From what I can tell, NUJU’s letter has been dropped completely. In the KO-KORO installment, he never stopped telling you to deliver it to the other five TURAGA, even after you’d delivered it. In this one, he never mentions it.

Okay, the basics of this one are that you need to go around and collect one TOHUNGA from each village. Most of them you’ve probably interacted with, but the one from LE-KORO was just a background character until now. The big problem I had with this part is that two of the TOHUNGA you need to collect are HAFU and TAIPU. They are completely identical except for their KANOHI. In the game, TAIPU wears a black RURU and HAFU wears a black PAKARI, but the toy that comes with the CD pack, which is supposed to be HAFU , has a black RURU, not a PAKARI. Between the fact that they’re both wearing black KANOHI, and HAFU’s particular flavor is not what you’re expecting, it’s really hard to tell them apart. As I found out later, this really matters.

Another problem is the way some of the story elements keep getting mixed up. If you search through the TOA mini-CD, you find out that AKAMAI is the TAHU/ONUA/POHATU combiner and WAIRUHA is the GALI/LEWA/KOPAKA combiner. According to the Universal website , the silver RUA is worn by WAIRUHA (the GA/LE/KO combiner) and combines the powers of their original KANOHI. The problem with this is that it conflicts with every image we’ve ever seen of the GA/LE/KO combiner. Now, in the online game, the names of the TOA KAITA have been switched, which conflicts with both of the other sources, especially when they’re both wearing gold KANOHI, and the silver RUA is nowhere to be seen. (Of course, we’ve seen at least two different explanations for the copper KANOHI as well, so I guess this isn’t anything new.)

Okay, so you’ve collected your six TOHUNGA and now you need to get to KINI-NUI. One of the TURAGA should have given you a clue that tells you both where to start, and how to continue. You’ll need to get your TOHUNGA buddies to help you advance past certain obstacles until you arrive at the KINI-NUI temple, where you’ll meet all six TOA. They’ll ask you to defend the temple while they go fight the MAKUTA. This is where it gets very, very tricky. You’ll have to fight off wave after wave after wave…after wave…of RAHI. I witnessed NUI-RAMA, NUI-JAGA, and TARAKAVA. I suspect that there are more, but I haven’t been able to play through the entire series of battles. Each TOHUNGA has a strength in attacking a certain type of RAHI, and a weakness in dealing with others. You can get them to tell you their strengths and weaknesses between fights, but I never managed to get more than one to talk before the next wave came, and since I never had a chance to write any of it down, it wasn’t much help to me. Oh yeah, this is where the HAFU/TAIPU problem really shows up. They have completely different abilities, but they almost look identical in the fight screen.

During the fights, the TOHUNGA will fling their discs where you tell them to (which requires a bit of fast mousing) and the RAHI will spit back at them. Each character will have an energy bar below them, which shows how badly they’ve been hurt. Pretty standard for video games. Anyways, when the energy bar is completely black, the corresponding character will lose his/her/its KANOHI and retreat from the fight. And just to make things difficult for you, if your TOHUNGA are pounded pretty badly in one fight, they’ll have very low energy in the next one. The RAHI, on the other hand, will be fully charged every time, and their numbers and mixes will change each fight. Between fights, GALI will telepathically send back images of how the TOA KIATA are faring.

Because it took me a while to figure out the whole rock/paper/scissors nature of this game, I ended up getting kicked out of the temple clearing and was left having to fight my way back in. I watched a cutscene where the MANAS attacked one of the TOA KAITA, and then…nothing. I got a loading screen that would never go away. At all. I let it sit for about ten minutes and then refreshed the screen, which sent me back to the beginning of the cutscene I’d just seen and resulted in me getting locked on the loading screen again. I’ve rebooted a couple of times, tried the game again this morning, and I still get locked up with a loading screen.

So, I created two new accounts and tried running the games from the beginning, but both times the item that gets you to KO-KORO failed to show up in my inventory when I reached the point where it was supposed to be given to me. Also, in both games ONEWA never gave me the PO-KORO CHISEL, so I couldn’t ever get the Episode Book. After beating my way through the whole game two more times and hitting the exact same snags, I’m not really thrilled with the idea of starting over again a third time.

I’ve e-mailed Leah with my list of glitches, but I don’t know if anything will be done over the weekend.