Character Skills — Relia

Relia’s Attributes 

Relia’s Attribute Scaling

Relia is not a playable character, but after joining, she accompanies the party, sticking close during exploration and battle. Unraveling the mystery of her presence and powers is one of the central threads of Star Ocean V.

Specialties (Party Skills)

While battle skills are abilities that party members execute in battle, specialty skills are more general traits that determine a lot of little things about what the party can do. Various crafts are mastered through unlocking and leveling up specialties, allowing item creation and augmentation. Spoils received at the end of encounters with specific enemy types can be increased, extra minimap functionality can be added, and new field abilities can be accessed.

New specialties are unlocked through quest completion. Specialties must be unlocked and then purchased from the Skills menu with SP before they’re activated. Most specialties can also be leveled up several times, increasing the effects in some way.

Harvesting Specialties

Icon	Name	Description	Acquisition	Lv.1 SP Cost	Lv.2	Lv.3	Lv.4	Lv.5	Lv.6	Lv.7	Lv.8
	Harvesting	Harvest nature’s bounty from certain locations. Your likelihood of success increases with the level of this skill.	Chapter 1 progress	25	100	225	400	625	900	1225	1600
	Excavation	Extract minerals, ore, and more from excavation locations. Your likelihood of success increases with the level of this skill.	Quest 003: Brute Strength of Blacksmithing	25	100	225	400	625	900	1225	1600
	Fishing	Fish for catches at fishing holes. Your likelihood of success increases with the level of this skill.	Quest 002: Drunk on Creation	25	100	225	400	625	900	1225	1600

Harvesting Results Bonus

These specialties allow for collection of various spoils afield. Harvesting points appear in grassy fields, excavation points appear along rocky cliff faces, and fishing points appear along various bodies of water. After these specialties are unlocked and harvesting is possible, you can improve harvesting rewards by spending SP to level up these specialties.

Item Creation Specialties

These specialties enable the creation of all kinds of items. Some items can only be accessed through item crafting. When an item creation specialty is unlocked, visit the Creation submenu off the Main Menu to explore potential material fusion combinations. At first, before a recipe has been attempted, only the required raw materials are visible—the result is not, at least not until the object has been made the first time.

Crafting attempts cannot fail; item creation success is assured. It’s just a matter of having the proper skill level and materials.

Increasing the level of item creation specialties opens up more potential recipes. At a skill level of 8, all recipes for a given item creation specialty are available; it’s just a matter of collecting the items needed.

You can always check out the Item Creation tables toward the back of this guide, where all recipes are included. This can remove the guesswork from going through new recipes or targeting particular results.

Synthesis and Augmentation Specialties

Beyond item creation, synthesis and augmentation specialties allow other means to produce new and powerful items.

With synthesis, items are fused into a surprise result. At first, you can only combine a couple of items, but you can eventually mash up to six items together in one synthesis attempt. Synthesis will always succeed, but unlike item creation, there’s no way to be certain about what results.

Before a synthesis is undertaken, the synthesis result’s “quality” and “impurity” levels are listed. Synthesis results basically pull from two very large pools of potential drops, one being the “quality” pile and the other the “impure” pile. (A synthesis result being “impure” is not necessarily a commentary on usefulness or rarity; some impurities-derived synthesis results are rare and sought after just the same.) These two reward pools both have values ranging from 0 to 50. These ratings reveal the range of potential results the synthesis will draw from. Generalizing, the listed value is the top end of the potential drop pool, with the spectrum extending 10-15+ levels down in value.

For example, attempt a Quality 39, Impurities 25 synthesis, and the result will be one item pulled from Quality results 25 to 39, and Impurities results 10 to 25.

If this sounds complex, just imagine rolling a pair of dice, but the numbers listed on them are different, and only one of them ends up counting. For more details on the synthesis system, as well as guidelines to synthesize all of the rarest synthesis results, see the Creation appendix near the end of the book.

Augmentation is more straightforward. Once you’ve earned the ability, item lists can be scanned, and the effects they can apply to equipment are simply listed. Items can be used as raw materials for augments to permanently increase items’ stats and even add new factors. What’s nice about augmentation is that there’s no guesswork or mystery. Check the Augmentation submenu under Creation regularly to see which surplus items can meaningfully juice up useful weapons and armor.

