Evertale, ZigZaGame's Pokémon-like and anime-hybrid title, tells a story about saving the world of Erden from an impending doom. Since its release, it's thematically similar (and compared) to Pokémon's catching and evolution gameplay style. The advantage of ZigZaGame's Pokémon-inspired game is that you don't need a Nintendo Switch or a top-end Android gaming phone to experience Evertale's take on monster-taming.

Not all newborn Crestbearers can wander into Erden mindlessly. The game's difficulty increases rapidly throughout the campaign, proving that every choice will impact your account. To aid your lonesome journey in Evertale, we compiled a starter guide offering early-game tips while paving a path to prepare for Evertale's grueling end-game content. This guide specializes in covering the game's unique battle gimmicks while showcasing the best practices for forming your starting platoon.

Evertale's turn-based battle system: The basics

You can have up to eight units in your battle lineup. You have a frontline and a backline. The frontline is your first starting four members listed in your party. The backline is your reserves. When a forward unit is knocked down to zero health, a reserve automatically jumps to the frontline to take its place.

You aren't required to have eight units, but it's recommended.

The three primary battle commands

You can perform three commands in battle: catch, pass, and skill. Capturing monsters uses the catch command. The probability for procurement increases by knocking the monsters down to lower health, similar to catching a wild Pokémon.

The pass command lets you skip your turn. Sometimes, you'll want to bank on your units to unleash a devastating attack sooner rather than later.

Using a skill has an associated cost that affects your unit's turn order and spirit points. Your units have unique skills tied to their element. You're encouraged to experiment with your units until you've formed a synergistic squad.

How turns work in Evertale

Battles rely heavily on turn-based mechanics. Your battle unit's turn order depends on the actions you take. Every skill has a turn order cost. The higher the turn order cost for using that skill, the longer it takes for your turn to come again. Enemies follow the same mechanic. If you're not careful, enemies can get a few moves in before you get another turn. Turn order cost is displayed on each skill.

Team spirit

Team spirit exists as a shared point system for all your units in battle. Every skill includes a spirit point expense or an amount gained. Negative points mean it costs your team spirit to use those skills, and positive numbers add to your team's spirit gauge.

Due to the team spirit mechanic, units can't spam their best attacks on every turn. You'll decide which units to prioritize when unleashing their best moves. This means your general strategy plays an important role.

Managing your story squad

Preferred weapon types and elemental affinities classify your unit's skills. Evertale, like Pokémon, uses a rock-paper-scissors system to determine a unit's performance in battle. Here are each element's strengths and weaknesses:

• Fire: Effective against wind, weak against water.
• Water: Effective against fire, weak against storm.
• Storm: Effective against water, weak against wind.
• Wind: Effective against storm, weak against fire.
• Light: Effective against dark, neutral to all other elements.
• Dark: Effective against light, neutral to all other elements.

Build your squad so that it offers the best coverage against multiple elements. You can find each unit's elemental affinity on the status screen.

You can't stack your squad with the game's best monsters and characters. A cost system prohibits this from occurring to incentivize you to keep up with ranking up your entire battalion. Every unit has a set cost when placing them on a team. This cost can grow higher when equipping certain weapons and armor.

Every newly formed battalion squad requires a leader. You can appoint any unit as the leader, but not all units are created equal since few contain the leader skill passive. Always play around with which units synergize to get the most out of your leader's skill passive bonus.

Evertale status effects

Learning to harness status effects to your advantage can turn the tides in your favor during battles. It's also true when status effects work against you since accumulating statuses can snowball into a quick loss. To ensure you're taking advantage of status effects, here are the types and how they affect a team's battle performance:

• Burn: A status that ignores damage reduction and causes damage that equals 0.1% of the burned-inflicted unit's max health per TU. The timer is at 300TU or whenever the unit is no longer present. It isn't possible to refresh the applied status' duration.
• Poison: A status that ignores damage reduction, and the damage calculates to 0.25% of the caster's attack. The poison damage tick occurs every TU (unit's associated turn order). Super poison (more potent version) raises to 1% of the caster's attack. Poison levels are overwritten, and damage per TU doesn't stack.
• Quicken: TU costs are reduced (up to 20%) when quicken is applied. It allows units to act faster in battle. Quicken cannot be stacked and overwritten by other statuses. This is a buff effect.
• Sleep: A negative status effect that renders a unit incapable of acting while sleep is in effect. Slept units wake up from an attack, a status effect, or when 200TU has passed. Units sleeping skip their turn and gain 100TU for each missed turn. You cannot reapply sleep to a sleeping unit.
• Stealth: A status applied to a unit enabling skills with Stealth Strike. Stealth Strike allows 400% dealt to any units, ignoring damage reduction and triggered passives (revenge and skins). Other statuses can overwrite the stealth status.

