I've only just started playing the game but this game is in a serious need for a guide. Erickdesu's guide has a good start on the combat but it doesn't look like that guide is going to get expanded any time soon and, IMHO, there's a lot more to know. The game itself has pretty good in-game help but I think it's best to have another source for anything you didn't quite understand.

This game has a few menus and I need to be able to say which one I’m talking about.

When the game loads up and shows its cut-scene, you’ll be presented with the main menu. You can resume a paused game here. The options menu has a few options enabled that you can’t change in the middle of playing, too, like switching between English and Japanese voice acting. (Unlike many JRPGs, the English voice acting in this game is quite good!)

Next is the pause menu, which you see by using the “Start” button on Xbox controllers. You can suspend the game from here or quite to the desktop. If you are on the world map, like this screenshot, then you can also use the controller Y button to see the conditions on your current hex.

Finally, there’s the gold menu. Outside of battle, you can see it by using the Y button on the controller. There’s a lot of things here listed on the left side. Don’t miss the upper right, though, where you can see the option to change party order!

When you start the game, you're plopped right outside your "Home Sweet Home" base. What you might not realize is that you can turn around and walk right back through that door to go back into your base. When you do, you'll get a prompt that will let you save the game. Right now, this is the one and only place where you can make a proper save.

There's also another save feature: suspend and resume. If you're out in the world of hexes, you can go to the system menu (ESC key or Start on an XBox controller) and suspend the game. This will make a special save of your game that isn't in a save game slot then, annoyingly, go to the Title menu via the cutscene you get when you load up. (If you have just done an normal save and you're looking to get out of the game, the same system menu also has a quit to desktop option.)

You can also make your own save points by making energy stations. You'll need to get a little ways into the game before you can do that, though.

This is hardly the best save system I've ever seen but it isn't quite as bad as it sounds. One of the main reasons for re-loading a game is to try a battle again and this game has another system for that: it charges you! When you get defeated, you don't just get a game over, you get the option to re-try from the start but you have to pay every time you do it. It's a really small fee - you'll need to use it dozens of times to even start to talk about real money. (If you need more than a dozen times, don't keep throwing away your cash. Re-load an older save and see about preparing better!)

It seems that every chapter has a main mission and a few smaller side missions. Those side missions are found at the guild. The first order of business is to run down the hill (chatting politely with the people on the way, naturally) and go into the guild. When you look at the board at the far end, you'll get your missions.

You can only get 3 at a time so, when you finish a few, be sure to check the board again to make sure it's clear. Or don't. Because...

When you finish the main mission for the chapter, walking in to your home base will trigger a message asking if you want to move on to the next chapter. If you've got outstanding side missions, it will warn you about those.

I really don't think you want to skip those side missions. The first ones are kinda dumb but they're easy and pay very well. There's a mission in Chapter 1 about giving a doll to a shop owner that you definitely want to do as that opens many well-paying missions in the future. (It seems he's letting his quite-young daughter run the shop! Well, I guess I've seen worse. Final Fantasy 7's gang left an extremely under-aged Marlene to run a bar! ;)

Once you've played around in the starting town and seen how the mission system works, you'll want to head out of town. When you do, make a bee-line for the Arena. Most of it is closed. There's a little girl selling ice cream that's good for a laugh (it's made of WHAT!?) but that's it. The main thing you want, though, is the guy at the desk on the left side. He gives you the tutorial.

Yeah, I know, you just got this game with a neat, new battle system and you're itching to try it out. When I hit the tutorial, I figured I would just do the first few and come back in a few hours to do the rest. That didn't work out so well. In the first few hours, you'll actually see all of that stuff except for the dual wielding! So yeah, you're going need to do the whole thing. Try not to bump your nose on the learning cliff.

In the next chapter, the two guys at the other desk will open the proper Arena. It's a pretty standard JRPG arena where you pay money to fight foes. If you win, you get your entry fee back plus a small bonus plus the loot from the encounter. The XP isn't bad, either. Any items you use do get used, though. You don't get special bullets or first aid kits back. If you get defeated, you don't lose the game, you just walk out without the cash payout. You do still get any loot you managed to pick up, though!

