unfulfilledestiny

[unfulfilledestiny]

Star #99 The Crow Princess Terrestrial Star Equip - Staves

HOW TO RECRUIT: You first meet her at the entrance to the Sorrowful Manse, which is a massive haunted house just outside the town of Gravetree, on the edge of the forest that takes up most of western Losethia. She wants you to go into the Manse and Do Something about the Dark Lady who holds the region in thrall. ...hmmmmmmmmmmm. The Sorrowful Manse is on par with the Enigma Labyrinth as one of the game's most brutal, frustrating optional dungeons. If you don't want to try to get through it on your own wits and skill, you should really read a dedicated dungeon guide. But the basics are as follows: - Right at the very beginning, there's a "vestibule," with a guy who won't let you through into the dungeon proper unless you bring him an Astral Skein. If you have Star #35 with you, she can do her "Play nice!" trick and bypass this fetch quest. Otherwise, have fun farming Star Spiders on Mt. Gorget for that 2% drop rate. - The Manse itself is full of ghosts. They will hit you very very hard, they have complete physical immunity, and -- most annoyingly -- they love to use various flavors of instant-kill magic. There's really no way to make it through that isn't a miserable slog, but you'll do a lot better if you have (1) a party full of powerful offensive mages, ideally ones with Light-elemental spells, and (2) lots and lots of low-command-delay resurrection options. - You will soon notice that you are very lost. This is because the Sorrowful Manse is built around an incredibly mean map trick. There are in fact three different unconnected dungeons, with different layouts, but identical tilesets and identical-looking rooms in different places. Every time you kill a Despairing Specter, you're teleported to Map A; every time you kill a Spiteful Wraith, you're sent to Map B; and every time you kill a Regretful Shade, you go to Map C. But you're always teleported to a place that looks just like the place you were. Exploring all three maps (and getting all the excellent loot) will take you a long, long time. - On each map, there's a room where you meet up with the Crow Princess, who tells you a sad story. She's been through a lot, apparently, but she does make it sound like she's trying to freak you out. - Once you talk to her all three times, you can examine the big ballroom mirror (on any of the maps), and you'll be taken to fight the Dark Lady. Who is...the Crow Princess. Surprise! It's a nasty little battle, nastier than PC recruitment fights usually are. She fights kind of like the ghosts from her dungeon, only more so, throwing around instant-kill spells left and right. Beat her and she joins (after saying some weird and unsettling things about why she's doing so). GAMEPLAY NOTES: Squishy Caster Girl, Endgame Boss Edition. Her main shtick is her large library of instant-kill magic, which turns most non-boss encounters into jokes -- and makes grinding/farming much faster -- if you actually understand how they all work. (They're all limited in various confusing ways, and they always whiff completely if you don't use them in the correct circumstances.) She also has a few good Dark-elemental damage spells, and a few passable debuffs, so she's not actually useless against bosses. Her crow familiar automatically recovers AP for her if it's next to an enemy as it dies. WHY YOU WANT HER: Having access to instant-kill magic that works is really fun, and opens up lots of tactical options, in addition to providing a big quality of life boost overall. Even leaving that aside, she's probably the strongest Dark magician you can get. She wields Staves, and by the time you get her, you'll be carting around so many super-powerful Staves that it's a blessing to find a caster who can make good use of them. She's kind of a social hub for the recruitable-endgame-boss-type characters, in terms of both Combine Tactics and fireside chats; if you like using the weird scary badasses that you can gather during the final segments (and who doesn't?), almost all of them are improved by having her around, mechanically and narratively. I like her gothy fashion sense. :) WHY YOU DON'T WANT HER: She has all the usual squishy-caster problems with survivability. Instant-kill magic is mostly slow as balls, so you need either protection or command-delay manipulation in order to make her tricks reliable. Her gimmick makes her poorly-suited for most boss fights, and by the time you get her, most of the really challenging content that remains consists of bosses.

[unfulfilledestiny]

Star #58 The Mad Gas Scholar Terrestrial Star Equip - Pistols HOW TO RECRUIT: He's one of those blessed Terrestrial Stars who makes it really easy.  :)  As you head down the road from Mt. Penasis to Algaricin, you'll see a little dirt trail heading off to the southeast.  Follow it, and eventually you'll come to a small cottage-like structure sitting in the middle of a field.  This is the Mad Gas Scholar's lab.  Head in and talk to him.  He sure is...enthusiastic.  Choose the obviously correct dialogue options.  (If you're really not paying attention, these are: "Well, no one's ever done it before.", "Do you think you actually understand destiny?", and "For knowledge's sake!".)  This will trigger a fight with him and four Voidlings.  This isn't the absolute pushover fight that you sometimes get with recruitable PCs -- the Voidlings have absurdly high Move, and their zipping around the board can make it hard to land a hit -- but it shouldn't be too tough.  If you're having trouble, try choosing fast characters or using items/abilities that reduce command delay.  Win and he joins.  Simple as that.  GAMEPLAY NOTES: He's basically a dedicated zone-control character.  His combat abilities mostly involve throwing gas vials, creating lingering trap zones that hit anything inside them with both damage and debuffs.  He also has a couple of powers that create weird little elemental minions...not enough to be categorized as a dedicated summoner by any stretch of the imagination, but enough to enhance the board-control strategy considerably, especially given that his minions tend to have decent Move and reasonable tanking abilities.  Some of his abilities consume specific items and can't be used if you don't have them.  Notably, he has one very weird ability called Destiny Ripper Gas, which causes enemies to abandon their AI and move/attack randomly. [He also sets up shop in the basement of the Citadel, where he'll make potions for you -- buffing items and offensive items -- in exchange for materials and "the cost of the process".  Mostly this isn't enormously useful, since non-healing item management is generally more annoying than it's worth, but for difficult boss fights his products can be absolutely critical.  Also, importantly, many of his higher-level powers consume items that can only be acquired from his stall.]  WHY YOU WANT HIM: He's easy to get and he gives you an important shop you wouldn't otherwise have.  Recruiting him should be a no-brainer even if you're not looking to complete your 108.  As for why you want him in your party: pound for pound, he's a surprisingly effective distance fighter, one of the better ones you get.  In small or bottlenecked battlefields, some well-placed gas zones and a summoned minion or two can shut down a surprising number of enemies, and he actually does some real damage when he shoots things.  Destiny Ripper Gas is very useful against superbosses, most of whom you fight in relatively small arenas, and most of whom have devastating attack sequences.  The Empyreal Chaos Emperor is hard to beat any other way.  His personality does in fact stay that adorable throughout the game.  WHY YOU DON'T WANT HIM: Zone control is a difficult strategy in a game where most of the heavy hitters fight at melee range.  The item consumption thing gets really irritating really quickly, and if you're not careful with your inventory you may find yourself unable to use an important gas at the crucial moment.  Given that he really needs both high DEXT (for shooting) and high CLVR (for gassing), finding the right gear for him is hard.  He has almost no Combine Tactics. 

