- After beating the game, I still have no idea what tension is, or why/how I was on fire some times, or how ether affected anything beyond "being good for casters", I assume by increasing their damage? I basically paid attention to cooldowns, positioning, hit points, and party attack bar when in combat.
Tension is basically based on how well you do in combat. It has effects on stats, agility in particular. The higher/lower your tension, the higher/lower your agility. So with max tension (characters on fire) you're less likely to be hit and more likely to hit the enemy. It's kind of self-cyclical, if that makes any sense. If you're tension is high it's fairly easy to keep it there, if it's low it's hard to come back from it. Fortunately the encourage option is there and that automatically brings characters to "normal" tension.
It also improves your critical hit rate.
It goes down when you miss attacks, some enemy attacks lower it, and some enemies have a tension-reduction spike. That's really common on the nebulae enemies, hitting them with physical attacks often lowers tension. It goes up when you use certain arts (or use directional arts properly), and hitting the battle start/burst affinity QTEs right. The closer you get those the more tension you gain, just like affinity.
You can see those red and blue arrows appearing by the character portraits real quick, that indicates tension rising or falling.
- I'm guessing I used less than 20% of the possible gem types. +Agility to 50 on everyone, 2xDouble Attack + 1xWeapon Power on weapons when possible, remaining slots got a mix of +Ether, +Physical Protect, +Ether Protect, +Damage Heal, and +HP. I only got one +Critical the entire game, that went to 7th's weapon slot in conjunction with Dunban's "heal on crit" skill link. Every other gem/ingredient was just wasted space, although I did try using Blaze Defense to defeat that named in
, and Spike Defense for that really annoying named dino in Makna Forest.
Weapon power doesn't help with double attack. That only works on gems that have two variables (x% chance of doing y whatever). So that was kind of a wasted gem.
Haste and critical have super-limited availability in the main game. There are two quest reward crit gems that kind of suck, then you can't get more unless you fight the level 108 super-boss since he drops rank V crystals for it.
And haste comes from a number of high level (80+) enemies, but before that it's only available as a quest reward one or two times. And ultimately you will want to get Glory Gauntlets from the Glory Slobos or super-bosses, since it gives you haste in one of the armor slots instead of having to use a weapon slot for it. Weapon specific gems >>>> armor specific ones, so freeing up that slot is great, even if it costs you 5% haste (45% in gaunts vs 50% for a megaheat gem).
- I only unlocked one additional skill tree; I looked into it for other characters but at endgame there aren't enough quests to raise reputation and it seemed I was thus locked out. Weird because I did *a lot* of quests in the game and figured all of my rep should have been maxed. But by the end I had 4 stars with
and not much with the other factions.
The 4th skill trees are more affinity-based than the 5th trees, but you can't unlock the 5th ones until the post-game. I don't remember exactly what they are, but most require you to beat some level 90+ enemies.
- Finished with something like 2.5mm gold and nothing to spend it on. Wish you could have bought high-level arts books for a ton of money, as it is I beat the game with maybe 30% of my arts stuck on intermediate level.
The only things worth buying are art books and spending money rebuilding the colony, with very few exceptions (like some of 7ths armor). I hate how RPGs balance money, for the first half or so you're barely getting by or even grinding for money, and the second half you're loaded with monstrous amounts of money and don't even need it.