battle party being made up of one player-controlled character and three characters controlled by the game's artificial intelligence. The AI commands can be customized from a set of skills, with their assigned tasks affecting their actions and placement on the battlefield. Vesperia also features a local four-player multiplayer option: up to four players can connect to a single Xbox 360 console through both wired and wireless controllers. While no online multiplayer is available, players can use Xbox Live to post their respective scores, including damage chains and consecutive hit numbers, on online leaderboards. The boards can be updated by players while saving the game. Enemies, encountered in environments as icons, react differently depending on how they are approached and attacked: using the right attack or approaching them unawares grants the party an advantage in battle. If other groups of enemies are close by, they are also drawn into the initiated battle. For both player characters and enemies, battle skills and character performance can be affected by elemental attributes. Status ailments can also be inflicted by both the party and enemies. They are divided into physical ailments and magical ailments, which have a variety of negative effects: physical effects can be effects like slowing or poisoning a character, while magical ailments can cause units to turn on their allies or automatically recover a knocked-out party member. Items used on characters can restore TP or HP, or remove status ailments. Characters learn new skills during battles, along with Titles that affect aspects of characters. In battle, players can perform multiple actions: walking or running along a fixed axis, freely running around the battlefield, jumping in any direction, guarding against attacks, and pausing the battle to select a different enemy to attack. Characters can launch various attacks, from standard strikes to strikes that can interrupt enemy attacks. The player character's attacks can be chained together to create combo attacks, which create a continual flow of attacks without giving the enemy a chance to attack. Continual strikes activate the chance for a Fatal Strike, which kills normal enemies and heavily damages bosses. Landing successive Fatal Strikes grants bonuses at the end of the battle. During battle, landing successive strikes without taking hits fill an Over Limit meter. Once the meter is full, the player character can perform continual attacks and cast Artes without casting time during the Over Limit's duration. During battles, Secret Mission