Deathblows & How To Unlock Them - Xenogears

Deathblows are a very important part of the combat in Xenogears and there is nothing in the game that properly explains how to unlock them. This guide will give you a list of all the Deathblows and advice on how to unlock them for each character. In order to see your current Deathblow progress open the Menu then go into Status and Skills. Below is a picture of roughly what you'll see when you do this.

The Deathblows that are already unlocked have the button combination next to them. Ones you haven't unlocked yet will have a green bar and a number, the number is the % towards unlocking it. If you find that you're stuck at 99% it's probably because you need levels or a story event to unlock it. There's a story event towards the end of Disc 1 in Shevat which will get you 7 AP during combat, this will allow you to unlock the final tier of Deathblows.

Unlocking a Deathblow is actually pretty straight forward... All you need to do is use your buttons during combat... Each Deathblow is leveled by a button, Triangle, Square or X. Normally what I do is get into battles and spam one of those three buttons until I am out of AP. Then I will check my Deathblows after battle to see if they got EXP and rinse/repeat if they did. Alternatively, you can also just use Deathblows that use different button combinations instead. Pressing X, Square or Triangle during a Deathblow is the same as doing it without a combo.

If you want to speed up the rate at which you learn Deathblows you may have gotten an item while playing called WizardryRing. Equip this to a character to increase the speed at which they learn Deathblows.

 

Gear Deathblows

How Deathblows work in Gears differs a bit, you won't unlock them in the same way when you're in a Gear as you do in human form. To use a higher level Deathblow in a Gear you must level up and unlock more Deathblows in your 'human' form. You can find DeathBlower items which allegedly give you Deathblows of that level... but they never seemed to work for me.

When using a Gear, all Level 1 Deathblows are started with Triangle. All Level 2 Deathblows start with Square and the Level 3 Deathblows start with X. To use Deathblows in Gears you'll need to raise your Attack Level during combat. Level 1 means you can use Level 1 Deathblows... Level 2 means you can use Level 2 Deathblows etc etc.

There is also an Infinity Mode which you can go into if you go past Attack Level 3, this will give you access to exclusive Deathblows which hit extremely hard.