qwark's For Inconvenience, Press "1" from Spanish to Swedish. Swedish is Finland's second official language. This is actually quite thoughtful: the original joke of going from English to Spanish refers to Southern American states often covering both languages in common use there thanks to their proximity to Mexico. The Finnish translation going to Swedish thus keeps the original spirit of the joke.

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