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Wandering Swordis a pixel RPG featuring a young swordsman, Yuwen Yi, as the protagonist. Yuwen Yi gets afflicted with a deadly venom, and while he recovers early on in the story, he must set out on a journey to become stronger.
During his journey, the young swordsman meets many characters, some of whom may be willing to spar with you, and might reward you with exquisite items if you’re able to win. Not only that, you’re able to also recruit a few NPCs, after fulfilling certain conditions. Additionally, if you have enough Affinity with them, some of these NPCs might even teach you some fighting abilities.
How To Increase Affinity
The best way to increase your Affinity with any character isby giving them gifts. You can give gifts to any NPC by approaching them,selecting the Observe option, and then selecting the Gift option from the bottom left corner of their character menu screen.
Certain NPCs won’t accept gifts at all. In most cases, you’ll have to complete a specific quest that relates to them. After that, you will be able to give gifts to these NPCs.
When you use the Observe option on any NPC, it takes you to their character menu, where you can see their inventory, stats, and preferences. The types of items these characters arewilling to accept as gifts are listed under their preferences.
Since the game features infinite inventory, you can hoard as many items as you like, and if you’ve been foraging a lot, you might have one or two things these characters would love to receive as a gift. The items that can be gifted to these characters aremarked by a heart icon on the gifting menu.
Once a character’s Affinityhas crossed a certain threshold, such as 20, 40, and so on,the rarity of the item that they’d be willing to accept also goes up. This is the reason why you should start gifting any NPC with the lowest rarity item that fits their preference, because the lower-rarity items will become unavailable to gift after the NPC’s Affinity crosses a specific threshold.
However, if you want to quickly raise a character’s Affinity, you should gift them a high-rarity item, becausethe higher the rarity of an item, the more Affinity it will increase, depending on their current Affinity threshold.
For example, a high-rarity item could increase a character’s Affinity by 16 points, if the character’s Affinity is below 20. The same item would increase their Affinity by eight points after you’ve crossed 20 Affinity with them, half of that after you’ve crossed the 40 Affinity threshold, and so on.
If you run out of items to gift to any NPC, you can spar with them to get some items back from their inventory as a reward and give those back to them as gifts again, depending on the item’s rarity. The characters that can be sparred with can be spotted by a small icon depicting a fist-and-palm gesture next to their names.
The Benefits Of Increasing A Character’s Affinity
Increasing the Affinity of a character requires a lot of effort and items, which is why youshouldn’t bother raising every single character’s Affinity. The following are some of the only characters that you should work towards increasing your Affinity with:
In some rare cases, raising the Affinity of a character would allow you to receive a new quest from them, or progress existing ones.
You will encounter a few characters as you progress through the story thatcan be recruited to your partyafter you’ve fulfilled a few conditions. However,these characters arerare and few. You can spot them by using the Observe option on them andchecking if there’s anInvite optionin the bottom left corner of their character menu, or check fora small panther-like icon next to their name.
There are a few NPCs thatcan teach you fighting abilities, such as Wang Shitou in the Inn inside Luo Village. You can also check if you can learn any abilities or skills from a character by using the Observe option on them and checking if they have aConsult optionin the bottom left corner of their character menu screen.
If you use the Observe option on a character and seeif they have any valuable items, you should check if you can spar with them. You will first have to raise their Affinity to 20, and then you can spar with them repeatedly, andcan even empty their entire inventory.
If a character doesn’t fit any of the three categories, it is best to not waste your resources on them, and focus on characters that would reward you appropriately.
