As you begin the game, you find yourself in a forest and meet up with an old masked man, who introduces himself as a mercenary named Hapsper. He’ll be working with you on this mission, as you’re a mercenary yourself. You’re free to rename your character if you please, but his default name of Endir will be used throughout this guide. Talking to the old man will bring up a dialogue option, but these aren’t really used for anything, so pick whichever one you want.

Hapsper mentions that you’ll be doing all of the fighting on this mission, as he’ll simply be an adviser. Once you can move, follow the path a little bit to encounter your first enemy, where you’ll learn about the Encounter system here. Basically, if you sneak up behind an enemy without it noticing you, then you’ll begin the battle with full ATB and SP gauges. ATB, or Active Time Battle, is a gauge at the bottom of the screen that fills up as battles progress and once it’s full, you will be able to select an action.

This Pengy is pretty easy to defeat, so you don’t really need to do anything else than attack it. When it’s finished, move on until you encounter some more of the little penguin-like creatures. You’ll be given the Cyclone spritnite before the battle begins. Spritnite are basically equipment that you can equip that with either give you Techs to use during battle, or passive bonuses during battle. You equip spritnite on Talismans and will gain more slots for them as you level up and find other Talismans.

View Full-size

Equipping spritnites on your characters (left) will enable them to use various techs in battle (right).

So, open up your menu and go to Spritnite, then equip Cyclone to your open slot. The battle will start shortly after that against two Pengys. Use your newly acquired Cyclone tech to hit both Pengys, then finish them off with normal attacks, unless you don’t mind using Cyclone again. After the battle, follow Hapsper to the north to find a save point (Hapsper can’t see it). Continue on and you’ll come to a clearing, where you’ll find the first boss of the game.

BOSS - Jaboo¶

This isn’t much more than a tutorial boss, but it is still a boss and you can die to it. It doesn’t have much health and it only has two attacks that it can do, Claw and Chomp. Claw is a simple physical attack that should hit you for around 20 damage, while Chomp is a two-hit physical attack that deals around 20 each. You shouldn’t need to heal with an item, but you do have some in case things get hairy. Just keep attacking it normally until you get a SP point, then use that with either another normal attack or with Cyclone to deal more damage.

After the battle is over, Hapsper gives you 5000G as your cut from the job, even though Endir ended up doing all of the work himself. A mysterious man approaches you from behind and offers another job for you, to kill a girl who is turning 18 years old very soon…