Yumina the Ethereal mini-guide/tips thing

JAST Games Game Discussions
#1

I’ve new to this game like most of you, but I feel I can offer some tips since I’ve seen some complaints about how grindy the game is upon certain levels of content I’ve already passed that I KNOW aren’t grindy.

People seem to have a mindset that they can just casually select random options in battles for turn-based rpgesque games and its the games fault/flaw that they gameover for that style of play. I personally prefer games to punish you for playing thoughtlessly, but for those who prefer not to thoerycraft their games… at all, I figure I’ll compile a list of things I’ve learned while playing that others may not care to notice for themselves.

1: Should be obvious but never ever goto the shop, choose training instead, you get a free shop visit before and after. Note that training once per week should be more than enough.

2: Unless needed for a quest, material class items seem to serve no purpose other than to be sold. Other than gargoyle heads, I haven’t even seen any quest materials that are difficult to obtain either, so don’t be to stingy with selling them! Obviously identify everything (skills especially) with the excess currency.

3: Be sure to buy level 2 of everyone’s basic attack before the election war finals. its damage increase is massive, and the audience requirement is still efficient. HOWEVER, make sure you buy some medium, and high cost (audience colour cost that is) attacks for every character as well. Certain battles are not won by proper buffing, debuffing, and attacking their weaknesses. But by “wasting” audience colours so that you fumble the enemy attack. This is extremely difficult to do if you do not have a wide range of attacks ranging from cheap to expensive audience! Do this with every colour! I can’t imagine how you can beat the final election battle without being super over level (if that’s even possible), or without chain-fumbling the enemy.

4: I unfortunately completed this part of the game without ever getting Ai’s hydrosplash (or whatever it’s called) level 2. I strongly suggest you get level 2 since all the enemies have level 2 skills by this point of the game and you will not be able to blast a damn thing for like 3 “boss” battles in a row (followed by a practically tutorial level).

5: upon reaching level 10, all your characters obtain a new improved weapon (that seems to equip automatically, I’m not sure how to switch to your old one, if that’s even possible). If you’re in a dungeon and you’re level 9, you may wanna hit 10 before leaving for that sizeable upgrade.

6: You also obtain new weapons depending on which skills/abilities…err, the one with a tree that you spend points on you get. I don’t know how it works exactly, I just know that after gaining a certain skill on Ai, she got a new weapon, and it’s a MASSIVE upgrade over her old one… For example, all my other characters’ weapons increase all their stats by 10 (other than hp)… ai’s? 50… yep, 50, probably not impressive late game, but at level 14 when I got it? holy smokes.

7: Don’t be afraid about NOT killing a certain enemy because you need them to consume their respective audience colour. For example, there’s a certain battle you must fight without yumina at a certain point in the game, and you fight 4 enemies, 1 of each colour. You might think you need to not kill the green one or else you’ll be stuck with full green audience and nobody who knows how to spend it (unless you have red world or whatever spells like that), but if you kill the green enemy, the green audience automatically manages itself for you, yay! Sparing green enemies is a pain anyway since they love healing the others.
8: Matching your defenses against the enemy attack if you can’t avoid it completely seems more important than attacking against their weakness (unless you are confident you can kill them with the attack) most of the time. If you do this properly you should take very little damage, perhaps even 0. While attacking however, even if you’re using logic against an enemy whose defense skill is against logic, you should still hit for a decent amount (like half in my experience). Obviously this depends on the power of your enemy, your attack, etc. But just as a general rule of thumb, I do not recommend sacrificing your defense strategy for offense unless you’re about to end the fight, or if you know you’ll get healed after, or whatever, etc.

Sorry if those seem too obvious, I just figure that at least some may have not occurred to some people based on the complaints about some relatively early game battles.

#2

Your weapons auto upgrade… 2 parts to it.

Part 1 is based on level… looks like every 10th level up your weapons grow and get new stats. 9 ranks to this.

Part 2 is based on your abilities… 4 different categories you can get into… Offense, Defense, Balanced and Ethereal. I think this is 6 ranks total… if your in Offense you cant go into Ethereal unless you reset all your Abilities at the shop. Rank 6 is +500 for Offense or Defense… Balanced is +300 across. Ethereal is +120 across with +60 to Ethereal power. Offense/Defense/Balanced does not give any to Ethereal.

#3

Does anyone have a guide for chapter 1?

#4

A couple quick corrections:

Weapons upgrade every ten levels, but not ON the tenth, its 11-21-31-41 etc.

@BettiePage It is possible for your weapon mutations to jump from one line to another. It happened to me like three times by accident (much to my chagrin).

@supervamp78 Chapter 1 is probably the only common route chapter that doesn’t need a guide. It is literally Impossible to miss the H scene (unless you say “no”). That being said, there are some missable skills.

