Basic Concepts

*Trials of Kokoro* requires players to understand a certain set of basic concepts, in order to succeed in the different aspects of the game.

## Gameplay

### Difficulty

The main objective of the game is to read through all of the narrative of it, beat all main story battles, and reach the end of the tale for your heroes. In order to do so, you will need to complete a series of tasks who difficulty will be controlled by two factors: how deep you are into the game, and the difficulty level you have selected. The first factor will always increase as you progress in the main story, matching the progress of your characters as they gain experience, unlock new skills. and get new and powerful items. However, you can modify the general difficulty of the game to allow for an easier of more difficult range of difficulty overall. You can select the game's difficulty level at the beginning of a new game, having up to 4 difficulties to choose from:

* **Storyteller:** Enemies' defenses and outgoing damage are reduced by 30%, and the heroes are immune to death magic. This difficulty is recommended if you just want to focus on the game's story.
* **Normal:** Enemies' defenses and outgoing damage are reduced by 15%. This difficulty is fair and forgiving, and is recommended for most players.
* **Challenging:** Enemies suffer no penalties. Battles will be difficult, and an understanding of the game is highly recommended.
* **Heroic:** Enemies' defenses and outgoing damage are increased by 15%. Min-maxing, careful resource management, and good strategies are a must.

### Narrative scenes

One of the two main game sceneries is the narrative scenes. In these scenes, you will see different sets of dialogues and cutscenes where different characters interact, discuss, explain, and talk about various aspects of the game, from main lore to individual stories. During the narrative scenes, you can press Left Click to go to the next dialogue line. You also have other alternatives, such as holding the ESC key to fast-forward the current dialogue, or you can set the Auto option on (at the bottom left of the current dialogue line) so that the dialogue continues after a small interval of time of finishing showing the current line.

During narrative scenes, you can also interact with other options at the bottom of the dialogue box, such as Save (allows you to save the game at the current point).

### Battles

During your adventure, a good amount of dialogues will end up with your heroes engaging into fights. You will fight a wide variety of creatures and for different reasons, but in all cases you objective is to survive to those fights by making your enemies lose all their health before you do. If you manage to do so, you will get various rewards in the form of character experience (EXP), currency (used to buy items) and materials that you can sell to get more money.

But winning in a fight is not as easy as it sounds. You need to consider a lot of factors, such as your equipment, your available powers and their cooldowns. Be patient, understand your enemies, know your limitations, and be aware of everything that happens during the fight. If you do so, you will live to see another set of narrative...and maybe even to fight another battle!

### Aggro

Aggro management is a huge part of the *Trials of Kokoro*. Incorrect Aggro management will result in the quick loss of less-hardy members of the party, so careful attention is needed. Each point of damage or healing a character does increases their personal Aggro by that amount. Since most enemies target the character with the highest Aggro rating, it is crucial that characters with the most Protection, i.e. Aedric, be targeted at all times. There are multiple ways to make this mechanic land in the player's favour; Aggro-adjusting equipment, powers, passive stances, and the Defend option.

## Manage Heroes

The **Manage Heroes** section allows you to perform different actions, from modifying your characters, to checking information in the saved tutorials or saving your game.

These are the main options you can access on in the 'Manage Heroes' section:

### Inventory

The Inventory menu is where you can review every item the party possesses, categorized according to type. Here, you can compare the effectiveness of items, read item descriptions, or see if there are items you need to sell.

#### Currency

Your party will have three currencies with which they can buy items, weapons and other objects that will be useful for their adventures. This currency, known generically as "Gold Crowns" by in-game parameters, groups every certain amount of units of gold into a different visual resource, facilitating the handling of big values. This means that:

* Your generic set of currency, copper pieces, is represented by this symbol:  . You can have 99 units of this currency.
* Whenever you reach 100 copper pieces, you will gain one unit of the superior currency, silver bars, represented by this symbol:  . You can have 9 units of this currency.
* Whenever you reach 10 silver bars, you will gain one unit of the superior currency, gold crowns, represented by this symbol:  . You can have an infinite amount of this currency.

### Powers

Powers are all the actions the characters may perform during battle. Depending on whether a character is a fighter or mage, they will have access to Abilities or Spells, and each will be valuable in the adventure. Characters gain one Power Point upon level-up, allowing them to learn a new power.

### Equip

The Equip menu allows you to fit the party with the various items you find in the game, increasing their potential and effectiveness in battle. Weigh your options carefully, and best outfit the heroes according to their strengths and how you perceive them. Check this section to know more about the equipment you can use with every hero, and their individual stats and effects.

### Review

#### Character Stats

There are eight major stats in the game, and each is valuable to your success. Fighter characters rely primarily on Strength and Health, Mages rely on Talent and Spell Energy, and Favoured rely on Faith and Spell Energy.

   **Health**: A measure of energy for a character’s physical capacity for injury. When Health lowers to zero, the character will fall unconscious, and be unable to act until the end of battle. Characters ending battle unconscious will lose 20% of earned experience, making them level up slower.

