If you think something's going to be a discovery, see if it'll prompt you (ex: the apple tree, the picture and the windmill in the childhood arc), and you should get a skit that accompanies the discovery somewhere (in the case of the windmill, you have to climb up and run a little bit in there to get the skit).
Talk to NPCs for food in the Childhood Arc. Also, remember to loot people's houses for free stuff.
There are some subevents which may or may not be recorded in your sidequest book, so check around for event stars or smiley faces on top of people's heads before you move onto the next objective.
Dualize your heart out! Getting used to dualization early will help you out immensely when it's truly time to dualize for the inn requests or something. The
links in this post will help you with finding shards to dualize weapons/armour with. Scy has been kind enough to detail
how to dualize weapons for profit, and also to
outline what to use in the Eleth Mixer to boost its capacity. I used the nearly same items when I played the JP version and it definitely works quickly. Cooking is your friend and it makes healing and getting stuff much easier since you have something automated on a gambit-like system working for you during battle.
If you feel like the game's too easy, or you're doing the same combos over and over, maybe try nudging the the difficulty up and see if that makes the difference. Exploiting enemy weaknesses via your A-Artes and/or your B-Artes can make the difference between life or death, CC boosts, and comboing on higher difficulties. And around-step is your friend. Don't forget that you can escape battles by making the character run against the battle arena's boundary (only if it's coloured blue; if red, you cannot escape) to fill up a gauge to escape.
I wrote up a small short post about the basics of A-Artes combat
here. Not sure if it's helpful, but it's the basics of the basics when it comes down to exploiting enemy weakness on a consistent basis.
You might feel like you have to adjust AI during battle if they're not doing what you want. Go ahead and do it, or you may manually take control of them by using the D-pad to quickly switch characters or go into the Artes menu to tell them which spells to cast/abilities to use.
The Google Doc we linked in the OP is helpful for checking around for the subevents, including the missable ones, like the Handkerchief event which you must do sometime between the end of Chapter 4 and before you enter the final dungeon (to be safe--I heard it's the final floor, but I just do it asap so I don't have to worry about it) otherwise you'll miss it permanently. There will very likely be FAQs out there for this game now, so you could use those to your advantage as opposed to the doc we linked in the OP. Nothing important like artes or quests are missable outside of that handkerchief quest, so it isn't like Abyss.
Feed the cats fish in every town you're in so you don't have to go back and do it all at the end of the game.
Edit: Wait. Even though it's in the OP... 200 battles on Hard to unlock Evil difficulty; 300 battles on Evil to unlock Chaos.
). It depends on her current weakness (they change as she changes forms).
