foreign [Music] who sunk a lot of time into blue archive I wanted to give something back to the community in the form of a tutorial advice video that we'll go over how to play the game as well as how to take advantage of everything blue archive has to offer if you clicked on this video and you aren't sure what blue archive is or what it's all about I'd highly suggest checking out my full review of the game here please don't be intimidated by the length it goes by surprisingly quickly and it'll not only teach you about the game but it'll also teach you about how to safely interact with gotcha games overall so I definitely give that a listen before deciding if you want to play the game if you're ready to get into the game mechanics then hear tips and tricks from a seasoned blue archive player then you're in the right spot I've time stamped this entire video so please feel free to skip around as you see fit although I'll try to make this whole video accessible to all levels of play as much as possible so without further Ado let's get into the gameplay of blue archive so for a variety of story and challenge missions you select a team of six students four of these students are going to be on the front lines they are called Strikers and two will be on the back line they are referred to as special students so the strikers will be on the front lines attacking the enemy and there are different specializations to keep in mind like a tank to soak up damage an attacker to deal loads of damage and on-field support units to buff up their teammates the two special characters are going to be in your reserve so most of them are never gonna hit the battlefield but they're going to assist from afar they have a variety of roles some of them are going to just be straight healers so um they'll be healing from the back lines without being at risk of taking damage some of them are actually going to buff your team which is awesome and then some of them actually just straight up do loads of damage from a safe distance there are some units who actually do enter the battlefield and they will attack alongside your team for a very short period of time these different specializations can be found in the character descriptions which are shown here as well as by looking at their skills which we'll get into more shortly even though your special students will assist from the back line they cannot carry the battle without your Strikers and if your Strikers go down in battle the stage will end and you'll need to redo it so you'll have to make sure that your Strikers will stay up and healthy in order to keep the battle going the combat works like rock paper scissors so the enemy's defense weakness will be displayed above their heads which is in very nice and convenient and the students attack type will be displayed down here in their active skill section so it's essentially color matching which is awesome the really nice thing too as far as the color matching is if you are red green colorblind you should still be able to see the blue and yellow enemy bars um whereas if you're blue and yellow colorblind the enemy types all have very distinctive looks so the explosive enemies are always going to be students so they'll be dressed in various school uniforms the piercing enemies are always robots and they're going to be heavily armored mechs drones or tanks and then the Mystic enemies are always going to be very Ghostly and spooky with these cloaks and these glowing myths here there are some exceptions here once you hit Level 55 and above with the notable ones shown here but by and large these rules are very consistent throughout the game if you're ever unsure before you start a battle you can always look at the enemies you'll be fighting by clicking this option here or once you're in the character selection menu you can select the enemy screen here as well and it will show you all the different enemy types you'll be up against there's also the super handy chart that goes over this which I definitely still reference from time to time since you don't always have to just pick particular students for particular enemies like if you look at the chart here an explosive student is going to do extra damage to an enemy with explosive armor just like I said color matching red for red but that same explosive student could actually still do a normal amount of damage to an enemy with piercing armor so it's really nice it gives you some flexibility since it doesn't force you to have a huge cast of characters to run different stages as far as party compositions are concerned most parties consist of the following members one tank one or more healer or support characters and your damage dealers these are all of the tanks in the game if you're just starting out and aren't sure who to go with these are my favorite tanks in the game for healers and support units these come in a lot of different flavors and are super fun to mix and match to see what works best for your team that being said if you're looking for some guidance on who to try first these are my favorite healers and these are my favorite support units for damage dealers there are a ton of characters to pick from seriously this is where you have the biggest variety of characters to select from and it really is up to your preference who you think looks cool and is fun to play so whoever you end up with give them a try and see how they feel to play there are characters that hit single targets really hard and characters that do massive AOE damage and they're both quite good for different applications so just have fun with it there are so many that I love for so many different reasons so I'm not sure if I could