Oliver can swing a stick with a decent amount of force, but let’s face it—the lad was built for spell-casting. When the battles get tough, he’s going to want someone else to do the heavy fighting, and that’s where familiars come in.
Raise them right, and they’ll serve ably as your heroes’ warriors, bodyguards, and companion elemental trick performers.
Recruiting Familiars
You receive your first few familiars as part of the game’s storyline, but after that, you’ll have to catch your own.
After Esther officially joins your party, you gain the ability to recruit familiars by defeating creatures, impressing them with your prowess, and then having Esther play her Serenade song to lure them over to your team.
Note that you don’t get to choose which creatures you want to turn into familiars—they’re the ones that choose you.
The odds that a heart will appear over the head of a defeated creature vary by their type, landing at around 25 percent for the most docile creatures and going down to 4 percent for rarer and more powerful creatures.
If you want a specific one, all you can do is battle it over and over again until you get lucky.
Each human party member can hold up to three familiars at once, and these familiars will gain experience points whether they’re actually used in battle or not. As a general rule, you’ll want at least two usable familiars that you can alternate between, with the third slot being saved for familiars you’re trying to level up. You can also carry three extra familiars in your reserves, which can be swapped into your active party at any time outside of combat. However, familiars in your reserves do not gain experience
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