Are you new to Magia Exedra? Check out this guide for a quick overview of what each role does and which Magical Girls are worth your time!
Introduction
This guide is intended for brand-new players who are just learning the ins and outs of Kioku combat. It will provide a brief overview of combat, Magical Girl roles, elements, and levelling up. At the end of the guide are some recommendations on which Magical Girls are most worth your time.
Combat Basics
The turn order of a battle will be shown in a stack on the left side of the screen. The character at the top of the stack moves first, followed by the characters below them.
You may notice right away that your attacks aren’t doing much damage to the enemy. This is because you typically need to break enemies to do major damage to them. Every enemy has a second, light blue bar right above their health bar. This is the enemy’s Break Gauge. It goes down as you attack the enemy over and over.
When the Break Gauge is completely emptied, the enemy will break, sending it a few turns down the stack and replacing the Break Gauge with a percentage. This percentage represents how “broken” the enemy is, and how much damage your attacks now inflict. (e.g. if the enemy is 200% broken, you will deal double damage). The more times you attack a broken enemy, the percentage will keep going up until it hits a maximum. You will know you’ve hit this maximum when the number turns silvery and won’t increase any farther.
Be warned that no enemy will stay broken forever. When a broken enemy takes their turn, they will get back up and their Break Gauge will refill, and you will go back to dealing the usual amount of damage.
Roles and Team Composition
A well-balanced party usually consists of the following:
- 1 Attacker
- 1 Breaker
- 1 Buffer or Debuffer
- 1 Defender
- 1 Healer
However, this is not a hard and fast rule. Some bosses may require you to use specific skills or forgo a role you’d otherwise rely on.
Below is a basic overview of what each role does.
Attackers
Attackers are glass cannons that excel at dealing damage. You can get the most out of an Attacker when you’re using them to attack a broken enemy. You don’t always need to use their special skill if you’re low on skill points, as it’s usually a stronger version of their basic attack.
Breakers
As the name implies, Breakers are characters who excel at dealing lots of damage to the enemy’s Break Gauge. They also have an edge when enemies are already broken, because their attacks increase the break percentage more than other Magical Girls’ attacks. They don’t do as much damage as Attackers, but they are phenomenally useful at softening up enemies as much as possible.
Buffers
Buffers are Magical Girls whose movesets revolve around supporting the team with status buffs. These are helpful statuses, like increasing your attack power or your chances of dealing a critical hit. Some of the most powerful Buffers can affect your team’s speed by sending your Magical Girls higher up the action stack, or by letting them move twice in a row.
Debuffers
The opposite of Buffers, Debuffers are Magical Girls whose movesets are focused on debuffing the enemy. In combat, they can do things like nullify the enemy’s existing status buffs, decrease the enemy’s stats, or inflict various status ailments. Some status ailments will slowly deal damage over time (e.g. Burn, Curse, Poison, Wound), while others may prevent the enemy from acting at all (e.g. Stun).
Defenders
Defenders are tanky, support-focused Magical Girls whose primary function is to protect the party with a helpful barrier. Some Defenders are purely focused on keeping the other Magical Girls alive, while others are more aggressive and can counterattack the enemy if their barriers are breached.
Healers
Healers are the lifeblood of any RPG, pun not intended. While they can’t fight back as well as other roles, their invaluable skills restore the party’s health. The most useful Healers in Magia Exedra can also remove harmful status ailments with their healing magic.
Elements and Elemental Affinity
The six elements in Magia Exedra are Flame, Aqua, Forest, Light, Dark, and Void.
If you don’t know which element a Magical Girl is, you can check on the party configuration screen. You can also tell by their special attack meter, because its color changes depending on their element.
- Flame: red
- Aqua: blue
- Forest: green
- Light: yellow
- Dark: purple
- Void: grey
Unlike some RPGs, you don’t need to remember which types are the most effective against different enemies. Instead, the game will recommend certain elements before starting missions. Magical Girls with a recommended element will take significantly less damage from the enemies in that mission. If you’re just starting out, you may not have enough Magical Girls to take advantage of this. But towards the end of the game, these elemental affinities become much more important, and can mean the difference between victory and defeat against the most powerful bosses.