Forming teams while combining leader passives around status effects and buffs can be a great strategy for winning against bosses and PvP content. Keep an eye on your units' skills to see how well they fit your team.

Equipping weapons and the cost system

Recruiting powerful allies is as important as upgrading your weapons. Upgrading weapons works similarly to upgrading your units. They contain skill sets while contributing to your team's cost system. This implies that equipping higher rarity weapons may cost a unit's slot or two, leading to limited choices in building your squad in the early game.

More team members versus geared team members

Due to the team cost system limitations, you must decide between managing a well-equipped smaller team versus a larger group where you can only gear some characters or everyone is weakly geared (with low rarity).

After progressing through the game, the issue becomes rectified as your capacity level increases. Stick to having at least six party members and only equipping your best units. Like Pokémon, element coverage is essential in battle. After raising your capacity level and becoming comfortable with the game's mechanics, invest in your team's hypercarry, the most powerful unit that determines your overall damage.

Developing team strategy in Evertale

You have a roster of eight members, and you want to consider team synergy and how to combine their strengths and weaknesses. Think of creating teams like you're building a deck of cards and promoting a playstyle within that chosen team/deck.

• Poison teams: Focused on poison and poison-eaters. Having a dark unit like Endless Rizette to lead the pack adds power for the dark element and poison.
• Spirit teams: A wholly defensive team containing light elements. You'll use these types of teams if you anticipate dark teams and teams dependent on inflicting status effects. The best spirit-based teams should cleanse negative status effects while buffing their capabilities. Jeanne d'Arc (light) and light Ludmilla (one of the best tanks) are excellent additions to light-based teams.
• Burn teams: Burn teams work similarly to poison-based teams, where inflicting the status can rack up a unit's power and add utility to a fight. However, burn teams have declined a bit in favor of poison-based teams around the dark element since dark doesn't have many glaring weaknesses. If you want to build one, pick up Elmina (fire), as she has solid stats and can revive.
• Stun teams: The best defense is also a good offense. Stun doesn't rely on raw power alone. Using stun mechanics to inflict the stun status on your opponents means you're always buying time by hindering and stopping the enemy before they can make too many moves on your team. It's helpful to bring in a tank unit like Norza and a DPS like Ossia to begin forming your core.

Collecting monsters and characters in Evertale

Unlike Pokémon, you have unlimited tries to catch a monster before running away. You can increase your chance for success by knocking down three-quarters of the monster's health before tapping the capture command.

To encounter unique monsters, always approach the shaking grass.

Your monsters can evolve into stronger monsters but require farming experience points, which are acquired through battling.

Who to pick for your first SR

By the end game, you won't care what SR units you have, but it could take a month or two of saving to get enough currency (with the help of the Lucky Fountain) to procure your first SSR unit. To get the strongest start on your account, grab Shanna or Jedariel.

Add some investment in those units to help clear the story, as the SR unit will still be the strongest out of the starting cast.

Navigating the gacha system

Hold onto your Soul Stones (premium currency) if you want to acquire new characters. Soul Stone lets you summon on a banner (rate ups on featured characters) of your choice. Banners are separated into limited-time-only characters and permanent character pools. Some banners require paid Soul Stones for summoning.

You should always summon with 1,000 Soul Stones at a time to guarantee an SR unit. SR units are potent but less potent than SSR units. Adding any SR unit to your team strengthens your account, so it's recommended to summon in bulk.

Obtaining more Soul Stones requires an investment and patience. Save up to 30,000 Soul Stones and use them at the Lucky Fountain to gain more. Grinding your daily missions and story quests also nets you more.

Pity system for limited banners in Evertale

You are guaranteed a featured SSR weapon every 500 summons, which equates to 50 summons with pulls of 10. Every 10-pull contains an SR, SSR weapon, or character, but it isn't guaranteed to be the rate up/featured character/weapon.