[unfulfilledestiny]

Star #85 The Beleaguered Chancellor Terrestrial Star Equip - Daggers

HOW TO RECRUIT: As you'd expect, this is another of the TPC characters you need in order to recruit the Princess.  He's probably the easiest of the three to acquire, with the shortest and simplest recruitment quest, so most players go for him first...particularly given that, for certain party builds, he can make the nastier parts of TPC substantially easier. You'll find him in the room right below the throne room, the one with the big map-table (which the fanbase has dubbed the "World Domination Room").  The first time you talk to him, he'll talk for a while about how great you are and how grateful the denizens of his kingdom are for your various world-saving exploits, but he'll also explain that he's far too busy to get involved with the adventuring life personally.  The kingdom won't manage itself, especially not with its finances in such dire straits.  Speaking of which, the Stars of Destiny are rich, any chance you could loan the kingdom 240,000 Gilpfennigs? Obviously the recruitment plot won't advance until you do just that.  Lend him the money, leave TPC, come back and talk to him again.  He's in a furious panic; the money apparently just disappeared before any of it could be spent.  After a long (and awkwardly amusing) cutscene, some royal guards will try to arrest him for having stolen the money himself.  You come to the poor man's defense, of course.  This is a trivially difficult battle by this point in the game; it's just four Cataphractoi, and they'll collapse in a minute or two unless you're doing something very wrong.  After the fight, there's another cutscene, and before long the truth comes out.  A guard captain took the money and ran off through the Southern Catacombs underneath TPC.  [And how many catacombs does this damn castle have?]  Time for a chase sequence!  And you'll have to choose whom you're leaving behind, because the Chancellor is joining your party.   The Southern Catacombs are simple to navigate, although the random encounters will mess you up unless you're very overleveled.  Watch out for Cyclone Ocelots, which automatically get a rearguard-attack on your party.    Get to the end, beat up the Renegade Captain, and reclaim the money.  Enjoy another cutscene.  Then leave and come back again.  A grateful Chancellor will join the party and repay your loan.  GAMEPLAY NOTES: Weird guy.  His abilities are a weird mix of leadership-style buffing with command-delay reduction, stat-targeting debuffs, and...Water-elemental magic attacks (???).  He's not at all bad as a support character, although by the time you get him you'll have way more non-healer support characters than you know what to do with, and it helps a lot that he has a few offensive abilities that actually pack a punch.   Most notably, however, he is the last and greatest of the Combine Tactic manipulators.   For one thing, he's got a crap-ton of them.  More than any other Terrestrial Star, bar none.  Quite a few are excellent; most commentators seem to agree that he has the second-best library of 2-character CTs in the game, even counting the Celestial Stars.  (His larger CTs aren't as impressive compared to the alternatives, but some are still pretty great.)  More importantly, however, he has two of the the game's best CT-enhancement abilities.  Social Focus halves the AP cost of all Combine Tactics for the rest of the battle; Words of Ubiquity halves the command delay of all Combine Tactics for the rest of the battle.  WHY YOU WANT HIM: He is the centerpiece of almost any serious build focused on Combine Tactics.  His abilities turn an expensive gimmick into one of the more viable and cost-effective endgame strategies, and once he has his CT party buffs up and running, he can serve ably as a CT wielder in his own right.  His stat debuffs are good enough to cripple powerful enemies in a pinch, if only very briefly.  For fireside chat fans, he's got unique dialogues with an absurdly large number of the other Stars.  Makes sense given his gimmick, I suppose.  WHY YOU DON’T WANT HIM: If you're not running a CT party, he's basically not worth it; there are better leaders, better debuffers, and certainly better elemental mages.  (Not that you're exactly crying out for leaders or debuffers in any case.)  If you are running a CT party, well, you've got a lot of irritating constraints on your build.  It's hard enough assembling characters whose abilities work well together without having to start with "who happens to have good Combine Tactics together?".  Also, of course, Daggers are crap.

[unfulfilledestiny]

Star #37 The Revolution Spear Terrestrial Star Equip - Polearms

HOW TO RECRUIT: Whenever you get into a random encounter in the Tolorian Woods, there's about a 1/3 chance that he'll be present in the battle as a neutral unit.  If you attack him, he gets mad and runs off.  If he kills the monster before you do, he says something snide and disappears.  What you have to do is take out the monster yourself...which basically means that you need a couple of fast party members, since the enemies here are pretty weak, and he's a strong fighter with high move and low command delay.  Do that, and you'll trigger a conversation about his hobbyhorse project, which apparently consists of "giving non-mages access to the arcane" by imbuing weapons with the mystic power of the lives they take.  (He seems to be the only person in the world bothered by the fact that you have to be a magician to use magic, but...whatever.)  Choose the dialogue option "That sounds like it has potential," and he joins the party.  Choose anything else and you'll have to hunt him down all over again.  :P GAMEPLAY NOTES: Meet your first really, really wonky character.  Up until now, the Stars you've gotten have had pretty standard tactical-RPG sorts of ability that work in intuitive ways, but this guy is a herald of the bullshit that is to come.  By the end of the game you'll be spending your fights monitoring gauges you've never heard of and playing Tetris Attack.  :P The Revolution Spear has more-or-less the stats of a melee DPS character, and he's basically OK in that role, but if you actually want him to be good you have to know how to use his two special command abilities: Imbue and Soul Radiate.  Getting the most out of those powers takes some pretty in-depth analysis...there's a reason that you can find specialty FAQs dedicated to this one character...but I'll cover the basics here.  Imbue is, at first glance, a weakish melee strike that drains some AP.  The important thing is that, if you kill an enemy with Imbue, it gets "imbued" into the weapon that the Revolution Spear has equipped.  This gives the weapon certain stat bonuses depending on the enemy, and in some uncommon cases also produces an additional effect when he uses it to make a regular attack.  Different polearms can have different numbers of "Imbue Slots", meaning that they can hold different numbers of enemy spirits at once.  The weapon he starts off with, and most basic polearms, have one Imbue slot; there's one particular weapon, the Elder Immortal's Halberd, that has five.  You can check his equipment in the inventory to see what enemies are imbued into his weapon and how many empty slots it has.  More impressive enemies, unsurprisingly, tend to produce better bonuses.  If you manage to imbue bosses or other super-hard foes, you can get some pretty monstrous weapons.  (Note that, if you kill an enemy with Imbue, it does not generate experience or Talent Points for anyone.  Also, if you unequip a weapon from the Revolution Spear, anything imbued within it goes away.)  Soul Radiate is the other half of the equation.  When you use Soul Radiate, you "release" one or more of the spirits you have imbued at the time.  (You choose which ones.)  This generally takes the form of activating a particular ability that enemy possesses.  Again, if you have a powerful enemy imbued, the Soul Radiate effect will usually be good.  WHY YOU WANT HIM: If you're willing to put in the trouble of using Imbue on the right enemies, he can be one of the best - and most versatile - characters in the game.  A spear filled with the spirits of several bosses will make him an absurd melee powerhouse.  Soul Radiate gives you access to enemy techniques, which can be overpowered, and for any given thing you might want him to do there's an enemy out there somewhere that will let him do it.  Certain spirit combinations can lead to some comically broken synergies.  A great many superboss-fighting plans begin with "Have Star #37 dump a bunch of bosses on it".  WHY YOU DON'T WANT HIM: Especially by the end of the game, making sure that things get killed by Imbue...as opposed to by one of your vastly stronger attacks...is quite a pain in and of itself.  Because you lose a spirit once you Radiate it out, there's always the tension of "do I want to keep this for the bonuses or get the release effect?" (and also "should I release this now or later?").  Imbuing bosses, which is the way to get the very most impressive effects, involves sacrificing the normal experience and Talent Point rewards for those bosses.  Once you've emptied all your Imbue slots - well, he's still an OK fighter, but you can certainly find ones who are much better.

