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Limbus Company: guide for beginners

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Limbus Company: guide for beginners

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Welcome to the Limbus Company, manager! If you, like most, were overwhelmed or lost upon entering your first bout of combat within this oddball turn-based gacha RPG, don’t worry - we’re here to help. In the Limbus Company guide, we’ll go over some of the basics that weren't explained too deeply in-game such as combat, stat breakdowns, and party composition. Let’s get started!

The biggest portion of this guide will be dedicated to the combat of Limbus Company, as it is wildly complex and very in-depth. Don't get too overwhelmed with all of this information, as we'll sum it all up into a few general tips by the end to focus on. For now, let's dive into one of the most confusing but engaging combat systems I've personally ever seen within a mobile game.

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Combat guide

Combat

The majority of your time spent within Limbus Company will be taken up by smaller combat encounters, usually placed between visual novel-style story sections. This is easily the most complex part of the game, so let’s not waste any time.

When you begin combat, you’ll see a sort of line of icons at the bottom of the screen. These are your character’s abilities, which are acquired at random from their “decks”. Think of these decks as a rotation of copies of their abilities. They come in randomly, and get put into a “discard” when used to make room for the next. You do not control which abilities will pop up and when, so roll with the punches.

Your characters, and the opponents, will also have a value next to a circle on their head. This is their Speed, which determines who goes first amidst the combat. This mainly only affects Boss encounters, but keep it in mind so you know the order of attacks. Speed is entirely random in terms of deciding, so don't worry too much about it.

From there, assuming this is a normal encounter and not a boss, you draw a line from the left to right of these icons to decide what abilities each character is using. Each row, top to bottom, is one character’s choices, and every skill icon has a colour associated with it. For a while, you’ll likely be able to get by simply drawing a line and matching those colours, but let’s dig into what it all means a bit further.

Finally, as you deal damage, you’ll notice a few yellow lines across your opponent’s health bar and yours, as well as a blue circle on each character’s bar. The yellow bar represents a stagger threshold. If you lower their health below this bar, the unit will become staggered, which makes them weak to every damage type and incapable of attacking.

The sphere next to each bar represents sanity, which basically gets increased or decreased as they win or lose clashes and take or deal damage. E.G.O, which is discussed later, can be affected by Sanity and even target your own teammates if the Sanity is low enough. On top of this, the most impactful part of Sanity is the fact that if it is low, your character will be less likely to roll Heads on their coins, making every ability less likely to get that bonus value. This can be vital to keeping your party members on their feet, so if you're likely to lose a clash, try to block, dodge, or counter at least to keep a little bit of it at least.

Resource Making

So, each colour of ability will, when used, give you one resource of that same colour. You can see on the right side of the screen a list of each resource, and they are used for one primary thing. You see, each of your characters also begins the game with an E.G.O. Think of this as a sort of equippable ultimate attack. Technically, you can get up to 5 of these equipped on one character, but let’s just worry about one for now.

These E.G.Os can be used by holding down the icon of whichever character, and will then take up one of the two abilities that rotated into their row. The downside is, using these abilities requires a certain amount of those resources, hence why you want to produce as many of whichever colour as is needed. Depending on the E.G.O, a different combination of colours will be needed, so keep an eye out.

Resistances

The next basic to cover is Resistance, which essentially works as it does in most RPGs. Every enemy and character of your own will have a level associated with three different types of attacks; Slash, Pierce, and Blunt. Each skill will do one of those three types of damage. Let’s go over an example.

Character 1 on your team is squared off against Enemy 1. Enemy 1 might have Normal Resistance to Slash but has Fatal Resistance to Pierce. If you got lucky and Character 1’s skill row has a Pierce skill in it, then you’re probably better off using it instead of a Slash skill. The icon to designate which type of damage this skill does will be overlaid on top of the skill icon in the row, but can also be seen in the details if tapped on.

