Stranger of Sword City

• Play the vita version called Stranger of Sword City: Revisited. It adds more content and considerably smooths out a ton of the games issues to the point where its a solid point to two points better on a 10 point scale than the base game. This update is Vita exclusive, so playing on any other system will be significantly more tedious and I cant in good faith recommend it

• The main character cannot permanently die. This means your character should be very old at character creation, having one life point literally doesnt matter for them and the extra stat points will be great

• When you get to the base, create characters to fill up your entire roster of available characters. Not only can you customize them, characters at base are a pretty significant source of money

• The shop never restocks and the equipment it sells is basically useless. Use it to buy items

• All easy mode changes is you get some free revives automatically, it does not alter the actual difficulty.

• The character recovery mechanic is so punishing youre better off considering a character who falls in battle a save reload. Typically it will result in a full party wipe anyway so its not too much of a choice

• Tying into the above, this means your characters you create should be as old as possible. If you're really worried about losing them forever make them 40 or so years old so they have two hitpoints

• Invincible is a trap background skill, Knight gets this skill automatically at the point in the game you really need it and only your knight realistically needs this

• There are mandatory hidden walls to progress, but theyre not very frequent. Id recommend looking up the games maps rather than dragging around a character whose starting skill is "spots hidden walls well".

• Fairly early in the game youll unlock three dungeons and it will seem like you can go in any order. You can, but realistically the order should be Strangers Guild Dungeon, Palace Dungeon, Slums dungeon and you will progress in their sequel versions in that order.

• Story progression is primarily gated by buying upgraded divinities. Very very few of the lineage demons are therefore actually optional.

• Enemies up to 15 levels above your party are appropriate for you to fight. Yes this is stupid and arbitrary.