   **Spell Energy**: A measure of energy for a mage’s ability to concentrate on their magic. Without Spell Energy, mages cannot cast spells.

   **Strength**: Represents a character’s physical power. Each point increases outgoing physical damage done with basic attacks and most abilities.

   **Protection**: Represents how armoured a character is. Incoming physical damage is reduced by each point. Keep in mind that some attacks, especially those that deal piercing damage, can bypass some or all of a character’s Protection rating.

   **Talent**: Represents a character’s skill with controlling magic. Each point increases outgoing magical damage done with most spells.

   **Willpower**: Represents how adept one is at defending themselves against the Weave’s powers. Incoming elemental damage from spells is reduced by each point.

   **Speed**: Affects turn order. Most characters have a base Speed of 10. A character with 20 Speed can move twice as fast as a character with only 10.

   **Faith**: Represents devotion to, adherence to the teachings of, and belief in the God one worships. Faith increases the potency of abilities or spells used by Favoured, and reduces incoming damage from enemy Favoured.

Apart from the major stats, a group of other individual stats for each character is available in their corresponding summary screen. These are the secondary stats you should be aware of:

   **Hit Chance**: This stat represents the percentage for an attack to hit its target under normal circumstances, which could be an important modifier to hit very fast and evasive targets.
   **Counter Chance**: This stat represents a probability of how probable it is that the character launches a counterattack once hit by an enemy's attack. The higher the value, the higher the chance of attacking the enemy with an autoattack.
   **Critical Rate**: This stat represents the probability of a normal attack to become a critical attack, multiplying its damage output. Increase this stat to deal high damage with your normal attacks.
   **HE Regen**: This stat represents how fast your character will recover Health every turn during a battle.
   **SE Regen**: A percentage of the character's Spell Energy that they will regenerate at the start of their turn.
   **RE Regen**: A percentage of the character's Resolve that they will regenerate at the start of their turn.
   **Evasion**: Represents a chance to completely dodge incoming attacks and some abilities. Spells bypass Evasion entirely, but it can also be reduced or nullified with certain actions, like the Wanderer's Diem or the Brawler's Low Blow.
   **Spell Deflection**: Functions the same as Evasion, but for incoming harmful spells. Spell Deflection can be nullified with the Fighter technique, Feint.
   **Critical Evade**: Represents a chance to dodge incoming critical hits. If a critical hit is successful and the attacked character has Critical Evade, a roll is made to see if the critical hit is evaded.
   **Healing Potency**: Represents the amount of incoming healing a character will receive. A character with 120% Healing Potency will heal 20% more from any healing ability or spell, on top of the normal amount.
   **SE Cost**: Represents how much Spell Energy it takes to cast spells. A character with 50% SE Cost can cast a spell that normally costs 20 SE for 10 SE.
   **RE Charge Rate**: Represents how much Resolve a character will gain when landing an attack or suffering damage. 100% is equal to 5 points, so a rating of 200% would grant 10 RE for every basic attack.

### Library

In the Library, you can check 4 different sections that would be of great help:

- **Bestiary:** In this section, you can check the names, splash art, full stats and many other details of all enemies you have found along your journey. The entries will be locked until you fight the creature for the first time, but once unlocked, the individual sections are of great help to help you identify strengths and weaknesses on the most formidable foes, and will be a crucial section in the highest difficulties!

- **Battle Log:** The Battle Log will allow you to review what happened during the last fights you have been through, allowing you to check the numbers for damage dealt and received and plan your strategies around the weaknesses and strengths you have discovered through ferocious fights.

- **Message Log:** Is there a particular part of a dialogue that got stuck in your brain and you would like to read again in context? No problem! Check this section so that you can relive that specific part of dialogue.

- **Tutorials:** The game will display several tutorials as you progress in the story and the mechanics are unlocked. But fret not, if you do not remember about any specifics of a given mechanic, you can read the tutorial again so that you know exactly how it works and how to use it to your advantage (for example, understanding what every statistic from your characters can boost in your battles).

### Options

The Options menu can be used to adjust some basic aspects of the gameplay, such as the difficulty or ingame volume, but can also be used for a much deeper modification of the gameplay, allowing you to speed battles up, to auto-heal your heroes after a battle, or even modify the color tones displayed on screen based on the three main colors (Red, Green and Blue). These and many other options can make your ingame experience much more enjoyable and custom-tailored, so do not forget to check it before you start your game.

### Save

In this menu, you can save your current run and use it as a backup whenever you die or want to restore an earlier stage of the story to improve the outcome of certain events and battles. You can save up to 20 different games, which will allow you to create several safepoints along the story, in case you want to even revive certain battles or history events that you enjoyed the most.

### End Game

Whenever you want to leave the game, you can use this option to go back to the Title Menu, where you can change the Options or load a new game if you are unhappy with the current state of your game.