On top of all of this, there are also coloured icons that have to do with damage type too. If you recall, we discussed how using certain colours of skills produces different types of resources, and your E.G.Os will decide what type of damage in this regard only your character is resistant to. So, there are two types of Resistances at the end of it all: the damage type and the skill colour. Your different identities will have their set Resistances to damage types (slash, blunt, pierce) while their E.G.Os will determine their Resistances to damage colour. If you want to change your coloured Resistances during combat, they will adjust to whichever of that character's E.G.Os was used most recently, while starting with the lowest level of the equipped ones at the base. Got all that? Good, cause it only gets more complex from here.

Target Acquisition

This section will be short, primarily because, well, there is none. The strangest part of Limbus Company is that each target your characters fight is randomly chosen, unless it’s a boss fight but we’ll get there. Instead, the game will decide who is attacking who, and from there, it’s up to you to decide the best way to proceed. The optimal way to destroy whoever you’re up against is to win Clashes, so let’s discuss those!

Clashes, Coins, and RNG

Alright, here’s where things get really complicated. Limbus Company operates on a new variant of the prequel, Library of Ruina’s combat. Clashes are a thing in both games, but they work a little differently here.

So, what happens when an opponent and their designated character to do combat with hit each other? A duel of sorts. Each skill will have an assigned coin value, seen in the top left of their icon. These can range from very high numbers to one. Each coin will add a bonus value to an initial roll that your character’s skill makes, and that roll either with or without said bonus will then need to equal higher or right on with the opponent’s own roll. This will continue until both characters have used all of the coins that are assigned to their skill.

Consult the picture above. Gregor, the suited-up one on the left, had chosen to Guard this turn. As Guard always has a base of one Coin value, which offers up a +3 bonus for Guard specifically, and since he rolled a Heads on that Coin, his value is at 8 total since Guard’s normal base value is 5. That is then squared up against Clumsy Chop, which has a base value of 3 and rolled Heads on one of its two Coins. Each Coin counts as +1, designated by the greyed out +1 above the value if rolled Heads, so he totals out to 4. He would then roll again on his next Coin, and even if he rolled Heads to get to 4 again, he would still lose against Gregor’s massive 8 value.

Phew! With me so far? We’re not quite done. Another thing to touch on is that each Skill has a defence and attack value, as seen in this picture. These will do varying multipliers of increased or decreased damage depending on how far the attack value on a skill is away from the defence value on the enemy’s skill. To be frank, this takes a backseat a lot, so focus on the Coins.

One more thing of note is also the text that will cover the top of the screen when you select a skill to use against an enemy. You will often see dominating in big bright letters, or neutral, or favoured, or struggling, or hopeless. All of these will tell you how the Clash is expected to go, and is typically a good indication of if it’s smart to use that skill against whichever the target is using.

Defensive Skills

Don’t worry, this one’s simple. Each character has their own defensive skill that can be added to their row if you tap on their icon. These are Guard, Counter, and Dodge. Guard is a flat value with a single Coin bonus that will either subtract the total roll from the enemy’s damage, or negate it altogether if it is equal to or less than the Guard roll. Counter is the same thing, except the character using it will do a smaller damage roll in retaliation. Dodge can fully negate damage if it’s equal to or more than the attacker’s roll, but will do nothing if it is less than, so it’s a bit riskier.

Team Composition

Let’s talk about team comp. The list on the right of this screen is your friend. It will tell you how many of the coloured resources you will need to fully utilise every E.G.O on your team if you were to produce that many.

For example, if two E.G.Os used 5 of the red resource with the characters you chose, but those characters only have a few of the red skills, then it would say something like 3/5 since you could only theoretically produce 3 of that skill per turn. This is not super important, however, as if a battle goes on long enough, you’d have plenty of chances to use your team’s red skills and produce lots of the red resource. The left number simply tells you how many you could produce in one turn. Regardless, it’s smart to focus on a few good E.G.Os your team has equipped and try to build around producing as many resources as it needs.