The world map is another unique thing about this game. You basically have to dig the whole place out with "energy hexes." Various enemies (especially human-looking enemies) drop patterns of hex tiles, a bit like puzzle pieces. You use these to open up the map.

When you drop one of these puzzle pieces on the map, you will be allowed to move it wherever you like and turn it around, too, though you can't flip it upside down. In order to be placed, your puzzle piece can only lie on hexes. It doesn't matter if those hexes are opened already or not, but you can not drop the puzzle piece if any of it is off of the map. Also, the piece has to be placed so it grants you more access - you can just drop it out in the middle of the map.

For example, in this image you can see a long passage going up and left. The area that I've opened up is as far as you're going to get with the pieces that are dropping early in the game. If you could flip the puzzle piece upside down you could get a couple more hexes but that's not allowed.

Also, at the top of the picture, you can see a couple of green hexes. Those can only be opened if you have colored hex puzzle pieces that are the same color. Colored pieces can open their own color and also white. Colored sets are not easy to find but you'll often be given them at the start of chapter missions. (Don't go selling them off until you know what you're doing!)

Advancement in this game is by weapon type. At the start of the game, Zephyr has a machine gun and the other two have pistols. Vashyron has a box of grenades, too. (Try to avoid using these for now! They do great damage in an area but you haven't really got a way to get more of them. Use them only in emergencies!) All three have skill levels. As your characters do damage with their guns (or grenades), the skill level goes up.

Your character's overall level is determined by adding the three together. At the start of the game, everyone has 1 skill level in each so each character's total level is 3. Your character's overall level determines hit points and how much weight they can carry.

Hit points and carrying capacity are pretty important so you aren't going to want to just leave everyone with the same weapon types the whole game. Pass that machine gun around a little. I don't think you need to keep everyone at the same levels but those first three experience levels come really fast even with the starting weapons - might as well get some free hit points!

When one of your characters gets a turn, the game pauses. At this point you can move your character around, switch what’s going on with your off-hand, or shoot.

Moving around is simple stuff – just move the stick around and your character goes a’running. Behind your character’s name, there’s shading that moves right to left. When it gets to the left edge, that character’s turn is done. While you’re running around, the enemies won’t just stand and wait, some of them can move and even shoot at you. If an enemy is just about to hit you with a melee attack, running can actually get your character out of the way!

When you try to shoot, a circle will build up around your target. While that circle is filling, enemies will move and shoot just as if you’re running and the shaded bar will slide along, too. If the shaded bar empties before you shoot, you don’t take a shot! Also, if an enemy hits you hard enough, you stop aiming and have to start all over again. The closer you are to an enemy, the faster the circle will fill up. Here’s a short example filling up two bars and shooting just before getting bonked by a melee hit.
As you gain levels in your weapon, you’ll be able to let the circle fill up more than once. Doing that will cause more and more damage.

Early on, the shop will have an accessory called the Auto-Trigger. You’ll want to give one of these to each of your characters as soon as you can afford it. Having this nifty thing makes sure that your character will fire at the last possible instant, assuming at least one circle has been filled.

Your other options depend on what’s in your other hand. If you’ve got a grenade box, you can switch to using that instead of your gun. You can also select which kind of grenade you want to use. If you’ve got the magazine box, you can pick the type of ammo you want to use – or no special ammo at all. Grenades and ammo are pretty uncommon in the early game so use them sparingly!

The first aid box is a little harder. You select it much like hand grenades and you can pick what type of item you want to use like picking a grenade, too. However, you target your friends instead of enemies. Also, you are throwing these things! If the character you’re trying to help is a long way off, the circle will fill slowly. If there’s some sort of barrier in the way, the item will bounce off it and fall to the ground – turning into a bit of treasure!

