During the aforementioned boss fights (the Ogre battle at the top of the Tower of Ishal, for example), keeping on top of all your characters’ abilities and locations is of the utmost importance. In the previous example, you’ll quickly discover that the ogre can charge characters from a distance or pick them up for a crushing attack that will most likely result in the condition known as death. He also has an obscene amount of health, so I was constantly pausing to keep my party members away from the ogre’s death grip while also setting up backstabs and making use of my characters’ ranged attacks and spells whenever the ogre turned his attention toward someone else. I suppose you could rush into some battles haphazardly using only a couple of primary talents, but you’re going to have some casualties from time to time and you’ll end up unnecessarily using quite a few health poultices and other one-shot items.
Should a character fall in combat (including the protagonist), they become incapacitated for the remainder of the battle. If all characters fall, you’re forced to load your last saved game. If at least one character survives, then all fallen characters stand back up when the battle is over. As a penalty for being incapacitated during combat, a character receives a persistent debilitating injury. Some of the injuries my characters sustained were “broken bone” (penalty to dexterity), “torn jugular” (penalty to constitution), “cracked skull” (penalty to cunning), “deafened” (penalty to defense), and “coughing blood” (penalty to fatigue). All of these injuries can stack, so it’s important to keep your most susceptible characters at a distance or they’ll wind up in a devastatingly weakened state. To remove a persistent injury, you must return to your party camp or use an injury kit. As with poultices, each kit has a certain level of potency that determines how much damage it’s able to repair (lesser injury kits heal a single injury and a small amount of health, for example).
