Originally Posted by vem

Pretty sure the Skip button uses the beam. At least if the bar is full at the start of the round, it will show the beam animation, so I'm assuming it can use it mid-round, too.

It behaves... oddly, to say the least. (At least from what I remember, as I haven't used it for about a week now.)

When you hit "skip", and the battle super-fast-forwards, the accumulated solar energy - the little yellow orbs that fly of when things get bopped with the business end of a blade - all fly off at once, cascading down towards the gauge and filling it (it actually looks pretty neat, seeing them go all at once). I figured, it's just showing it to us like that, that the gauge is filling in real-time behind the scenes.

Nope. What you see, graphically, is what's there. If those yellow orbs didn't make it to my gauge before the next team took the field, they didn't get added to the gauge.

It was pretty easy to reproduce. If your team dies to the boss, it takes a fair bit longer to move onto the next squad (due to them having to play their death/vanish animation, and their HP having to slowly decrease) than if you draw against the boss (where it just tosses up a "DRAW" and skips to the next one). I found that, if I drew against the boss, that often times those orbs didn't make it to the gauge in time, before the loading screen for the next squad... and sure enough, the gauge when the next squad took the field hadn't risen an inch.

This means a few things. One, if you skip, there's a chance that you miss out on some solar energy. And two, it means that the skip button CAN'T use a blast mid-skipped-fight, as there's no way the yellow orbs could have reached the gauge to raise it before the end of the fight. So yeah, the skip button will only use a blast if the gauge is full at the start of the fight.

I don't know, maybe I was seeing a bug or something, but it seemed pretty consistent when I tried it out.