When you shoot an enemy with a handgun, the enemy’s health bar is reduced. (Well, at least one of the health bars, anyway.) Nice, standard stuff – though the damage sure is pitiful. When you shoot an enemy with a submachinegun, the health bar just starts to turn blue. If the health bar is completely blue already, it does nothing at all. That blue is what the game calls “scratch damage,” though a better name for it would be “potential damage.”

To change that potential damage into real damage, all you have to do is hit the health bar one time with real damage (which is what the handguns do) and it all changes over. If an enemy’s health bar is all blue, one shot from a handgun will finish it off! The short video in the previous section shows a gremlin with a bar that’s almost completely blue, allowing Vashyron to finish it very quickly.

So the typical way to fight in this game is to send the submachinegun in first, then finish the enemy off with a handgun. That means you’re almost always going to want somebody with a submachinegun be the first person in your party. (You can change party order in the gold menu.)

The hero moves are where this game stands out from the crowd. When a character does a hero move, s/he runs to the point you designate. While running, the character is immune to attacks and actually heals scratch damage. More importantly, the character can shoot multiple times. The circles fill up just like a normal attack but, after shooting, it doesn’t go to the next character’s turn – it stays with the same character until the run is done. Here’s an example of Zephyr doing one, finishing off 3 different enemies and knocking a 4th into the air.
While hero-running along, your character will come to a dead stop if s/he runs into anything. That auto-fire accessory won’t kick in, either, wasting any circles you’ve built up. Jumping can help with that. Hitting the X button while running will send your character into the sky, sailing over enemies and barriers! Maybe. If you jump right at the start of a run expecting to get over a barrier near the end of the run, you’ll find your character is too low when s/he gets to the other end and will bounce off it! Also, if the obstruction is very close to your character at the start of the run, you’ll need to press the X button very quickly or your hero run will end before you take a single step.

Jumping has a big effect on your shooting, too. Shots from the ground will hit whatever health bar is facing your character most of the time. When up in the air, though, most shots seem to hit the body while the rest are scattered around random (?) health bars! However, shots from the ground also have a chance to knock the target into the air, which sets the target up for multiple hits and smackdown damage.

Note that you can start your hero move at any point in your turn. If there’s a barrier right in front of you, take a few steps back before starting the run. (Unless you’re trying to build up resonance – see below.) Also, you can switch targets. Your circles will reset and it’s really hard to guess what target the game is going to pick next but it’s still a good thing to do if you’ve gotten far away from the original target.

If you watch carefully at the 10 second mark of the video, you’ll notice something else: a gremlin that isn’t a target gets shot (and, thanks to a fully blue bar, killed). The game is actually figuring out if something is between the gun and the intended target and hitting whatever gets in the way! The same happens if some sort of barrier gets between you and the target, which will waste your shots.

You gain a resonance point when a character doing a hero move crosses over the line between the two other characters. When you start to plot your hero move, the game will initially set the move to go between your other two characters (if possible) and will be drawn in blue. If you move the end point somewhere that won’t generate a resonance point, it turns red. The hero move will still work just fine, it simply won’t generate the point.

So why do you want resonance points? Because they enable tri-attacks. A tri-attack is essentially a hero move by all three characters at the same time! They’re quite devastating to the target and don’t forget that side benefit of healing up scratch damage on your own characters.

Resonance points are very finicky things, though, and get wiped out by almost any action that isn’t “do a hero move that crosses between the other two characters.” You can change which weapon hand you’re using or what ammo you’ve got loaded but, if you so much as tap the movement stick, all of your resonance points are wiped out!

When you do a tri-attack, your three characters all run around the triangle made by each character’s starting point. You’re allowed to switch to any character and you can also pick which way the characters run around the triangle. Here’s a quick example against some low level enemies.
I’ve got Leanne with the submachinegun so she starts it out with a hero run, shooting up a couple of goblins (and smacking one down again – see the in-game tutorial on how that works). Vashyron goes next, doing his hero run toward the left so it crosses the line between the other two. If you watch closely at 41 seconds, you can see the resonance score go up as he crosses the line. He kills off a goblin and, because I’m really too high level for these enemies, even kills off a rogue gunman that hasn’t been painted blue at all.

