Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria

"* "The system looks and feels very active, but unless you are standing in their attack radius or moving, you can stand still to see their attack ranges, and nothing will happen while you do. It's not a fast-paced rush-fest.

- You can usually tell what attack is coming up by the attack radius it has. If you use a menu command or attack, all the upcoming attacks from everything on the field have a chance to change. If you see something nasty coming up, you can usually try to get rid of it.

- Skills. Go to the equip menu, and push triangle. This will bring up an incomplete skill list of stuff you can learn, with the runes and colors you need to learn them. After you equip the stuff you need from there, it'll alert you that you formed the skill, at which point you will start gaining points to use it after battles.

- Learn Training (red, Strengthening/Weakening/Leg) as soon as you can on all your main characters. You don't have to use it, but it's good to have when you need a few levels.

- Do not worry about releasing Einherjar like in VP1. You never have to do so, and the rewards are not terribly impressive, and it's usually helpful to do it as late as possible anyhow, since you get better stat-boosters if they have higher stats.

- Sealstones are vital to making some nasty encounters manageable, but you don't have to go crazy buying them for use anywhere--you'll almost always be able to use the ones in the dungeon to solve any problems the dungeon presents. Sword Blessing, Lifeforce Blessing, and maybe Experience Pig Law and Ice Blessing are the only ones early on that are worth actually buying.

- Get Celes from the Serdberg Mountain Ruins instead of the other alternative. Her skill and default attack can rip enemies apart with no actual effort invested.

- Killing the leader for a direct assault can be useful, but chopping up enemies for parts and accessories is key to getting some good items, mostly accessories to have a good variety of runes to learn skills from. You can also re-fight a lot of the early bosses to bust parts off of them by going to where you fought them and investigating the strange presence nearby.

- You can still learn skills really easily anyhow, just throw your lower levelled dudes into the group with the people you want to learn skills, and repeat until everybody has the skills you want, since it uses your party's average level to determine how much to give you.

- Don't give stat-boosting items to Lezard or Dylan.

- The first time you visit Dipan is the only time you'll ever visit Dipan, so any items or side quests you want to do there have to be done then.

- Or Arngrim or Leone. Though if you feel like powerlevelling them to 40 before the end of chapter 3 you can get some swank gear that makes the rest of the game trivial.