So, you've picked up this game, thinking that this will be another one of Winged Cloud's hentai games, right? And you're just finding out how difficult the game is to simply breeze through without thinking hard about your actions, right? Perhaps you've underestimated just how deep this game's mechanics are? Perhaps you weren't paying attention to what your skills' hit percentages were the moment you used them? Well, I won't insult your intelligence any further, so let's get to the guide.

You see that blue bar underneath your character's health bar? Those are your Action Points, but you probably knew that already, and you probably already knew that AP is used as a resource to spend to be able to use the vast majority of skills in the game, right?

What you might not have known is that each point of AP in stock contributes a 1% dodge bonus. Therefore, if you have 50 AP in reserve, that's a whopping 50% dodge bonus! No wonder why you'd normally miss when you try to use a powerful but inaccurate skill like, say, Thunder Chain or Astral Blade (which both have a base accuracy of 80, which is considered very low in this game) on an enemy with a near-full AP bar! You may have also noticed that certain abilities, like Parry and D-Shield, provide additional dodge bonuses against certain skill types, including melee, ranged, and magic skills, and that these bonuses stack with the natural dodge bonuses provided by high AP, which I mentioned before.

In a situation where your opponents have alot of AP to give them such hefty dodge bonuses, you'd be better off using your more accurate skills like, say, Single Slash, Shot, Gust, Dust Blast, Venom Shot, or Poison Dust to name a few, since even though they're among the weakest skills in the game, they're also some of the most accurate skills in the game. (With the exception of Dust Blast and Gust, which both have a base accuracy of 130, these skills all have a base accuracy of 120.) They, along with Meditation, are also among the least AP-costly skills in the game (-15 AP), which is perfect if you want to conserve your own AP whilst building up your CP (more on that later), and possibly whittling down the opponent's VP as well. (VP stands for Vitality Points, which is basically this game's way of calling them "hit points", but you probably knew that as well I presume?) Against an enemy with abilities like Parry or D-Shield, it might even be a good idea to switch to a different skill type to try to bypass these defenses. (That is, try ranged or magic skills against an opponent with Parry or Floating, and try using melee or ranged skills against an opponent with D-Shield.)

Finally, one last thing that you should know about AP is that, each turn, you naturally recover AP equal to 1/5th of your max AP. That's not counting the additional AP regeneration bonus provided by the Recovery ability, which is 5 + your Agility. Speaking of Agility, you may recall that characters start off with 50 AP maximum at 0 Agility, and that each point of Agility increases your max AP by 5 points (which, in turn, could potentially mean a 5% increase in dodge rates). With the Recovery ability, you essentially gain a 50% boost in AP regeneration at 0 Agility, and a 75% boost at 10 Agility. However, even without the Recovery ability (and you probably won't be getting more than 2 characters with the Recovery ability through the 1st half of the game), you can pretty much spam the aforementioned low-AP skills almost non-stop if your Agility is 5 or more (since 5 Agility, as you may have already guessed by doing some math, means 75 AP to work with, and 1/5th of 75 AP is 15 AP, which is exactly the AP cost of the aforementioned low-AP skills). With Recovery, you can afford to spam skills with slightly higher AP costs, especially Tornado Slashes (a decently-powerful skill with an astounding 120 base accuracy, and a moderate AP cost of 25, enough to make me want to recommend it over Single Slash should your character have the Recovery ability).

So in short, AP is more than a resource. AP is love! AP is life! AP helps you avoid attacks! AP allows you to do great things! But you need to budget your AP, and pay attention to your opponent's AP as well! If you don't, then not only will your more powerful attacks miss, but you'll leave yourself wide open to a potentially-devastating counterattack. As Yomi put it in her own words: "It's one thing to wield power, but it is another if you wield power in the same manner an ogre would wield a club: lazily, with no finesse, and not thinking about the best way to use it."

