Just started. Few question regarding upgrades/what to buy in shop.

[Neonetik]

As the titles implies, I've just started playing, and just got the "Go to the mailroom" mission.

I've searched everything I could in the hub area before getting that mission. However, I've noticed there's a whole bunch of stuff in in the upper parts of the motherlobe hub that I just can't seem to reach. Since I've collected everything, I do have a fair few upgrade tokens, as well as a few cards, and I was wondering a few specific things.

1. Will I automatically get access to those upper areas I mentioned later, or do I need to buy an upgrade to do so?

2. I noticed that the levitation skill's stage 2 and 3 upgrades don't require a rank to be upgraded. One of them being something called "Pouncy Ball". Do I need this to be able to reach those upper areas and get all those cards and cores I see up there?

3. So far, I've collected a few cores that were surrounded by cards, and a bunch of loose cards themselves. I'd prefer not to spend cash wastefully. Do I need to purchase cores to make use of the cards, or will I just fine loose cores in the wild that I can combine with the cards later on?

4. I did buy the wallet that let's me store more money, since it was extremely obvious that it was basically a necessary purchase. Are there any other things I should be aiming to buy immediately? What about the wallet upgrade that states it'll let me store more money than I could ever use? Seeing as nothing in the shops costs over 1000 of the game's currently, would it be pointless to buy it?

5. What skills are the most important to upgrade in the sense of letting my avoid backtracking for hidden collectables and stuff? I did notice there was a bunch of blank spots for skills I'll acquire later, and I don't have any issue with saving my points until I can use them on something that will be more useful, rather than something that'll just make combat a bit easier or whatever, but not actually give me anything "new" (like more mobility may do in the case of the upper area motherlobe example I keep bringing up).

Thank you for the help!

[tripbillie]

1. This is only the first time that you will encounter collectibles that are currently unreachable. Just keep playing, and you will gain more skills/items that will let you get those collectibles later.

2. Pouncy Ball will let you reach some areas easier. See my answer to #1.

3. There are no loose cores, it's either individual cards or complete challenge markers. My advice is to not buy cores until you have the appropriate number of cards to make a new challenge marker, which I think is 9. There are not "extra" cards, meaning that if you have one card in your inventory there are at least 8 other cards somewhere in the game that you haven't collected yet.

4. It all depends on how you want to play. You can reasonably purchase everything by the end of the game. There are multiple pins to modify every single skill that you get in the game. I would advise buying the pins that fit your play style, the "increased inventory space for healing items" are useful if you have difficulty staying alive, and the largest wallet will be useful (especially if you are a completionist and want to buy everything without a lot of extra psitanium grinding). Later on you will get access to a camera (how to take posed screenshots in game), and there are filters for that camera. Those filters are completely optional.

5. Trying to not give too many spoilers here. If you collect/complete everything, there are enough points to upgrade all the skills all the way by the end of the game. If you don't see anything that interests you in upgrades, you can certainly hold off on upgrading until there is something interesting. I would say that Pouncy Ball is useful for getting to more places, punching is one of the last skills that I upgrade, and I like to upgrade my fire as I often use it to help deal with large groups of enemies or to help plink down the larger enemies faster. There is one other skill upgrade that acts as a gate to some collectables: you don't have the skill yet, but it will be the next skill that you earn. There might be other skill upgrades that are collectable gates, but I can't think of them at the moment.