Also, to anyone who cares: you can use a Boss skill from a previous playthrough to get an H scene even if you were nowhere close to earning it for the current playthrough.

#5

There are cg you can miss right and is it ok not to have every skill?

#6

It would be more accurate to say it is impossible to get every cg and skill on a single playthrough. I was wrong before btw about using a skill from a previous playthrough, when I tested it last time I must have triggered something that was a prereq. When I tried again just now I didn’t get it.

#7

so your skills carry over into the next play thru? even the special player skills you get when you clear chapter events?

btw it is impossible to get Kirara’s event in chapter 2 if you go after the Sister Blade to use against Rei.

Wish there was a way to skip combat animations… just select your skills and tell me the results, it gets boring really fast trying to do this multiple times and you need to grind.

#8

You can fast forward by crtl button or x button if you use xbox360 controller.

#9

Here are so observations I noted after playing with the last boss in normal mode, who acted as my training dummy (done in normal mode, lv33).
Attack Stats (ie: Logic Attack) seem to give a almost static increase in damage.
Spirit attack of 815, Spirit Damage of 670, Ethereal Power of 109 does 8867 damage.
Spirit attack of 815, Spirit Damage of 840, Ethereal Power of 109 does 9386 damage.

+120 Attack

Spirit attack of 935, Spirit Damage of 670, Ethereal Power of 109 does 8973 damage. (+106)
Spirit attack of 935, Spirit Damage of 840, Ethereal Power of 109 does 9493 damage. (+107)

A similar pattern is noticed after using Awakening Override (+450 attack), where the +450 attack translated into +540 dmg.

Items which grant Spirit/Logic Power seem to have the most noticeable increase in damage. Therefore those +110 Power items are worth more than those +160 Attack items. +Power essentially turns a “weaker” skill into a more powerful one.

The effects of Ethereal power at my current level seem rather weak.
Spirit attack of 815, Spirit Damage of 670, Ethereal Power of 109 does 8867 damage.
Spirit attack of 815, Spirit Damage of 840, Ethereal Power of 109 does 9386 damage.

+12 Ethereal Power

Spirit attack of 815, Spirit Damage of 670, Ethereal Power of 121 does 9018 damage. (+151)
Spirit attack of 815, Spirit Damage of 840, Ethereal Power of 121 does 9546 damage. (+160)

In comparison, going from Spirit Damage 670 to 840 (+170) gives around +519 damage @ 109 Ethereal Power, and +528 damage @ 121 Ethereal Power.

Ethereal power boosts both Spirit and Logic attacks at the same time and I believe it also take part in the defense calculation (not tested!). Therefore it may be really effective on Kirara, who have access to several hybrid attacks (namely Veil of Shadow). it will boost both portion of her attack as well as contributing to her defense calculation.

Note that the weight of each stat may change in Hard or Super Hard Mode, where more powerful items become accessible. I might repeat my test at the end of HM. There is a chance which the scaling of Ethereal power improves in SHM.

I would love it if someone can provide info/guesses as to how damage is calculated in the game.

(if you read the post in the 1st 10 minutes it has been up, some info are incorrect due to my very poor handwriting and being in the evenings)

#10

I’ve think I noticed that even if an attack has a really small amount of “hybrid” damage, the contribution is very large.

for example, if you have a skill that does only 1 element of damage (lets say 0/900) and you smack someone for 3000 with it, if you find a yellow version of that skill which has a bonus of the other element, making it like 20/900 damage. your damage will go up by heaps.

Basically, your base stat and a skill’s logic/spirit damage stats seem to have an additive relationship to overall damage, but if the skill does 0, then your character’s inherant stat of its element type gets ignored, but if that skill has even just 1 of that element for damage, your character’s stat gets added to the damage formula in full.

I don’t really have the means to test this to be sure because I noticed after I trashed an old skill without that double element thing, but if I manage to get a duplicate skill with and without that bonus, I’ll try and prove it.

#11

I think that has to do with Logic and Spirit damage being calculated separately. Most enemies have either no logic or no spirit defense, thus the other portion of your attack becomes super effective. There might also be diminishing returns to certain numbers which result in the first 20 damage (from the spell) being super efficient compared to spells with higher damage.

//

Here is another round of test. This time the test is done on Rei. Unlike the test dummy, Rei has a Spirit Defense of 800 and a defense spell with 955 Spirit Power. Attack used is the basic version of Akishima Calibur lv4.

