Basic Mechanics

## Dungeon Runs

The original game consists of a brief tutorial, First Village, and the nine Dungeons. You generally start in the village, get the gear, items, and friends that you wish to take with you, and then go into a dungeon. Upon either completing the dungeon, leaving early by using a Grimoire of Return, or dying, you return to the village.

The sequel has Hope Village instead of First Village, as well as different dungeons. Certain rest areas in dungeons also give you a chance to leave the dungeon early.

## Stats

Your six main stats are health, stamina, attack, defense, power, and experience. As your experience goes up, you gain levels, and that increases your maximum health, attack, and defense. Your experience always resets to zero at the start of a new dungeon run.

The sequel adds two new stats: agility and magic points. Agility affects your chance to hit or miss. Magic points are used to summon friends or use sword or shield skills. Agility scales with your level, while magic points have a fixed cap of 50.

## Dungeon Floors

Each dungeon has a number of floors that you go through in order. You cannot return to a previous floor in the same run. The actual layout of most floors is randomized every time, so it will be different for every dungeon run.

## Combat

Movement and combat in the game are entirely turn-based. You get a turn, then hostile monsters get a turn, and then your friends get a turn. After that, the cycle repeats.

## Controls

The game is intended to be controlled with either a keyboard or a gamepad. The controls are configurable, but a mouse is typically not used at all.

## Equipment

You have four main equipment slots. Your sword is your weapon, and improves your attack. Your shield is your armor, and improves your defense. Your bracelet is an accessory with a variety of possible effects. Unlike the other types of gear that you can equip, arrows do not grant any passive effects and can even be fired without equipping them. This is covered in far more detail in pages linked from this wiki's home page.

## Items

There are several types of items that you can use but cannot equip. Reading books can have a variety of effects, but normally consumes the book. Swinging staffs is similar, but they typically give weaker effects and allow using a staff several times before it is used up. Eating fruit can give you a variety of effects, or throwing it can give those effects to whoever you hit. Eating bread is mainly to restore your stamina, though some types also have other effects. This is covered in far more detail in pages linked from this wiki's home page.

## Synthesis

Loosely, synthesis combines two different items into a single item with at least some of the properties of both of the original items. How it works varies some between the two games, but it's a very important way to improve your gear in both.

## Inventory

You can normally have twenty items in your main inventory, though this can eventually be expanded by Magic Pouches. Equipped and consumable items all use inventory slots. A bag itself even uses a slot of your main inventory, which is the limit on how many bags you can have.

## Look Over

You can at any time in a dungeon use the look over command to get a first-person perspective. There are several reasons why you might wish to do this.

## Party

In the original game, you can bring up to two other monsters with you to join you in your adventure.

The sequel greatly expands upon this, allowing for a party of up to six friends, of whom up to three can be present at a time. This allows for easy replacements if one is defeated. You can send a friend home whenever you like if you are adjacent to her, and summon a friend from your house at the cost of some magic points.

## Orders

You can give orders to your friends, which basically determines which AI your party members will use. There are six possibilities, and in most cases, at least one of them will do roughly what you want. You can change the orders at any time, and without using a turn.

The sequel expands upon this by allowing you to selectively disable a particular skill that one of your friends might use.

## Making Friends

In all but one case, you get party members by talking to monsters in dungeons and asking them to join you. It is only possible to do this in some dungeons, and some particular monsters cannot be recruited.

## Traps

Most dungeon floors have some traps laying about. They are normally invisible until you step on one to trigger its effects.

## Conditions

There are several status conditions that you can get, mostly with negative effects. Your party members and hostile monsters can mostly get the same status conditions. They can be caused by traps, monster skills, or particular items.

## Dying

If you run out of health but have a Revival Fruit in your inventory, it will consume the fruit to restore you to full health. If you don't have such a fruit in your inventory, it will send you back to First Village, where Tarte will revive you. In the sequel, it will send you back to Hope Village instead of First Village.

## Saving

The game is automatically saved when you complete a dungeon floor, end a dungeon run, or manually save your game at your house in First Village. There are three save slots, but you cannot manually copy a single run to use multiple slots as you can in some other games.

The sequel has two save slots instead of three, and allows you to save and return to the title screen from anywhere in Hope Village, rather than only at your house.

## Alpha Monsters

Some dungeon floors will have an alpha monster, which is a much stronger version of a normal monster. Alpha monsters always drop some loot for you upon dying.

## Tanukichi's shop

In addition to maintaining a shop in town, Tanukichi also has a shop in some floors of certain dungeons. She will sell you various items, and has a random inventory that mostly consists of things that she does not sell in town. You can also sell her unwanted items in order to clear inventory space.

## Monster Houses

Some dungeon floors will have a room that is labeled a monster house. That particular room will have many monsters, many traps, and many items densely packed into the room. The many monsters and traps make monster houses dangerous, but the many items make them lucrative to clear.

## Monster Homes

Some dungeon floors will have the home where a neutral, high-level monster lives. She typically has several items in her house, but may attack you if you try to steal them.

## Adventurers

Some dungeon floors have a party of one to three high-level adventurers gathered around a campfire. The adventurers are neutral and won't attack you unless you attack them first.

In the sequel, sometimes one of the adventurers will be a Sensei who can teach new skills to your friends.

## Fog

If you take too long on a floor, some fog will roll in, making the monsters much stronger. This will never happen to you in normal gameplay unless you do something to make it happen, but is there to prevent certain exploits.

## Reputation

You can get a good reputation by persuading monsters not to fight you, though this usually doesn't matter. You can get a bad reputation by attacking and killing neutral monsters. If you do this too much, Watcher will step in and kill you to end your dungeon run. Or at least that's true in the original game; I'm not sure about the sequel.

## Unidentified Items

In some dungeons, items are unidentified by default. It will tell you that an item is a fruit or staff or whatever, but not which particular type of fruit until you identify the item.

## Monster Book

You have a monster book that gives you information about all of the monsters that you have met. It is available from the "others" section of your menu.