Early in the game, you may not have had to pay much attention to this resource, but as you progress through the game, you'll start to find that a character's Concentration Power (or CP) will play a bigger and bigger role in the later fights. You may already be aware that CP is used as a resource to spend for more powerful skills, including Tornado, Rings of Flames, and Holy Bolt to name a few. You may also be aware that, if your character reaches 10 or more CP, they'll gain the Flow condition (which completely refills their AP bar, and gives them a 25% hit and dodge bonus), and if your character reaches 0 CP, they'll gain the Panic condition (which completely drains their AP bar, and gives them a 25% hit and dodge penalty). Heck, your 1st real taste of how useful having the Flow condition could be for your characters, and how frustrating it can get if your opponents did the same, could very well be during the battle against the Succubus boss on level 8, right?

So how do you gain or lose CP? For starters, if you successfully land a hit against an enemy, no matter how weak it may be, you gain 1 CP. You gain another CP if you manage to KO an opponent. If you take a critical hit, you lose 1 CP (or 2 CP if your clothes are torn).

CP, as mentioned before, is also spent when using certain skills. However, the Meditation skill boosts your CP by 2, and doesn't require you to hit your target. In fact, I'd highly recommend Meditation as a skill for each of your main party members, if at all possible. I'd also recommend taking a look at the Terrorize skill, which causes enemies, especially lower-leveled ones, to lose CP. (My reasons for recommending both these skills will be further explained below.)

Certain abilities can further boost your CP as well. Fortitude causes you to gain 1 CP at the start of each of your character's turns if that character is under 50% max VP. Brutal causes you to gain 1 CP whenever you successfully score a critical hit. However, by far, the most noteworthy of the bunch has to go to the Adaptive ability, since with that ability, you'll gain 1 CP each time you successfully avoid an attack.

Why do I consider the Adaptive ability to be noteworthy in terms of gaining CP? Well, certain abilities also provide bonuses to other stats, depending on how much CP the character has. The Grappler, Conjurer, and Hunter abilities, for example, provide a 3% critical bonus for every CP your character has. However, in my personal opinion, that hardly compares to the Acrobat ability, which I personally consider to be the most OP ability in the game. Why? Because you gain a 3% dodge bonus for every CP you have. If you have 10 CP, that's a 30% dodge bonus (on top of the 25% dodge bonus provided by the Flow condition)! And on top of that, imagine how untouchable you'd become with a near-full AP bar, and a very high Agility and Dexterity stat!

Now you know why those Fox Tamers at level 5 were initially such a pain to fight and capture when you 1st met them. The combination of the Acrobat ability's dodge bonuses and the Adaptive ability's CP bonuses for successfully dodging attacks makes for an increasingly-frustrating opponent to deal with, especially when your attacks continue to miss (for reasons that were previously stated). In fact, I'd strongly recommend bringing a Fox Tamer with you until at least mid-game, since no other monster in the game has that ability combo. (Fox Archers, which are another character I'd recommend until at least the mid-game, can also be a pain to initially fight and capture thanks to the Recovery ability providing them with enough AP regeneration to more than make up for the AP costs of using weaker skills like Shot and Dust Blast. However, a smart and resourceful player would already know how to manage their AP, even without the Recovery ability.)

Finally, one last note about CP. For every point of Mentality you gain, you start off with more CP. In fact, by the end of the game, with Mentality scores of 8 or higher, you'll often start off with so much CP that you could instantaneously gain the Flow condition with a single use of the Meditation skill, almost like you're going Super Saiyan on the opponent at the start of each battle! On the other hand, your opponents gradually start with more CP as well, so by the end of the game, you're almost guaranteed to be fighting eachother while in the Flow condition, unless, of course, you're willing to prevent any of your opponents from gaining the Flow condition by draining their CP with the Terrorize skill.

