Playing Both Sides: Tips & Tricks

Feel free to dash past random encounters, because:

There are trainers which will level you up for a fee.

Money can be made by buying commodities and selling them to appropriate buyers.

When you first enter Port Tyres, you can buy Rations from the commodity vendor. If you leave town, following the road around the island, you’ll come across a bridge that’s blocked off because of an unrelated apocalypse. The merchant to the side will buy Rations, giving you a profit and easy means to make unlimited money. That being said, other buyers will buy other commodities for better prices later in the game, for faster unlimited money.

So, you don’t have to grind unless you want to.

That being said, the power increase from leveling up isn’t much. If you’re struggling, try changing tactics.

You’ll start the game with three basic moves: Attack, Parry, and Feint. Your basic attack actually does the most damage at this point, and will remain comparable even at the end of the game.

Parry can trigger an unlimited amount of times per turn, unless you are hit with a parry-countering attack such as feint. Thus, it is most useful when facing a large number of small enemies.

Prise De Fer should not be underestimated. Generally, enemies can do a punishing amount of damage to the point of one-hit KOs in the mid-late game, if they are not disabled first. For this reason, most enemies, including bosses, can be easily disabled.

Remise can be parried. Remise is very, very, painful to you if the enemy decides to parry.

Environmental states are applied both to the party and to the enemy whenever an appropriate spell is cast.

A shock spell cast on a wet target will paralyze that target

A cold spell cast on a target that is both wet and cold will freeze that target

The AI will respond to states. If you’re wet and it knows shock, it will use it.

Thus, the key to fighting enemy spellcasters is to watch the environmental states so that it’s you that lands the disabling shot first.

Timeskip can be cast out of combat. It can also be beneficial to “save” it by casting it every turn, until the enemy casts a state you can exploit.

Flash is also an incredibly useful skill, functioning as an AoE version of Prise de Fer.

Barrier is OP. It is the in-universe explanation as to why the Patriarchy is in charge. It’s free, works on the whole party, lasts several turns, and doubles as a parry.

Eric gets a very special and somewhat offensive attack near the end of the game

The first skill you get sucks. You have to unlock better transforms through use.

It takes 15 transforms to unlock a skill you need to use to continue through the game. Thus it is recommended to practice these skills as soon as you get them.

To transform an enemy, you have to apply 3 stacks of the “Chaos” state on them.

Chaos Blast will convert environmental states into chaos stacks.

This makes transforming enemy spellcasters easier, since they assist by applying environmental states to themselves.