As of the start of writing this guide I only have about 15 hours in the game.

My main reason to write this guide is that I love this game so far and I wish more people enjoying it.

Unfortunately some mechanics are poorly explained and while the game presents itself as an accessible friendly JRPG it does have some unexpected difficulty spikes here and there.

So as I started to gather information about the game (partly by playing and partly by googling) and seeing that there was no other guide available yet here on steam I thought it would be a good idea to put everything I know so far together in one place to make the game more accessible for newcomers such as me.

If this guide is helpful to you I'd appreciate if you gave it a thumbs up!

 
With as many companions/familiars as you get, fitting them all with weapons and armor can be quite difficult as equipment in this game does not come cheaply. And mana restoring items will slowly but surely also burn a hole in your pocket...

Fortunately you can get a decent sum of money for free early on in the game.
Upon your first visit to the familiar retreat you will receive a one time gift of 3 drops for each sign + 3 Great Sage's secret. The latter are essentially elixir type of items which restore all your HP and MP and as we all know will they are too good to ever be used so you might as well just sell them.

Luckily for us each of them sells for a whopping 6000 guilders. And you get 3 of them at a point in time where you have only aqcuired about 4000. So I strongly recommend selling them whenever you are low on money. However don't sell them all at once so that in case you die you will lose less money if you chose to continue.

 
This should probably go without saying but do all the errands and bounties as soon as they become available before moving on. There are a few good reasons for this:

• It will keep you at an appropriate level where bosses won't knock you off your feet but without overleveling you to the point that the game would become trivial.
  
  
• The rewards may not be worth your trouble later in the game which is essentially a waste of resources. This is especially true for alchemy ingredients and recipes that sometimes unlock powerful equipment you couldn't get otherwise.
  
  
• Most importantly every sidequest in the game gives you merit stamps which can be exchanged for greatly beneficial rewards such as increased walking speed, bonus EXP, more loot dropped, higher tame chances and even reduced money lost upon a KO.

So no matter what the item/guilders reward is the merit stamps always make sidequests worth doing.

 
Familiar signs give you a 20% damage boost to the sign it is strong against.

Single sun does 20% more damage to single/double moon and 20% less to single/double star.
Single moon does 20% more damage to single/double star and 20% less to single/double sun.
Single star does 20% more damage to single/double sun and 20% less to single/double moon.

Sun > Moon > Star > Sun.

If a familiar has a double sign that damage boost goes up to 30%. But so does also the damage penalty against the sign it is weak against. So if you have a double sign it is even more important to attack a neutral/strong sign. It is also worth noting that familiars with a double sign have higher stats than those with a single sign.

Planet is a bit different with single planet doing 50% more damage to double planet. Double planet does 10% more to sun, moon and star.

You also get the following bonuses: (single/double)

Sun: 5/10% bonus resist to fire and sleep
Moon: 5/10% bonus resist to storm and poison
Star: 5/10% bonus resist to water and confusion
Planet: 5/10% bonus experience points

The distribution of signs is somewhat random. Most familiars can be either sun, moon, or star. They can also have a double sign though it is rarer than the single sign.
Some stronger familiars have a small chance to show up as either single or double planet. In this case, if a familiar shows up as single planet, it can't show up as double planet. Same for reverse too. If it's possible to be one, it can't be the other.

Once you tame a familiar you cannot change it's sign. It will keep the same sign forever even through metamorphosis.

 
As you will quickly notice once you get new companions the AI in this game sucks. There is no way around it even with the tactics settings, however using them to your advantage will make life a little easier.

There are a few ways to go around this:

• Personally I have set everyone to "keep us healthy" as they will generally heal themselves before getting killed and keep you topped up so you can focus on using your familiars (as opposed to switching to Oliver to heal). They still attack and use magics so it is a nice compromise where they don't kill themselves by neglecting to heal while still being aggressive when appropriate. The only downside is your companions will often run out of magic.
  
  
• Another strategy to prevent them from using too much magic is to set everyone to "dont use any abilities" and choose familiars with strong attack and good defense as the first familiar for everyone on your party. However this will require more manual healing and magical familiars can do much more damage than physical ones in some cases so it might not be ideal dps wise.

Overall my point is: if you have trouble with the AI play around with the tactics and which familiars you are giving to whom as it can make a big difference in the effectiveness of the AI.
For example when I gave Yellow Buncher to Esther she almost never used him and stupidly attacked herself when her main familiar was on cooldown. Then I replaced him with Greater Griffy and she started using him even before it was catched up in level with the others.

 
1) Use L2 and R2 to navigate the battle menus.
At the start you will likely use your D-pad to navigate those but the downside is that it will hinder your ability to move as your left thumb can't be on the control stick and D-pad at the same. Which bring us to the next point.

2) Keep moving during battle.
Ni no Kuni is a mix of turn-based elements and actions based combat. Do not get into the habit of just standing there and mashing the attack button as this can easily get you killed even in normal encounters. Movement is key for a number of reason:

• you can bait out attacks to gain time to cast a spell without taking damage
  
• you can entirely dodge certain attacks that would otherwise hit you
  
• you can gain time while waiting for a command that is currently on cooldown (healing e.g.)
  
• you can pick up orbs before they disappear (especially helpful in boss battles)
  
• de-aggroing enemies by getting out of their reach
  
• some bosses can only be damaged from behind

3) Pay attention to damage numbers.
The color of the damage numbers tells you if an attack is strong, neutral or weak against the current enemy. Blue means your attack is weak, white means neutral and red means it's strong. This has nothing to do with the sign system but rather the element you are using and whether the enemy has a weakness or resistance against it. So if you are doing blue damage it's time to switch familiars or use a different elemental attack against them. Since bosses have no sign this is also the only way to do increased damage to them.