And finally, one last note about the Flow condition. While you're in the Flow condition, your skills' CP costs are ignored, so you're free to spam Tornado, Toxic Bomb, and Holy Bolt to name a few, to your heart's content... so long as you have AP to spare of course. The only skills that you can't spam are Astral Blade and Astral Flare, since not only can they only be used while you have the Flow condition, but using them will automatically cause the Flow condition to end, regardless of whether or not they successfully hit. Because of this, and because I feel as if these skills are pretty much overkill given their exorbitant AP costs on top of all that, I'd consider these skills to be far too situational for my liking, even though they're pretty much the signature skills of Ceri and Yomi respectively.

So, you may have heard of Paralysis or the Flow or Panic conditions I presume. However, do you know how you can exploit them to your advantage?

- Paralysis:

In a nutshell, Paralysis causes the accuracy of your melee and ranged skills to be reduced by 50%. Sounds like a very useful condition to inflict on your opponents, right? However, Paralysis has no effect on the accuracy of magic skills, which is why I'd recommend that brawlers and rangers that primarily rely on melee and ranged attacks respectively should carry a magic skill as backup, especially Gust.

Moreover, the chances of inflicting Paralysis, as well as the duration of the status effect, are entirely dependent on the differences between the user's and target's levels, and on the differences between their Resistance stats. The skill's power has no effect on this calculation.

With that in mind, I'd personally recommend Venom Shot (for brawlers or rangers) or Poison Dust (for spellcasters) over just about every other poison skill, since they're the most accurate out of the bunch, and thus, the most dependable. (Recall also that they're two of the most accurate, and least AP-costly, skills in the game.) I'd recommend them over Venom Claws, even if the character has the Grappler ability, since high damage and critical rates won't matter if the skills cannot even land a hit on their targets. (Besides, the critical rates of poison-attribute skills are very weak, with a base critical rate of only 10, as opposed to critical rates of 20 or 30 on most other skills in the game.)

- Spell Disruption:

Unless you're lucky enough to get such a drop from a Broom Witch or Abyss Mimic, or unless you're playing a modded version of the game (like this), then chances are that you won't be using this status effect anywhere in-game. Not to worry, as you probably wouldn't need to use it over the likes of Paralysis-inducing skills or Terrorize. Why's that you ask?

Well, what this status effect does is that it prevents the character from using any magic skills whatsoever until it wears off. While at first, this might seem like an amazing thing to inflict on the opponent, not to mention a good supplementary skill for dealing with the spellcasters that poison-attribute skills cannot cripple (I even thought so as well initially), when an AI opponent is afflicted with this status ailment, and she ONLY has magic skills at her disposal (which is quite a few), then she'll just continuously use the Guard skill, as if she's hunkering down until the status effect wears off, preventing you from landing any clear shots at her, even with high-accuracy skills like Gust or Dust Blast.

At best, you're temporarily removing that spellcaster as a threat, so that you can focus on eliminating her companions, whom may be brawlers or rangers that are unaffected by this status effect. However, by inflicting Paralysis on said brawlers or rangers, whom are more numerous than spellcasters, you're effectively removing them as threats for the most part, and can then choose to focus on taking out the spellcasters first, since you're giving these brawlers and rangers a crippling 50% penalty towards their melee and ranged skills' hit rates. Furthermore, even in spite of their crippling accuracy reduction, they'll still attempt to attack you, which would usually end in vain, and would usually provide you with more opportunities to land blows against them.

Still, while I might not recommend bothering to put this skill on any of your characters, I would recommend teaching your spellcasters Dust Blast (a ranged-type skill) as a backup skill in the rare event that they're hit with Spell Disruption. (It's also handy to have if they're fighting against an opponent with the D-Shield ability.)

- Terrorize:

As mentioned before, Terrorize reduces the CP of opponents, and as mentioned before, CP is important to keep track of, whether it's trying to gain the Flow condition, avoid gaining the Panic condition, prevent the opponent from gaining the Flow condition, or cause the opponent to gain the Panic condition. As with Paralysis, the amount of CP lost is dependent on the differences between the user's and target's levels, and on the differences between their Mentality stats. It's possible to lose no CP if your level and Mentality stats are too high compared to any opponents that attempt to use Terrorize against you. Furthermore, characters with the Serenity ability, like Yomi, the Ninetails, the Exalted Angel, and the Ryuuou to name a few, are totally immune to the effects of this skill.