Naturally, any items used as raw materials in augmentation are destroyed. There are no surprises, but there are still consequences.

Each item also has a limit on how often it can be augmented, which is the other bottleneck on improving gear through item cannibalization. Augmentations can’t just be performed whenever extra items are lying around and might give marginal boosts to useful gear. The number of total augmentations left must be considered. In other words, make augmentation shots count. The augmentation limit differs for each piece of equipment. These values are listed in the equipment tables of this guide and can also be found in the Augmentation submenu under Creation.

Combat Drop Rate Specialties

Drop Rate Specialty Bonus

These specialties slightly boost the spoils you receive after defeating enemies from particular monster categories. The bonus increases the more you level up the specialty with SP. On one hand, the faster you invest as much as possible into these categories, the longer you’ll benefit from them. After all, once they’re on, they’re on forever. On the other hand, SP can easily be spent elsewhere, where the impact on abilities might be more directly felt.

Miscellaneous Specialties

Minimap and Treasure Chests

The minimap becomes significantly more useful when extra pieces of information are placed on it. The Lookout specialty adds the positions of hostile creatures to the map, while the Treasure Sense specialty does the same for treasure chests. Treasure chests afield are usually locked—they’re treasure chests, after all—but the Lockpicking specialty eventually allows access to the booty within.

These specialties are basically toggles, either unlocked or still hidden away, and they don’t level up beyond their initial activation.

Haggling Specialty

Sell Price Boost

In some of this guide’s item lists, values (in Fol) are included. These values indicate what a shop can be expected to sell the item for. Items that aren’t sold anywhere still have a value listed, in parentheses. Either way, you can sell items in hand to shops for 10 percent of their listed value. Thus, an item with a listed value of 1000 or (1000) can be sold for 100 Fol.

The Haggling specialty buffs this amount. Like the specialties that benefit combat rewards, the faster this is leveled up as much as possible, the better, so the boost is bigger for longer. (There wouldn’t be much point to waiting until near the end of Star Ocean V and then finally spending the SP to begin leveling up specialties for combat drop rate specialties and resale prices.) But this depends on preference, too. Combat is inevitable, but haggling with vendors isn’t. It’s perfectly reasonable and encouraged to keep most spare items around as fodder for item creation, synthesis, and augmentation. In that case, it doesn’t provide much benefit to invest a lot of SP into maximizing sale value. Whether to invest SP in leveling up creation categories or Haggling can be seen as an either/or decision, coming down to playstyle.

Ocarina

Once unlocked, you can use the ocarina afield to attract local monsters to the location of the music. When combat is desired, this is a big help for removing the tedium of locating prey repeatedly. The ocarina is played from the Specialties submenu from the Main Menu and cannot be used in locations where combat isn’t possible.

Express Yourself!

This specialty unlocks many gestures that add a lot of flavor to Fidel, with way more of these to unlock and play with than one might expect from a single-player RPG. At Lv. 1, eight emote gestures are available, and more are added to the total when this skill is leveled up. Emotes are accessed with the R2 button—hold it down to access the emote quick menu, then use the D-Pad to toggle between available emotes, four on each D-Pad pane. Eight new emotes are unlocked at each level-up, until Lv. 5 adds a baker’s dozen.

The Augury and the Hare

Like with the ocarina, a couple of other specialties add new functions to the Specialties menu. You unlock these by completing quests later on in the story.

The Augury specialty allows consultation with Tria straight from the menu. Tria has more than 100 different cryptic pieces of wisdom she can dispense. Increasing the skill level of Augury increases the amount of wise comments Tria will utter, with 15~20 added for each skill level up to Lv. 6. Eight more pieces of wisdom are added at Lv. 7, and a final three tokens of wisdom from the sage emerge at Lv. 8.

Familiar Spirit adds a lot of convenience since it summons a bunny familiar directly from Specialties in the Main Menu. At first, the bunny arrives only selling Blueberries and Blackberries, but its wares increase as SP is invested into leveling up the specialty.

Transcending Your Limits

The ultimate specialty is unlocked late in the game. Once Limit Break is available during Chapter 12, its benefits can be conferred to the party permanently for the low price of 10,000 SP. The bonuses are incredible: the party’s level cap is boosted from 99 to 255, and the cap on individual battle skills is increased from Lv. 5 to Lv. 9.