Performed by Ayumu @ lv37.
Ethereal power is untouched this time. I will try to remember not to sell off single-stat items next time I do dungeons…

Basis:
1225 Spirit Attack, 940 Spirit Power, 1157 Damage

Test on +% Damage
+6% Spirit Damage
1225 Spirit Attack, 940 Spirit Power, 1242 Damage (+85)
+12% SD, 40 SA
1265 Spirit Attack, 940 Spirit Power, 1375 Damage (+218)

Test on +Power
+150 Spirit Power
1225 Spirit Attack, 1090 Spirit Power, 1383 Damage (+226)
+250 Spirit Power
1225 Spirit Attack, 1190 Spirit Power, 1535 Damage (+378)
+400 Spirit Power
1225 Spirit Attack, 1340 Spirit Power, 1762 Damage (+605)

Test on +Attack
+168 Spirit Attack
1393 Spirit Attack, 940 Spirit Power, 1503 Damage (+346)
-225 Spirit Attack
1000 Spirit Attack, 940 Spirit Power, 695 Damage (-462)

Increase in attack stat seem to have much more effect on someone using the “right” defense skill this time round: either that or it has to do with a significant increase in spell power going from Normal > Hard while spirit attack remain more or less untouched.

+% Damage has disappointing gains.

  • Power remain quite effective, but the +250 Power item I got in HM barely outdamaged the +168 Attack item from endgame normal.

This test is not exactly useful, as most of the time you should be using attacks against the enemy’s weakness. Ie: using a logic attack vs someone using a defense skill with no logic power. It does seem to point out that having higher Attack stat is worth a lot vs enemies with hybrid defense skills.

When I get some time I might test this out on a defenseless target, or test it using low power attacks.
Backyard attacks such as pyrosplit often has low Power to begin with. So you can either give it +400 power, which almost an 80% boost, vs stacking Attack, which might make it more devastating even against enemies with the proper defense types to begin with.

//

My top for newer players is that while high level spells are great and always give a noticeable increase in damage (and most of the time yield an increase in efficiency), always keep something which can drain low levels of audiences. A 300 Power spells may look weak when you have spells clocking at 900+, but when augmented with +power items coupled with high base attributes, those spells still deal a fair amount of damage (against unguarded opponents), and also act as an effective audience drain to get rid of that last 18 audience, causing the AI to fumble their attacks.

AoE attacks are amazing but at the same time too situational. All the dungeon battles I have seen so far are single mob battles. At the end of the day the AoE attacks are really only good for the first few school battles. (Although I find them really powerful when they can be used)

You will have enough skill points to unlock every single ability in the game (at low levels). Go ahead and unlock every tree and learn what the different things do. Worst case you can just pay a small sum of money to reset your skills (and this also come in handy when you want a certain weapon evolution).

Another thing is that the sex scenes are attached to the usage of Ayumu’s special attack gained in that chapter. With careful skill usage of skills, the first three chapters should give you minimal troubles as the special skill often just 1 shot the boss. This also mean if you want the end of chapter sex in hard/super hard, you can pull out the skill you gained in normal mode to satisfy the condition.

//

After experimenting with more configs and learning about dmg calculation formula, stacking Spirit/Logic Attack often time gives the best gains. The itemization cost for attack is lower than power and gives a % modifier to power until you have 10x the attack > enemy defense. On top of that each Attack still contribute 1 dmg to the dmg calculation. Power comes in more handy if you are using low powered spells (ie: backyard spells).

#12

I ran into a big problem guys

I choose Kirara twice on the days off but still got Yumina?
I was suppose to get Kirara’s spells or something?

Due to the gameplay, I am not going back to replay this

does anyone have a game save so I can see Kirara’s ending?

#13

Here are some lv90sh findings which has remained consistent since I really began to probe at damage optimization @ the beginning of hard mode.

How to maximize damage:

  • Attack stat is good. It always scale well in most cases. (ie: Spirit Attack, Logic Attack)
  • You want a little bit of the “other type of damage”. For example, Ayumu’s attacks all deal Spirit Damage. You want just a little bit of +Logic Damage somewhere on your equipment for the majority of the fights (other than opponents with drain def skills where the logic dmg might be detrimental). You do not need it as a “primary stat” on a piece of equipment. A bonus modifier roll is enough.
  • Once you have that “other type of damage”. The Hybrid Attack items (items that offer both Spirit and Logic attack) become far better than the single stat ones. Look for the ones with a bonus modifier on your primary stat.
  • +Power can be better than +Attack for low powered skills. That is, most backyard damage skills. Although this only holds true to a certain point (that is, when your attack is a lot higher, ratio wise, compared to skill damage). Lower level characters are better off just stacking +Attack. The gap between Power and Damage at high levels (SHM).
  • +Ethereal value items are really weak.
  • +% damage items are always a little weaker than the +Attack/+Power items.
  • Defense is trivial. Forget about defense.
  • Backyard defense lowering skills on enemies are good on long fights late game. However for the most part you are much much better off using backyard damaging spells. Attack buffs are also very weak compared to backyard damage spells.

