Part 2: Mini-Grade Store and New Game Plus
Mini-Update 1: Grade Store and New Game Plus
Let's go over a quick explanation of what we're doing here. Like the first picture showed you, the grade shop lets us spend grade points to buy various bonuses. The yellow ones are selected. The gray ones can't be selected with one of the options we've already selected.
EX Skills and EX Gems: These allow us to keep our set and unset EX Gems respectively. Later on I'll cover what these actually are, but for the time being think of them as special abilities that are passive.
Affection: This transfers over our affection level from the previous game, but I don't want this since it would pretty much make it impossible to get some characters' scenes... later.
Increase Tension: This increases the rate at which characters (including enemies) go into Overlimit. It makes a certain character a lot more useful.
Play Time: Self explanatory and very cheap.
Memory Circles: Start with unlockable save points unlocked, pretty useful.
30 items: Increases the amount of an item we can carry from 20 to 30. Later on I might blow 20+ life bottles fighting a boss on Mania and you can appreciate this.
Gald: Keep our money so we never run out of cash!
Recipes and Cooking Ability: Keep our cooking at its best.
Titles: Keep all the titles we got in the previous playthroughs, and it's necessary to select this option to obtain all titles especially costume titles .
Figurines/Monster List/Collector's Book/World Map/Mini Game/Battle Info: Keep our accumulated data.
Tech: Keep all our cool special attacks. For the people earlier complaining about me using this: I like Meteor Storm and want to use it on more than 3 bosses.
Tech Usage: Keep track of how many times we've used any particular tech. Might be useful if I decide to go for a certain glitch.
Max HP: Increases the starting HP of each party member. Not taking it because I don't want to go overboard in making things easier on myself.
Min HP: The opposite of Max HP and mutually exclusive.
Combos/Half XP/Double XP/10x XP: Alter how you gain XP, mutually exclusive. Combos decreases how much XP you get from battles but increases the combo bonus. I got 2x so I can both not be too overpowered for hard difficulty but not too underpowered for Mania difficulty (some people play Mania with normal xp, but I'm not a masochist).
GRADE: Increases the amount of GRADE you get in a battle. I believe this is multiplicative (which can matter if you're awarded NEGATIVE GRADE from a battle for sucking).
By the way, you might notice I have FORTY ONE THOUSAND Grade there. That's rather a lot, but I did not cheat to get it (although I can't say I entirely earned it either). There will be an explanation later.
While some of this stuff does make the game a bit easier, it's not nearly as important as my skill (or lack thereof) in determining success (OK if I selected 10x XP I could seriously burn through everything but I didn't).