Obtaining Proud Souls

Proud souls are the currency that you're going to be using to upgrade your abilities and unlock new moves for your weapons. The game rewards you Proud Souls based on your ranking at the end of a mission; having an A or S ranking will be important if you want to really rake in the Souls.

Luckily for you, you can replay missions as often as you like to gain more Proud Souls. You don't have to achieve a high score each time you play a mission to obtain more Proud Souls; just do well, and you can earn Souls every time you replay a mission.

Repeat easy missions repeatedly to earn a bunch of Proud Souls.

The game is markedly easier if you engage in a bit of Soul-farming early on. Good missions to quickly replay for Proud Souls are missions eight and nine, which go by quickly and have relatively easy boss fights at the end of them. Just be sure to pick up as many of the Red Orbs in the levels as you can to boost that rating.

Red Queen Exceed Mode

This section is from the chapter on Nero's moves and abilities, but since we and other people have been a bit confused by Exceed, we figured we'd reprint it here.

Exceed allows Nero to power up his Red Queen, infusing the sword with fuel and setting it alight for more powerful attacks. In order to charge up the sword, press down on the left trigger on your controller; you should notice the gauge in the upper left corner of your screen move up a bit. If you press it down, release it and press it down again, you should be able to charge the sword with as many as three red bulbs. These designate the amount of fuel that your sword is charged up with.

The next time you swing your sword, that attack will deal a fair amount more damage than it would otherwise have done. You don't want to waste Exceed on normal combos, though; instead, you'll want to use it on the moves that have special Exceed versions of themselves. These are, as marked above, High Roller, Streak, Split, Calibur, and Shuffle. If you perform one of these moves while your sword is powered up, Red Queen will blaze with fire and the maneuver will be much more powerful than it normally is.

Exceed moves are fiery and more powerful than your normal attacks are.

The only problem here is that it takes a while to charge up your Exceed meter if you stand there clicking on your left trigger button. There are a couple of ways around this problem. The first is a hard-to-find skill called EX-Act that is apparently available to you at the very beginning of the game, but which doesn't show up on your in-game skill list for whatever reason. (You can find it in the Library, however.) What it consists of is attacking, then tapping the left trigger just after your attack animation starts. The timing is tricky on this, but if performed correctly, you should be able to instantly boost your Exceed meter up to the first rank. You can perform this after any attack, even one that doesn't hit an opponent, so if you have time and can get used to the timing on the manuever, you can get to rank one Exceed by simply swinging your sword at the air and tapping the trigger.

There is also a Max ACT ability that you can purchase, which offers you the ability to instantly boost your Exceed meter all the way up to the third rank. This is performed in much the same manner as the other ability mentioned above, but the timing is much trickier to pull off, making it effectively a random bonus to your charging abilities unless you nail the timing perfectly through a lot of practice.

Lastly, there are also Exceed 2 and Exceed 3 abilities you can purchase which make your Exceed abilities much more powerful. If you have three bulbs in your Exceed meter, but haven't purchased Exceed 2 or 3, then you will perform a level one Exceed ability when you use an ability, and drain one bulb from your meter. If you have Exceed 3, you'll use up your entire Exceed meter but perform one of the more powerful maneuvers.

Exceed moves are powerful on their own, but if you combine them with Devil Trigger, the damage you're capable of dishing out becomes pretty incredible. It can be a pain to charge the meter, and it usually isn't needed during normal fights, but against bosses you can use it to inflict a lot of pain.