Touhou Artificial Dream in Arcadia – Mechanics Tips

Tips to Mechanics

A condensed overview of stats:

• STR governs physical damage, and provides a minor boost to HP. MAG does the same for magical damage and MP. Guns on Sumireko do not take STR into account.
• VIT governs physical defense, reducing damage from physical attacks, and boosts your HP. INT does the same for magical defense and MP.
• AGI determines move order during a turn, as well as run away chances. LUK provides a small boost to all types of damage, influences drop rates, and status success rate.
• Please do not neglect your VIT or INT unless you know what you’re doing. As the game progresses, damage output from enemies will continually increase.
• There are three types of buff, Attack, Defense, and Evasion. They are largely self-explanatory. Evasion also influences accuracy though. Each buff can stack up to three times.
• Buffs are some of the most powerful things in the game, capable of quadrupling your damage output under the right circumstances. Do not ignore them.
• Due to how powerful buffs are, being able to manage and clear them is a must. Dai-Atma and Dai-Para are critical for this. (As well as other Unique skills)
• If a boss does not have the ability to clear your buffs, or clear debuffs on themselves, abuse this for an easy win.
• Hijack is an absurdly powerful tool. A successful hijack instantly wins you a fight – which can be great in many circumstances.
• More critically – the items and money that hjiack provides you are vital for a very long time. You should be using it pretty regularly.
• If you’re doing reverse level order during the open sequences – hijack will be your way to success. You can hijack Sleepers that are above your level.
• Using Skill Transfer, you can have pretty great builds even without Fusion. Some endgame Sleepers entirely rely on Skill Transfer for their movesets.
• Hijacks efficiency is greater the higher your level is in comparison to the Sleeper you’re hijacking, and gets weaker when your level is lower. Keep this in mind.
• You can only have Sleepers inherit [Unique] skills through Fusion. They cannot be provided through Skill Transfer.
• If there is a specific [Unique] skill you want, find a fusion route that gets it where you need it. Or use Sacrifice to level up that Sleeper.
• Several lategame Sleepers cannot inherit [Unique] skills at time of writing due to a fusion loop. There are a few that can, however. They are marked in the DB with an added (SP) at the end.
• There is no damage bonus from levels, nor is there an increase or reduction to damage based on level gap. This has been confirmed by the developer. We see this as a common response to questions about difficulty, but the answer is that leveling up will not help and waste your time.
• Damage is calculated by a variety of other factors such as your STR/MAG stat (for offense) and your INT/VIT stat (for defense), buffs/debuffs, whether or not you are in the back row, the LUK stat, your equipment bonuses, and more.
• This means that if you are taking hits too heavily, or not doing enough damage, consider resetting Sumireko’s stats, fusing new Sleepers, adjusting party position, and using buffs more frequently.