Battle System Guide

[Cyllya]

You can click to jump to a section:

-What's the Battle System Like?
-Basics
-Battle Modes
-Multiplayer and Character Choice
-Effects of Attributes
-Targeting
-Using Skills
-Combos
-Unison Attacks
-Defending
-Status Effects
-Character Specifics
-Strategies
-Technical Smash
-Stealing
-Over Limit
-Grade Points
-Special Effects of Equipment, Elemental Attack/Defense
-Running Away
-Damage Formula
-Credit

[Cyllya]

What's the Battle System Like?


For those of you who don't have the game yet and want to know about the battle system but are in too big of a hurry to read this whole guide, the following is the rest of the guide crammed into one little list:

-This battle system is real-time.
-Target enemy with R.
-Attack with A. Use the control stick for different kinds of attacks.
-Use skills with B and the control stick.
-Defend with X. Defending is handy.
-You control one character while the other three are AI-controlled.
-There are settings to control how the AI characters work. You can command them via the battle menu also.
-You get bonuses for combos (hitting the enemy multiple times before it recovers)
-When your combo gauge fills, you can do a team attack on an enemy.

[Cyllya]

Basics


The camera will change so that P1's character and the target form a horizontal line across the screen. Here are the general button commands.

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Battle Modes


You can switch battle modes in the skill menu. In battle, you can open the battle menu and change between modes with the START button. Here are the battle modes.

Semi-Auto
The default setting. If your character is not in range of an enemy when you tell him/her to attack, he/she will run forward to attack. You must push UP+X to jump, which makes it easier to do your UP+B skill and UP+A attack without jumping by accident, but it's much harder to jump over enemies. Your character will also defend automatically when attacked, but I'm not sure how reliable it is.

Auto
The character is controlled by the AI. Sit back and watch.

Manual
The character does nothing except what you tell him/her to do. If your character is not in range of an enemy when you tell him/her to attack, he/she will attack thin air. Since only pushing UP makes you jump, you have to be careful not to jump instead of doing your UP+B skill and UP+A attack, but it's easier to jump over enemies (why attack from the front when you can attack from behind?) or to dodge by jumping. The character will never defend without you using the X button.

All characters who are being controlled by a human player should be on either Semi-Auto or Manual mode. All others should be on Auto. DUH. :p [See Also: Multiplayer and Character Choice]

[Cyllya]

Multiplayer and Character Choice


Outside of battle, you can change the order of your characters in the menu. To change characters in battle, open the battle menu and flip through your four characters with the Z button (sometimes this mysteriously stops working in multiplayer?). The character in the first slot is the one you control in battle. (This is not necessarily the character who's shown walking around.)

The second player controls the character in the second slot and so on. To activate a second/third/forth character, go into his/her skill menu and change him/her to semi-auto or manual. [See: Battle Modes]

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Effects of Attributes


These are the effect of attributes according to the game manual:

Strength
Directly effects attack power. Higher strength means more damage.
Accuracy
Higher accuracy means more damage when the attack hits the enemy.
Defense
Higher defense means less damage taken.
Evade
Higher evade means less damage taken when an enemy attack hits a character.
Intellegence
Higher intellegence means casting stronger/more effective spells and taking less damage from enemy spells.
Luck
Affects many things, including critical hit percentage (changes randomly whenever you sleep).

Some of this info is a little questionable though. [See: Damage Formula] for a little information on Accuracy. Evade is a total mystery, but I'm guessing it effects how effectively the characters will automatically guard on Semi-Auto mode. I'm no expert on Semi-Auto in this game though.

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Targeting


People who have played past Tales games should keep in mind that targeting is more important in this game than it has been in the past.

An enemy is automatically targeted at the beginning of the battle, but you can change it with the R button. The camera will change so that the first player's character and the target form a horizontal line across the screen. (So that left and right move to and from the enemy predictably.)

If you're using offensive magic, you target enemies the way you do with weapon skills and normal attacks.

If you're using a skill that targets a party member, the target is indicated at the bottom of the screen, and you select it during your character's casting time. (Multi-target healing/support spells effect everyone, no matter who you target.) [See: Using Skills]

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Using Skills


You can equip four skills for your player-controlled character to use. Use them in battle by pushing B, Up+B (careful not to just jump instead when in manual mode), Left/Right+B, or Down+B.

You can open the menu (Y button) to change which skills you have equipped or to command another party member to use a particular skill on a particular enemy. You can turn off certain skills to keep the AI from using them (so they don't waste TP casting powerful spells on weak enemies or don't waste time casting less effective spells on strong enemies).

You can set two shortcut skills (for characters other than the one you're controlling) to be used by pressing the yellow C-stick either up or down. Handy for healing or comboing.

Like in past Tales games, you need to keep in mind how long it takes for a skill to take effect. Most physical skills start hitting the enemy right away, but there are a few that leave you vulnerable for a split second before attacking. When it comes to spells, there's a very notable amount of time before the spell takes place, while the character does the incantations and everything, so remember to move away from enemies before casting spells.

Only two spells can be seen on the screen at a time. One is the enemies' and one is yours. The exceptions to this are novice spells, they all be on the screen at the same time with anything else, those are: Fireball, Lightning, Wind Blade, Icicle, Stone Blast, and Aqua Edge.

[See Also: Targeting]

[Thanks: Kiko]

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Combos


Whenever your team hits an enemy multiple times before it recovers from the first attack, that's a combo. The number of hits will appear in the upper-right corner (upper-left if the enemy is comboing on you!). When the enemy recovers, your combo is broken, and the game will display the total amount of damage you did to that enemy during the whole combo.

You get some bonus EXP based on whatever your biggest combo was. (Say if you got a 10 hit combo and a 9 hit combo in one battle, you get bonus EXP for 10 hits, not 19 hits.)

