SaGa Frontier 2, like every other SaGa game, has a pretty tought battle system to get a grasp on. If you don't understand it, and if you don't know some key things about each game, you're bound to have to just start all over. So...We made THIS page to prevent that from happening, or try to anyways.
Team Battles
Team battles are the common battles of the SaGa games. All your party members fight at once. You can have 4 members fighting at a time. Your first option menu says Battle Command and Recover HP. Battle command lets you choose what you want your characters to do, and Recover HP lets your character recover all his HP at the expense of one of his Life Points. This is a feature to be taken advantage of and definitely to be abused in the earlier stages of the game. However later in the game, you'll want to be more conservative about using Recover HP.
Anyways, when you choose battle command, you can choose your characters' actions one by one. Pressing left and right on the menu toggles between Weapons, Techs, Spells, Tool options, topography options (temporary ability to use a certain element depending on your environment), and Defense. Choose what you want do with all your characters, and then a short battle sequence will play out, and then you do it over again.
During battle, you may learn weapon techs. These will be automatically equipped and set in your tech list, which you can look at outside of battle. Any magic learned will be learned after the fight, when you gain experience, AND it won't be equipped automatically; you have to equip spells manually.
You don't actually gain experience points in this game, but rather, your HP, WP (MP for weapon techs), SP (MP equivalent), and Weapon/Magic levels (Determines the damage done and tech learning speed with said weapon/magic type) Will go up gradually after each fight. If any spells were learned during battle, it will be announced at this time as well.
In team battles, you can do combination attacks by linking different Techs with different people together; this is why it's recommended not to have 2 people using the same weapon and sometimes same magic in your group. You should make your groups versatile because Combo attacks do a lot more damage than the two attacks will do separately. There are Triple combos and Quadruple combos too, if you're lucky enough to pull one off.
Lastly, outside of fights, you can go to the menu and choose an option called "Battle Style." This will allow you to Switch party members, set the order that your characters act in (good for doing combos if you have them memorized), or choose Battle Roles. Battle Roles will give your character a special trait in battle- maybe raise the success of having their moves start a combination attack, prevent enemy combos, put priority on certain weapon attacks or magic, or even raise all members' defense, recovery, speed, or evasion, among other things.
Whew, that's about all there is to it. Remember to unequip techs when they get full, you can only have 8 spots to fill with techs, and these spots are shared by Techs and Spells, so choose wisely. Also, any techs learned can be used with any of your party members, as long as they've been unequipped at least once.
Duel Battles
At the beginning of most fights, you'll have the option to fight a battle with one person, OR fight as a team. Choosing to fight the monster with just one party memeber will start a duel battle. You have three options: Battle Command starts the fight, Recover HP allows you to recover all your HP at the cost of one LP, and lastly, Change Weapon allows you to toggle between weapons before each turn (you can only use one weapon at a time in duel battles). You can choose to use martial arts in those options too. During your Battle Command, you have the ability to use a few unique moves with your weapon, toggle left or right to use tools, or defend. You can mix those with your four special options (Ready, Charge, Focus, Feint) to make combos that will use techs or spells. Duel battling is very important in SaGa Frontier 2, because you gain experience, techs and spells exponentially faster than you do in team battles. Experiment with different combinations to learn techs and spells. It'll take a while, but you should fight a whole bunch anyways. I mean hell, the SaGa games are almost entirely fighting based anyways. :P
War Battles
The War Battles all have similar objectives- you must not let the enemy cross a certain line while trying to achieve the victory conditions. The basic ideas here are that you absolutely must protect these lines at all costs. Soldiers (save Steel Soldiers and soldiers in the Battle of Southmound Top) all have 100 HP- try using Flame Spear or anyother anima-based attack to kill enemy soldiers. When one of your soldiers dies, the next turn, the reserves will come in and replace them. If you run out of reserves, battles will become much tougher. Also, try to attack enemy units multiple times in the same turn. They won't have been able to replace enemy soldiers, and they face a loss of a percentage of their HP.
Here are a few types of units you'll come across:
Infantry: Your basic unit. They have some basic Spear Attacks, and can also use Flame Spear. This is good to use against other infantry, but not other Steel Soldiers, for they have high magic defense.