Given the limited roster of Limbus Company since the game is so new, it’s tough to say what characters are better than others, but that’s a guide for another time. For now, it’s safe to use what characters you like until some really challenging content hits.

On top of the Identity's Skills, which will be used in Combat encounters, Identities also have out-of-combat Passives and in-combat Passives. These will activate naturally depending on certain things during the encounter, and even your Identities that aren't within this particular encounter, since every encounter has a team limit keeping you from taking all 12 of your Sinners, and will have Passives that activate during certain circumstances. This makes it pretty worth it to keep your entire team upgraded if you can, as they'll be useful even on the bench.

Final General Combat Advice

So, with all of the mechanics covered, how do we wrap it all up? Well, it’s easier than you might think. Here are a few pieces of advice I’ve figured out myself as I progressed through Limbus Company.

Focus on your coin count

Always keep an eye on how many coins your ability has vs how many the opponent’s move has. Even if the big text says dominating, that’s based on likelihood of rolling a higher number than them, but it doesn’t take into account how your opponent might have four chances to roll higher than you while you have one chance to roll higher than them. If someone is using a big coin count ability, try to counter with one that also has a lot of coins.

Focus on damage types

Always try to take into account what damage type your opponent is weak to. Don’t worry about damage colour too much. Aside from producing resources, using types that your opponent has a fatal weakness to will stagger them much faster.

Take advantage of those two things, to begin with, and as you go on, you’ll learn more and more about combat and be capable of juggling all these crazy complex mechanics.

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Game Modes

Currently, there are four game modes within Limbus Company. Story Mode, EXP Luxcavation, Thread Luxcavation, and Mirror Dungeons.

These are all pretty self-explanatory. The Story Mode will take you on a wild adventure as Dante, the Manager with a clock for a head, and his Sinners. I won’t go into detail here as the plot is 90% of the reason people play Project Moon games, but it gets quite interesting at every turn.

EXP Luxcavation is a simple encounter with 2-3 waves of enemies of different varieties who will deal out EXP Tickets to use on your Sinners to up their level, which in turn will up their base stats, enhance their abilities, and give them more attack and defence.

Thread Luxcavation is a boss encounter that when defeated, will give you Thread. Thread is basically this game’s version of “uncapping” your characters. It unlocks new abilities for them, upgrades their ability’s capabilities, and things like that. Each character can currently only get up to Tier 3 of Threading, and you’ll want to get them there to take full advantage of their kit.

Mirror Dungeons are where things get a little spicy. Unlocked later into the Story, these are long-form dungeons where you get a random assortment of Sinners based on who you have unlocked, still capable of using their Identities, and will have to use what you gather to progress encounter-by-encounter. The enemies are random, the final boss of the dungeon is random, and even the text-based encounters are random. These are pretty easy to understand, but they’re not always meant to be won, as your rewards are also based on how far you made it. If you beat the final boss, you’ll be handsomely rewarded with upgrade materials, Thread, and more, while if you make it part way through, you'll only get a smaller serving of those in lower rarities too.

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Final Tips and Progression

So, once you master the combat and wrap your head around everything going on, Limbus Company becomes a pretty typical gacha in terms of progression and game modes. You’ll progress through the Story Mode, hit a wall, and upgrade your characters by doing both EXP Excavations and Thread Excavations, all while rolling for better characters when you gather up enough of the game’s gacha currency, Lunacy, to try your luck on whichever Banner looks good to you.

Hopefully, with this guide, you can understand the complex combat inner workings of Limbus Company and become a true master of the game!

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Connor Derrick
Connor Derrick
Connor is a diehard JRPG fan and an equally diehard fan of writing. When he isn’t putting 100+ hours into the latest Atlus release, he’s playing board games with his partner or blasting a mid-2000s punk record. Music, film, writing, and games are his biggest passions, and he hopes to one day unite all of those in some way or another.