Friendship Lvls how do they work?

[OffstagePlayer]

Im only about 5 hrs in and notices sometimes it lowers in dialogue. question is how hard is this to max out? or should i be save scumming? id prefer to just play it as blind as possible and not worry about it. im new to star ocean but have played games like dragon age before so im aware of how most friendship mechs work. thanks for the imput

[Second Duke Revier]

Relationship levels generally go up through either PA actions or participation in battle. In PA actions, it depends heavily on the context, however it's usually easy to infer what improves them. In battle, fighting alongside them against bosses raises it. It's usually not too hard to get relationship levels among four people decently high, even without utilizing any PAs, but maxing it out involves a bit more work and PA hunting.

That being said, there's no real reason to worry about them, the only thing they impact is small parts of the endings, and in New Game + you can manipulate them quite easily.

[Haglitm]

Relationship values only go up on key battles. Generally speaking it's anytime there's a story beat that happens where the party accomplishes something that's big. It should be noted that the only people that get an affection boost on those fights are people that actively participated in the fight. So this means that people that you want to be closer can be made closer by having them participate on large boss battles (you'll generally know where they are).

PAs are the main way to manipulate affections between your main character and other party members, but generally not between each other (there are a few of those however, but they are few and far inbetween).

For other party members, you can also manipulate it easy with writing books. If you write books, you can supply characters with books to boost their affection to set levels. There's a common book, and a rare book. If you give the characters a rare book than the relationship will be boosted to levels that *will* result in a paired ending. This also means that you can force endings that you want by making characters you *don't* want to get an ending read the common books, and characters you want to get pairs to read the rare books.

Affection won't do so much that you'll have to worry about any characters leaving or anything based on approval or disapproval. Once a character joins, they will stay permanently forever.

The main thing that it does aside from endings is that it makes the characters have a bit of priority for each other based on affection. People with high affection towards one another are more likely to have a rage moment if the one they are closest to gets KOed. There's also the fact that it will determine who they are more likely to "guard" for defensive strategies, and it also determines support priority. Rena for instance is more likely to heal the people she likes more and give them buffs first before other people than someone she doesn't like as much.

So if you plan on using Rena for instance, it's probably important that she likes is the character you like to control.

tldr: affection matters very little outside of some slight perks and determining who your character would shack up with by endgame.

[Second Duke Revier]

Right, forgot that books can also manipulate it. Thanks for mentioning that!