[unfulfilledestiny]

Star #96 The Seeker of Forgotten Words Terrestrial Star Equip - Swords

HOW TO RECRUIT: Another one you’ve been waiting for. This is the guy you had to name all the way back in the Ruined Ziggurat, and whom you’ve kept running into in the middle of dangerous out-of-the-way places.  Yes, he does more than spout interesting facts about the history and cultural relevance of various dungeons; you can actually get him to join the party. After the Tower of Revelation, you’ll find him hanging out in the Dalbrov library.  By default, he doesn’t seem to find you very interesting…which is surprising, given how often he’s met up with the party under unusual circumstances.  :P  So go find something that’ll interest him. On Larena Island, which you can’t reach without the zeppelin, there’s a temple complex called the Sunset Cathedral.  It has some of the best loot available anywhere. It also has an inscription on the walls in a language you don’t know. Read the inscription, and then go back to Dalbrov and talk to the Seeker about it.  He’ll be very excited indeed, and immediately run off to investigate.  Head over to the Cathedral again and he’ll be there waiting – how he gets there without a zeppelin, I have no idea.  :P  In any event, apparently this is enough to impress him with your scholarly adventurism (or adventure-y scholarship), and he joins the team. GAMEPLAY NOTES: Basically a melee fighter with a vaguely bardlike gimmick.  He’s got a bunch of abilities whose names are all of the form “Ancient Text: NAME”; each is a simultaneous universal party buff and universal enemy debuff, like two bard spells at once, but you can have only one Ancient Text up at a time.  So basically you pick your favorite one and then wade into combat. WHY YOU WANT HIM: Some of his Ancient Texts are really very powerful, and can yield tremendous synergies when you have the right other characters to go with them. The Golden Man, which lowers enemy defense and adds a flat bonus to party attacks, can turn multi-hit skills (such as those of Star #17) into deathfests. A couple of them, the ones that fiddle with elemental resistances, serve as keystones for superboss-fighting tactics. The real reason you want the Seeker, though, is that he has one of the game’s best Combine Tactics libraries.  He has a lot of two- and three-man Tactics for a Terrestrial star, and they’re amazing.  Giant Heads is probably the most powerful three-character move in the game. Building your party entirely around his Combine Tactics isn’t a terrible strategy much of the time. WHY YOU DON’T WANT HIM: He’s kind of unprepossessing as an actual fighter.  Once you’ve got your Ancient Text up, if you’re not using a Combine Tactic, he’s almost strictly a backup character.

[unfulfilledestiny]

Star #27 The Light of Rebirth Celestial Star Equip - Swords, Wands

HOW TO RECRUIT: You’ll find him when you get to the bottom of the Apostasy Pit. You’ve probably noticed that each floor of that rather annoying dungeon is darker than the last. The final level is pitch black, but there are no random encounters, so just wander around a bit. Eventually you’ll find a single sputtering circle of light, which illuminates a man locked in battle against a…thing. A very large thing. Walk over and you’re suddenly fighting the Vitrioline Tormentor. Oh well, you came down here to kill that thing anyway. The guy (who is of course Star #27) automatically joins you for the fight, which is presumably why you’re allowed to bring only five people down. The Tormentor isn’t too hard, although it’s got enough HP that it’ll take a while to die. Its only particularly dangerous attack is something called Thorns of Angst, which hits all your guys regardless of position, so make sure to keep your squishies healthy and buffed. Once the fight is over, the Light of Rebirth lights up the whole dungeon…revealing all the people that the Tormentor was keeping trapped in its lair. The visuals are pretty icky, honestly. But you get a nice scene of freeing them all, the Star joins your party, and the trek upwards is substantially better-lit. :) GAMEPLAY NOTES: Another dual-wielding fighter/mage. Woo woo. This guy is actually, in all likelihood, the single best-rounded character you’ll ever acquire; in addition to his melee powers and his offensive magic, he also lives up to his title and gets a couple of bona fide resurrection abilities, making him a nice backup for your healing/support crew. He has both Light- and Fire-elemental magic, with single-target and AoE effects in both elements. WHY YOU WANT HIM: To start with, he’s got the usual generalist’s overall stat boost. He really can hold his own as either a mage or a fighter, and the fact that he uses two elements makes him all the more versatile on the magic front. Even for a generalist, he’s pretty tough, and honestly you can’t really do better if you want a physically durable wizard. Between his sword and his spells, he’s one of the most flexible DPS machines in the game. His aces in the hole, of course, are Phoenix Will and Prince’s Rose. They’re not as good as the resurrection powers that the actual healers get – bringing someone back with 0 AP is kind of a pain, and so is bringing someone back with 1 HP – but you’ll often be very glad to have the option. Particularly when it’s your squishy healer who goes down. Having that kind of failsafe stuck onto an otherwise extremely useful character feels fantastic. The Light is another super-plot-relevant guy, so if you like drama he’s the sort of person it’s worth having in your party at key moments. WHY YOU DON’T WANT HIM: His AP pool is depressingly small, so you have to be careful about throwing his various exciting abilities around, and his physical accuracy and magical accuracy are both pretty bad. His various Combine Tactics are nothing to write home about.

