This is a list of things I wanted to know about the game before I bought it.

Q: How many characters can I make?

You can create up to 16 characters in the game. Each character must belong to one of 7 jobs, and each job has 4 character designs you can choose from.

You can have up to 4 characters in your party at once. To switch characters, delete characters, or add characters, you must go back to Kazan (the starting town) to do so.

If you're just getting into the game, it's easiest to start off with a 4-person party. Having one healing character and two attackers is recommended.

Everyone with pointed ears (male) or cat ears (female) are part of the Rushe race. The male Rushe are found in the Knight, Healer, and Rogue classes. The female Rushe are the Princess, Fighter, Samurai, and Mage. This means you can have Team Cat-Ears, but not Team Pointed-Ears unless you have two of the same design in your party (or have less than a four person party).

Q: Do I really only have one save?


Q: What are skills, and how to I get them?

Skills are actually divided into two categories: Party skills and Character skills.

Party skills are basically things that let you take certain actions on the field, no matter who you have in your party. There are skills that let you gather materials from the field, languages that let you understand certain books or NPCs, and ones that let you travel certain places. Doing certain quests will give you some of these skills. Others can be bought at shops that sell them.

Character skills are special actions you can take during battle or while on the field, though a few of these are passive and will always be in effect. They're pretty much what you know and love about most RPGs now. Whenever you level up, you'll gain SP that you can use to gain these skills. For most skills, you'll have to raise some other skill (usually a Mastery skill) to a certain level before you can them. For example, all the Fighter's Sword skills need you to level Sword Mastery before you can learn them. Keen Edge can be learned after you've got Sword Mastery to Lv. 1, and Grand Buster can only be learned after it's at Lv. 8. Fang Blade can be learned if you have Sword Mastery at Lv. 5, but you also need Offensive Switch at Lv. 3.

Q: How do I get SP?

Simply speaking, you gain SP by leveling up.

  • At Lv. 1, you have 3 SP.
  • Every level you gain, you gain another 1 SP.
  • Every fifth level you gain, you instead gain 2 SP. This continues until Lv. 75, which is the last level that gives you extra SP.

Q: I messed up my skills! Is this irreversible?

You can buy an item in shops at around mid-game that will reset your skills. It will also lower your level by 5, so you'll have 6 less SP to spend (or 5 SP if your levels are really high).

Q: What's the maximum level in this game?

100. You'll have 117 SP by that point.

Q: What level do most people complete the game at?

By looking at one of the Japanese wikis, most people clear the game at mid-60's. At level 60, you'll have 74 SP.

Q: I keep hearing people talking about LF and MN. Are those what I think they are?

LF is the abbreviation for Life, and is what most people know as HP.
MN is the abbreviation for Mana, and is what most people know as MP.

Q: POW? SPD? INT? ATK? DEF? Those are my stats, right? Are those all I have? How many abbrevations are there?

POW, SPD, and INT are every character's three stats. There are only these three, unless you count LF and MN.
POW is the character's physical power, and affects physical attack power and defense power against both physical and magical damage.
SPD is the character's speed, and affects how fast you act, your hit rate, and your evasion.
INT is the character's intelligence, and affects the power of your magic spells and your defense against magical damage.

Every character has the three skills POW Bonus, SPD Bonus, and INT Bonus. They can level these skills to increase those stats, but they max out at Lv. 10 (so you can only gain 10 more of a stat than you normally get). POW Bonus always costs 2 SP per level, SPD and INT Bonus cost 1 SP per level for all characters.

Additionally, there is ATK and DEF, both of which are related to POW. ATK stands for attack power, and DEF stands for defense power.
Your ATK and DEF are equal to your POW, plus any bonuses you get from equipment. Obviously, weapons give ATK and armor gives DEF.
Both DEF and INT are used to resist magical damage, so POW does help defend against it somewhat.

You can also equip accessories, which will have different effects. Some of these will raise your stats, or your LF or MN.

Q: What's Exhaust? Is it what people are talking about when they mention EX?

Every character has a stock of 3 Exhaust (EX) they can use, and this gets replenished when you rest. You can use EX and take action in the same turn. Using EX will have a number of effects on whatever action you take. Some of them are:

  • You'll have a massive speed increase, and will pretty much go first (unless some faster party member also used EX, but you'll all pretty much go first).
  • You'll do more damage with attacks. (150% damage)
  • You'll take less damage from attacks.
  • Recovery skills heal more.
  • If you use a skill with a status ailment attached to it, the status effect will go off more often.
  • Status ailments have a lesser chance of affecting you.
  • You can use special EX skills that you've learned, which can't be used normally without spending EX.
  • You can run with a higher chance of success.

You won't lose EX unless you actually are able to act that turn, so if you fired out some EX but didn't get to go, you won't have actually used up one of your three EX stocks.

Q: What's an EX skill?

EX skills are special skills that you can learn only after you have unlocked them. Each EX skill is unlocked in a different way, and each costs 3 SP. You will usually have to get some other skills to certain levels to be able to learn them - usually some sort of Mastery skill at Lv. 10.

EX skills can only be used after you've used EX. They don't cost MN, and have varying effects.

