The following was accomplished on Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions for iPad, but is capable of working for all other iterations and platforms of FFT.
Final Fantasy Tactics is pretty much one my favorite games ever. It’s challenging, has a fantastic story to those invested into the game enough to decipher it all out, and is a long, rewarding journey of a role-player. When they released it for the iOS, I purchased it immediately, and it has been my go-to way of killing time on my iPad when I don’t have wifi, and don’t feel like/ are out of books to read on Kindle. I would be Tom Cruise on Oprah or Nintendo 64-kid levels of ecstatic if Square would go on and re-release FFT Advance and FFT Advance A2 for the iOS in the future as well.
Anyway, the game mechanics allow for the player to grind levels from the very start of the game. Due to the fact that all enemies scale with you throughout the duration of the game, there’s never the disparity of exceeding your opposition and being incapable of efficiently leveling. A popular belief is that if you grind yourself to way too high of levels too early in the game, you basically screw yourself, because some of the boss characters become unbeatably overpowered once their levels and abilities are scaled to match your own.
Such is true to some degree, but in the end, no enemy with a finite amount of hit points is unbeatable, and as long as they’re controlled by a fairly predictable AI, they’re still dog food on legs. Personally, aside from my very first foray in playing FFT, I have never had any difficulty in overcoming the game, no matter how much I have maxed out my characters as early as the first chapter.
Once you break FFT, the rest of the game is a breeze. No boss or any particular fight is necessarily difficult once you create at least three or four completely maxed out characters, because you will be able to run roughshod through anyone if you play your cards right.
I guess what it really boils down to is if you’re going to power level, go all the way, otherwise, don’t bother until you’ve gotten Agrias, and to some degree, Orlandu, because they’re pretty much the best storyline characters in the game. Half-assing it only makes you susceptible to certain boss attacks and Chocobo rapes.
It does take time, however. Such might consider the use of the phrase “breaking the game” null as a result, because I guess people consider breaking a game open to be an exploit that makes the game inordinately easy at an earlier phase, but that’s definitely not the case here.
It took me 58 hours of game time to get to where I am when I decided to write this. But I’ve got five maxed out characters that can do 99% of the abilities in the game, minus the Ultima spell and Zodiac spell, both of which you have to get hit with before you learn them, which happens much later than where I am (Chapter 2 of 4). At this point, it would take me less than three hours of continuous play to breeze through the remainder of the game if I wanted, but being the bastion of patience and one who likes to savor the journey, I’m obviously not going to do that.
To those who are aware of the job point glitch that is apparently only available in the Piss1 version of the game, maxing out characters takes substantially less time, due to the fact that you can glitch your way into maxing out all the abilities in the game. However, you still have to grind out the job levels in order to unlock other classes, not to mention the Piss1 version of the game does not have the Onion or Dark Knight classes, which I’m finding out to be extremely overpowered and fun, and will make blowing through the rest of the game way simpler.
Anyway, I’ll spell it out in the most minimal way possible; not like I genuinely expect anyone to really follow this guide, but hey, I know that sometimes I like reading guides of games that I’ve never played, because sometimes it’s just fun to see how other games’ mechanics work.*
*All class and ability names will be from remake versions, with Piss1 names in parenthesis
-
Learn Focus (Accumulate) and Stone (Throw Stone) in Squire class. Also, get Squire class to level 2, to unlock the Archer class.
Focus is one of the staples of grinding in FFT. It’s a self-buff that gives you +1 attack power, but more importantly it has a quick animation and can be spammed infinitely. As long as you apply Fundaments (Basic Skill) to any other job you change a character to, you can spam away and amass EXP/JP at will with Focus.
Stone is important because it’s a low-damage ranged attack that has a lot of utility when it comes to grinding. In an earlier iteration of my level grinding tactics, I used to have my five characters surround a chocobo in a corner, and have all of them use stone repeatedly, pelting it with rocks for hours on end. Because they could heal themselves, it was an endless and sadistic cycle of my characters pelting it stones, making it use its turn on nothing but self-heals. But it’s also good for waking up your teammates that you might have inadvertently put to sleep in an attempt to put an enemy to sleep, without murdering them.