[unfulfilledestiny]

Star #73 The Goddess of Coin Terrestrial Star Equip - Rifles

HOW TO RECRUIT: You'll find her in the bank in Catalin.  Go up and talk to her; she'll tell you about the killing she could make investing in Gervais Porcelain (due to the secret markets she's found), and how irritating it is that the guy who owns a huge stock of it won't sell it to her at any price.  Random woman has a personal problem totally unrelated to anything you care about?  Sounds like sidequest time to me! This is the inevitable "red paperclip trading" plot.  Boy howdy.  Right outside the bank, there's a merchant standing around who does indeed have a whole bunch of Gervais Porcelain, and just as promised he won't sell it.  Money is beneath this man, which is clearly why he became a merchant.  All he wants is a Delarian Heart Ruby... ..and you get the idea.  To sum up the quest's various steps: - The Heart Ruby is owned by a merchant in Fastin, who wants some Maxatar Steel - The Maxatar Steel is owned by a merchant in (shock) Maxatar, who wants a Celestial Sorcerer's Guild Ownership Certificate - The certificate is owned by a merchant in Montararat, who wants some Immortal's Wine - The Immortal's Wine is owned by a merchant in Yotsuku, who wants some Calfar Carpets - The Calfar Carpets are owned by a merchant in Alcaria, who wants some Thunderclaw Bear Hides ...Thunderclaw Bear Hides?  You can just get those!  Fight Thunderclaw Bears in the outskirts of Paladiev until you get 10 hides, bring them to the Alcarian merchant, and begin your sequence of trades. (Seriously, you can do this as soon as you get to Catalin, but if you don't wait until you get the zeppelin there will be a nightmarish amount of trekking involved.)  Bring the Gervais Porcelain to the Goddess of Coin.  She will be...very surprised by your generosity, and donate a nice 10K Gilpfennigs to the cause as she joins up.  GAMEPLAY NOTES: Another pet character.  Her "puppy", Argo, is a sort of secondary melee DPS unit that doesn't hit very hard but strikes often and auto-parries a lot.  She herself is a hybrid secondary ranged DPS/debuffer hybrid, with a number of skills that inflict both damage and nasty statuses.  Her most notable abilities are probably two passive always-on area buffs, which are both fairly easy to learn.  Efficiency Maxim, which covers a small radius around her, lowers command delay for all allied units.  Puppy Playtime, which covers a small radius around Argo, increases allied units' chances of Auspicious Strikes and gives them extra move.  [The Goddess of Coin is also one of the characters who sets up a booth in the basement of the Citadel.  Her little stall isn't a "shop" in the normal sense; she's an investor, and she sells arbitrage opportunities.  For a fee, she'll tell you about a merchant in a particular city who's buying a particular thing at an abnormally high price or selling it at an abnormally low price.  If you're willing to do a lot of schlepping, this is capable of making you literally unlimited money.  Which is good, since the endgame pretty much expects you to have unlimited money.] WHY YOU WANT HER: Depending on your party setup, she can make a lot of things just work a lot better.  Offensive casters and healers both tend to be irritatingly slow, and Efficiency Maxim goes a fair way towards making your nukes nuke-ier and your healbots heal-ier; slow frontline fighters become a lot more useful when they can follow the puppy around and stay on the enemy's tail (and also crit more).  Like other pet characters, she does several jobs at once and is sort of generically useful on the average battlefield.  Some of her rifle skills inflict impressively powerful debuffs, particularly Crash Endowment, which lowers defense and has a chance of disappearing enemy buffs.      Her campfire chats with Star #5 are also among the cutest things in the entire game.  WHY YOU DON'T WANT HER: She doesn't fit into any normal party role particularly neatly.  She's just doing too many things at once and not doing any of them as well as another character might.  (You might say that she's a real generalist, not just a fighter-mage with an inflated set of well-rounded stats.)  Unless you've got both low-move fighters and command-delay-riddled casters, you're not getting the most out of her buffs, which are the best things that she has to offer.  She just plain doesn't hurt things very much when she shoots them; her stats are distributed weirdly for a supposed DPS character, and thanks to her terrible weapon choice she doesn't have an offhand slot, so it's harder to fix that with equipment.  (Particularly since Argo's attack power scales with hers.) 

[unfulfilledestiny]

SPECIAL BONUS PICTURE

Star #67 with Exalted Fallaren

[unfulfilledestiny]

Star #67 The Blue Dragon Knight Celestial Star Equip - Polearms

HOW TO RECRUIT: OK, this one is a bit silly and irritating. When you arrive in Caldithraxia, you're sent to go find the mysterious "Guardian" so that she can open the Wyrmfire Gate. Guess what, you go to the Guardian's Pavilion and she's not there. Her familiar is, though. The little dragon spirit gives you a physical description of his master and tells you to go find her; she's apparently been missing for a while. Now the fun begins. The Caldithraxian Vale is enormous, and it's crawling with both Gorgiolines and dragons, and the non-hostile NPCs are hiding terrified in corners. Eventually you'll hunt down a (confused) woman who matches the description, and bring her back to the Gate...where Fallaren will tell you that it's the wrong person and then give you a completely different physical description.  Stupid fucking dragon.  Go through this rigamarole a few times.  The fourth person you find will be a Gorgioline soldier, who'll reluctantly tag along with you to the gate after a funny conversation.  When you go back, Fallaren panics and attacks.  The first time you hit him, the Blue Dragon Knight will show up out of nowhere and join in the fight.  This is another "party outnumbers the recruitable NPC" fight, so it's not any real trouble by this stage, but it can be surprisingly annoying depending on your party configuration.  The Knight is absurdly durable and also extremely fast.  If you've been counting on physical DPS, especially melee DPS, you've got a real slog ahead of you.  Offensive mages can take her out fast, so try to have one.  Beat her and she joins up (and opens the Gate).  Yayyyy.  GAMEPLAY NOTES: Well...she's not a tank, although it feels like she should be.  She is so tough.  She's got the best physical defense of any Star, and close to the best HP.  But she has no actual tanking skills.  It feels like such a waste.  Perhaps for the best, though -- her magic defense is really very bad. So what does she do?  She's basically a mobile death machine with a very weird gimmick.  Primarily she's just a high-move, high-survivability fighter.  She can wade into the thick of melee, survive basically any physical assaults that can be thrown at her, and whale on things.  Meanwhile, her familiar will be auto-casting weak magic attacks that are practically useless by the time she joins your party.      She's also got an "Interiority Gauge", which fills up as she gets hit.  When she maxes out her Interiority, she gains access to an ability called Dragon Exaltation, which turns her familiar into a terrifying monster that spits out some of the most powerful spells in the game.  An Exalted Fallaren is basically a high-level DPS mage.  WHY YOU WANT HER: She may be the most useful character in the game for large-scale battles against many melee-oriented enemies: she mows them down like wheat, gets pincushioned enough to activate Dragon Exaltation pretty fast, and then doubles the carnage as both she and Fallaren throw out the DPS.  And sure enough, in the period right after you get her, there are a lot of fights against scads of Gorgioline troops.  Even in endgame, she's one of the most reliable straightforward melee DPS Stars.  Her physical survivability and her move are both absolutely top-tier, and her melee abilities...particularly Break You...are brutal.  Fallaren is almost unnecessary much of the time, but is incredibly good in Exalted form nonetheless.  WHY YOU DON'T WANT HER: Anything with magic attacks kills her dead.  Probably before she can fill her Interiority Gauge.  There are a number of fights, sadly including most of the hardest fights in the game, where she's basically useless. 

