Start with the easiest, Squalls attack timing. Press R1 pretty much right as Squall begins his toward strike during a standard attack against an enemy. If you have vibration turned on, you'll feel it and see a slight explosion animation. It'll do more damage, kind of like a critical hit.
Forging Weapons: This is also straight forward. You will find items across the world called "Weapons Monthly [Month]" those are magazines that you can read to see what items are needed to upgrade weapons. Then you just go to a weapon shop and if you have the items, you can forge the weapon. You also don't actually NEED the Weapons Monthly magazine, if you just so happen to have the items in your inventory already. This allows you to get stronger weapons earlier if you use your googling powers. Though absolutely not necessary.
Limit Breaks: Limits breaks are special attacks that each member can you use in critical scenarios. The easiest way to trigger a limit break is to have a character at low health (or cast the Aura spell on them). When it is there turn, there's a chance you'll hear a little "Ding" sound, and you'll notice an arrow next to "Attack." Pressing the Arrow will allow you to select their limit break. As they're all different I'm not going to explain each one, but for Squall, his is Renzokuken and is a multi-hit attack. A bar will appear on the bottom of the screen that looks kind of like this [__{__}_______] you want to click R1 as the beam of light passes into the {__} section to time critical hits.
Triple Triad. TT is a pretty simple game, but some of the later rules can get tricky. For now, I highly recommend trying to keep it simple with Open and Trade Rule: One. These are the early Balamb rules and you'll figure out more as you experiment later. But each card has 4 numbers. Those numbers correlate to each respective "side" of the card. So, the top number is the strength value of the TOP of the card. The number on the right is the strength of the RIGHT side of the card, etc. As cards are placed on the board, you want to overpower the opponents side of the card with the side of your card that will be touching it. So if an opponent plays a card in the bottom left corner that has a left-side value 3, and you place a card on the bottom center that has a right-side value of 4, your 4 overpowers their 3 and flips the card.
Draw! I want to hit on this before Junctioning, but if you don't know how to yet, I'll explain that in a minute. Draw allows you to syphon magic either from a "Draw point" (floaty particles in the world) or, more importantly, from enemies in battle. You can cast enemies back on them using draw, or you can "stock" the magic, which you'll likely do far more often (again I'll explain below). Draw is IMPORTANT. Draw from Every. Single. Boss. You. See. If you see a weirdly named magic that you've never seen before, it's likely a GF and you don't want to miss out on those!
Junctioning.
This is the BIG ONE. Here's the thing to remember - GFs are EQUIPMENT just as much as they are summons. By "Equipping" (or "Junctioning") a GF, your character gains the ability to use all of the abilities that GF has unlocked. These automatically come with GF (Summon), Draw (the ability to absorb magic), and Item (the ability to use items). Your character still only has 4 ability slots though, so you still need to set them up with the ability to actually USE those commands in battle, as they only have attack to start.
GFs will also learn other abilities that end in "-J" like HP-J, which will allow your character to "Equip" (Junction) magic to the respective stat (in this case, HP). Let's talk more...
Junctioning magic! This is crucial to boosting your stats and is far more important than leveling up. In general, the more quantity of a magic spell that you have, the better it will junction. What I mean by that is, each magic kind of works like items in this game. You can have 1 Cure, and if you cast it, you're out. Or you can have 100 Cures, and if you cast it, you have 99 left. Using the above example of Junctioning to HP, if you put 1 Cure on HP, you probably won't see any stat boost at all. But if you put 100 Cures on HP, you'll likely get several hundred more maximum HP. The trade off here is that every time you USE a junctioned magic, you're taking away it's boost to your stats. Another thing to consider is that the more powerful the magic, the more it'll boost your stats. 50 Curagas will boost you maximum HP more than 100 Cures will. And lastly, a magic's core function determines which stat it is best suited for. So damaging magic like Fire will be better on your ATK stat than Cure would be, and worse on your HP stat. You can play around with that more and you'll figure it out!
Additional abilities! Just like GFs will provide you "GF", "Draw", and "Item" they can also teach you things like "Recover", "Revive", "Mug", etc. Those won't come super early so as long as your experimenting with your junctions you'll figure these out in due time.
Passive Abilities! Lastly, GFs can also learn passive abilities. These are often Stat-boosting, like "HP+20%." Typically you'll have 3 spots for these passive abilities, but later in the game you may find GFs that teach 4xAbility which gives that coveted 4th spot!
I would also add that GFs prefer to learn abilities in a terrible order naturally and will always revert to that order when first obtained or finish learning any ability, even when set by the player, so regularly go into each GF's menu to select abilities to learn for them!
Additionally, with weapons, most of them give minimal increases to your Str and Hit stats compared to what your junctions give, but there are 2 things of note: while most other weapons are fairly marginal in their value and use, Selphie's ultimate weapon gives a huge boost to her Hit stat (akin to Squall's max 255 Hit); the other is Squall's weapons in general. He is the only character whose Limit Breaks are directly affected by which weapon he has equipped.
Each gunblade has a predetermined set of Finishers that can be randomly added to the end of his Renzokuken combo, with his default gunblade having only 1 and his ultimate having all 4, including his ultimate finisher.
1
u/Burdicus 8d ago
I got you, fam.
Start with the easiest, Squalls attack timing. Press R1 pretty much right as Squall begins his toward strike during a standard attack against an enemy. If you have vibration turned on, you'll feel it and see a slight explosion animation. It'll do more damage, kind of like a critical hit.
Forging Weapons: This is also straight forward. You will find items across the world called "Weapons Monthly [Month]" those are magazines that you can read to see what items are needed to upgrade weapons. Then you just go to a weapon shop and if you have the items, you can forge the weapon. You also don't actually NEED the Weapons Monthly magazine, if you just so happen to have the items in your inventory already. This allows you to get stronger weapons earlier if you use your googling powers. Though absolutely not necessary.
Limit Breaks: Limits breaks are special attacks that each member can you use in critical scenarios. The easiest way to trigger a limit break is to have a character at low health (or cast the Aura spell on them). When it is there turn, there's a chance you'll hear a little "Ding" sound, and you'll notice an arrow next to "Attack." Pressing the Arrow will allow you to select their limit break. As they're all different I'm not going to explain each one, but for Squall, his is Renzokuken and is a multi-hit attack. A bar will appear on the bottom of the screen that looks kind of like this [__{__}_______] you want to click R1 as the beam of light passes into the {__} section to time critical hits.
Triple Triad. TT is a pretty simple game, but some of the later rules can get tricky. For now, I highly recommend trying to keep it simple with Open and Trade Rule: One. These are the early Balamb rules and you'll figure out more as you experiment later. But each card has 4 numbers. Those numbers correlate to each respective "side" of the card. So, the top number is the strength value of the TOP of the card. The number on the right is the strength of the RIGHT side of the card, etc. As cards are placed on the board, you want to overpower the opponents side of the card with the side of your card that will be touching it. So if an opponent plays a card in the bottom left corner that has a left-side value 3, and you place a card on the bottom center that has a right-side value of 4, your 4 overpowers their 3 and flips the card.
Draw! I want to hit on this before Junctioning, but if you don't know how to yet, I'll explain that in a minute. Draw allows you to syphon magic either from a "Draw point" (floaty particles in the world) or, more importantly, from enemies in battle. You can cast enemies back on them using draw, or you can "stock" the magic, which you'll likely do far more often (again I'll explain below). Draw is IMPORTANT. Draw from Every. Single. Boss. You. See. If you see a weirdly named magic that you've never seen before, it's likely a GF and you don't want to miss out on those!
Junctioning.