What you might not have known about this skill is that Terrorize can also be used to shorten the duration of any opponents' Flow conditions, or extend the duration of any opponents' Panic conditions, so it could be useful to use for end-game battles, when both players and opponents start off with more CP. (By the way, when a character leaves the Flow condition, they tend to start off with only a handful of CP, which makes them especially vulnerable to getting Panicked when hit with the Terrorize skill)

- Meditation:

Finally, I'd like to talk about the Meditation skill. I've already mentioned before that it increases your CP by 2, has a very low AP cost, and doesn't need to hit the opponent in order to work its magic. However, in addition to all that, it can be used to reduce the duration of status effects like Paralysis, Spell Disruption, and the Panic condition. Then again, once you enter the Flow condition, any status effects that you have are instantly removed, so that extra tidbit sounds kind of petty, right?

Still, this is one skill that I'd absolutely recommend putting on each and every one of your party members, starting with your "champion", whether it's Ceri, Sylvi, Yomi, the Fox Tamer, etc. Being able to gain the Flow condition very quickly should alone be quite the boon for your team. However, being able to quickly accumulate CP to empower your abilities, especially Acrobat, should be an even bigger boon.

Now that we've talked about the nature of AP, CP, the Flow condition, status effects, and a few skills of interest, I believe that now's the time to recommend some skill sets for particular character classes in general:

Generally, I'd recommend adding the following skills to just about any character's skill set:

- Gust/Dust Blast (for accuracy)
- Venom Shot/Poison Dust (for inflicting Paralysis on the enemy, as well as for providing a backup option in case Gust/Dust Blast is unavailable or unusable against a particular enemy)
- Holy Slash/Holy Arrows/Holy Bolt (for dealing heavy damage that ignores all resistances, can be swapped for Shock or Ice-attribute skills if they're unavailable)
- Meditation (to quickly enter the Flow condition)

These 4 skills are just my recommended skills for just about anyone in the game. You may also wish to add a skill with intermediary accuracy (between 100 and 110) and AP cost (between -20 and -30) to better round out your character's skill set, with skills like Fire Slash, Tornado Slashes, Ice Flash, Fire Twist, and Triple Slashes to name a few. Alternatively, if your character is using the Capture skill, then you can opt to replace Meditation, or Holy Slash/Holy Arrows/Holy Bolt, with said intermediate skill... until you reach the Abyss, in which case, you most likely won't need the Capture skill anymore.

Here's a sample skill set that I like to use for most spellcasters (i.e. characters with the Conjurer ability):

- Dust Blast
- Poison Dust
- Ice Flash/Combust
- Meditation
- Thunder Chain/Crystal Spike/Holy Bolt

Here's one for most rangers (i.e. characters with the Hunter ability):

- Gust
- Venom Shot
- Arrows
- Meditation
- Ball Lightning/Ice Cutter/Holy Arrows

And finally, here's one for most brawlers (i.e. characters with the Grappler ability, Ceri included):

- Gust
- Venom Shot
- Fire Slash/Triple Slashes
- Meditation
- Lightning Slices/Ice Hammer/Holy Slash

However, most characters aren't strictly confined to the roles of brawler, ranger, or spellcaster, since they lack abilities that cater especially to these roles (such as Grappler, Conjurer, and Hunter). In this case, I tend to go for a skill set full of a mix of melee, ranged, and magic type skills, like this:

- Gust
- Venom Shot
- Tornado Slashes
- Meditation
- Thunder Chain/Crystal Spike/Holy Bolt

...or this:

- Dust Blast
- Poison Dust
- Tornado Slashes
- Meditation
- Ball Lightning/Ice Cutter/Holy Arrows

Other than mitigating the effects of Paralysis or Spell Disruption, this kind of skill type diversity allows me to better bypass defensive abilities like Parry, Floating, D-Shield, and S-Field.