The formula is
Earned Experience * (HIT)% = Bonus EXP
(rounded down)

When you get combos, it fills up a combo gauge. [See: Unison Attacks]

Try linking normal attacks into lv 1 skills, then into lv2 or lv3 skills, because you can attack this way without a pause that gives the enemy a chance to recover. As a character does continuous strikes, the damage gets weaker. [See: Damage Formula]

A good way to get high combos is to have all your characters participating in using good combo skills on an enemy, then initiate at U-Attack at just the right time. Use good combo skills in the U-Attack too, including something that makes a combonation skill, especially Prism Stars or Stardust Rain.

[Cyllya]

Unison Attacks


As you hit the enemies, it fills up a combo gauge. It takes roughly 250 hits. Also, if your character has the Appeal EX-Skill (level 1), you can increase the combo gauge by pushing Z.

When it's full, you can push Z to perform a U-Attack. (Your character will attack when you do this, and the attack must hit the enemy for the U-Attack to begin successfully.) In a U-Attack, the battle pauses for a short time to let each of your characters pummel the enemy with one skill. (You equip four skills to choose from for each character just as you equip four skills for your controlled character, but each character is assigned a different button out of A/B/X/Y.)

The skills will be listed along the side as they are used. Based on which skills they used during the U-Attack, two characters may combine their two skills together. For example, if Genis uses Lightning and Colette uses Pow Hammer, after all four characters go, they will use Mjolnir together. Here's a list of U-Attacks combinations.

You can only do one combination skill per U-Attack. Just in case someone uses a skill that can be combined with more than one of the other skills you used, there's a predefined priority for which skills will be used. If you add Lloyd using Tiger Blade in the example I used above, Colette will do Pow Blade with Lloyd instead of Mjolnir with Genis.

Only two spells of a certain level can be used instantly in a U-Attack. The third one used will take its normal casting time to come out, and the U-Attack will still end after time is up, even if the effect of the spell hasn't finished. The novice spells will still take their casting time, so they may or may not come out in time; it depends on how long the Unison is lasting.

If an enemy has Absorb status for a certain element, that element will suddenly cause damage so long as it's in a U-Attack. It's only for Absorb, however; Reduce and Invalid work the same as normal. [See: Elemental Attack/Defense]

[Thanks: GallyYouko, dgjk, maiwurm, Kiko, Kratos_Aurion75]

[Cyllya]

Defending


Push (and hold) X to go into a defensive stance. While holding X, push LEFT/RIGHT away from the enemy to hop backwards. Press DOWN while holding X to use the character's barrier skill (Guardian, Force Field, Guardian Seal, Earthly Protection, etc), which takes 10% of their max TP. Holding DOWN and then pushing X won't work.

While defending, you will take a mere 1/4 of the damage you would have normally taken. Also, you're ready to attack again right after the enemy is done attacking, instead of waiting a split second while your character is in "Ouch~ ;_;" mode. If an enemy throws you into the air, push X while in flight, and you're almost guaranteed to land on your feet and ready to fight, instead of on your back ready to get hit as you stand up.

[Thanks: dgjk, Chuc]

[Cyllya]

Status Effects


Physical Ailements
Effective until cured by item/spell/sleeping. Use a Life Bottle to cure KO and a Panacea Bottle for everything else.

[Cyllya]

Character Specifics


I thought I'd add some info specific to each character, since the manual and most other info usually focus on Lloyd. If you have any comments on how to use a specific character (especially non-Lloyd characters) more effectively, please feel free to tell me! I'm only very good with Colette.

Lloyd

He attacks quickly because he has two swords. He is pretty good at everything since he's the default character.

To use Falcon Crest, equip the Material Blade and the Eternal Swordsman title and push X+A+B together while HP is in red.

Colette

Colette is meant to be a ranged fighter, so whenever you put her right up in an enemy's face, she's likely to get clobbered. If you do want to use her at close-range, make sure you have you thumb entirely off the Control Stick when pushing A. Pressing LEFT/RIGHT+A will make her throw her chakram upward, and DOWN+A will make her throw her chakram far, neither of which something she does quickly, so she's very vulnerable to nearby enemies in the process. She can combo two hits with a close-range attack so long as the first hit doesn't push the enemy too far away.

Paraball is a great skill, but many choose to sacrifice it for Hammer Rain (necessary for the Stardust Rain U-attack).

Colette is the only character who can steal. [See: Stealing]

About Colette's DOWN+A... Pretend this is a view of the battle field from directly above:

[Cyllya]

Strategies


The settings you chose on the Strat menu effect what the characters do when they're on Auto mode. [See: Battle Modes] There are three settings per character:

TARGET/ACTION
This tells the character which enemy to attack, e.g. the same one the Manual/Semi-Auto character is attacking or that pesky mage in the back.
SKILL FREQUENCY
This tells the character how often to use skills versus how often to use normal attacks to save TP.
SKILL TYPE/POSITION
This tells the character what kind of skills to use, like magic or physical skills.

Don't forget to read the description of each option.

The diagram at the bottom of the screen (with the cute little heads) shows the position your characters will be in by default, and its affected by that third catagory above.

Now, you probably have a different strategy for bosses than normal enemies, right? Sometimes you might want to change back and forth depending on what's going on in the battle. Since all those options would be annoying to change all the time, you can save three sets of settings. Push X in the menu to pick between the three commands: Reserve, Guard, and All Out (you can rename them).

Choose all the options you want for each of those three commands. Then when you get in battle, use the D-Pad up/left/right to swap between them. Push D-Pad down to cancel.

Don't forget you can access the Strat menu from the battle menu.

[Thanks: GallyYouko]

[Cyllya]

Technical Smash


You get a Technical Smash if you meet certain conditions when killing an enemy. A few examples: