- Text and Animations
This game has an in battle option to allow you to control the text speed and whether animations play or not under the 'SET' battle menu. This is an absolute must for speedruns as each turn goes by insanely fast.
The only downside is the text is going so fast you have to kinda take hints about what your opponent has done before your turn comes back. For instance, if bomb was used against you, all of your characters will suffer damage and you have very little time to acknowledge this before the game gives you control again.
Some minor key words to look for are "Sharp Hit" and "Critical Hit." Both mean the same thing, however contextually, Sharp Hits means one of your characters scored the stronger hit whereas Critical Hit means you suffered a stronger hit.
As for text dialogue outside of battle, the fastest way to advance the text is to hold the A button down. However, you must press the A button to advance to the next part of dialogue once a dialogue box gets filled. So it's a repetition of holding A and repressing A to hold it down. In addition, some dialogue boxes in this game allow you to just hold A to advance without having to repress, notable examples are when the first Homncruse generals cutscene occurs, as well as the 4 Starcrests inside the Misty Pass lab in Hidon.
- Auto Battle
Auto is a command found in the battle menu that lets the game choose what to do automatically. This is ideal for grinding and when no magic needs to be used in fights with more than 1 character in your party as the commands are selected very fast. The only downside to this is you don't have control over what gets used, but for the most part the AI just attacks and heals when it feels necessary.
- Magic
Magic in this game does a set amount of damage between a range of values. In addition, certain armor and enemies yield magical resistance to certain spells.
A final thing to mention is there are 2 kinds of magic, which is Magic and Creation Magic.
Magic is any spell that your own party is capable of using and is classified in a group of spells that can be bounced back using the spell "Mirror 1," or using the Mirror item.
Creation Magic is any spell that is unique to enemies that your own party does not have any access to, such as "Breathe Fire" and "Create Bolt," and can have their damage reduced using "Mirror 2/3," or using the Barrier item. This magic cannot be reflected.
Both types of Magic do a set damage within a range and cannot cause a Sharp Hit.
- Unity Magic
Having 2 characters of the rank Banalet or Aqutallion allows you to perform Unity Magic. The most common example of this is the Slash Unity Magic.
Ice Sword, Fire Sword, and Bolt Sword can be combined with their respectively level 1 Magic spell to create Slash Unity Magic. This is the highest damage output that can be performed as the attack strengh of the character using the sword is applied as well as the possibility of a Sharp Hit still being possible.
- Special Effects on Weapons
Some weapons come with additional features. Hit%, Crit%, and Sharp Hit to one enemy are the most common.
A. Hit% most likely refers to the chance of hitting enemies with high Evasion like Ghosts or Spectres
B. Crit% refers to the chance of an attack hitting for more damage, i.e a sharp hit.
C. Sharp Hit refers to the possibility of guaranteeing a Sharp Hit against an enemy in a certain group. Ray's Metal Sword being used vs. Homncruse is the most obvious example of a weapon with a Sharp Hit feature.
Outside of these 3, some weapons can be used as items in battle to cast spells. FireSword, IceSword, and BoltSword, for instance, cast Fire 2, Freeze 2, and Bolt 2, respectively, when still in your inventory and used as an Item during battle as many times as you want.
- Speed
On the surface, speed does exactly what you think any speed stat should do, which is let you move before your opponent. However, that's not really the case in this game as the only time Speed seems to do what it's suppose to do is on the very first turn. After that, the order of who should be attacking based on speed changes, with even your fastest characters (like Leona) not being able to move until last. Needless to say, speed isn't a very important stat.
- Leveling up
Upon each level up, the stats gained are given from a small range. That means that over the course of an entire run, it's quite possible Ray's own Attack can vary by up to double digit points in just one stat. While no control over this aspect of the game, it does yield some small time save for getting max stat gains against some early game fights in English. For Glitchless and Japanese, this stat spread won't mean much as Spells would dominate how fights would go for the most part.
One minor note about experience, but the only way you can gain experience is if the character in the party at the time of the final blow is neither dead nor under Sleep status. Experience does not get broken up and divided evenly, whatever number the game says you gained is gained by everyone with the above exception. This is different as in other RPG's, the less characters the net experience, the more the surviving members gain.
- Searching objects
This game allows you to search spots in buildings for hidden treasure. Most of the time it's just small healing items or Gold, but as the run progresses you'll start to find items not possible to buy, such as Moon-Drops and Mirrors, extremely vital to a run.
- Random Encounters
The random encounter rate in this game is ridiculous. The best way to describe it is you could have a very lengthy stretch of no encounter, but the moment you least expect it you get hit with 5 encounters within 8 steps. This can and will probably happen at some point during runs.
Random encounters yield the following: Gold, Experience, and a very small chance of an item drop.
As a small saving grace to the encounter rate, the escape rate in this game is extremely generous. Even with a max party of level 5's, you can expect to escape even the final enemy encounter most of the time. Unless you are doing Glitchless or Japanese runs, run from all encounters unless specified.
It should also be noted that this game has a spell called "Repel," however its function isn't to lower the encounter rate, but to completely eradicate the encounter rate of monsters at a much lower strength than you. It's not known what the game's criteria for this is, but it can be assumed that something along the lines of "Strength of Party."
- Boss Fights
These fights are required to progress the story. They have much higher health and defense than most enemies, have an infinite amount of Magic (if they can use magic), and are the only fights in the game that do not grant you Gold.
Most Bosses also have an immunity to any spell that tries to Mute, Stop, Sleep, Daze, and Death (Vanish). There are a few fights where a Boss can be hit with Mute, which are Sidon and Arthur (could be more but these are only ones someone's confirmed). The major downside to this is that, even though they can be Muted, they are only unable to cast spells from their Magic Pool. Their Creation Magic, however, requires no MP at all and can be cast on a whim. It's been documented that being under Mute leads to a much higher frequency of Creation Magic usage.
