The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky

- If you want the ultimate weapon you're gonna need to find 10 collectibles that you should absolutely look up where they are because if you don't you will not find them.

- Nearly everything you need to know is in the Bracer Notebook: What every spell in the game does and what quartz combinations unlock them, what effect each individual quartz has, the various rewards for each Bracer Guild rank you achieve, etc.

- Pretty much every sidequest is found on the billboard in the Guild, but there's around three hidden sidequests scattered throughout the game. If you want to get max Bracer Points, you'll want to use a guide. Note that all that max BP does is give you a bonus in the sequel if you transfer your data, you get the best reward for collecting BP much earlier. So if you're not much of a completionist, don't bother. Also sidequests can expire pretty quickly, so if you want to do one, do it when it opens.

- Time magic/quartz are really good, and so I'd default to throwing them on a character with room. Hell's Gate and White Gehanna do lots of damage, and have a good chance of causing faint, incapacitating an enemy for a while. The quartz also have useful effects (Cast time Up, Speed Up, stuff like that.)

- If you really want to cheese things, get as many people as you can to have Earth Wall. Everyone it's used on will take no damage from the next attack that hits them, meaning you can basically turtle your way through everything. Combine this with quartz to increase the effective radius of spells, and to reduce EP usage to break things even further.

- In Chapters 1 and 2, make sure you visit the Amberl Tower and the Sappherl Tower respectively. They seem like places the plot would bring you to eventually, but they're actually just bonus areas with treasure to pilfer. (And in the former case, the location of one of the hidden sidequests I was talking about.)

- When you lose a fight, you'll be given the option to retry. If you do this, the enemy will become slightly weaker the next time you fight it. There's an option buried in the menu to change this if this doesn't appeal to you. (If you don't retry, you'll need to reload a save.)

- You'll notice that party members tend to come and go fairly often. Don't worry about them stealing your stuff - they'll leave everything, including stuff they brought (which you can freely sell for profit.)

- Every once a while, go the general store and buy the new issue of the Liberl News. They're normally fairly interesting.

- Don't fight too many generic encounters. Between the chests guarded by monsters, as well as scripted encounters and bounties for the guild, they're not really that necessary for staying leveled. This is more applicable if you're doing the majority of the sidequests, however. You might need the extra EXP if you're doing a more bare-bones run.

- It's not actually that long. If you know what you're doing, you can do a completionist playthrough in 40 hours without too much trouble.