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They cost 200g normally, or 180g after the 10% discount, or if you do the lewd scene, only 100g so you can grab all five of them for merely 500g.
I must admit, I underestimated the benefits they provide, despite how expensive they are. Without boosting your mana quickly by buying from the Alchemist, you can't learn Fire I from Charlotte, and without Fire I you can't access the Southern and Eastern Forests of Runes, nor hit the Spiders' Fire weakness and gain Tactical Advantage in battle.
This may not be a big deal on lower difficulty levels, since your stats will mostly carry you through, but I've found that the higher you go (especially on Nightmare Mode) having the right tool for the job is more important than your exact stats.
I have it written down that, besides the three spells he can teach (Brittle I, Water Skin I and Thunderbolt I), the Spellshop Owner teaches these stat-increasing courses.
-Mana Control 1: MATK +3. Costs 100g, requires access to 2+ Magic skills, training ends the day.
-Mana Capacity 1: Max MP +8. Costs 300g, requires access to 3+ Magic skills, training ends the day.
-Mana Control 2: MATK +3. Costs 500g, requires access to 4+ Magic skills, training ends the day.
So, you need a total of 3 spells for an MP increase. In the early game, that's a pretty huge ask.
The first couple spells you can learn are Light I (for 100g from the White Priestess), Fire I (from Charlotte, free but you need 10 MP or more and she can't be in jail), Brittle I from the Spellshop Owner himself (which costs 400g to learn, you need 7 MP or more, and it takes up 2 days, not one), or maybe Tailwind I from Nadia (you only need 8 MP, it's free and training doesn't end the day, but you need to defeat the Goblin Shaman to return Albrecht's ring first).
With two spells, say Light I and Fire I, you qualify for the MATK boost, but you can't get extra MP yet. And that extra MP would be very useful for learning Fire I, and later Open Domain I, which you need to reach the Low-Demon Core. The headscratcher is really, what order to take these in? Your guess is as good as mine.
During my first playthrough, when I played the Demo on Normal Difficulty and so ended after the Festival of Greed quest, I used the Spellshop for its courses and to learn Water Skin I, but never got Brittle I or Thunderbolt I. This time around, I want to get more spells, I feel like Brittle I may be a boss-killer spell when you've got your allies around, so that with Charlotte's Heat Up I both John and Paul can benefit and deal massive damage to the likes of the Young Spider Queen, the Minotaur, the Low-Demon: Core and even some enemies you meet in the Festival of Greed. But we'll see how it goes in practice, I'll definitely comment again once I have some data to back this up.
Buddy, I'm playing the game on the second lowest difficulty and I'm just getting stomped left and right.
I spend multiple in game days at a time building stats in every way the game lets me. Then I barely manage to defeat the mutated Hydrangias, and then comes Four Super Ninjas.
The ninjas then go on to ALL get +5 Agi to START the battle, and then smack me with THREE debuffs. On top of which all of my magic does nothing. Literal nothing.
The balance in this game is ass backwards. I'm sorry, there's no excusing it.
I thought I bought a cute corruption H-Game. Instead I got ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Demon Souls RPG Maker Edition.
Although, if it's any help, the Ninjas don't get the same surprise nuke - that's reserved for boss type enemies. Which they are not.
The Ninjas are pretty squishy, they just deal a ton of damage. If you're totally struggling, try throwing a Smoke Bomb at them so the Blind makes their Attacks miss. Blind doesn't work against spells, so take out the spellcasters before their melee allies, start with the Water Mage so he can't debuff your ATK then go for the Wind Mage next. It's not an easy fight, it's a step up from the Goblins and Ogres in the forest, but it's absolutely doable.
It's also possible that you missed an easier quest or two, with rewards that would help you immensely in these fights. Have you already fought the duelists in Trademond, as part of the quest "Honing my Skills"? Because every time you beat a Duelist, you get +1 ATK and +5 HP, and there's even a fourth Duelist that you find in the Refugee Camp. Believe me, with +4 ATK and +20 HP in total, this fight goes very differently.
Magic build is weaker in the first part of the game (to the Festival of Greed). But I wanna know, what magic spell do you cast? I hope you are trying Thundebolt I and not Light I.
And I think the balance in this game is OK, it's just not created to be obvious or simple.
No, it's balanced to be "right" or "wrong."
These aren't "battles" they are a mix of stat checks and puzzles.
For example, if you haven't built magic prior to the hydrangias, good ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ luck, because the companion the game sticks you with is melee based - against a pair of enemies who leave you blind and your ATK-stat nerfed the entire fight. If you didn't buy the magic upgrades prior to this fight, you are going to have go back and start grinding for them.
