What You Should Know Before Starting Wandering Sword

Wandering Sword is a pixel tactical RPG based on martial arts where you take the role of Yuwen Yi, a young swordsman who gets inflicted with a deadly poison. As he finally recovers, he’s forced to take on a journey where he must hone his skills and become stronger.

There’s a lot to do in this game, and the amount of options you have can quickly get overwhelming. Even the combat can be fairly complicated due to the multitude of skills that you and your opponents have in their arsenal. However, if you want to get a head start, these beginner tips will help you get up to speed with the game’s mechanics in no time.

Maximizing The Utility Of Your Inheritance

As you start a new game, you’re presented with Inheritance Points that can be used to boost your stats and other abilities at the beginning of the game. However, the complicated thing about this feature is that different bonuses require different amounts of Inheritance Points, making it difficult to maximize its utility.

You can increase the number of Inheritance Points that you receive at the start of a new game by completing in-game achievements. However, you won’t have this bonus on your first-ever playthrough and will have to make do with 200 Inheritance Points.

The bonuses that you pick from the Inheritance don’t make that much of a difference, as all the bonuses are fairly minimal, and you can get just about everything quite early in the story.

If you want to fully utilize the 200 Inheritance Points, you can pick each option from the Life Skill Mastery tab and increase it by one level. The skills included in the Life Skill Mastery are as follows:

• Forging
• Tailoring
• Alchemy
• Cooking

Leveling up each of the skills once will cost you 50 Inheritance Points, allowing you to fully utilize the 200 Inheritance Points that you have been given at the start of the game.

Forage Everything

You should try to forage every item that you come across on your journey. These items may come in handy later on, and they also provide a little experience. Foraging is also especially useful, as you can get some items that can be gifted to other characters to raise their affinity.

The items that you receive from foraging can also be used for cooking and alchemy later on as you progress in the story, allowing you to create several beneficial items out of them.

Always Aim For The Back

The combat style is turn-based tactical, allowing you to move on a grid, where positioning is everything. Attacking from the side gives you a small damage bonus, while attacking from behind gives you a 50 percent damage increase and there’s a lot more chance of not missing the attack.

If you can, you should always try to aim for the opponent’s back to deal an increased amount of damage. This trick allows you to end a lot of battles easily and can be exceptionally useful against difficult opponents later on in the game. Furthermore, you should also position yourself in a way that doesn’t allow your opponent to attack you from behind easily.

Not Every NPC Can Become A Companion

There are a few NPCs in the game that can be invited to your party. Once you’ve fulfilled certain conditions, you’ll be able to invite an NPC to your party, and they will stay with you and help you out in your battles. Having a large roster of companions can make many challenging battles a walk in the park.

There is no limit to how many NPCs you can invite to your party at a time. However, only a limited number of these party members can be deployed on the grid. The rest of the members can be swapped out whenever you’re out of battle.

While introducing the first companion, the game makes it look like you could invite just about any NPC in the game if you’ve raised their affinity enough. But, that is not the case as only a few NPCs can join your party as companions.

Memorizing Hotkeys

During battle, you’ll have to get used to the hotkeys if you want to be able to execute an action quickly. There is a huge variety of options and moves that you can select in battle, and using hotkeys to do what you want, instead of scrolling through the many options, can make things super easy.

Memorizing hotkeys can also play an important role in real-time battles as you can quickly execute an action instead of scrolling through each option. While it may be difficult at first, you can quickly get used to these hotkeys and will be able to do your best in combat.

Learn From Your Friends

You can learn new skills from your party members by selecting the Consult option from their inventory menu. This allows you to use a portion of your resources to learn their skills, and then you can deploy those skills in battle as your own.

You can also learn Life Mastery Skills by consulting your party members, such as cooking, fishing, and alchemy.

It also shows how necessary it is to gather new companions throughout your journey. It doesn’t matter if the party members are deployed, once you’ve invited them to your party, you’ll be able to consult them to learn their skills.

Easy Trick To Increase Affinity

You can easily increase your affinity with many NPCs by giving them random materials that you find while foraging. However, once you’ve hit a specific threshold for their Affinity, the rarity of items that the NPC will accept increases, and their preferences narrow down a little, making it difficult to find suitable gifts to give them.

After you’ve hit at least 20 Affinity with an NPC, you can spar with them. Sparring allows you to gain rewards by winning a one-on-one battle against the NPC. These rewards are usually according to the NPC’s preference, which means that you can gift them the same item back, and that would increase their affinity with you.

Repeatedly doing so will allow you to increase your affinity with the NPCs infinitely. However, note that they won’t always reward you with an item that they’re willing to accept back as a gift.

Look In Every Corner For Chests

There are plenty of chests in the game, and some of them are hidden in plain sight. Explore every corner of the towns and dungeons to find these chests, and you might find something valuable.

Sometimes, these chests can be difficult to spot because they look quite similar to the random objects in the background, so it is recommended that you approach anything that might look like a chest to see if an option pops up to open it.

Infinite Inventory And Its Utility

The game allows you to hoard as many items as you want, so you don’t have to worry about selling your items every time you go to a trader’s shop. It also encourages foraging and casual sparring with NPCs, as you don’t have to worry about your storage space running out.

However, having many items can make it difficult for you to scroll through to find what you need. Luckily, there are plenty of categorization and sorting options for that problem, allowing you to look up anything you want fairly easily.