Finally, I'd like to recommend a few characters to bring along with you on your adventure, along with some recommended skill sets for them. While the skill sets that I mentioned before should be suitable for most characters, including many of the characters in this list, they aren't recommended for all of them, since special circumstances might warrant special skill sets for them.

As far as stat growth is concerned, I'd want to increase my characters' Dexterity 1st and foremost, followed by their Agility, then their Mentality, then their Resistance, then their Vitality, and finally, their Strength. As mentioned before, what good are the most powerful skills in the game if they can't even hit their targets?

- Ceri:

Let's face it, whether or not you believe her to be the best character in the game, like it or not, you're stuck with her from beginning to end. So why not give Ceri a pretty decent skill set?

As a brawler for the most part, Ceri would do well with a skill set like this:

- Gust
- Venom Shot
- Fire Slash/Triple Slashes
- Capture/Astral Blade/Meditation
- Capture/Astral Blade/Lightning Slices/Ice Hammer/Holy Slash

As much as I have misgivings for Astral Blade, I'll admit that Astral Blade is pretty much Ceri's only available Astral-attribute attack until she stumbles upon Holy Slash, and is ideal to use when her Flow condition is about to end. With Meditation in her skill set, Ceri stands a fighting chance at using Astral Blade every 5 to 6 turns at the earliest, or every 3 to 4 turns if she remains under half VP thanks to her Fortitude ability.

Many consider Ceri to be the most ideal character to make into their champion because her Capacity ability allows her to automatically gain 1 point in either Vitality, Agility, Mentality, Strength, Dexterity, or Resilience every time Ceri levels up twice. Therefore, players may wish to put their seeds into her 1st, so that they can save up their hard-earned mana elsewhere.

- Sylvi:

While Yomi may be the game's protagonist, and while Ceri may be the deuteragonist, Sylvi might as well be the tritagonist, since she plays such a big role in the game, especially early on, although despite lacking Ceri's Capacity ability, Sylvi's stats can grow by 2 stages through a couple scripted events.

Initially, Sylvi starts the game with the Recovery ability, which, as mentioned before, allows her to better spam more powerful skills without having to worry about running low on AP. Later on, through said scripted events, she'll obtain the Conjurer ability and, more importantly, the Spiritual ability, which reduces the CP cost of skills by 1 point IF they hit. While this ability becomes irrelevant when you have the Flow condition (recall that CP costs are ignored while you have the Flow condition), it's still handy to have up until the end game. In fact, because of this, I'd want to give Sylvi a different skill set than usual that caters more to a support-oriented playstyle:

- Dust Blast (highest accuracy, and backup skill in case Sylvi's spells are Disrupted)
- Toxic Bomb (Paralysis support that can hit multiple enemies, and Sylvi's intermediate-power skill)
- Terrorize (Helps keep enemy CP low, Sylvi can afford to use this skill frequently thanks to her Recovery ability)
- Capture/Meditation (Meditation helps Sylvi reach the Flow condition sooner)
- Capture/Holy Bolt (Sylvi's hardest-hitting skill)

Because of these traits, some players might consider Sylvi to be an ideal champion to dump all their seeds into. However, it should be noted that both the Forest Spirit and Abyss Mimic can effectively pull off similar sets, with the Abyss Mimic having even better stats to start with than Sylvi's (even after factoring in all of the stat boosts that Sylvi gains through scripted events), and Terrorize already in her skill set. Meanwhile, the Forest Spirit starts with Meditation and Holy Arrows already in her skill set. Still, Sylvi makes for an invaluable companion up until at least the Abyss, and possibly beyond...

- Fox Tamer:

As the only character to possess both the Adaptive and Acrobat abilities, this monster girl holds a special place in my heart. Although it'll take quite a bit of effort to bolster her meagre starting stats up to end-game levels, if you manage to pull it off, then you'll have yourself a pretty formidable party member that can easily evade enemy attacks. Even if you don't, however, you might find her abilities to be of good use until at least the 12th and 13th levels, where you can capture a Tiger Girl.