Four Ways to Level Up
A Magical Girl’s Level is much like the Level in most turn-based RPGs. When you defeat enemies, you will gain experience points, and when you have enough experience points, you will reach a higher Level and your stats will increase slightly. In Magia Exedra, a Magical Girl’s Level is tied to the overall strength of your account: for example, if your account is Level 100, your Magical Girls’ maximum Level is also 100.
To increase a Magical Girl’s Level without fighting enemies over and over again, you can spend Growth Enhancement.
A Magical Girl’s Magic Level will only increase if you use materials (Stones, Gems, Orbs, and Cores) to strengthen her, but it is even more useful. Increasing the Magic Level will affect your Magical Girl’s stats, the strength of her attacks and skills, and even her value as a Support Kioku later in the game. However, if her Level is too low, she won’t be able to increase her Magic Level beyond a certain point, no matter how many materials you have.
A Magical Girl’s Special Attack Level specifically affects her special attack. Increasing it requires special materials (Magia Scrolls, Magia Codexes, and Magia Grimoires). If her Ascension is too low, she won’t be able to increase her Special Attack Level beyond a certain point, no matter how many materials you have.
Ascension represents how many times you have pulled that specific Magical Girl in the Fate Weave gacha system. If you pull a Magical Girl you already have, she will gain one level of Ascension. This will increase her stats slightly, and it will also unlock Ascension-exclusive abilities that make her more powerful. Also, the higher Ascension she is, the higher Special Attack Level she can reach.
Who to Pull For?
Felicia isn’t the most powerful Magical Girl in the main game, but her ability to Stun enemies becomes much more useful in Player Match mode. When she uses her special attack, Ultra Great Big Hammer, she will likely stun the enemy’s entire party, giving you an extra turn.
Don’t be fooled by Homura’s weak special attack. Thanks to her passive ability, Accele Chase, she will automatically throw a grenade whenever you successfully break an enemy, immediately dealing a decent chunk of damage. Her special attack may do less damage than other Attackers’, but it also gives her an extra turn immediately afterwards.
The less experienced Homura, colloquially named “Moemura”, is one of the best support Magical Girls in the game. Her ability, Assault Charge, passively increases your party’s speed by 30% and gives you extra skill points every so often. Also, every time she uses her skill, DIY Bomb Toss, your entire party will go up the action stack: one of the most coveted abilities out there.
Kaede is, bar none, the best Healer in the game. Her healing magic cures status ailments — a rarity even among her fellow Healers — and will even charge up other Magical Girls’ special attack meters. She also has the highest maximum HP of any Magical Girl in the game, so she’ll stay around as long as she has an elemental advantage.
A must-have support unit for challenging boss battles. Mabayu’s passive ability, Quickness Enchantment, magnifies elemental weaknesses so that your party can deal extra damage. Her skill, Cut and Splice, grants “Cutaway”, which lets the Magical Girl move twice in a row; it’s best used on your strongest Attacker to deal huge amounts of damage.
Not to be confused with the much weaker Madoka you get at the start of the game, Pluvia Magica Madoka is the ultimate Breaker. Her passive ability, Accele Piercing, restores a little HP and starts broken enemies at a higher percentage than usual. Her special attack is extremely useful because it charges up your entire party’s special attack meters, letting you bum-rush enemies with special attack after special attack.
Mami plays like a slower but more offensively oriented Moemura. Her Tiro Volley skill can be used to up everyone’s attack power. She’ll also send your whole team up the action stack once she attacks enough times as part of her ability, Haste Quickness. Once she hits Ascension 2, she’ll also passively increase the whole team’s speed, though not as much as Moemura does.
Ren’s claim to fame is “death by a thousand cuts”. Use her Merciful Relief skill on an enemy to Wound them and leave them vulnerable to her passive ability, Crash Chase: if you keep attacking a Wounded enemy, she’ll start unleashing extra follow-up attacks that drop their defenses. After she hits Ascension 2, these extra attacks will come out twice as fast, shredding their defenses to ribbons.
I hope you have fun playing Magia Exedra!