4) Managing aggro and defending.

• Unlike in a lot of other JRPGs the "Defend" button in this game is meant to be used frequently. Use it whenever you are getting overwhelmed by enemies to drastically reduce the damage you take, let your companions take aggro from you and to generate orbs that will help you recover any damage you took.
  
• Enemies mostly aggro by whoever is currently doing the most damage to them but also by whoever is in their close reach. So if you want enemies to stop attacking you simply running away is another option.
  
• Lastly do not forget about the All-Out-Defense against special attacks or All-Out-Attack to force your companions to get aggro on enemies.

5) Don't be afraid to use items.
This is not the type of game where you should hord items forever only to never use them. Especially after you get your third companion I noticed that a lot of enemies started dropping burger type of items that can heal you for 100+ HP. Not only do they heal more than a magic based heal but they also cost you less turns spent on healing + conserve your MP to do more damage (aka dead enemies and less incoming damage). MP generating items are ridiculously expensive in this game therefor it is cheaper to use HP healing items and use your MP primarily on disposing enemies faster.

6) Steal from bosses.
Without spoiling too much you will get the ability later in the game to steal items from enemies. While nightmares and bounties never carry items to steal, bosses always carry items that are worthwhile stealing.

 
Each monster has a set chance for it to be tamed. Even though the game says that "the stronger you are the easier it becomes" this is not true. It also does not matter whether enemies run away from you before battle or not (as I initially assumed).

Here is a google doc that I found linked on reddit which shows all the tame chances for every enemy in the game. I DID NOT MAKE THIS GOOGLE DOC AND I DO NOT CLAIM ANY CREDIT FOR IT. I just want to spare you the time to search for it as I stumbled on this by accident. If linking this is not allowed or the creator wants me to remove it I will do so.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jrIJRPiSlkcri88TZQD6aFjiQ5GJ-9vBsSe3WlDgX6k/edit#gid=0

Also important to note is that there is a tier 3 merit reward that will increase your tame chance by 20% (1.2x) of your current chance. This is the only way to increase your tame chances. So do your sidequests!

 
Each familiar can metamorph 2 times. For the second metamorphose there are 2 final forms available to choose from. The first metamorphose usually happens around level 10 and 20. The second one will be between 28 and 35.

Before metamorphing there are a few things to consider:

• First of all when a familiar undergoes metamorphosis it resets its stats (more on this later) and level to 1. Even though the second and final forms have higher stats than the first your level 1 creature still does not stand a chance against significantly higher leveled enemies. So naturally you always want to have 2 familiars on each companion that are still at a high level.
  
  
• Secondly and more importantly you should wait until it has learned all the tricks of it's current form. If you metamorph before having learned all the abilities they will be lost forever. To see if there is any available tricks just go the tricks menu and you'll see the list of both learned and unlearned skills/spells. It also shows you the level they're learned at.
  
  
• And finally when a familiar evolves it will carry over 10% of it's current stats to the new form. What this essentially means is that the later you metamorph the higher the stats will be at level 1 once you do. Due to the fact that you can metamorph twice this means that only 1% of the first form stats (10% of 10%) will carry over to the third one, making it hardly worth going max level in the first.

With these things in mind my recommendation is to wait at least until you learned all the tricks of the current form but do not bother leveling a familiar to it's current max level (especially in the first form) unless you know you will keep it for the rest of the game and you absolutely want to min max it's stats.

On that note the level caps for the base and second form are considerably lower than 99 (30 and 50 respectively at most) and you will know it has reached the max level once you get this message: "This familiar has reached its maximum potential for this species".

 
Feeding is an entirely separate way to customize and increase your familiars base stats by up to 50 points. It does not matter at which level you start feeding and the bonus stats neither affect the 10% stats that carry over after morphing nor the stats growth afterwards. The feeding bonus itself carries over 100% throughout each metamorphosis.

Each genus has a type of favorite food (types of food being one of the 6 stats) which will increase both familiarity and the stat boost they gain more significantly. However it is not necessary to feed them their favorite food and in most cases you will get more out of feeding by boosting one of the weak stats (which happen to never be their favorite food unfortunately) like a low defense or accuracy.

Each treat increases 3 things:

• Fullness: This is basically to prevent you from getting all the stats at once. For each battle fought fullness goes back down by 1. So after 10 battles you can fully feed your familiars again.
  
  
• Stats increase: The increase depends on the stat. Favorite treat stats increase much easier than their weak stats.
  
  
• Familiarity: Each heart of familiarity unlocks another 10 points of stats you can increase. Later hearts require more familiarity to unlock.

Each higher tier of treats gives about double familiarity and stats. I highly recommend using alchemy to craft tier 2 treats since all of the ingredients can be bought. The recipes for those can be found in Castaway Cove by talking to the women on the small boat.

Due to the fullness mechanic I also recommend feeding your familiars regularly as it will take more and more treats to unlock each of the 10 extra stats and you don’t want to spend time later on grinding 10 battles in between feeding just to reset fullness.

 
Due to my low playtime as of writing this guide there might be mistakes and missing information which I did not include.

If you have anything to add to this guide or correct (grammatical or informational) just comment it below and I will review it asap.

I will likely expand this guide slowly as I uncover more things that I think are worthwhile sharing here.