Archer: Archers normally have a Sword, with no techs to use, and a Bow with one or two techs. They don't fight well in battles; however, if an ally archer is next to another friendly unit, they will give them support fire. Use this to your advantage (obviously :P)
Steel Soldier: You don't get to use these guys often, unfortunately. They are skilled Soldiers, with particularly high defense, and very high magic defense (Steel resists anima). Their techs are strong, and they're hard to kill. There's really not much more to say about them.
Here are some tips you'll need to get through the game with much ease.
Tips
--- Engage in Duel battles very often. Sit around and fight. You're going to have to like the fighting to get anywhere in this game, because you'll have to start learning techs from the very beginning.
--- Try to be versatile with your groups; don't have four people on swords, your combos will suck. Also, don't use weapons with a character if he's not proficient at it. Magic is an exception, but only because almost all spells are a hybrid of its root element and something else. But try to stay within root elements, and try to stay within your proficient elements even then.
--- Use magic as often as possible in team battles. You learn spells pretty fast in team battles, but the trick is consistency.
--- For Battle Roles, try and select roles that will benefit the entire group, such as ones that increase everyone's recovery or defense, ones that raise combo rates, or techs that prevent enemies from acting. Don't bother with ones that make escaping easier or something; it's not really worth it.
--- LIFE WATER. It's the most important spell in the GAME. This spell should come with one of the characters you get very early in the game. Equip it on EVERYONE and make sure they can use it; it's the primary method of curing yourself in SaGa Frontier 2. Having high Tree and Water magic levels is very important, and even if you don't have high levels, you should probably still equip Life Water. Recovery Breath is pretty important too, but not quite as important as Life Water. Regardless, it would be nice to equip Recovery Breath on anyone who can use it, but Life Water is a must.
--- Save Ark Stones. SAVE THEM DAMNIT. Also, save ANY Quells that recover HP, WP, SP, and LP, such as Anima Crystals and Soul Crystals. AND save any tools or Quells that null "Deathblow". When you get to the last dungeon, you'll thank me. TRUST ME.
--- There are two types of currency in this game; Crowns and Chips. Crowns are like normal money, and every main character's crowns are separated. Chips are basically stuff used to make tools; the number of chips, and chip circulation is shared between every character. You don't normally buy stuff with Chips, but it's important to try and have a lot of them. Read the next tip to see why.
--- In shops, you have the option to convert tools into chips, and to exchange chips for crowns. Any time you have extra stuff that you don't need, you should really just convert them into chips. There are two reasons for this:
1. Since chips are shared by every main character, you can carry your money from one scenario to the next if it's in chip form. A good way to do this is to spend all your money every time you've bought everything you need, and convert all the excess crap you bought into chips.
2. Any time a tool is made into chips, and any time chips are exchanged for crowns, it increases a special counter (not shown anywhere, unfortunately), called Circulation. It's important for Circulation to be high, because Circulation determines what you can buy at the 'Custom Order' shop (Only available at some shops, Vogelang for example). Just as well, any time you buy something from the Custom Order shop, it lowers your Circulation. So, it's important to Chip tools, and exchange chips as often as you can, if you plan on buying from the Custom Order shop (And they really do have some good stuff, so it's worth it).
--- An add-on for the previous tip: When spending crowns on excess crap, it's best to go to Laubholz, and buy Oak Staffs. This is because when you convert crowns to chips in this manner, while you are SAVING money, you're not saving all of it. Oak Staffs, when bought en masse, solves this problem, as they have the best Crowns-to-chips conversion rate.
--- Be sure to buy Soul Crystals from the Custom Order shop. Everything else is nice, but those are REALLY important. You wanna have at LEAST 4, I get about 8.
--- Quicksave. It's your best friend. The hotkey is Triangle. Make a habit out of just pressing Triangle and then Circle after every fight, conversation, purchase, or anything. You HAVE to take advantage of Quicksave and the fact that you can save any time anywhere, because you never know when the evil demon GROGMO will come out and suddenly kill you (And I'm serious...only it'll be an Armor Beetle or a boss, not GROGMO.)