point out any that are my favorites because of that but if I had to pick for the sake of this video these are my favorite single Target damage dealers and these are my favorite AOE damage dealers in the game students have a maximum of four skills available to them for combat one of these is called the ex skill and you can think of it as a student's ultimate move this will be the skill that is selectable by the player during combat and will be displayed here in the lower right hand corner of the screen ex skills all have a cost displayed as a number here and you can activate a skill once this bar is sufficiently full the ex skill bar fills up automatically and it fills up faster the more students you have on your team this is why it's ideal to run a full six person team as your ex skill bar will feel the fastest that way managing ex skills and deciding where and when they will activate is one of the main challenges of the combat as you will only have three ex skills available at any time and it will be random which ones will appear you will only see new skills once you use the ones that are currently displayed but this is part of the challenge the other three skills that students can have will all be passive skills so you cannot select them but the student will be periodically using them throughout the battle some skills are just stat Buffs to the character or to the party as a whole or some skills will activate untimed intervals doing damage or healing party members or buffing teammates it's a great idea to read through these when looking over students because you can get a good idea of which students might synergize best with other students ex skills can be leveled up to more powerful forms by exchanging school specific tactical training Blu-rays and artifacts whereas passive skills can be leveled up with tech notes and artifacts ex skills have a maximum of five levels whereas passive skills have a maximum of 10. in order to reach level 10 for a passive skill you must use a secret Tech note and these are very difficult to come by so most players don't bother going past level 8 for most passive skills you will use different types of materials to reach different levels and these materials will be differentiated by color from Gray being the lowest all the way up to purple which is the highest you can hover over a resource to see where it can be obtained which is really helpful when you're trying to plan out where to find items to level up your characters for most students leveling up their ex skill is generally the highest priority but some of these passive skills can be really valuable as well so do not ignore them when you're leveling the number of skills that a character has unlocked will depend on their star ranking with one star students having two skills two star students having three and three star students having all four skills student star rankings can actually be increased by exchanging lfts to unlock higher star levels with the maximum star ranking being five elves are obtainable for making gotcha rolls events and several different game modes like total assault and hard missions which we're going to get into a little bit later increasing star ranking will not only unlock skills but it will also increase a student's stats meaning a one-star student can reach the same power levels as the three star with very minor investment there are diminishing returns when you're upgrading to a four or a 5 Star character as you no longer unlock new skills and you only get stat increases but if you ever do reach a five star you will unlock a character-specific weapon that you can sink any excess elifts that you end up getting and you can further improve a character's stats and abilities students can also be physically leveled up which will improve their stats across the board you will need these books called activity reports to level up characters again with gray reports being the least amount of experience and purple being the highest amount leveling up students is vital for survivability as well as attacker healing power so don't neglect this finally you can also outfit students with a quick equipment and leveling up this equipment will give them a variety of stat Buffs students can wear three types of equipment one of which will be available from level one the second will unlock at level 15 and the third will unlock at level 35. equipment can be upgraded by having the next level of equipment and then using these Experience Awards that again range from Gray to purple it's generally a good idea to at least equip a student with the base level of equipment and then you can examine a student's skills and their role to determine what equipment you actually want to upgrade from there damage dealers generally benefit from having the first and the last equipment upgraded quite a bit with some minor investment into the middle option just for survivability whereas tanks will want the second and third options since this will increase their HP and their defense and will also increase their resistances to a variety of things healers and support units are more of a mixed bag so I would check their skills to see what stats are used for their abilities for example Serena who was a Healer her skills are based on her healing stat so you'd want to upgrade this third equipment as it says it will improve that healing set whereas you don't need to bother upgrading her other two equipment slots since those would increase her attack or her HP which she does not need either of those things the last aspect of a character is this little heart icon which is your friendship with a character improving character friendship is one of my