Since the Fox Tamer has no abilities that cater to a particular playstyle, a mixed skill set such as either of these should work just fine:

- Gust
- Venom Shot
- Tornado Slashes
- Meditation
- Thunder Chain/Crystal Spike/Holy Bolt

or...

- Dust Blast
- Poison Dust
- Tornado Slashes
- Meditation
- Ball Lightning/Ice Cutter/Holy Arrows

- Tiger Girl:

Another monster with the Acrobat ability, the Tiger Girl could almost be considered an upgraded Fox Tamer... except that, instead of the Adaptive ability, she has the Grappler ability, which would mean that a melee-oriented skill set such as this would be most useful:

- Gust
- Venom Shot
- Fire Slash/Triple Slashes
- Meditation
- Lightning Slices/Ice Hammer/Holy Slash

Since, unlike the Fox Tamer, the Tiger Girl lacks any abilities that grant her additional CP, giving her Meditation would be quite the boon for her. However, you may wish to hold out on that if you plan on getting any of the next 4 characters:

- Abyss Demon:

This is pretty much an upgraded Tiger Girl, with the Parry ability added alongside the Acrobat and Grappler abilities.

- Abyssal Watcher:

Basically another upgraded Tiger Girl, with the Brutal ability added alongside the Acrobat and Grappler abilities. Although she starts with Astral Blade already in her skill set, along with slightly higher stats than the Abyss Demon, I'd take the Abyss Demon over the Abyssal Watcher since Parry sounds like a better, more defensive ability to have than Brutal this late in the game.

- Yori:

Yet another upgraded Tiger Girl, with the Patient ability added alongside the Acrobat and Grappler abilities, Yori doesn't seem to impress me as much as the Abyss Demon or Abyssal Watcher.

- Ella:

Probably the most potentially-evasive character in the game, Ella combines both the Acrobat ability with the S-Field ability, which provides a dodge bonus against ranged and magic attacks equal to 25% her AP. Like the Fox Tamer, although she starts with a melee-oriented skill set, she's best suited towards a mixed skill set, like the ones mentioned before with the Fox Tamer.

- Spear Warrior, Sword Witch, Tribeswoman, Monk, Maeve, Captain Bonny, Broom Witch, Noblewoman, Assassin, Abyssal Goat, Ryuuou, Yomi, Queen Bee, Exalted Angel, Succubus, Anubis, Tribal Warrior:

All of these characters provide abilities that enhance their survivability, such as Parry, Floating, D-Shield, and S-Field, along with ever-increasing stat distributions. However, none of them compare to the evasive capabilities found within the above-mentioned characters that all have the Acrobat ability, especially Ella. Still, they could be fairly useful until you manage to acquire an almost-full party full of Acrobats.

And that's my little guide on how to effectively kick a** and chew bubblegum (while you're all out of gum) within this game, even on Abyssal difficulty. While you might have a hard time trying to get your characters the skills they'll need to succeed (unless you're playing a certain mod that I've been developing over the past 2 months), hopefully, you'll have a far easier time with this game, especially in terms of managing your AP and CP, choosing which skills to use in which situations, and which skills to teach to which characters. And hopefully, you won't need to use the game's Auto-Battle system as a crutch, especially since it, sadly, doesn't know how to effectively manage AP and CP like I, and hopefully you, do.

Oh, and one last tip: If you're unsure of how accurate your skills will be against a particular foe, then it's best to start with a low-AP, high-accuracy skill such as Gust, Dust Blast, Single Slash, etc. As the skill is being executed, pay attention to what the game briefly displays as the skill's hit chance (that green number that briefly appears in-front of your character for about a second). For example, if you're seeing a 130% chance at hitting a certain enemy with a skill like Dust Blast, then you could say with confidence that you'd have an 80% chance of landing a hit with a more powerful skill like Holy Arrows.

Now good luck, and happy a** kicking! :)