[unfulfilledestiny]

Star #48 The Brown-Coated Rebel Terrestrial Star Equip - Pistols

HOW TO RECRUIT: While you're exploring the Badlands, if you head away from the little road and go north instead of east, you'll find the base camp for a Tenturi goon squad...and then you'll see this one guy trying to storm it by himself. It's brave and admirable and turns catastrophic pretty quickly. :P One of your party members will ask whether you should intervene; choose the "Let's go!" dialogue option to rush into the base and help him out. This is a battle against four Black Hat Thugs and four Lariateers. Nothing special, although ideally you'll want some way of shortening your command delay, since they'll be prolonging it to an irritating degree. When you win, there's an awkwardly cute scene in which the Rebel explains why he thought this was a good idea, and then he joins the party. Note that if you choose not to intervene, at any later point you can go into the base yourself and take out the goons. You'll find the Rebel tied up in a basement. He'll still join, although he's substantially less happy with you. :P GAMEPLAY NOTES: A fun defensive/trap character. Several of his abilities create "trap zones" that punish enemies who enter them or do certain things within them. Two of these are particularly notable. Chaos Law is a triggered attack that hits a bunch of times in a row; Lead Farmer, his "top" ability, creates a trap zone that allows him to hit any enemy who takes an action and lasts for the rest of the fight.  His non-defensive skills are less exciting overall, although Freeshot is an...interesting...ability that hits a random set of targets a random number of times. WHY YOU WANT HIM: In certain fights -- the ones where they'll get triggered several times -- his trap abilities can be brutally efficient.  Chaos Law can absolutely devastate tight formations of enemies; Lead Farmer, if used against a relatively stationary (or hemmed-in) opponent, can basically give you an extra attacker for the duration of the fight.  His offensive and defensive stats are pretty good overall, and he makes for a good and not-totally-squishy ranged fighter when he has nothing better to do.  Freeshot is a pretty cheap Hail Mary that sometimes pans out.  He's totally lovable.   WHY YOU DON'T WANT HIM: The traps are mostly situational; if enemies aren't in a position where they have to trigger them, they're often a waste of time and AP.  Most (although not all) of the game's super-difficult foes are sufficiently mobile that Lead Farmer doesn't really work as well as you'd like.  His accuracy is kind of poor, and his abilities mostly come with unfortunate levels of command delay. 

[unfulfilledestiny]

Star #5 The Fire-Souled Duelist Celestial Star Equip - Rapiers, Wands

HOW TO RECRUIT: You meet her at the tavern in Lazlo Village; when you walk in, you'll hear her talking to the barkeep about local problems. Your party will sit down and have a meal -- you can't avoid it, someone or other will insist -- and there'll be a little scene in which chat about the difficulties that the local towns have faced since the Tentur Consortium started throwing its weight around. She starts listening in at a bad time, and comes to the conclusion that you're responsible for some of what's gone down.  The only honorable recourse, naturally, is single combat with your party leader.  :P  This is the first of many, many Stars whom you have to beat in order to recruit.  Get used to it.  This is, oddly, one of the most difficult battles in the main storyline.  At this point in the game you just don't have anyone nearly as well-designed for solo combat as she is.  If you send in a fighter, she'll stay out of melee range and pelt him with fire spells; if you send in a mage she'll tear him to shreds with her rapier.  Before you walk into the village, you should wander around outside for a bit fighting Crimson Chickens -- they drop Fire Feathers, and a melee character will stand a decent chance against her if he's buffed up with fire resistance.  Nonetheless be prepared to lose a couple of times.  You're basically hoping for Auspicious Strikes.  Beat her and the party clears up the misunderstanding.  She's excited enough about your venture to sign on.  GAMEPLAY NOTES: Meet the fighter/mage generalist.  You get a few of them over the course of the game, and they'll always make you smile.  Their physical stats are almost as good as those of a frontline melee DPS character, their magic stats are almost as good as those of a primary offensive spellcaster, and they get relevant skills for both roles.  Some of them, the Duelist included, dual-wield fighter weapons and mage weapons.  (They lose their offhand slot, but you'll never miss it; weapon bonuses are almost uniformly better than anything you'd get from an offhand item at the same point in the game.)  Generalists are kind of broken until the end of the game, when you'll want party members to fill extremely specific roles and to do so with the most specialized possible stats and skills.  The penalties for "multiclassing" are very small; a generalist is basically a perfectly fine fighter and a perfectly fine mage at the same time, and the versatility allows you to do whatever's most effective in a given situation (and to avoid the irritation of constantly switching out party members).  The Duelist in particular leans slightly more to the physical-combat end of things.  She gets a number of sword skills that increase her damage output on further attacks, such as Fulmination and Focused Diligence.  Her spells are exclusively fire-elemental and mostly single-target, although eventually she learns a "wave" attack called Onrushing Firehounds that hits all enemies within several horizontal rows of her.  Bizarrely, she also gets an out-of-combat recovery skill that cures Poison and Bleed.  WHY YOU WANT HER: I've already explained why generalists are great, and she embodies most of the reason why that's true.  Having her in your party, able to do either ranged or melee DPS, will make pretty much every fight simpler and more pleasant.  Her statline is very good across the board, adding up to higher numbers than almost any specialist character gets overall.  She equips exactly the weapons that a melee combatant and an offensive caster most want.  Her move is top-notch.  Her status-recovery powers are incredibly convenient in several early dungeons, when you probably won't have tons of Purgative and Coagulant.  Really, when you first get her, she'll seem like a miracle worker compared with your other characters...and she'd probably seem that way a lot longer if you didn't get the Legend Knight so soon thereafter.  (Anyone having flashbacks to Edgar and Sabin?)   WHY YOU DON'T WANT HER: As I said, generalists suffer during endgame.  Your party will need its melee DPS doing its thing all the time, and its magic DPS doing its thing all the time; if you're having to switch-hit, something's gone wrong with the plan, which in the hardest battles probably means that the situation's unsalvageable anyway.  So you might as well take the specialists with their slight edges in relevant stats and skill applicability. Beyond that: a versatility-centric character suffers somewhat from using only a single element, especially one like Fire where immunity is so common.  Her overall lack of multitarget attacks further reduces her utility as a mage-type, although the Firehounds alone do a lot to make up for that.  (Really, you'll probably do best thinking of her as a fighter with backup options.)  She also doesn't have a great Combine Tactics library for a Celestial Star. 

