Some advanced techniques/tips for Star Ocean: Anamnesis

I was thinking about some other things that I wish I had known when I first started playing the game and a few tips or good-to-know things popped up:

Dash cancelling combos

The evade dash can be used to cancel combos as long as you’re on the ground (later on some characters are also able to dash cancel in midair). Even if you’re not being attacked, this can help you regain AP faster. Some moves have an abnormally long recovery animation time (especially Caster spells) so once the move has fired off, if you dash cancel the recovery animation you can start regenerating AP a few seconds faster. Really helpful if you’re trying to maintain combo or just increase your DPS. (You do need at least 1 AP to dash cancel, so if your combo puts you at 0 AP you will not be able to do this.)

Cliff has a related technique that may be a bug (but it’s still in the game in JP) where if you dash cancel Flash Chariot (Fists of Fury in English? the punch rush skill) the ‘waves’ of the move stay behind so they’ll continue hitting the target while you do something else.

See the next tip before you overuse this technique, though.

Cancel bonus multiplier override

The cancel bonus you currently have affects all hits coming from your character in real-time. So what this means is that if you have certain slow projectiles or long-lasting AoE attacks (again, mostly Casters will be affected, but some Shooters too, like with Maria’s Gravity Bullet) you can add on a higher multiplier after the fact.

For instance, if you do normal attack -> cancel into Plasma Cyclone with Myuria, normally Plasma Cyclone will be at 150%. However, since the hits of PC are so slow to come out, if you do normal attack -> PC -> a different spell (200%) then PC’s hits will also be at 200% Cancel Bonus. (There are some hybrid characters later on that have both spells and battle skills that you can really abuse this. For instance, Maid Claire can do reg attack -> Black Split (spell) -> Benishigure (skill) -> Black Split and both the first and second Black Splits will be at 300% Cancel Bonus, since it’s relatively slow to come out even after the cast.)

However, be aware that this also works in reverse. So in the example above, if you say cast a Plasma Cyclone at a multiplier of 300%, but then dash cancel the recovery and start a regular attack before PC’s hits come out, PC’s hits will revert to 100% cancel bonus only. For this reason when you are dash cancelling with Casters you should either 1) wait for spells to finish before attacking or 2) only use natural AP regen.

Combos that cost more than 100 (105) AP

A similar technique, this utilizes the fact that normal attacks will give you back AP even if you’re already in the middle of a combo. This is mostly for characters using a bow (some Orb characters also, and later on, they updated dagger animations so that long-range normal attack for daggers is a thrown projectile). If you do a regular attack at max AP and at max range, you may be able to cancel into the first move of the combo before your projectile actually hits the target, so that you’ve already spent some AP when the normal attack gives you some AP back. This allows you to do some combos that add up to more than 100 AP (or 105 AP for Seeded characters).

Wall evade

If you dash into the edge of the field, the dash animation actually lasts slightly longer. The good part about this is that the invincibility frames also last slightly longer. This means there are some attacks that you might not be able to completely dodge if you’re in the middle of the field but you will be able to completely dodge if you repeatedly dash into the wall (still takes some timing).