The catch is that pity does not carry over to the following limited banner. Instead, your pity resets to 0, effectively losing progress for winning any future rate-ups. So, for example, summoning on a rate-up banner up to 49 times with 10-pulls resets the pity count on the following banner to 0, even if it has the same featured character. You need at least 50,000 Soul Stones within that banner cycle to guarantee a featured SSR character.

To beat the system, you must save up and select your banner carefully. Otherwise, you waste a lot of resources (unless you get lucky).

Beginner's Fountain

New players should keep track of the Beginner's Fountain. This fountain only sticks around temporarily. Your first stop is to complete the story mode and then hop onto events. Working through that should get you enough currency to use the fountain. Be warned that you may hit a wall during the event challenges. Hit up the Mercenary feature (with fully awakened units) to help bypass the difficulty spike (these events can scale to mid to end-game levels). The Mercenary feature adds other player's units to your battle squad.

Managing duplicates

Too many sources quickly build up copies of monsters, characters, and weapons. Essentially, you'll cap out, unable to acquire more, leaving you with two options: forging and power-ups. Forging converts characters and monsters into craftable materials. Power-ups strengthen your selected unit.

Duplicates are needed when you awaken the same unit. To begin the awakening process, navigate to the power-ups menu. Awakened units see gains in base stats for power, health, and attack, and on their passives. It doesn't matter which option you select since forging automatically converts your extra copies into shards.

Hitting the level cap in Evertale

Evertale features an offline and an online story. The online story happens after you complete the offline story. Be aware of the level cap you hit from gaining natural EXP. Level 40 seems to be the hard limit.

When you've reached that point, use Green and Blue Coins (for weapons) to bypass that point. Make sure you hoard these resources as you come across them during your adventures.

Unit's stats and how it affects your power level

Sometimes, choosing characters and monsters that make it on your team comes down to their starting stats after you've considered elements and passives. Units have different stats and overall power levels. The stats determine their raw output and are amplified by their equipment.

Higher attack means they deal more damage, higher base HP means they could be a solid tank, and higher speed refers to how much initial TU they have and how soon that unit gets its turn. Ensure you have a potential tank, speedy characters for supportive DPS and buffers, and your damage dealers have high attack.

Tweaking and determining your turn order

While building your team, have your supports/buffers ready to take the turn before your DPS is ready to act. This relies mainly on base stats (speed rating), but you can equip some accessories that add extra speed.

The formula for TU is:

• (1000 - speed number)/10

If units have the same speed stat, the order is determined randomly. Enemies also have a baseline speed stat and a calculated turn order, which may sandwich between your own. Skills have a separate turn order and can be affected by spell type (quick spells) or leader ability but not by your speed stat.

If a unit dies, the turn order calculation is reset to determine a new queue of turns (series of turn orders).

Optimization practices

It's a theme in gacha-based titles where you'll juggle the many systems thrown your way. If you don't know what you're doing from the start, you could be punished when you approach the end game. Here are some tips and tricks to help your account growth:

• Work through the offline story and then focus on events. Events are not beginner-friendly and cost mana.
• Save your Soul Stones (30,000) before dumping them in the gacha banners, and visit Lucky Fountain to multiply the value. Lucky Fountain is found through events that occur a few times a month.
• Upgrade your SSR units and avoid using too many resources on your SR units.
• If you're pulling for meta, select your first SSR carefully. Choose one that can carry through different content, such as Endless Rizette (dark) and Jeanne D'Arc (light and dark).
• If you're aiming for end-game content like Arena, meta is always fluid, so try to pull newer units over older ones. Typically, recent units have fewer counters, which makes them overpowered on release.
• Don't depend on the AI in autoplay. Stick to manual play when possible.
• When facing adversity in battle, use Auto Guard or Full Guard (if available units have it) to mitigate the damage.
• Focus on leveling one character and weapon at a time, starting with your SSR carry.
• Clear side stories to earn exp up materials.
• Join an Alliance and add friends to use your Friends Points.
• Complete High Activity milestones.
• Finish your daily missions and work on achievements.

Gotta catch 'em all to be the hero

Evertale is a story-driven gacha game that motivates you to build the most powerful team to overcome the challenging content. Many obstacles lie in wait within these heroic tales. You must make informed choices about which allies to recruit and how to optimize your resource spending. There's plenty to learn in Evertale and friends to make while uncovering the dark truth behind Erden.