A little what to do list when you are starting to play final fantasy XIII
This wil contain spoilers about the game, so if you want to be suprised (in a good and a bad way) stop reading here.
The first thing you need to know is that the game really starts when you are able to cast magic and that will be about 3 hours from the intro cutscene. In that timeframe the only thing you can do is attack and blitz (aoe dmg melee attack) your enemies will not drop anything usefull if they are humans, only some potions and phoenix down (those are worth to get but rarly drops) if you encounter non human enemies they will drop usefull things, the game will advise that you can sell these items, DON'T SELL THEM, they become very usefull in the game later on.
Second is that until you know how to cast magic you wont gain any exp and so you don't have any use on battles, if it is your first time in final fantasy 13, i suggest you fight them all, if not try to avoid the human enemies only battles as much as possible, they only will slow you down anyway.
If you get into a new area because of a cutscene, try to search the area where you came from in the cutscence, most of the time some items spheres will be there.
when you can cast magic, don't be afraid to encounter every damn enemy you come across, the more exp you can get the better, plus if you succesfully research every enemy (kill them often or use libra twice on them) you come a across you can get a trophy called loremaster, its 100 different kinds of monsters, in about chapter 9 or 10 you should reach this and you will get a gold trophy (its utterly easy for a gold trophy, i can ony imagne that they did this on purpose to increase the ff13 trophy values)
read your enemies info, this can be extremly usefull, its good to know were that goddamn boss his weaknesses lies, to make things extremely easy they even spell out what the enemies are able of and what you can use to defeat them.
Eidolons apears before your characters at a point in the story and most people have troubles defeating them, there are different ways to sumbit them to your will. The first way is to do what stands in their info when you cast libra twice, Ther will be something like yields to those who heals his allies, meaning you will fill the gesthal bar faster when you asume the roll of medic and start healing your allies. Now from personal encounters i know that being medic sucks, i will place a eidolon guide later on or you can look at achievement hunter on
Youtube or on the site
Rooster teeht. Now the second way is to hit them with their elemental, not all eidolons have elements, but the most of them have some elements that fill the gesthal bar faster than normal attacks. for the first eidolons i suggest you use the element attacks, so be sure that snow and lightning know some magic attacks.
Now the use of items, as i said before don't sell the items you get from battles or find in spheres, the only thing you can sell to my opinion are the spare armlets and stuff, you can dismantle them, bu that is a waste of money, you can get a stupid item from it and when you sell the armlet you can buy almost 5 of the items you can get out of it. Now there is a diifrence between electrical items and natural items, electrical are things like integrated circuit and natural are Chipped fangs or things like that. You can upgrade your gear in this game, and every lvl needs an good amount of exp, you can increase the exp with the electrical items and so lvl up easy, the natural items doesnt give much exp but when you add enough items to it you can get multiplier bonusses, i have only got to 3 times multiplier but i dont know if that is the limit. If you have an electrical item that gives a lot of exp and you got lots of that item, be sure to get a 3 times multiplier first, otherwise it will be a waste. As example you have an item that gives 800 exp and you have 5 of them, that would give 4000 exp but when you have a multiply by 3 bonus, that would be 12000 exp, i would know what i should choose.
Try to think tactical, most of your allies will have usefull jobs or paradigms. Out of all the final fantasy games, this would be the first where i use the buff spells and the debuff spells, you also need them because some enemies wil be that powerfull you can't go without it.
Eidolons are useless, i think they are only flashy things that do minimal dmg. I never used any eidolon on a boss, only onn some enemies that are sligtly superior than me. This could also be becaus i only summond odin and the shiva(s) and they didn't do much dmg. I have to admit that they are cool though.
dont use you deceptisol, fortisol, etc immidiatly, they can make battles easyer, but are hard to get, so save them for battles you have difficulties to get past them.
phoenix downs are your friend, they aren't usefull at the start, but later on your allies will die frequently because they hev a low hp max and/or make retarded decisions (like healing an ally who have 60% when they are on 30%).
Thats about it for now, i will try to find some good tricks and/or tips later on.