[unfulfilledestiny]

Star #101 The White-Mantled Presbyter Terrestrial Star Equip - Staves

HOW TO RECRUIT: She's in the chapel in Kandalor, sitting in a circle with a bunch of other clerics. As soon as you walk in the door, you'll be treated to an extremely lengthy tirade by one of the other clerics there -- and then, every time you take a few steps, he'll start up again.  (If you keep walking around the chapel, he'll repeat himself eventually, but that takes a surprisingly long time.  He's got a lot of opinions, and he wants everyone to know all about them.  If you're determined to see all of his dialogue, you'll be here for a while.)  Make your way over to him and initiate a conversation.  This is a lengthy dialogue tree, and you have to get all the choices exactly right to recruit Star #101; in every instance you want the "firm but respectful" option.  When he offers you the floor, choose "I think these people have all been waiting longer than I have".  At this point he gets mad and initiates a fight...sort of.  He runs away before the first turn.  :) Go over to the Presbyter and talk to her.  She'll be impressed enough to join the gang.  Even this late in the game, they don't all require hideously overblown quests.  I think the developers figured that getting this particular character is important enough that they weren't going to make you jump through a million hoops. :)   GAMEPLAY NOTES: Yes, it's your last dedicated healer.  Finally.  The Presbyter is most famous for Grand Chaplaincy, a skill that fully restores the HP and AP of every other party member at the cost of draining her AP and stunning her.  This ability alone is enough to make her the healer-of-choice for most superboss-hunting parties; it is so much more effective than any other (non-item) recovery method in the game that it's worth the difficulty of having to tend to her every time she uses it.  Her other skills are, well, pretty much all healing and healing-oriented.  She's got several heal-over-time variants, some of which come with buffs attached.  On the flip side, her status-recovery abilities are mediocre...and she has no resurrection powers at all.  WHY YOU WANT HER: Pound for pound, she's the most powerful and efficient healer-qua-healer in the game; enough attention has been paid to this question that I feel comfortable asserting it as a fact.  Grand Chaplaincy can turn "brink of disaster" into "A-OK" all by itself, of course, but that's far from the extent of it.  Her HoT/buffs in particular are amazing; Ornaments of Joy is one of the best overall protective spells you can get.  She beats out the other dedicated healers on overall AP-pool-to-ability-cost ratio.  She can equip staves, which have the bonuses you actually want for healbots.    WHY YOU DON'T WANT HER: Most parties kind of want a single "recovery" character to, well, do all the recovery work.  Using a healer with no natural resurrection abilities means that you have to have someone else capable of doing that part of the job, or else that you have to be willing to make the Aqua Vitae run like water, and her lack of status-recovery magic only exacerbates the problem. 

[unfulfilledestiny]

Star #107 The Dream Horror Terrestrial Star Equip - Canes

HOW TO RECRUIT: At the far northeastern corner of the map, there's a tiny island with a set of ruins on it. That island is important for two reasons. One is that it's populated by Revolution Angels, which yield scads of Talent Points when you kill them and occasionally drop Genesis Roses, and are therefore worth farming even though they're monstrously hard. The other is, well, Star #107. The only notable object within the ruins is a book sitting on a lectern. If you read it...you get a bunch of gibberish and nothing happens. So what's the gimmick? You've probably noticed that every character has a stat called SANT, which seems to stay at 100 for everyone and which doesn't appear to do anything. That's actually "Sanity", and if you knock your lead character's SANT down to 0, he becomes crazy enough to understand the book. Doing this has no other effects. It's a fantastic life lesson. :P You reduce a character's SANT by having him read evil creepy tomes (presumably not quite as evil or creepy as the one on the island). There are four such tomes altogether; reading one takes off 25 SANT, and each works only once for any given character, so you have to get all of them. Sadly, three of them are scattered throughout some of the game's most difficult quest dungeons, which is perhaps why this guy is the second-to-last Star. "Contemplations of Troon" is in the basement of Twilight Primrose Castle, "Unliving Insect Prayer" is in the Enigma Labyrinth, and "Morals of Extermination" is in the Sorrowful Manse. The fourth tome, "Inauspicious Tablets", can for some reason be purchased from the bookshop in Yotsuku. :P Once you've had someone read all four, and enjoyed the disturbing little passages they contain, go to the northeastern island and read the book with your 0-SANT character as party lead. You get another disturbing passage -- and WHOOSH you're suddenly someplace freaky. I call this area the Dream City; I don't think its name is ever mentioned. There are no random encounters, but if you talk to any of the people in the street, they'll recite some poetry and then attack. The men are Sorcerers of Dust and the women are Whispering Ladies, and both kinds are amongst the hardest non-boss enemies in the game. You can never come back to the Dream City once you leave, so it's definitely worth fighting one of each to complete your bestiary. The zone is pretty much linear. Head down the street to the palace; Star #107 is sitting in the throne room. Talking to him results in some nuttiness and then the inevitable boss fight. It's him and four Biockis. The Biockis fly around and use debuff-attacks, and he himself mostly stands there and does...random crap. This fight is pretty easy, certainly compared with the insanely powerful dudes and ladies just milling around outside, and you probably won't have any trouble -- but if you're unlucky, you can just get stomped flat without being able to do very much about it.  (See below for an explanation of the Dream Horror's weird-ass power.)  If that happens, don't sweat it, just come back and try again.  Win the fight, and get more nuttiness and a new party member.  Take on some more Dream City citizens if you want to, and then head through the portal in the throne room to return to the real world.  GAMEPLAY NOTES: It's time for your last minigame character.  Mad Mind is a special command action that represents the Dream Horror's ability to imagine terrible things into existence.  So how does he accomplish this?  By playing Boggle.  Yes, you read that right.  When you use Mad Mind, the game spits out a four-by-four grid of letters, and you have to find a word by chaining one letter to another within a time limit.  If the game recognizes the word, then you'll get a particular effect.  Note that that's a big "if"; Mad Mind has a great many possible outcomes, but (unsurprisingly) not nearly as many as there are actual English words, so prepare to be frustrated as you find cool words that the game doesn't recognize.  Words have to be at least three letters long.  Mostly you're looking for nouns and verbs.  The general rule is that longer words yield more impressive effects in a way totally divorced from their content.  Thus DRAGON is a very powerful attack, but not nearly as powerful as PORCUPINE.  (The tradeoff is that word length increases command delay.)  Pluralizing nouns usually (but not always) turns a single-target effect into a multi-target effect.  Mad Mind is free, and it can do a very wide range of things depending on what word you get.  His other abilities are the usual gimmick-character pricey potpourri, with something of a focus on debuffs.  WHY YOU WANT HIM: If you've got Boggle skills, Mad Mind can get you some extremely potent effects for free.  Most words of six or more letters create effects that are about as good as normal top-level skills, and really long words can be genuinely absurd.  (I've seen my friend one-shot Franz Beatificus with ARCHAEOPTERYX.)  Mad Mind is also a very versatile skill that rarely whiffs.  You can frequently get something like CAT or HIT or IMP, all of which are decent-if-not-great attacks; you've often got a choice between EAT and TEA, which do HP and AP restoration respectively; and so on.  Furthermore, I'm pretty sure that the game sets things up such that the board usually has at least one or two good long words.   In the end, using Mad Mind is basically playing a low-budget version of Scribblenauts.  It's fun to mess around and see what different words do, and there's always more to discover.  Hideous Cackle is pretty good as debuffs go, and it's an area-effect power (if a small one), which is nice.  If you're ever reduced to using the Dream Horror's regular attack for some reason, you'll find that he packs a surprising wallop with his canes.  WHY YOU DON'T WANT HIM: Mad Mind is ridiculously unreliable for an endgame power.  The time limit will allow you to find a three- or four-letter word without much trouble, but it's very hard to get anything really good unless you're a Boggle master...and, even if you are a Boggle master, not knowing what sort of powerful outcomes will be available makes it very hard to plan your strategy.  If you're determined to get a particular kind of effect -- attack, healing, buff, whatever -- you may be reduced to some pretty bad choices.  Overall, it's hard to fit him into any kind of coherent party, because his main ability is such a wild card.  In situations that matter, Mad Mind mostly boils down to "hope you can find some really impressive word that happens to do something useful right now".     He's very slow.  His non-Mad Mind abilities are expensive.  Canes still suck.  Unsurprisingly, he's not big on Combine Tactics.  I personally find that his contributions to chats and triggered scenes are more annoying than clever. 

