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Blade Arts
September 14, 2026 at 01:21 AM
Created the Blade Arts hub covering the roster, how they unlock, their finishers, and the September 8 balance pass
Blade Arts are Emma’s named katana techniques, the sword-side counterpart to Koo’s Bloom Arts. Almost all of them are named after a plant, almost all of them are unlocked by defeating a boss rather than by spending down a branch, and all of them are paid for out of the Entanglement Gauge rather than out of the FP pool that Koo draws on. The Japanese interface calls them katana techniques, which is the more literal description of what they are.
The unlock is two-stage, and the two stages are easy to confuse. Defeating a boss does not hand Emma the art itself; it makes the art purchasable. The node then still has to be bought in the skill tree with Skill Points, like any other node. A player who beats a Nushi and cannot find the new ability has almost always skipped the second step.
The Bosses page records the general shape of the reward ladder. A first defeat usually pays a Nushi Skill; a rematch pays an active pair, one Bloom Art for Koo and one Blade Art for Emma; a third pays the upgraded versions and, on most lines, the matching finisher. Two encounters in the game pay no skill at all, and the Crimson Malefact is the notable one, a story boss that hands over no new art of either kind.
Blade Arts sit outside the three attribute-gated root branches that organise the rest of Emma’s list. Each one carries a Range+ node and a Skill Speed+ node hanging off it, and most carry a matching finisher with the same two upgrades again, which is where a large share of a playthrough’s points end up.
Blade Art | Plant | Unlocked by | Matching finisher |
|---|---|---|---|
Cherry blossom | Rangifer, second fight | Finisher: Sakura, from the third fight | |
Dokuzeri | Water hemlock | Lacerta, second fight | Finisher: Dokuzeri, from the Nue Malefact solo encounter in Chapter 6 |
Asagao | Morning glory | Nue Malefact, the third Chapter 3 chase | Finisher: Asagao, from Ursa |
Botan | Tree peony | Taurus, second fight | Finisher: Botan, from the third fight |
Nobudou | Wild grape | Corvus, first fight | Finisher: Nobudou, gated on the second kill specifically |
Thunder | Not plant-named | Kunai and Kirin, second fight | Not recorded |
Nue | Not plant-named | Shidou and Nue, the Chapter 11 encounter | Not recorded |
Kiku | Chrysanthemum | Not recorded as a Blade Art unlock | |
Blossoms of Reincarnation | Not plant-named | The final fight, and available on a completed save | Not applicable |
Two entries on that table need a caveat rather than a footnote. Published listings disagree about which second Asagao skill the Ursa fight pays out: one names Finisher: Asagao and another names Blade Art: Asagao, and both exist in the game as separate nodes, so the practical answer is to open the tree after the fight and read which one has become purchasable. Kiku is the other: its finisher is recorded from the Erymanth encounter, but no source in the corpus records a plain Blade Art: Kiku unlock, so the row is left open rather than filled in by pattern-matching against the other plant lines.
One Blade Art stands apart. Blossoms of Reincarnation is a post-game unlock rather than a mid-campaign reward, it exists in versions for both characters, as a Blade Art for Emma and a Bloom Art for Koo, and it is a heavy area attack described as carrying the powers of reincarnation. It is one of the rewards that makes a New Game Plus cycle worth starting rather than a second first run.
The gauge economy is what separates Blade Arts from Bloom Arts in play. Koo’s Bloom Arts are chosen from a command menu and paid for in FP, which builds from successful parries. Emma’s Blade Arts, her Nushi Skills and Entanglement Overdrive all draw on the Entanglement Gauge instead, a single meter with three sinks and no fourth. Traversal is deliberately not one of them: nothing Emma does to cross a gap ever spends what she needs for the next fight.
That means a build running Entanglement Overdrive heavily and a build running Blade Arts heavily are competing for the same resource, and the Parry System is what funds both. Parries push the stagger meter under the enemy health bar, and a full stagger is the cue to spend a Blade Art rather than keep chipping.
Blade Arts were named as a balance target in the patch notes for versions 1.0.8 and 1.0.9 without any direction or target list attached, and the pass arrived on September 8, 2026 in version 1.0.11. It retuned parameters across Blade Arts, finishers, Nushi Skills and ranged weapons together, and the developer published no per-skill numbers with it.
The practical consequence is that any damage figure or tier ordering written for these abilities before September 2026 describes the pre-patch build. Re-test rather than trust. The same update also adjusted attack patterns and attack frequency for some Nushi, so the windows a Blade Art was previously spent in may not open in the same places. Version history is tracked under Post-Launch Updates.
Bloom Arts covers Koo’s half of the same design, Nushi Skills covers the boss finishers that share the Entanglement Gauge with these, Katanas covers the blades themselves rather than the arts swung with them, and Flower System explains the plant naming that runs through the whole reward ladder.
