Skies of Arcadia
- If you care about your in-game title "Vyse the _____" never run from a battle, open *every* treasure chest, and GameFAQ the stupid mine dungeon. If you are trying to get 100% discovery completion, get a location guide and do them as soon as you have access to whatever area they are in. You can get scooped by Domingo and lose your discovery reward (until a certain plot point happens, at which point you can take your time).
- Try and figure out ahead of time which characters will be the healer(s) and specialize your magic that way. Save all the "seeds" you find until you know who you want to specialize in what stat.
- Catching fish can be fun, but isn't worth it if you're only doing it for the cash.
- Kill loopers when you can, they drop mad cash.
- Do the Doctor + little girl with a bird sidequest, it will get you the black/white map way early in the game, which is key to avoiding random battles. Not to mention the other insane amount of loot you get from finding food for her bird.
- For the love of god, save before challenging any bounty. You always have the option to "walk away" when you meet a new bounty. Do so, save, and then go try and kick their ass. Bounty battles and the black spot battles are the hardest part of the game, bar none. Final bosses don't even compare.
- Don't ever sell the "special" weapons. Aka tuna cutlass, lolipop-marang...
- Magic works weird in this game, and I'll talk about it a little so it's not so confusing, but feel free to skip ahead if you already know. Every weapon in the game can be any of the 6 moon colors at any time. You can even switch the color mid-battle. These colors are how your team learns new magic spells. If everyone is using purple weapons, then your entire team gets lots of purple magic experience, which will get you new ice spells. If 2 people are using yellow and 2 people are using blue weapons when the battle ends, the entire team will get an even amount of yellow and blue magic experience. I originally thought that whatever character was holding the weapon would get magic experience correlating with that color, but this is false, it is team-wide experience. Basically you want the entire team to use one color because you get a bonus for more people using one color at time. Max out green first since that is your healing / regen / poison stuff, and after that it's up to you.
- Ship battles are complicated but can be a lot of fun, I suggest reading a FAQ on it. The short of it is, you can have every character do 1 action per turn, similar to normal combat. You want Vyse and anyone with high ATK to fire the main cannons (torps and side cannons it doesn't matter), and you want Fina or anyone with high MAG to cast spells.
- Don't fret too much about Moonberry spending, but I can tell you right now most of Drachma and Fina's stuff isn't worth it. Definitely get pirate's wrath and delta shield, as well as royal shield.
- This site is pretty useful, although very old and poorly designed.
- Each character seems to have a different affinity to each colour. As in their learn rate for spells will be higher. In fact I think each of your playable characters have a different element they learn quickest.
- In reality offensive magic isn't so important, focus on learning green, and maybe silver on one or two people.
- Any defensive special attacks Delta Shield, etc. will always act first, take advantage of that.
- Ship battles are fun and usually easy. With the right tactics you can win just about any ship battle. I prefer big guns over sub machine guns. Make sure you have torpedoes so you can stack the damage on the rounds where the enemy is wide open.
- Don't worry about saving your captain's stripes (or what ever the item that increases all parameters of a ship are) The final ship is over powered, ship battles are easy once you get the hang of them, and they might actually carry over (Not sure on that last one)
- Learn the elemental chart well. You can get through most of the random battles without relying on elemental weaknesses. But it never hurts to have the edge.
Magic Experience
Not like this really matters, but... That magic experience system seems off. It's been a while since I played, and I don't feel like playing to the point where I can accurately test. Lost my memory card in a move and haven't started again since.
But the way I remember working it out was each character produces the same amount of magic experience for all characters in the colour of their weapon in the amount of the magic exp earned. Then character receives a bonus of the earned magic experience in the colour of their weapon.
Eg: magic exp of 3: Vyse - silver, Fina & Aika - green, Drachma - purple
Team each earns 3 silver, 6 green, 3 purple. Vyse earns an extra 3, silver, Fina & Aika each earn an extra 3 green, and Drachma earns an extra 3 purple. Making the totals:
Vyse: 6 silver, 6 green, 3 purple
Fina & Aika: 3 silver, 9 green, 3 purple
Drachma: 3 silver, 6 green, 6 purple.
Which kind of goes against Pyrocats' theory that a weapon's colour doesn't help that character learn faster.