That's not "balance," that's a "pass or fail" scenario.
And items, such as bombs, help a lot. Throwing a bomb and then attacking/piercing Hydrangea deals a lot of damage. Additionaly, now they don't have a lot of mana on debuffing spells, so you could kill one of them with the help of bombs, wait guarding while the other will spend all mana, and then without debuffs on ATK just kill it by usual means.
Spell Fire could help, but not as a main damage dealer, but as a boost to your physical attacks.
Add these to the list of Gotchas. The quest should probably send you to the Monsterologist in Trademond to research the Mutated Hydrangeas. The problem then is that the Mutated Hydrangea entry there doesn't give you any hints about using tailwind to disperse pollen and the bestiary in the compendium is of limited usefulness (For instance what do the traits Pack Leader, Refined Nose, Gold Hoarder, and Gluttonous do? You won't be able to tell from the compendium).
I agree that Compendium doesn't explain such things. But usually it is explained in dialogs with characters. Pack Leader is explained by companions before killing Young Spider Queen, Refined Nose is known from Albrecht, Gold Hoarder is known from Jacob, etc. So it's explained in the game.
There's a difference between "obvious solution" and "burying the solution" and "if you miss the solution tough luck."
You're talking about dialogues that are spread across multiple characters, at multiple points throughout the beginning phase of the game - and then never mentioned again,
Very few people are going to painstakingly read through the walls of text this game throws at you and then take notes on things like "Pack Leader" or "Gold Hoarder" in the hopes that it becomes relevant at some point down the road.
And unless you then opt to cross reference those dialogues in the compendium or at the Monstrologist, you'll never actually know who has these traits (or why its relevant).
That's just not a reasonable assumption.
If something is going to be key to winning a plot-necessary boss battle, it needs to be stated somewhere clearly - like every other game in existence. Nobody is going to sit behind their keyboard taking RL notes in an H-Game.
As an example - if Tailwind is "the right answer" to the Hydrengia battle, the player should be pointed in that direction at some point during the quest.
*looks up from my notepad with all the notes I am taking on this silly and lewd H-game*
Forgive me the smirk, I don't mean to poke fun at that. I actually agree with you on this point, Hexagoros, and with you Auros. It's not obvious where to look for the information you need, and if you don't find it in game you can get seriously stuck.
I'm just the exception to the norm, you could say. The kind of player who reads all the NPCs dialogues and item descriptions, who checks every tile on the map for hidden items, and who even after winning a fight hits reset and tries it again - hoping to do that same fight better, faster, cleaner.
That's not a reasonable assumption to make. Most players don't play like this. Most players are going to struggle, sooner or later, and wander around lost as they bounce from boss fight to boss fight with the gnawing feeling of 'I don't know what I'm doing wrong!' sucking out all the fun from this game.
I'm not going to tell you that my way is somehow superior or should be the norm that everyone follows. It has its downsides, it's very time-consuming and unintuitive, and I spend more time taking notes and reading information on the game than actually playing it. A lot of players who tried my method would probably move on to some other game, instead of focusing so much on this one.
All I want to say is that, I found a method that works for me, and that by searching through the game with a fine tooth'ed comb, the information you need is out there, somewhere. It's easy to miss, and if you miss it you need to come up with your own solution, or guess the answer the game expects from you, or maybe upgrade so much that you brute force your way through a fight without relying on the boss' weakness - all of these have their pros and cons. Some depend on luck, while the grind removes the luck factor and replaces it with time and resources you spend to get powerful enough to win.
I like the variety of methods that players can use to win. And I enjoy how this game lets me research monsters and use their weaknesses to my advantage, to feel like I can bring down much more powerful foes by using my head, connecting the dots, making a plan and seeing it through. It's a rewarding feeling, and if the enemies and bosses didn't have such crippling, major weaknesses, then at best the research would give you a small edge but ultimately the battle would still be either a matter of RNG, a simple stat check, or somewhere between those two extremes. You just can't have it all.
.
The TL;DR for this post is "thinking has a future". There are some games out there where you can just auto-pilot your way through: you go into the dungeon, fight until you level up enough, then move on to the next area with stronger enemies. This is not one of those games, and for me, that is a huge benefit, it has secrets I get to discover and enemies with weaknesses I can exploit. If this weren't the case, it wouldn't be as fun for me, and it certainly wouldn't have captured my heart like it did.
Also, none of this is meant to suggest you are playing it wrong. You obviously care about the game, since you keep pushing despite how hard it is and how many fights you lose. I understand the need for venting your frustration, especially when the game doesn't provide the answers you need. I just hope we can help you find those answers, at some point, so that you can beat the challenges and enjoy the game with the rest of us.