The Legend of Legacy Walkthrough: Character and Skill Leveling Guide

Main Walkthrough

The Legend of Legacy is a difficult game, and the leveling system plays a huge role in the difficulty curve. Throwing aside experience points and clear-cut level advancement, The Legend of Legacy instead forces you to rely on the whims of fate to strengthen your characters. This can make for a frustrating experience if you're just starting out.

This guide will teach you how to level your characters, their skills, and their charms in The Legend of Legacy. The process comes down to a significant amount of grinding, so if you're not a fan of fighting battles with little tangible reward this might not be the game for you.

The Basics

There are three general stats in The Legend of Legacy:

• Attack, which governs the strength of the character's offensive moves
• Guard, which governs the strength of the character's defensive moves, and the likelihood that they will use the move when attacked
• Support, which governs the character's speed, healing abilities, and likelihood that their status-based Arts or Charms will work on an enemy

If you check the Equipment screen for a character via the menu you'll see a breakdown of their current stats in the bottom-right corner of the screen.

In most games these stats would only apply to your characters. This isn't the case in The Legend of Legacy. Each of your characters learns Skills over the course of the game, and each Skill has these three stats applied as well. The higher you raise each stat on a Skill, the more effective that Skill becomes. If you're using a defensive Skill, for example, it will go off more often - and absorb more damage - with a high Guard stat.

This raises an important question: How do you level stats? The process is more or less the same for your characters and their Skills, and this is where things get a bit painful. We'll start with character stats.

Leveling Characters

The Legend of Legacy relies on a Formation system for governing the roles of your characters in combat, and in order to create a Formation you need Stances. Stances determine how each character will act and react on a given turn, and shifting Stances can give you a decisive advantage in combat. This guide will teach you more about Stances.

Stances are crucial for leveling your characters' stats. Each Stance correlates to one of the three main stat groups - Attack, Guard, Support - and when a character is in that Stance during combat there is a small chance that they will receive a Stat boost. If a character spends the battle in the Guard Stance, for example, they may gain a point in Guard when the battle ends. This makes them an overall tougher character.

For the most part characters spend the entire game using a particular type of Stance. Your frontline defensive tank, for example, should almost always be in a Guard Stance, as this applies their defensive Skills to the whole party rather than just themselves. This can lead to characters with skewed stats that excel in one area and drag in others. To remedy this you should occasionally let characters fight using other, less-optimal Stances, just to raise those stats a bit. Stick to weaker enemies when doing this.

In addition to Attack, Guard, and Support, your characters have two other stats to worry about:

• Hit Points (HP), how much damage the character can take before getting knocked out
• Skill Points (SP), used when performing a Skill 

HP and SP are not tied to particular Stances. They instead seem to rise in value based on how things go in combat. HP seems to rise when a character takes damage, while SP seems to rise when characters use Skills. HP and SP are character-dependent, and you'll have a much easier time raising these stats with some characters than others. Owen gains HP quickly, for example, while Eloise receives HP boosts much less frequently - though by contrast Eloise should have a lot more SP than Owen by the end of the game.

Regardless of the stat you're raising, it's important to note that stat gains are tied to your level of strength and the enemies you're fighting. You can only get so strong battling early-game enemies, and eventually you'll gain next to no stat gains against weaklings. This means that fighting enemies above your weight class can lead to rapid stat gains.

Leveling Skills

Skills - aka Arts and Charms - receive stat boosts in more or less the same way as your characters. Apply a Stance to a character, use the Skill on an enemy, and hope for a stat boost. You can raise Attack, Guard, and Support on every one of your Skills, without exception.

There are two things to keep in mind when leveling Skills:

• When leveling Arts (Skills tied to a weapon) there's a chance that the character will unlock a new Skill. They will immediately use that Skill, rather than the one you chose.
• When leveling Charms (Skills tied to a Singing Shard) the character must learn the Charm before they can raise any of its stats. As with Arts, it's possible for the character to suddenly learn a completely different Charm, though these instances are rare - and often happen at a bad time, if you're in the middle of a boss battle and want a predictable outcome.

You don't need to worry about leveling your Skill stats in particular directions. Use the Skills in the appropriate situations and they will grow as needed.

Quick Leveling Tips

For the most part you'll improve your characters and their Skills just by play through the game. That said, there are a few things you can do to strengthen your team more quickly:

• Move on from an area once the enemies become easy. There's no point trying to level in, say, the Hidden Forest, once you're annihilating the enemies with ease. The chances you'll get any stat boosts are slim to nil.
• Don't be afraid to fight enemies that are above your weight class. If you stick near the entrance of a map and run from stronger enemy formations you'll eventually come across battles that you can win with a weaker party. This will increase the chances of boosting everyone's stats.
• Draw battles out. If you've found a powerful enemy than you can survive, avoid demolishing it. Let your party take a bunch of actions to raise their stats. This also increases the chances that your characters will unlock new Skills.
• Don't be afraid to run! Stat boosts to Skills accumulate over the course of the battle, and you don't suddenly lose them if you flee the fight.
• Grind on bosses. For the most part bosses in The Legend of Legacy are one-and-done, but there are a few boss-level enemies that you can fight as many times as you want:
• Archwings, which first appear in the Roaring Valley
• Nest Wardens, a stronger variant of the Archwing which can also appear in the Roaring Valley
• High-Lady Mertons, which appear when you defeat an Archwing Runt in the Valley Ruins
• Bogsaurs, which appear in Bogsaur Marsh
• Shadow Giants, which appear in areas that are covered in shadow (happens randomly, though they appear as normal enemies in Bottomless Pit)

One last note! When you begin a new game of The Legend of Legacy you'll choose a starting character, and receive two other characters, depending on who you chose. You can also recruit the other four characters at random in Initium. This makes for a grand total of seven characters. You should not try to level them all! At no point are you forced to swap party members, and given how long it takes to boost one characters' stats trying to do it for all seven is a waste of time. Pick a team of three that you like and stick with them.

Main Walkthrough