favorite aspects of the game is you can not only obtain stat Buffs for increasing friendship but you can also unlock fun Side Stories and live 2D animations for the cast one in two star students can reach a maximum of level 10 friendship and three star students can reach level 20 friendship the main benefit for me of a five-star character is that you can increase friendship up to a hundred and you'll get these little sad Buffs along the way but again there are diminishing returns characters will unlock different stories and a live 2D animation at different friendship levels but they'll only do that between levels 1 and 10 so that keeps some variety with friendship leveling and also means that if you want to see a character's story you technically don't have to bring them up past a one star in order to access that character friendship can be leveled up primarily at the cafe where five random students will appear each day for you to interact with you can also invite one student who you've obtained to visit the cafe the Friendship is leveled up by tapping on the students and by giving them gifts character friendship can also be leveled by visiting the lesson tab where you can increase friendship with characters while also obtaining tactical Blu-rays and Tech notes which can level up skills there are several different game modes where you can collect the resources to level up skills equipment and character levels the first of these are found here in the missions tab standard missions are divided into 18 different levels which will increase in level cap and difficulty the higher you progress there is a normal mode where you can collect equipment and ex skill Blu-rays and there's a hard mode where you can collect all of the above as well as lfs for one two and three star characters you can actually grind hard modes to unlock characters this way which is exactly what I did to unlock kifumi all normal floors will have five missions and all hard floors will have three they will all be formatted in a similar way you will enter the mission to see a puzzle made of hexes which you'll navigate your students through to reach the boss your mission objectives will all be displayed in the upper left here and you will be able to see the enemy icons as cheap babies to help plan your path to the boss these puzzles are largely straightforward to navigate but if you ever feel stumped or you're unsure about how to proceed there's a robust community that posts walkthroughs for each level both normal and hard so there's absolutely no shame in checking these out on YouTube I've had to do this many times to make sure my pathing was right particularly in those later stages if you want to know what enemies will be on a particular stage you can check this option here to see which enemies you'll be fighting against for stages that have different enemy types listed you'll have to run two different sets of teams so two teams of six characters each and one team will fight one set of enemies and vice versa this is to say that if you see the enemies will have let's say piercing an explosive armor you can plan to have one team with explosive units and one team with piercing units since they'll generally end up fighting only one type of enemy when deciding where I want to place them you can look at the enemy Chibis to figure out which damage type they'll take the students will all be explosive the Mexican tanks will be piercing and the Spooky cloaked folks are all going to be Mystic periodically blue archive will also have events with their own missions to run I would highly suggest prioritizing these events when they're running as they are a ton of fun and a great way to get resources characters and level up materials for your characters in order to run missions and events you'll need to use energy which is also called AP this is stored here a set amount will accumulate each day depending on your level and then any extra energy can be obtained from completing daily tasks or from visiting the cafe increasing the level of the cafe will increase the amount of energy you gain from it so it's a worthwhile investment to improve the cafe a normal stage will only use 10 AP or as a hard stage we'll use 20. so unless you're grinding for a specific character's elifs I generally just run normal missions and run a maximum of three hard missions a day the game does give you the option to refill AP by using your gotcha currency but I would advise against this is your gotcha currency is extremely valuable for making polls you can kind of think of your AP as a timer on how much to play the game once you've run out the game is inviting you to go play something else so it is respecting your time the other way that this game respects your time is by making stages sweepable this means that once you've completed the three tasks within a stage you can then sweep that stage in the future and you won't have to use your characters to run it over and over again I'll often set aside time the evening or a weekend to run stages once and then I can just sweep them the next time I want to run that mission stage which is really convenient the other place you can use your energy or your AP as in commissions which have two modes one for obtaining activity reports to level up your characters and one to obtain credits which are the generic currency used for all leveling in the activity report stage you'll be fighting mobs of angry robots trying to electrocute you to death so you'll want explosive or piercing characters who can hit a large AOE to most easily Clear the Stage whereas in the money credit stage you'll be fighting a single Mystic Jack in the Box who will not be attacking