LogFAQs > #955076686

The whole system is basically built around soul bursts and being able to use them as much as possible but not stupidly.

Basically, soul bursts extend your combo in very powerful ways at the cost of removing one soul from your bar and giving it to a nearby enemy. In addition to resetting your soul gauge (as does everyone's), Velvet's heals her (also, as does everyone's) and makes her unkillable but starts draining her HP and lasts until you empty your soul gauge with attacks or hit 1 HP, which then gives her a super move and ends the state. It's really overpowered and brainless up until the hardest difficulty because you can just mash through everything and win on lower difficulties due to the fact that the finisher that triggers at 1 HP will almost always stun something and thus give you another soul. Then you hit the hardest difficulty (unlocked lategame, probably not even really meant to be tried until NG+/extreme postgame) and suddenly everything's almost immune to stuns and everything is pain and death. It's very binary.

The following rules about souls apply to both you and the enemy:
The more you have, the longer your combos can be and thus the stronger your offense.
The more you have, the more susceptible to damage and stuns/status effects you are.
When a battle participant is stunned or given a status effect, they give a soul to the attacker that inflicted the effect.

So you can see that this naturally encourages a flow where, by using your soul gauge to extend your combos, you'll make yourself increasingly likely to get those souls back and extend your combo even more, and keep the enemy taking more damage since they have more souls. (Note that there is zero randomness with stuns and status effects; they build up with a points system from the attacks that inflict those effects.) However, if you blow all your souls, you'll have a hard time getting combos started, and it's possible that you'll drop to one soul (awful) if you get stunned while at two. On the other hand, you're more likely to be stunned with more souls, so the onus is on your to guard/evade and protect them.

Additionally, if you hit every single weakness an enemy has in the same combo, the enemy becomes MUCH easier to rough up in all sorts of ways (damage, stun, stagger, status effects) until the combo ends. However, there are some weakness types that are much harder to actually find attacks to exploit than others.

Everyone has a completely different playstyle, and even the casters are extremely dynamic because of how spells are now just combo pieces as cast times go way down later into combos, and you eventually unlock the ability to cast a low-level spell but then extend the cast time to make it a higher-level spell instead, letting you have a bunch of spells on the same button. (You can also backdash/sidestep in place of a combo stage to get to the faster spell casts more quickly.) One of the casters has crazy high mobility with how his soul burst works and is really fun for it, as he'll often open enemies up with spells, then jump to them and weave in a melee combo, then cast a max level spell at super speed to stun the next enemy and repeat.

Later on, a system is even introduced to switch between characters during battle (as in, from the reserve members) which can be done mid-combo since they come in with an attack.

I will complain that at high difficulties, the game becomes almost a joke in certain areas and you are almost forced to spam one particular member's ability that stops enemy spells, because there will be like five enemies doing nothing but cast spells that take three seconds to cast and kill everyone they hit. Not sure what's up with that design...

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"That is why war is so tragic. To win means to make victims of your opponents and give birth to hatred." - Kratos Aurion, Tales of Symphonia