[unfulfilledestiny]

Star #64 The Stormcaller Terrestrial Star Equip - Eastern Swords, Fans

HOW TO RECRUIT: While you're in Yotsuku, head up to the top of the tall pagoda all the way by the southern wall. She's standing on the observation deck. To get her, all you have to do is talk to her while you have the Lost Sonde in your inventory. You've probably gotten it already by accident. In case you haven't, it's dropped by the Blackcap Roc Chick, which is a not-very-difficult optional boss that hangs out on one of Mt. Penasis's rocky outcropping-ledge-things. The bird has a couple of high-damage Wind-elemental attacks, but it's enough of a pushover that you should probably just focus on whacking it until it goes down. In any event, once she has the wherewithal to complete her research duties - meaning "you give her the Sonde" - she's thrilled to embrace her destiny as a world-saving hero. It would be nice if they were all this easy. :) GAMEPLAY NOTES: Another dual-wielding generalist fighter/mage. This one leans more towards mage than fighter, both in statline and in skills. Her magic is a mix of Thunder-, Wind-, and Water-Elemental spells; most of them are area-effect attacks of one kind or another. WHY YOU WANT HER: Generalists continue to be pretty dominant throughout most of the game, and she's no exception. Her main use is as crowd-control secondary DPS, where her many options for elemental area attacks put her on par with pretty much any dedicated caster...and she can hold her own in melee as well. Her HP and dodge are both notably above average, so she can stand up to aggro quite well, and she learns a sword ability called Mataro Stab that does hefty damage and has a good chance of inflicting Bleed.  There aren't too many good Wind attacks in the game, and hers are some of the best.  You may notice that, when the Stormcaller is in your active party, the zeppelin travels about 50% faster.  This doesn't actually matter - it's not like the zeppelin isn't fast enough on its own - but it's one of those cute "the dev team thought of everything" things.  WHY YOU DON'T WANT HER Her alleged dual-wielding is kind of a mean joke, given that Fans are terrible one-off weapons like Orbs or Bangles; basically she loses her off-hand slot in exchange for a couple of extra stat points that should really just be in her basic profile.  Her MGHT is pretty low for an alleged melee character, which is especially sad given that Mataro Stab (her only real melee alternative to regular attacks) is expensive.  She suffers the same difficulties as other generalists in endgame, where other characters contribute more easily to the weird Rube Goldberg party models that you need for the hardest fights. 

[unfulfilledestiny]

Star #91 The Steel-Clawed Cat Terrestrial Star Equip - Eastern Swords

HOW TO RECRUIT: Anytime after you finish the Tower of Revelations, head over to the Mikado’s palace in Yotsuku.  It’s…different than you remember. The samurai woman you met before – the one who was basically chilling out in the library – is now the Mikado’s only remaining retainer.  Pretty much everyone deserted him after the war went south.  All his ministers and generals and such, and even the palace staff, resigned in a huff.  Exactly two people stayed loyal, one of whom is now a member of your party.  So she’s still serving as his archivist, but also as his bodyguard and his general and his cook and… Long story short: she’d love to be a Star and save the world, but she’s not abandoning her master.  He has no one else.  You’ll have to fix that.  There are twelve people in Yotsuku whom you can lure into the Mikado’s service, but you need to get only six in order to recruit the Steel-Clawed Cat.  (Note that at least one of them has to be a bodyguard.)  If you like, you can do the minimum in order to get the Star, and then finish off the sidequest whenever you want; the reward for finding all twelve retainers is the Orochi Tail Blade, one of the best Eastern Swords available, so it’s probably worth pursuing at some point.  See the walkthrough for details.  The easiest way to complete the basic requirements is as follows: (1) Go to the restaurant near the central square and order the most expensive meal.  Choose the “This sushi is fit for an emperor!” dialogue option.  (2) Talk to the woman wearing yellow in the eastern quarter.  (3) Talk to the little kid selling snacks in the southern quarter, then talk to his parents in their house.  It’s the one with the three lanterns in front.  (4) Buy some Cherry Blossom Fragrance.  Go into the back room of the bookshop and talk to the bookseller’s daughter.  Give her the perfume when prompted.  (5) Talk to the man running in circles next to livery stable.  Choose the “Calm yourself, man!” dialogue option.  (6) Go to the top of the dojo.  Spar with the Spear Arts Master.  Talk to him after you beat him.  Once you’ve done that (or fulfilled the quest requirements some other way), go back to the palace and talk to the Cat.  She’s still not willing to leave the Mikado’s side.  Now go talk to the Mikado himself, and he basically orders her to go fulfill her destiny.  :) GAMEPLAY NOTES: Hybrid tank/melee-DPS character.  She has a number of passive interception abilities, some of which are auto-parries, and a couple of which come with attached counters.  Her usable skills are a jumble of movement-attacks and instant death techniques.  She also has a free special command ability called Reference, which reveals enemy information (elemental affinities/weaknesses, starting HP and AP, etc.) – it’s useless if you’re using a walkthrough, but if you’re not cheating it can actually provide key information.  WHY YOU WANT HER: If you’re seriously trying not to cheat…well, you’re probably not reading this FAQ.   Nonetheless, if you don’t have other sources of enemy knowledge, Reference can help you formulate a strategy.  That aside, she can do backup tanking duty while still making a respectable damage contribution, which gives you a fair amount of breathing room.  Her dodge is actually quite good, and if you boost it you can use her as a “blink tank”, a strategy that can pretty much neutralize enemies that use physical attacks.  Multi-target instant death attacks are obviously kind of fun.  WHY YOU DON’T WANT HER: High dodge or not, she’s a tank with cruddy HP, which is kind of a glaring liability.  All her tanking abilities target physical attacks only, so against magic-users of any kind she’s basically second-tier DPS.  Her natural move is low, so if you want to keep her mobile you’ll have to use her abilities, which cuts down on her combat usefulness.  Her instant death attacks don’t connect any more often than anyone else’s. 