you so you just need your hardest hitting piercing and Mystic single Target damage dealers to lay into this thing if you can clear five of these Jack in the boxes before the time runs out you'll have fully Clear the Stage from my experience I generally just run that first commission for activity reports as I found these tend to be the resources I burn through the fastest but I only run it once a day unless I'm completely out of activity reports or if there's a campaign going on to increase the rewards gained the last place you can use AP is the scrimmage Tab and if you are a new or a mid-level player I wouldn't bother with this tab whatsoever the rewards from scrimmage are used to upgrade those five-star specific weapons and if you aren't even close to level 50 and you don't even have a 5 Star character you should just ignore this stage if you are someone who has or is close to having a five star character and you are at least the level 50. buckle up because scrimmage is some of the hardest content in the game you will be fighting against four to six character teams of AI students some of which will hit extremely hard and will try to down your team as fast as possible they have access to all the same things you do healers support units extremely good damage dealers and they they will capitalize on it even as a late game player I found it quite difficult to complete the sweep requirements just for the second stage and I haven't bothered with the last stage because I don't need that in my life so be prepared uh you might end up running these multiple times but whenever you do get a sweepable run count your stars for good luck and just sweep that in the future I typically don't touch these stages because you can get the level of materials from them through events and I'd rather spend my AP in that way but if there is a campaign and you have the AP to spare feel free to run this as you like for all other game modes you won't be using AP and instead you'll be using tickets which reset each day in the bounties tab you can use two tickets per day to obtain tactical Blu-rays Tech notes and artifacts to level up character skills you actually get two tickets per each of these stages so you have a total of six which is awesome if you have the monthly pass which is the only financial purchase I would suggest making in this game see my other video on this please don't buy packs then you will have two extra tickets per stage but that's more a quality of life Improvement and you can absolutely take full advantage of this with just the two tickets per stage all bounties will feature the same enemies the group of wily sushi-headed students called The kaisingers Who all have explosive armor as well as their minions who will try to slow you down your goal is to down all of these sushi-headed kitingers within the allotted time these stages are definitely more difficult than your regular missions but the rewards make them worth your while and since you're spending tickets on them which again those refresh every day for free you should absolutely do these bounties every single time you log in when you're first starting out you'll only be able to complete the first few levels here and that is completely okay these stages can be pretty difficult compared to normal stages because the enemies hit pretty hard and they have a lot more health so take your time going up through the different levels I only reached the highest level once I was max level and even then it was a challenge to reach the sweepable requirements for the stages the next mode that uses tickets are these lessons that I mentioned before here you can not only increase friendship with students but you can also obtain tactical Blu-rays and Tech notes which you use for upgrading skills there are a variety of schools represented and you will unlock higher Blu-ray and Tech note Gathering spots the more lessons that you run at each school I generally prioritize the Chalet offices since you can obtain generic Blu-rays and Tech notes that you can then transform into whatever you want but if you're looking for specific student upgrades you can't go wrong with Millennium gehenna or Trinity since they're the biggest schools and they represent a huge chunk of the cast the last two major game modes are total assault and the joint firing drill which are the bread and butter for tactical decision makers each of these only run for one week at a time and when they're not running you won't be able to interact with their tabs when they are running you can use a total of three tickets for each mode a day and your rewards will include special coins that you can use in their respective shops between the two of them total assault has been around the longest and it has your students facing up against a massive boss who's threatening kivotos which boss will be available to fight will change between each total assault season which is that week when total assault is actually active and you'll have various levels of difficulty to the boss fight which will yield different Rewards total assault is some of the most challenging but rewarding parts of the game it feels really good to defeat a powerful opponent and test out different teams to improve your scores although you only get three tickets per day you can test out different teams for different levels by doing what are called mock battles these simulate a real battle against the boss but you won't lose any tickets or any chances of fighting the real thing I would highly recommend running mock battles when you can especially if you're going to try the next challenge level as they are crucial for testing your strength against the boss