On skills:
My favorite skill modifier is -Audience Change, followed by bonus to Damage. An -Audience Change Akishima Volcano for example, can replace Calibur as your primary attack. Note that while it consumes less audience, the required amount of audience does not change. Having a -30% audience lv8 Akishima Volcano means you really do not need a regular lv9 Akishima Calibur.
*There is a bug in game where Audience Change modifiers do not work on equipment, but it works on skills.

  • Stuff like retreat, advance, bind, etc are often not worth it. Those skills cost more audiences. A Disinterrupt on Akishima Calibur is handy because it denies enemy backyard interrupts like pyrosplit, cross nova, etc… In fact Ayumu is great at killing the red drake type enemies despite their spirit-based defense, solely because he can deny them of their backyard spells, and by consuming Red audiences, also deny the drake from triggering its defense skill.

Late edit 1:
Your equipment really breaks the game. Battles are a lot more balanced if you ditch some of your equipment. Try at least leaving out 1 one of equipment slots open if you feel the game is too much of a walkover.

#14

I just finished Yumina on Kirara’s route – LOVED it. This game kicks so much ass, and that particular ending was so perfect… but I digress. Back to gameplay!

I ran into a gameplay mechanic that I’m wondering if there’s a work-around for. For skills that are buyable in the shops or discoverable in Ordacle’s dungeons, you can of course level them up by progressing to more difficult dungeon levels or progressing in the game. But what about the “event” skills that you earn by triggering certain plot points? (Ex. Ayumu’s H-scene specials, Kirara’s “Glint in the Dark,” Ai’s “Piercing Choice of Words,” and so on.) Is there a way to level those up? A lot of the event skills were really amazing when you first earned them, but by late in the game they were too underpowered to be useful.

So can “event” skills get stronger, or is that just a built-in limitation one has to deal with?

#15

When you load your cleared save file, you’ll have an option for “Normal” or “Hard” difficulty. Hard enhances the enemies up around the 26-60 range so they remain a threat against your endgame party, and allows deeper access to the Ordacle dungeons. On hard difficulty the event skills you get are also enhanced. For example Kirara’s “Sincere Brainwashing” which was lvl 1 on your 1st playthrough, will become lvl 4 on hard mode. And Yumina’s “Liars and Scars” lvl 2 skill will become lvl 5. Basically any event skill that was a certain level on the 1st playthrough, will be enhanced by 3 levels on hard mode when you get the skill again.

Hopefully this answers your question.

#16

You may need. I was missing a skill and a Cg there even after i cleared the superhard mode. I was trying to replay to get the ultimate skills at level 9 when i found them.The only problem is that you may not be strongt enought when you fight maino unles you play first Fighting the battles to leven up and then surrender agains maino in order to re-start the chapter from the begining following the choose i’ll give you now.
1d First metting, Kirara training
2d Library Clubroom
3D First metting Entrance
4d Old Bulding Entrance
5d Untouchable Darnbell
Girl choise
6d Roof (You get Kirara’s “Sincere Brainwash” skill and a CG from this event)
Library
7d cafeteria Gym (You get Ayumu’s “Endeavor Mind” skill and a CG from this event)
8 Clubroom Clasroom
9 Clubroom speach
10 Clubroom speach

The H-scene is not problem but Like i said you may miss Kirara’s Sincere Brainwash" skill and a CG. And The sisters doesn’t get the H-scene if you just use the skill in Sakao, Not sure if you have to use the skill in the two sisters or if you need to at least so some events in order to it happen.

Now talking abouth something else. I’m going to name the “important items” you need in order to unlock the “Quest of proof” since they release the ultimate skill at lv 10. Maybe some player are wondering where to luck for the item they are missing. The quest are called Defender’s Seal (ayumu), Songstress’ seal (Yumina), Avenger’s Seal (Kirara) and Knight’s Seal (Ai)

Ayumu: Path of Cracks
Lv 30 Blood Jewel Of Ideas
Lv 60 Blood Jewel Of Flame
Lv 90 Blood Jewel Of Passion

Yumina: Marane’s Maw
Lv 30 Branch of strenght
Lv 60 Sacred Branch
Lv 90 Viridian Branch

Kirara: Mizelt Tomb
Lv 30 Moonlight Prism
Lv 60 Obsidian Prism
Lv 90 Prism of Hope

Ai: Key to Heaven Irukaruo
Lv 30 Blue Spirit Seal
Lv 60 Flowing Ice Seal
Lv 90 Seal of Turbulence