The Synthesis Specialty skill is unlocked upon completing Welch’s sixth quest, Happy Fun Bunny Time, and it works a bit differently from the other Item Creation skills. The others have set recipes that will always produce the same results, while the results you get from Synthesis are random (to a certain degree). You can combine up to six different items (three when you first unlock the skill, then an additional item for every level you increase it) to produce a new one, with a few variables affecting the outcome. Note that you can have the game choose items automatically for you, or you can manually select all six items.

Whenever you’re adding items, you will see the variables affecting the outcome appear in the bottom right of your screen. The first one you will want to look at is the resulting item’s type, which can be one of six things: Food , Machine , Medicine , Metal , Natural Mineral or Signeturgy . The other variables are things called Quality and Impurities, both of which will affect the end product. Both Quality and Impurities have values that range from 0-50, with the end result being pulled from a pool of items, taking into consideration quality and impurities.

As already mentioned, the max Quality/Impurity rating you can have is 50 and using that and the item type, the result will be determined. When you first add items, you might only increase the Quality, but as you add other items, you will likely increase the Impurity. For example, adding six Wires will put the Quality at 48, but if you add something like a Micro Circuit, you will get an Impurity of 9 and Quality of 40. With this example, the Impurities will make it so you add a bunch of different items that can appear in the results. It can be a bit confusing at first, but once you play around with it some, it will start to become clearer.

Using Synthesis to your Advantage¶

Since you can gain access to Synthesis relatively early, you can use it to your advantage to get some very nice items. Once you first gain access to the Charles D. Goale, purchase at least 24-30 Wires from the one merchant there. Making sure you save, you can use six Wires to get an extremely powerful piece of armor for Fidel, Victor, Emmerson and Anne, called Elemental Leather. This piece of armor has 300 DEF, 250 MEN, +40 resistance to fire/ice/earth/wind, and a factor that makes you take 10% less damage from Corrupt enemies.

Another thing you can make with the wires is a sword for Fidel, called Insignivon. While the sword isn’t very powerful, it does have an extremely helpful factor on it, which can help boost up your Reserve Gauge in battle. This will allow you to actually use the Reserve Rush move more often, even during boss battles. Six Wires can also get you a nice pair of gauntlets for Anne before you will be able to buy them later in the story, but they don’t have anything special attached to them.