Characters advance in strength and ability through combat experience. The more enemies a character defeats, the more experience points (XP) they gain. The stronger the defeated enemy, the more XP the character receives. XP contributes to the character's individual collection of Advancement Points.
Note: Leveling-Up does not improve combat ability. Players must then use their points.
Level-Up System
When the character receives enough XP, they level up and gain at least one advancement point. Advancement points can then be allocated to certain skills, depending on which area of the character's combat ability the player wishes to improve. Character advancements can be made at any time (outside of combat) by visiting the Advancements page in the pause menu.
Advancement points can be allocated to the following:
The character's base amount of Health Points (HP)
The character's base amount of Skill Points (SP)
The character's Power
The character's Essence
and can later be used to learn new combat spells or skills. These skills can inflict massive damage, bestow positive Status Effects, or otherwise give their team a strong advantage in battle. For a character to learn a new skill, they must already have a particular amount of SP and Level to reach the skill's prerequisite.
Health Points (HP)
The higher a character's HP, the more damage they can withstand in battle before they fall. Allocating Advancement Points to a character's HP bar increases the base amount of HP they can have at the start of any battle. A character's HP level is represented by a green bar.
Skill Points (SP)
Skill points are forfeited for a character to cast combat spells or skills. Particular spells and skills require the character to use up a corresponding amount of skill points during the battle. For example, the Spirit Wind regenerative spell uses up 25 SP. A character's SP level is represented by a blue bar.
Like Health Points, the character can recover and earn back their full level of skill points. They can do this by resting at an inn, breathing in Opal's incense, using potions or other consumable items and so on.
See Battle Spells and Skills for a list of SP abilities.
Power
The higher a character's Power level, the more damage they can inflict on their enemies in battle. When fighting, each hit the character lands on an enemy is either 'standard' or 'critical'. Critical hits occur less often, but take away more of the enemy's HP. The frequency of a critical hit is largely dependent on the weapon that the player has selected. However, continued Power upgrades mean that all of a character's standard strikes (regardless of weapon choice) can still inflict greater damage on their enemies.
Essence
The higher a character's Essence, the more effective their SP spells and skills will be in battle. Attack spells inflict more damage to enemies if the character has a build up of Essence, spells to induce positive Statuses will remain in effect for longer, and so on. For example, if Ailish has low Essence when she casts her Haste spell, the team may only have increased speed for a few seconds. If she has high Essence, the team can continue to recover almost immediately and outrun their foes for the entire duration of the battle.
See Battle Spells and Skills for a list of SP abilities.