while also getting better at the mechanics of the game if you are not able to defeat the boss with one team of characters you can actually re-enter the boss battle with a second team who can keep attacking the boss at the same Health as when your first team left you can do this multiple times with multiple teams but this gets a little taxing because you need to have allergic cast of characters who are well equipped to fight so not everyone will have this many characters and it's a little bit less common to see like three or four teams when you do go to fight the real battle you will have one hour to complete the fight and that includes time leaving the total assault area leveling up characters trying out different things generally the fights themselves will last about four minutes so you don't need to block off an hour of your time they're just trying to be flexible in case you have things you need to do if they're not trying to keep you nailed down to a spot if you have a friend who also plays Blue archive you should consider joining a club with them because it lets you borrow students for total assault these students are called assistance and they can be borrowed for a fee of 40 000 credits you can use only one assistant for an entire total assault run so you'll have to be careful about when you borrow them but this is super useful for if you don't have a particular character but your friend does do keep in mind that you have to set which students are available for selection ahead of time so you can only select whichever characters your friend has in the club based on when they've been preset I uh only mentioned this because uh bear and I frequently forget to change uh out our club students and this can be hilarious when you go to select assistance later on and if the wrong ones but if you live with your friend like I do that isn't such a big deal but you know try to be on the same page with each other uh you can use assistance for mock battles and the real total assault runs but do know that once you've used an assistant in an actual total assault you cannot use them again that day and future runs or mock battles so use them wisely when the time comes for the real battle as a side note even if you don't have someone to play with you should still make a club because you'll get a little extra energy each day from it and if you do find someone to play with you'll have a club all ready to go at that point the lovely thing about total assault is that in addition to earning those total assault coins which can be exchanged for character elifts Blu-rays and Tech notes you can also obtain artifacts generic elifts and even gotcha currency depending on where you rank at the end of that one week season these rewards will include these adorable trophies which you can display in the cafe as well as pyroxine that you can use for gotcha poles this is one of the only game modes where you will be ranked against other players and they divide these rankings into several regions depending on where you were playing the game that being said you should always participate in total assault when it's available even if you're in the lowest ranking because you can still get total assault coins and pyroxine Just for participating as far as suggestions for higher level players who are grinding through total assault and trying to obtain the highest rankings possible let me provide some advice about obtaining good rankings as well as a word of warning about trying to get platinum ranking the highest that you can obtain Platinum ranking can only be obtained by completing the two highest levels insane or extreme and generally your ranking is only secure if you can complete extreme without using a second team foreign this alone is a colossal task to do and as a result the Platinum ranking is the domain of max level players who are either whales meaning they have all the characters in the game or they are well connected meaning you have a friend who has all the characters you do not have as a result I would only advise grinding for platinum ranking if you meet one of these two criteria again you need to be max level that is a prerequisite and beyond that you need to be well connected which is pretty difficult in and of itself this can be difficult and time consuming to run these difficulty modes the reason I bring this up is that the benefit for getting Platinum ranking is just 200 extra pyroxine at the end of the season Yes you heard that right it is only 200 extra pyroxine which is quite small when you consider you can get 100 pyroxine from some character friendship stories as a result I would highly recommend only grinding to Gold because you get a thousand pyroxine with that and the gold statues are honestly better looking than the Platinum ones if I'm being completely honest you will save yourself a lot of headaches which this snake lady has experienced and you can just enjoy total assault for what it is a really fun way to test your skills and kick the ass of some really cool bosses if this still does not dissuade you and you are going to try to grind for platinum I get it I have the sickness as well so my best advice would actually be to go and look at the top ranked players these are going to be your actual bona fide whales who have all of the characters and it's really nice because you can see what all they're using to see if you have any of those characters you can think about why they're grabbing particular characters it's kind of helpful to think about oh well maybe this character synergizes well for this fight I've found myself sometimes looking at the top five players and thinking wow I didn't think that this character would