[unfulfilledestiny]

Star #70 The Hand of Shadow Terrestrial Star Equip – Daggers

HOW TO RECRUIT: This one’s certainly been long enough in coming.  After everything you’ve been through with this guy – letting him tag along with your team as Brother Penitence, seeing him reveal his dark powers against Prince Franz, watching him run away right after you name him, following his campaign of hideous vengeance against the Tenturi, fighting him, un-fighting him, watching as he (apparently) sacrificed himself to save the party at Malagard – you finally get to sign him up for real.  Sheesh. He’s somehow landed a gig as a confessor priest in the Grand Duke’s palace in Alcaria; you can find him in the chapel.  He’ll be very surprised to see you.  If you talk to him with Star #22, Star #65, or Star #101 in your party, you’ll trigger a very long conversation (the details of which change dramatically depending on the participants), near the end of which you’ll get the dialogue option “…you’re already forgiven.”.  Choose it and he joins the party after some further dialogue.  (Star #50 makes this talk a lot more interesting.) GAMEPLAY NOTES: The good news is that, however he may feel about his shady (heyo!) past, he employs his shadow magic and not the worthless healing spells that he used as Brother Penitence.  The bad news is that Advancing Darkness is gone for good.  No, there is no way to use it.  Really.  I don’t know why the game gives him such a distinctive ability in his boss incarnation and then takes it away when he becomes playable – maybe it’s supposed to represent beyond-the-pale use of evil powers – but it does.  The rumors are false.  Deal with it.  So what can he do?  Well, a he's summoner in some technical sense, but he doesn't really play like one.  His shadow slaves can be fairly described as “invincible” – they’re immune to all statuses and take 0 damage from, well, just about everything.  (There are a few enemy powers that can mess with them, but you can count those on the fingers of one hand.)  On the other hand, they don't attack (with one exception) and can’t be buffed in any way.  They're more like mobile spell effects than units.  It’s also important to note that enemies can move through them, so they can’t be used as chump-cloggers the way most summoned units can, although they do block many ranged attacks.  What you're looking at, really, is a debuffer with a focus on battlefield control.  The shadows mostly have powers that interfere with enemy actions (actively or passively), and they run around the map causing trouble.  Fun times.               WHY YOU WANT HIM: The range and mobility of his shadows makes dedicated debuff a viable strategy in large-scale fights, which it isn't usually.  If there are a bunch of enemies on the map, the Hand can do a fair bit to mess them up all on his own.  In particular, Allegory Maidens passively increase the command delay of everything around them, which absolutely wrecks attempts to overwhelm you with numbers.  Fearsome Selachimorph, the attack shadow, is basically a secondary bruiser that ignores all the normal ways that enemies deal with bruisers.  He’s got better physical stats than you’d expect, and occasionally you might even do some real damage with that dagger.  He’s one of the more legitimately drama-ful characters you get, so it can be worth having him around for triggered scenes if you like things serious.  WHY YOU DON’T WANT HIM: His AP pool is small for a caster.  It takes him a while to get his interference army up and running, both because the shadows are all pretty specialized and because most of his spells have high command delay; especially against single enemies and enemies with high mobility, there are generally easier and more efficient ways to debuff.  He’s burlier than your average mage, but not sufficiently burly to serve as a generalist in the normal sense.  Also, he doesn’t have Advancing Darkness, and that will make you sad.  :(

[unfulfilledestiny]

Star #50 The Sage of Time Celestial Star Equip - Canes

HOW TO RECRUIT: There’s a lot of complicated plot surrounding this one.  This isn’t a storyline FAQ, so I’m just going to summarize pretty fast.  Bear with me.  For a little while now, you've been following rumors of a clock-obsessed mage who's supposed to have great power over past and future.  Maybe she can tell you what the deal is with the destiny of the Stars!  Eventually, in Paladiev, you hear that she's supposed to be the surprisingly-young daughter of a local baron. You go to the relevant castle...but the Hand of Shadow has gotten there first.  He’s already murdered the baron and baroness for being “Tenturi collaborators”, and he’s got the girl herself tied to a chair in a room full of clocks.  He’s standing there monologuing at her.  Boss fight! It’s him and a whole bunch of assorted shadow minions, all of which are totally invincible.  :(  They won't attack you, but they will stand around debuffing you and blocking your ranged techniques, so it gets irritating.  The real problem is the Hand himself, though.  He’s got a nasty power called Advancing Darkness that does hefty Dark-elemental damage to everyone as well as inflicting Blind and Despair.  Stock up on restoratives beforehand.  If you’ve got a Fuligin Cloak, it’s a good idea to have your healer equip it.  One of two things will happen when you beat him: either someone in your party will kill him to avenge all the wrongs he’s done, or someone in your party will harangue him until he kills himself.  At this point there’s a weird green special effect, and in runs...the Baron’s daughter.  Who is still tied to the chair.  This is of course her future self, and she’s very distraught.  Seems like the Hand of Shadow is supposed to do something very important down the line, and with him dead things are going to be really bad.  Sure, maybe he killed her parents, but he's got to be saved.  You must stop the villains who wrecked the timeline.  Which is to say: you.  Future Time Sage has enough awesome time-travel mojo to drag you all a few minutes back into the past; you wait in the castle entryway and ambush your past selves as they come in.  This is, unsurprisingly, one of the most entertaining fights in the entire game.  Also one of the trickiest; you’re obviously not capable of outgunning the enemy no matter what you do.  The right strategy depends strongly on your party composition.  When you win, the future-self of the Baron’s daughter will disappear (after a few kind words), since you destroyed her timeline.  So will your own future-selves.  Your past-selves (present-selves?), now fully informed, proceed to head back in and talk the Hand of Shadow down.  He runs away.  The Sage's present-self is grateful for the rescue and joins the party.  Sadly, this version of her isn’t yet badass enough to do timeline-hopping stunts, and she can’t find out what destiny holds.  But she’s heard of someone who can...  GAMEPLAY NOTES: Congratulations: you’ve just gotten the game’s premier command-delay manipulation character.  Basically you’re looking at the analogue of a Time Mage from FF Tactics.  Her bread-and-butter abilities are analogues of Haste, Slow, and Stop; she’s there to speed up your actions and to delay the enemy.  She’s also got a couple of high-end offensive powers, some wonkier abilities that do things like grant extra actions, and an extremely wonky (and pricey) ability called Time Warp that replays the last actions of every character prior to her in the turn order.  WHY YOU WANT HER: Command delay is a critical element of the game.  There is no better way to enhance your odds of victory than taking actions more often relative to the enemy.  It’s also true that many otherwise-excellent abilities are slow and interruptible, and that many enemy attacks can be largely nullified if you slow them down long enough for your support crew to keep the party protections up.  With the Time Sage in the party, whole new strategic avenues open up.  She’s also got sky-high CLVR and WILL, as well as giant buckets of AP.   Her offensive spells, while expensive, can wreak devastation across a wide area.  Time Warp is situational, but it can be almost comically powerful in the right circumstances.  WHY YOU DON’T WANT HER: Sweet Christ on a pogo stick, she is fragile.  Her HP is the lowest of any Star’s at a given level, and her defensive stats are almost as bad.  Her abilities are at their most useful in hard fights against powerful foes, and powerful foes will tear her in half if you give them any kind of chance.  (Relevantly, all her ongoing-effect spells stop working when she dies…)  In endgame, when things are seriously difficult, she basically can’t function without a dedicated maintenance/buffer character.    Also, of course, her MGHT is miniscule and she equips canes.  When you don’t have a good use for her magic, she’s a waste.