The AP System, in which AP stands for Ability Points, is a gameplay mechanic introduced in Star Ocean: Anamnesis. Replacing the MP value from previous entries in the Star Ocean series, it is total amount of points a character can spend to use battle skills.
Appearances[]
Anamnesis[]
The Divine Force[]
In order to use a particular assigned skill, a character needs a fixed amount of AP. If they do not have enough, the skill will not activate even if a button is pressed. AP recovers naturally over time. The default amount of maximum AP is 5 for all party members, but it can be temporarily increased or decreased for the player-controlled character based on battle performance, eg. landing critical hits and blindsides can increase maximum AP, up to 15. Poor battle performance, like suffering damage or being continuously attacked reduces maximum AP, but to no lower amount than 5.
Because there is no way to permanently increase maximum AP it is important to set battle skills for characters intended to be controlled by AI that such a character can perform a skill chain with the total of 5 AP as any action beyond that value will not be used. This is mostly detrimental to Nina Deforges whose majority of skills cost a lot of AP, severely limiting her performance in battle.
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