be good at all for this fight but look they're using this clearly there's something I'm missing besides that the reality of gotcha games is that for these really hard modes a lot of times whatever limited characters on the banner will be good for the total assault fight so I would definitely resist the urge to pull for every single character obviously but do you know that if there's a character that you're interested in there's a pretty good chance that they're gonna be good for this total assault so just keep that in mind um obviously you don't have to level up every single character you get but if you're grinding for gold I would definitely take a look to see what the top level players are doing level up your characters do a bunch of mock battles and also with that advice about looking at the top players obviously because they're going to have all the characters there's a very good chance that there will be some sloth that you have to fill with other people but I have not found that to be an issue whatsoever there's a lot of people who can slot in over other students so yeah I wouldn't sweat it too much just look to the top players for General guidance as far as what characters you could run and then go and run some testing from there just make sure that you're having fun and don't lose sight of that by obsessing over rankings the other mode that will rotate on one week Cycles is the joint firing drill which is a relatively new addition to the game although it's new this is quickly becoming my favorite game mode for a few reasons first the mode is entirely based on self-improvement so you were only ever ranked against yourself this removes that social pressure of ranking against others in total assault while still keeping the fun Challenge and team comp testing that I really enjoy similar to Total assault the actual type of joint firing drill will differ between each one week session so you'll get a variety of challenges to try over time from what I've seen so far the gameplay of joint firing drill is kind of similar to Commissions in that you'll either fight a series of jack-in-the-box enemies or you'll fight a swarm of those tiny robots trying to take you down but there will be some extra caveats to these fights such as decreased accuracy of your characters or decrease defense or increase time for your ex skills to be reactivated as a result support units are super important for these modes and it gives your support characters a chance to shine through these stages not only that just having the opportunity to try students you might not have tried in other areas is so rewarding I have tried these stages with characters who I had never run in a different mode before and it was so much fun I really enjoyed it so I like this mode quite a bit whereas total assault generally tends to be geared towards a very powerful characters I would say this mode is way more flexible and wanting you to try a huge range of characters which is awesome the main difference here is that you'll have a total of three tickets each day where you'll need to have three different teams of characters to complete these tasks we're in total assault you can theoretically beat it with just one team you are going to have to have three different teams now they don't all have to have six students on them so if you don't have six students worth of teams don't sweat it you just need three teams just know your ex skill the bar will fill up a little slower but you can still totally run this mode even if you don't have three teams full of students you can do mock battles just like with total assault and when you're ready to go you can use your three tickets in any combination you can run the same stage three times you can run three different levels the world is your oyster here when you're finished with your three tickets you'll get joint firing drill coins which you can use to buy artifacts activity reports and the stones which are used for specialized crafting which we're gonna get into in just a moment here and just like with total assault I would highly suggest trying this out when it's available since it's a ton of fun to test out different teams and the rewards are fantastic for leveling up characters a few brief words on Crafting which I haven't had much of a chance to talk about until now crafting is an additional way to obtain all the different materials and items in the game you can obtain gifts for students furniture for the Cafe Blue raised Tech notes artifacts you name it the least resource intensive mode is the simple crafting chamber where you can put in these items called keystones which you'll generally get just from doing tasks every single day I think I get about one per day and then you can select which general item category you'd like crafted from a randomized list the items I generally like to craft are activity reports gifts furniture and high grade materials if multiple of these show up at once I have this ranked system for items that I prioritize with high grade materials being at the top and Furniture being at the bottom this second option here is where you can actually select items that you want but this gets quite expensive from a resource standpoint I use this menu only to obtain Furniture I'm missing and even then I only use it when I have enough resources for it I do this because some students have character specific interaction with Furniture which will be highlighted here with this little icon on a piece of furniture and since I love the time and effort that went into the character animations I will spend the resources to get this furniture here but if that's not something you're interested in I wouldn't bother