Shadow's Reach

---- HOW TO GET IT ----

At the top of a towering optional dungeon within the second worldmap of the game (the Ripallan area, which you enter just as the demo for the game ends) lies a prize that will make the tricky music-based puzzles you had to answer worth all of the effort to unlock the highest level. It is here that you can meet the Goddess of Travellers, who will grant you an audiance and fuse your excess items together into newer and more powerful artifacts called ORBS.

---- THE POWER OF ORBS ----

What are Orbs I hear you say? Simple. Every item in the game falls into the realm of one of the four key character stats (strength, Speed, Defence and Intelligence). Give one of these items to the Goddess and she will turn it into an Orb of that type. The basic orb is a simple +5 to that stat when equipped to a character.

---- SYNTHESIS ----

We all know that a +5 to any stat is pretty much useless later into a game. However, now that you have a healthy supply of Orbs you can start to fuse them together for greater effects. Fusing 10 of a single type of Orb together increases it to a single +20 Orb, and 5 of these will create a +50, and so on, etc. This form of synthesis is called FUSION SYNTHESIS.

The second type is called COMBINATION SYNTHESIS and involves fusing Orbs of different traits together in order to give multiple stat bonuses from the same single item, and again works in much the same way.

Through the use of synthesis characters can become powerful very quickly, however they do not possess the added bonuses of equippable items such as armour or weapons, such as critical factors, immunity to status effects, etc. It is up to the player to decide which path they ultimatly want to take. Still, it does wonders for culling the useless items you pick up throughout a game ;)