With resonance at 2, I can do a nice tri-attack. It’s Zephyr’s turn but I could have started the hero moves with Leanne or Vashyron if I wanted. I want to finish off that goblin, though, and Leanne already made it blue so I start with Zephyr and make the characters run so that Zephyr will close on the goblin. I start it off, and you can see what happens in the video. The enemies are weak enough that the battle ends before the tri-attack even finishes.

Here’s another video – this one with two tri-attacks against some stronger foes.Notice in the first tri-attack how Leanne runs out of gas but Vashyron keeps running for a while? I used a resonance of two so each character runs through two corners. For Vashyron, that meant going a lot further than either of the other two characters so he got a little bonus time at the end. As long as you don’t run into any enemies or barriers, your characters will up at the points of the same triangle when it’s over.

Did you also notice how the guy playing this game managed to miss his bonus shots every time? That’s NOT RELEVANT TO THIS GUIDE! <glare>

Naturally, there’s a cost for all these wonderful moves and that cost is the bezels at the bottom of the screen. Every hero move costs a bezel. Every tri-attack costs a bezel, too. Bezels re-fill every time an enemy is killed. They also re-fill when a body part is destroyed. Handguns can do something called a “gauge break” which divides a body part’s health bar in two. When that happens, you’ll get another bezel for removing 50% of the health.

If all your bezels are empty, you go into a critical state and your characters get the shakes. Bad. They don’t charge their aim circles as quickly and, when they do fire, they fire more slowly. Worse yet, your characters start taking real damage instead of blue “scratch” damage and, in this game, health doesn’t come back unless you use one of the “perfect health” kits or rest at a save point. If any character’s health bar gets emptied, it’s game over.

Bezels can also be destroyed. If your character takes 1000 scratch damage, a bezel shatters and the character’s scratch damage is healed. Shattered pieces of bezel are strewn around the field. If you can pick up four of them, a bezel gets restored. It’s still empty but at least it can be filled. If an enemy picks up a bezel piece, the enemy gets some health back and your broken bezel will stay broken until you rest!

At the start of the game, you’ve only got three bezels. That makes tri-attacks at the very start of the game rather risky unless you get a bezel back while setting the whole thing up. You can get bezel pieces in main story missions, from some of the red encounter hexes, and sometimes from uncovering treasure on the map. You'll need to find four pieces to add one bezel.

Killing off all the enemies will finish the battle and restore your bezels to what they were when the battle started (unless one or more of them has been destroyed). If there are any enemy leaders, killing all the leaders will make the rest of the enemies dissolve.

Sometimes you just don't want to fight a battle. In most battles, there will be an exit right behind where you start. Simply run through that exit, confirm that you want to run, and the battle ends. You can also end a battle by using an escape hex in your first aid kit. Using that won't just exit the battle - it will take you all the way out to the world map again! (Very handy if you get to the end of a dungeon and you don't want to have to fight your way back out again.)

Keep in mind that exiting does not restore bezels. If you exit the game with empty bezels, those bezels will start out empty in your next battle! You can still fill the bezels by defeating enemies or resting but using your last bezel to hero-run to the exit can be a dangerous gamble.

They look nice (or silly) and that's it. If you're looking for buffs, customize your guns or maybe toss some potions around with the first aid kit. Clothing does absolutely nothing but change how your character looks.

You can find clothing when you uncover the map or you can buy it in the clothing store of the starter town. The clothing store has quite a few missions that will help open up more outfit options. Failing to complete one of those missions will close the store for a time.

By the way, you can skip these elevator scenes by pushing A on an XBox controller.

I've barely started playing the game so there's a lot that isn't here yet. Hopefully I'll like the game well enough to expand on it but I wanted to get something out ASAP.

Threetimes has an excellent, text-only guide on good old GameFAQs that you should read for about a megabyte's worth of details: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps3/959317-resonance-of-fate/faqs/60149, I couldn't have built this guide without help from that guide!