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Combat in Tianji: Shadow of the Ancients is turn-based, fought by a party of up to three characters against enemies that show their weaknesses openly. The published system summary puts combo chains at the centre of it, and the five systems named in the announcement are Chain Skills, Weak Points Exploitation, Pursuit Skills, Block Counters and a No DMG Bonus. Battles begin from encounters the player can see coming on the field, so the opening conditions of a fight are partly decided before it starts. See Exploration for how encounters are entered.

Named Systems

The five systems below are the ones the developer named when the game was announced. The Chinese and Japanese forms are the ones published alongside the English names in the game's own localised announcement materials.

The Battle Screen

The interface can be read directly off the published screenshots, which show it in English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and Japanese.

• A turn-order timeline runs across the top of the screen, with portraits of the party and of the enemies placed along it.

• A combo counter sits with a live damage multiplier beside it, rising as the chain continues.

• The party of three occupies the bottom of the screen with health bars, the observed totals sitting in the low hundreds, and a small droplet icon beside each character showing a count of 0 or 1.

• Enemies carry a secondary gauge underneath the health bar, shield-shaped icons marking elemental weaknesses, and downward arrows for debuffs.

• A segmented gauge shared by the whole party sits bottom-centre, partly filled. Nothing published identifies what it tracks.

• Skill names appear as banners with rank numerals attached, such as Metalfang Thrust III (Japanese 金牙突・参), Drain Arrow III and Scattered Stars I.

• A battle speed toggle is bound to R and shows a 1.0x indicator, alongside a menu button. Controller prompts appear natively and the store listing marks the game as gamepad recommended.

Combo Counter and Damage

The combo counter raises damage as it climbs. Three pairings are legible in published screenshots, and they are reported here as observed values rather than as a formula, because no scaling rule has been published.

Spirit, the Skill Resource

Hands-on coverage of the September 2026 preview build reports that the game has no MP or SP bar. Skills are paid for with a spirit resource (気力 in the Japanese build), which the battle screen appears to show as the droplet counter under each portrait. The same account gives three ways it moves: declining to use a skill on a turn grants one point on the next turn, landing a normal attack grants one point, and some skills restore it as a secondary effect. Opening a fight from an ambush starts every character with one point already banked.

This resource description rests on a single hands-on account and has not been restated on any official surface, so the numbers above should be treated as provisional until the developer publishes the system.

Weaknesses, Guard Points and the Vulnerable State

Both independent accounts of the preview build describe the same loop, which makes it the best supported mechanical claim available. Enemies display the elements they are weak to. Hitting those weaknesses drains a gauge beneath the enemy health bar, called a guard-point gauge in one account and a weakness gauge in the other. Emptying it puts the enemy into a vulnerable, broken state in which it cannot act and takes increased damage.

Two extensions to that loop are each carried by only one account. One reports that when the vulnerable state ends, the enemy enters a temporary window in which its weaknesses no longer apply, so a party cannot simply repeat the same break indefinitely. The other reports elemental combos layered on top of the gauge: applying burn and then following with a water attack raises damage and takes extra guard points off, with a worked example pairing a fire-attribute arrow into a water-attribute follow-up.

Pursuit Skills, and an Unresolved Question About How They Fire

Pursuit Skills are named by the developer, and a published screenshot shows the label 追擊 sitting above a named follow-up skill, so the system exists and is surfaced by name in battle. How it is triggered is genuinely unclear, because the two independent hands-on accounts of the same build describe incompatible mechanisms.

• One account describes Pursuit as a random extra attack whose chance is weighted by the acting character's own stats, and which can stack more than once in a turn.

• The other describes a chase performed by a timed press of the right trigger, able to break an enemy's final guard point on its own, and able to be assigned a specific follow-up skill with bonus potency against a vulnerable target.

These may be one system described two ways, or two separate systems that sit next to each other. Nothing first-party resolves it as of 12 September 2026, and neither version is treated here as the mechanism.

Guarding and Timed Input

Both accounts of the preview build report a real-time input during battle that produces a guard or block, one describing it as a parry and the other binding it to the right trigger. One of the two adds that a successful guard can roll into a stronger just-guard result or into a counter-attack, which lines up with the Block Counters system name.

There is a nuance here worth stating plainly rather than flattening. The store listing's accessibility features include an entry stating the game is playable without timed input, while both hands-on accounts describe timed guard inputs in the build they played. Both of those are reported as they stand. The timed inputs are evidently optional, or have a non-timed path around them, but no published statement explains how the two fit together, and it would be wrong to read the accessibility entry as a denial that timed inputs exist or to read the hands-on accounts as proof they are mandatory.

Skills and Builds

One hands-on account describes skill points arriving from level-ups and from skill books found while exploring, with skills chosen freely from a menu rather than along a fixed path. The same account reports that skill points can be reset at any time, making builds fully reversible. The protagonist is described as fighting with sword energy, and the third party member met in the demo filled a healing role.

Only three skill names exist in public material, all read off screenshot banners: Metalfang Thrust III, Drain Arrow III and Scattered Stars I. The rank numerals suggest skills have levels, but no skill list, no damage figures and no costs have been published.

Party Size

Six playable characters are reported, of whom three take the field at a time, with characters joining and temporarily leaving as the story moves. Every battle screenshot published so far shows exactly three party members. Character detail is collected under Party and Companions.

Not Yet Published

As of 12 September 2026, four days after the reveal, the following were absent from every official surface: any full skill list, any damage or cost figures, any equipment or item names, any named enemy or boss, any explanation of the shared segmented gauge on the battle screen, any statement of what the No DMG Bonus grants, and any difficulty or status-effect documentation beyond the debuff arrows visible on screenshots. The store listing does mark difficulty as adjustable. Cores feed into combat as passive effects but were not playable in the preview build.