Some EX skills do things that your regular skills can't, and others do similar things to other skills you could learn but better. However, you can use regular skills with EX, and some of them do everything an EX skill can do better, but this is usually only if you've leveled it up enough.

Q: Extra turns? React skills? What are these?

Every job but the Mage has a React skill which, when you spend your turn to use it, puts the character into React status for some time (usually 5 turns). During this time, if something special happens, that character can get an extra turn, and get to act again just before the next turn begins. This something special varies from job to job - the Fighter can get extra turns by dealing the killing blow to an enemy, while the Samurai can get them by taking a large chunk of damage in a single hit.

If your special something happens again during your extra turn, you'll get another extra turn, and get to act again. While this might sound like this happens rarely, some jobs can actually pull this off somewhat consistently.

Q: Are certain character combinations more effective than others?

Many characters have skills that mesh well with other jobs. For example, the Samurai's Zeppa-Uchi can keep enemies from using their own skills, but this effect doesn't go off often. A Fighter with Balance Kill lowers enemies resistances to status ailments, though, making Zeppa-Uchi more likely to inflict its Skill Seal.

Some character have skills that are specifically made to work with other skills. The Knight's Save the Queen and the Princess' Princess Order are two examples: Princess Order puts one enemy into Order status, and Save the Queen does twice the damage of a normal attack against enemies that are in Order status. There's no other way to get enemies into Order, so these are two skills that have to be used together.

Q: Some people mentioned Furowaro or Frowaro or Flowers or something like that, and I have no idea what they're talking about.

Those are the flowers on the ground. Stepping on them twice (they're 2x2 panels big) will cause them to disappear, but at the expense of draining each of your members' health by 2% of their maximum LF. There's a lot of these Flowers everywhere, and you'll be stepping on these all the time. The Knight's Walk Safe skill can reduce this, and you can buy items that will do this (though not as well) at around mid-game.

Flowers on the field will grow back slowly as you rest at inns and such. Flowers in a dungeon will regrow whenever you leave the area for another (when you come back to the same area in the dungeon, the Flowers will all be back). It is possible to make Flowers in a dungeon disappear forever, though.

If the name doesn't make sense, you can just call them Flowers. The easy way to think about where the name came from is Furowaro (original Japanese) -> Fulowaro -> Flowaro -> Flowar -> Flower. You could say it's an elaborate way to say Flower using the Japanese syllabary.

Q: I was stomping on Flowers when all of a sudden, I got into a fight with a crystal looking thing that ran away before I could do anything!

Rarely, some Flowers will give of a strange bell-like noise and won't disappear after just 2 steps. You can keep stepping on them and they'll disappear eventually, with different effects depending on how many steps it took to squash them down.

  • If it takes 8 steps for them to disappear, then your characters will gain 1% of the Exp. needed to go from the start of their current level to the end of it. (Though the Exp. gained will stop just short of a level up.)
  • If it takes 12 steps, then your party will gain 2% of the Exp. they needed to level up from the beginning of their current level. (Again, you'll stop just 1 Exp. short of a level up no matter how much Exp. you gain.)
  • If it takes 20 steps, then you'll get into battle with a Flower Seed, which will usually run away as fast as it can (and they've got lots of SPD). They usually can be taken out in a single hit by anybody.

Flower Seeds give 50% of the experience needed to go from the start of your current level to the end of it. Use EX so that you go first and beat them up.

Q: I heard that dragons can wander into a fight you're already in…?

If you have a map of the dungeon you're in, dragons will be marked on the map. When you get into battle, you might notice a number pop up on some of those marks. When that many turns go by, the dragon will join the battle. This can be bad, but this means you can spend time before the dragon shows up to prepare things like stat enhancements that you can't do on the field.

Sometimes, having many enemies around or having one big enemy (e.g. Mammoths or other large dragons) around will prevent a dragon from joining the battle and sometimes really big dragons (e.g. Lon, JyrHorn Drake) won't join a battle. Generally, if the screen can't fit the dragon and all the enemies you're currently fighting, then the dragon may not jump into battle. There have been cases where an entire enemy party was replaced by a single large dragon, though, so this isn't always accurate.

Q: I heard that dragons can revive?!?

If you haven't cleared an area of Flowers, then dragons will start to revive after so many rests at inns and such.

In rare cases, areas can also grow Flowers again after you've cleared them. All dragons in that area will be revived when this happens.

Q: What's with this Price Meter whenever I visit shops?

The price of items in a town depends on the amount of Flowers around it. Stepping on Flowers outside of the town will cause the price meter to drop back to 100%.

Flowers will grow back the more times you rest at inns, but if you've cleared out an area of the overworld, you generally don't have to worry about Flowers growing back enough to boost the price meter significantly. Once an area is cleared out, prices won't generally increase by more than a few percent by the time you reach the end of the game.

Q: What's this about harvesting materials?

You can gain Party skills to harvest materials from the environment.

First, you need both a Party skill to be able to find Harvesting Points, and another Party skill that will let you do the actual harvesting. Once you have that, you can see points on the field which give off a small shiny spark. These are Harvesting Points. Examine them (with the A button) to start harvesting. Different spots will contain different materials, and what you get is determined in part by chance.

You can only harvest a certain amount of times between rests (stays at an inn). Healers have a skill that allow you to harvest more times before needing to rest.
