Tales of Graces F

"* "Manual combat just means you have complete control of your character's movement, Semi-Auto makes them run to get in range of the enemy when you hit the arte button.

- There's a few missable sidequests, but most of them can be done up to right before you fight the final boss of the Adult arc. Just use a guide if it's a big deal to you, the story isn't about to win any awards.

- They got rid of TP and now use the CC system. Basically you have X amount of points, normal attacks are gone and all your attacks use points. You have a minimum and maximum amount of points on each character depending on the weapon and skills they have. You don't start the battle with the maximum amount of points, but you maximum available increases as you perform combos and avoid attacks. Your available CC recharges when you're not attacking or Free Running (moving outside the straight line towards a monster), so your bigger combos will come from timing your attacks between the lull of your AI teammate's attacks.

- Every character has two different fighting styles called A-Artes and B-Artes. A-Artes are done in a consecutive order as a string of attacks, B-Artes are customizable. For example, Asbel's A-Artes are martial arts that do low damage but hit multiple times and cover several attack types, his B-Artes are his sword attacks that do high damage but not as many hits and attack types. Regardless, you can use any of them as long as you have the CC. Most character's B-Artes are just spells they use.

- The game automatically displays an enemy's HP and weaknesses when you hold R1. When you target those weaknesses it increases the damage of everyone hitting the enemy. If you hit all their weaknesses in one combo it will restore your CC, and increase the damage even more.

- Some of the bosses in this game are utter cocks, as they will spontaneously enter Iron Stance (Extreme defense and immunity to staggering), shrug you off in mid-combo and ruin your day AND/OR they have an "aura" that can damage you and cause you to stagger to keep you from actually attacking.

- Towards the end of the game, you'll need to keep Cheria in your party as Sophie won't be able to effectively heal alone. Sophie is still an extremely useful attacker however, so keep her around anyways.

- Pascal has devastating B-Artes, but most of them require almost standing on top of the targeted enemy, so be aware of that fact in an area with powerful enemies.

- Malik on the other hand has weaker spells, but he likes to keep his distance and has a naturally higher HP total.

- Battles have a bar on the left side that fills up blue and down red. When the blue bar fills up: Your CC is unlimited, certain skills activate, and mystic artes become available. When the red bar fills up: The enemies get all that, plus they can't stagger, and bosses can use their mystic artes.

- Weapons and armor can be combined with shards that give them a stat boost or ability, along with a small boost to the item's stats itself. After a few battles, those items are "tempered" and can be combined with other weapons and armors to remove the *TOP* effect in the description of the items. This creates an equippable gem with those two effects, and lets you combine the items with shards again for more stat boosts. The gems can also be combined with other gems to possibly upgrade the effects. The resulting gem is usually the two effects that are the top effect of each gem used. It's confusing, but you'll figure out the fundamentals as you go. There's a sidequest you can do as you're supposed to leave Strahta that opens a store that will upgrade your gems for a price and period of time, if you have a combination of effects on a gem that you like and want to keep.