More so than almost any other Atlus title, Tokyo Mirage Sessions features a huge selection of skills for your characters to choose from. Active skills and spells, Sessions, Radiant skills, Special Performances and Passives all combine to give the player a tremendous amount of customisation, and plenty of ways to defeat opponents. Remarkably, it’s the latter of these options that provide some of the greatest benefits to your characters, so we’ve decided to put to rights some of the very best Passives available in the entirety of TMS#FE Encore.
Expertise Skills
- Raises the power of Sword, Axe, Ice etc. Skills.
Our first passive is likely to sound like a very basic recommendation, but having played through both iterations of TMS#FE, multiple times, we know all too well just how easy it is to prioritise other things. Take it from us, you do not want to let the ‘Expertise’ passive skills go; they’re a significant flat increase on any type of damage, and having these accruing in the background will make a big difference to the damage any character does. It’s also worth noting that the EX version, which is the most powerful and desirable of these Expertise skills, does actually stack with the normal version. We’re not about to recommend that you give up two slots for these, but with a bit of planning it’s possible to make one character hit incredibly hard with their main skill or weapon.
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Blades of Domination
- Moderate chance for physical attacks to cause the target to act last.
Players familiar with TMS#FE Encore, and indeed most turn based RPG games, will be aware that there is a turn order to things, and that acting before the enemy is almost always a very good thing. Such things are even more beneficial in this game, where Sessions can completely remove entire encounters all by themselves. Now, character speed is an obvious way to ensure that your team can move first, but there are some encounters where such things aren’t possible, like those versus Savage Mirages. Using your SP will only get you so far, but skills like Blades of Dominion (and the weaker version, Blades of Restraint) can make a huge difference. Yes, there is a random element to its activation, but you’ll be surprised just how often this pops up and make your loot farming runs a whole lot easier.
Luna & Aether
- (Luna) – Chance of lowering the target’s Defence by 50% when attacking.
- (Aether) – Chance of lowering the target’s Defence by 50% and recovering 50% of the damage dealt as HP.
Be it Touma or Yashiro, which are the characters that gain access to Luna and Aether respectively, you’re always going to want some high physical damage in your main party. These attackers have access to some fantastic skills, particularly those that target armoured or horseback units, so using at least one of them as a main, session starting member is highly recommended. Alongside skills like Expertise noted above, these are essentially the ‘endgame’ passives of both characters, and they’ll tip them over the edge of being tremendously powerful damage dealers. They will often get access to skills that strip away Defence, so there is an argument that you’d rather have the guaranteed effect, however taking one of these passives means that you can focus on full power attacks, rather than skills that deal less damage at the expense of additional utility.
There is an argument that Sol, which is Itsuki’s version of an ‘ultimate’ passive of sorts, should appear on this list, however this only offers a chance to heal for 50% of the damage dealt. Technically that’s quite a good thing, especially when Itsuki cannot leave the main party at all, however this game has countless better options for health restoration, and it’s not worth relying upon a passive activation to save his life.
True Casting
- Greatly increases the power of Magic attack.
In many ways, Kiria is one of the most ‘individual’ characters in Tokyo Mirage Sessions. You could argue that Touma and Yashiro are similar, since they lean in more of an exclusively damaging direction, but Kiria is the only character that is exclusively designed to use spells. That being the case, there are a variety of ways to amplify her damage in the late game, but none of these are greater than the True Casting passive. This skill is truly essential in ensuring that Kiria does the most damage possible, which is her entire mantra in TMS#FE. Grab this, slot it alongside a couple of the Expertise passives that we noted first in this article, and watch the massive magical damage numbers fly.
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Shield of Love
- Greatly Increases the chance to take an attack aimed at an ally.
Speaking of an individual skill, if you’re looking for one particular passive that can carry you through the hardest parts of TMS#FE Encore, then look no further. Shield of Love is, without a doubt, one of the best skills you can possibly pick up. As you might imagine, this is exclusive to Mamori, which is the closest to a ‘tanking’ character that you’ll find in the game, and it will give her a chance to literally take damage in place of an ally. As a General, there is no other character and class combination that is capable of both reducing overall incoming damage, and taking individually reduced damage in the entire game.
This sounds good of course, but why would you want to rely on random chance in order to succeed? Well, we’re not joking when we tell you that this will activate multiple times in every battle. Regular encounters, Savage Mirages and Boss fights; Mamori does not differentiate, and will seemingly protect your party members more often than not. We’ve had runs where she has completely nullified the final boss, often negating or significantly reducing healing requirements on the team, thus allowing offensive members to go all out. It’s almost too powerful, honestly.
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