with this section and only do the base randomized crafting once per day in the final game mode I will highlight is tactical challenge which is my uh least favorite mode in the entire game this mode bets you directly against other teams of players uh but it is completely AI controlled you cannot direct your team to attack or use ex skills at operating times and must watch and despair as the AI mistimes your skills or picks a very odd skill priorities to activate uh the gimmick of this mode is that in exchange for having powerful units you will be rewarded with pyroxine and tactical challenge coins depending on your ranking but in practice because the AI is so wonky and you have no agency Beyond character selection I find this to be the weakest mode and the least deserving of your attention I am a Max Level player and I still struggle to break into the highest ranks of this mode because it is so Random the AI also heavily favors particular characters over others so it's the one mode that heavily punishes you if you don't have certain characters and that is the ultimate feels bad however the nice thing is that the rewards are so minimal for this mode you're not really incentivized to put time into playing it so my biggest suggestion for anyone playing is that you engage with this mode exactly once whenever it rotates which is every few months try to see how far up in the rankings you can get with a single day's worth of tickets which is only five and then you never run this challenge again only stopping by once each day to collect your Tactical challenge coins and your pyroxine that you will gain passively you don't even have to run it just stop by pick up your stuff and leave uh when this game first dropped people were advising new players to restart their game data over and over so they could get the characters of the AI favors for this mode do not do this the rewards are so minimal that it just does not matter then it also takes away from the beauty of this game which is how huge and fun the cast is you do not need the characters that the AI prefers enjoy your game so now that I've gone over how to play the game and all the different modes let me walk you through my daily routine for playing this game so the game Day quote unquote recess at 2PM EST which is 7 P.M UTC and 4 am jst so about an hour beforehand I'll log on collect my tactical challenge coins get my login after 3 pm reward and I'll collect energy from the cafe I'll only collect energy if I see that kind of my Natural Energy regeneration is as high as possible and then I will go and grab whatever energy I need then after the day resets I'll log back on collect whatever I was crafting yesterday and set a new item to craft then I'll collect energy from the club and I will run all of my lessons then I'll swing by the cafe increase friendship and collect more energy [Music] I'll grab anything that I got in the mail then I'll stop by the store to grab the lowest level artifacts from the first shop and then it's on to missions if there is an event I will use all of my AP for that no questions asked if there isn't an event I'll split my AP between at least 20 missions and one commission I'll run all of my bounties and if it's available I'll run total assault or the joint firing drill then at that point if there's any story I want to complete or any Momo talk friendship events I'll check those out at my leisure now do keep in mind this is just how I play you don't have to play this way at all I just thought it might be helpful to see how I structure my time when I do go and play so on top of that here are some tips and tricks for making the most of this game and having combat run as smoothly as possible in addition to double checking which enemy types will appear before a battle begins you can also check that handy type chart before the battle as well just in case you want to run a team with a variety of damage dealers when you're running a mission you can swap the turn order of your teams by hitting this button here in the corner which is super handy in case movement order matters when you select an ex skill time actually slows down for several seconds so you can decide where you want to place something more easily if you decide not to use that ex skill just drag your finger back to the ex bar and let go and that skill won't activate for normal and hard missions each Mission floor will have a suggested level for characters but this is more of a rough power level check I've run floors with characters who are 10 to 15 levels below the suggested level because I had invested in those characters so this adjusted level really is more of a suggestion than hard rule for the other game modes like bounties commissions total assault recommended levels matter a little more but you can still fudge this a bit if you've invested in your characters when you run missions you should turn off this Auto end turn button it'll let you make more tactical decisions and avoid accidentally skipping a turn if you aren't able to complete a mission or you need to leave a mission you can also hit the forfeit option here which will leave this run and return to the menu there really isn't much of a penalty for this either as whatever energy you use will be returned to you minus one if you forfeit a bounty you will get your entire ticket returned to you without penalty the only game mode where you cannot forfeit without a penalty is total assault or the joint firing drill but that's why you should practice ahead of time using mock battles so you feel prepared before heading in speaking of total assault you can only use one assistant per total assault run but did you know you can use multiple assistants per day if your friend has two characters available in the club you can use both of those characters for two different runs so take advantage of this to test out different teams in the character selection menu you can upgrade a character without exiting through different menus by holding your finger over the character for a few seconds and it will take you to the character upgrade menu once you've done your upgrades just hit the back button and you'll return to the character selection screen for your mission you might have noticed that some students have multiple variants these students will have different skills attack types and roles but you can still run them on the same team together if you have two heinas and you can still run them on the same team so this doesn't limit you when deciding which teams you're gonna run you can pause the battle at any time by hitting this pause button here which will pull up this handy little menu this pause menu also houses one of my favorite buttons in the game the restart button if a battle isn't going well and you feel like you could have done things differently just hit the pause button before the battle completes and hit restart so you can try it again this feature is super forgiving and really nice if you feel like you were really close but something went wrong or you accidentally mistimed an ex skill but you also don't have to use this if you're happy with your run in addition you can also increase the speed of the battle by hitting this button here I generally prefer battles to be at two to three times speed since your ex skills will become selectable faster but one time speed is really nice when you're first learning the game just to get a feel for the timing of everything you might also notice there is an auto button that is right here it is unfortunately a lie and you shouldn't pretend that it does not exist the AI for the enemies is pretty decent but the decisions you make in battle are precise enough that the Auto Battle AI just cannot compete and you can actually lose a lot of games if you let the AI run the battle for you a factor of the game that I did not discuss are terrain types which theoretically have an impact on combat different students will have different affinities for different areas and they'll perform better in those areas but after a year of testing I found that other factors like a student's ex skill their passive skills the amount of investment that you have in them those play a lot bigger roles in the game compared to terrain types so I'd say if it's something where you want to invest the brain power into it you absolutely can the one place where I tend to think about terrain is total assault so if you're someone who is grinding for those higher levels that's definitely something to keep in mind but by and large I would say that you can kind of ignore terrain types and really focus more on what is it that a student's ex skill does and go from there within the blue archive Community it is widely understood that if you want a character that is on a banner you should only roll on that Banner if you have at least 24 000 pyroxine anything less than this and you are at risk of shooting your hard-earned pyroxine into the void with 24 000 you are guaranteed that you will get that character if you end up being unlucky The Only Exception I would make for this rule is that if you are brand new to the game you do technically need units to actually play so I would suggest only using a maximum of 4 800 pyroxine or 40 poles to obtain characters from the cast to play with [Music] and finally don't forget about the story this whole video has been largely focused on the gameplay missions but one of the best aspects of blue archive is the story and Side Stories don't skip these you are missing out on some of the best parts of the game outside of the gameplay then you were also letting gosh a currency language waiting to be claimed if you skip these and with that that's everything that you need to know about blue archive if you do have any other questions or comments please leave them in the comments below then I'll be happy to answer whatever I can some other great resources for this game include gameplays blue archive beginner guide which is absolutely spectacular and for higher level play I'd highly suggest Valiant who puts out great blue archive content that admittedly skews a little bit more hardcore but is great insight into the Japanese version of the game than what is to come on the global version as well thank you so much for watching this I hope it was helpful for learning more about the game and making the most out of your time playing it um so this has been four videos I think in two and a half weeks um when I originally planned on only doing this once a month so um yeah I had a couple of things back to back that felt very timely but I think I'm gonna go into hibernation now I will see you all in a month um I'm currently getting my streaming set up so I'm hoping maybe the next video can actually be a stream I will put something on the Community page as well as Twitter if it's working at that point just to gauge what times work best for people because I know there's a huge range of time zones that people are tuning in from so I'll do my best to try and facilitate the best times for everyone to come in so um if you're not able to join that I'll also post a link where you can send in questions and I'll answer those on stream I'm thinking it'll probably be a drawing stream anyway um I'm kind of rambling now I think I need to go and get some sleep uh you all have a great rest of your day and I'll see y'all in a month bye [Music]