-
Get Archer class to level 3.
Honestly, the archer is a terrible class, IMO. There are no particularly great bows in the game, and they simply do not do enough damage, nor are there any really good perches on any of the maps for them to be capitalized on. The easiest way to grind your archers to level 3 is to simply hang back and spam Focus. But this is necessary, because getting your archers to level 3 unlocks the thief class, which is pretty much the backbone of this method.
-
Get thief, learn all thief abilities
The thief’s abilities are the most important part of this entire method. Every single thief ability is useful throughout the duration of your grinding. The most common ones going to be used are Steal Gil and Steal Heart. The programmers of the game overlooked giving enemies an infinite amount of gil in their possession, therefore it’s completely possible to surround a single enemy unit and spam Steal Gil on them endlessly. Not only are you grinding out levels, but you’re also accumulating GP at an astronomical rate which will make purchasing anything at later parts of the game completely available at all times.
Steal Heart is also an extremely valuable skill, because as you level up and the enemies scale with you, monsters become inordinately strong at a certain point. Most will be able to kill you in two hits, or one on a critical. So utilizing the Steal Heart skill on them charms them into fighting for you, and being one less unit to worry about. Smart use of Stealing Hearts is to simply spam it on all enemy units, and let them fight each other until just one remains, where you can then surround it and spam Steal Gil.
The only drawback is that most monsters, regardless of if they’re charmed or not, have a high percent chance of countering with a physical attack when you attempt to steal gil from them. This can be alleviated by casting a Stop or putting them to sleep in some fashion to disable their physical actions.
Steal Helm/Armor/Shield/Weapon/Accessory are also extremely important to learn, because occasionally random encounters will have a human opponent or two. Not only do their levels and stats scale with yours, a neat little exploit in the game means that their equipment also improves as well. Meaning, if you grind early in the game, it’s completely realistically possible to get some very high level armor, weapons and accessories well before they’re available in stores, by stealing them from high-level opponents. Stealing equipment becomes vastly more successful when the opponents are charmed, put to sleep, or both.
Steal EXP is a nice little trick that has a high success rate and doesn’t trigger physical reactions on enemies. If you want to level faster, it’s good to be able to get like 28 EXP in a single turn (Levels raise every 100 EXP), but at the same token, those who are anal about stat growth and trying to salvage the finite number of level-ups possible in the game might want to avoid this skill outright.
But the bottom line is that you want to learn all the thief abilities, because about 90% of the time, this method revolves around using Steal Gil and Steal Heart to really do the meat of your grinding.
-
Pick up a Mystic (Oracle) and then an Orator (Mediator)
The importance of the Mystic and Orator classes are that they contain the skill to be able to put units to sleep. When an opponent is asleep, they are ripe for the picking in being able to steal as much gil from them as you see fit, and if they’re a human unit, you can steal all their equipment with a vastly higher success rate than when they’re awake. As long as a unit does not incur damage, they will be asleep for a very long time, giving you plenty of turns to spam the Steal Gil command.
The Mystic class is available first, with the pre-requisite for getting the Orator class being a level 3 Mystic. Although the Mystic’s Repose (Sleep) skill is good, the Orator’s Mimic Darlavon is better because it requires no charge time and casts immediately after selection.
Alternatively to putting an enemy to sleep is using the Black Mage’s Toad spell to turn opponents into toads. Toads do next to no damage, and their resilience in protecting themselves from theft of gil or gear is reduced. Combining turning enemy units into toads as well as putting them to sleep yields even higher success rate of stealing gil and gear. If you really want a human opponents’ gear, turning them into toads and putting them to sleep is the way to do it.
-
Now you are ready to grind like a champion
Explanation through example: the team I used when doing this was to have everyone being whatever class they were grinding, with at least one character being a Mystic or an Orator. I usually kept Ramza to have the Mettle (Equivalent of Fundaments) skill as secondary, because he could then sit off to the side and spam Focus, while the other four units surrounded the last enemy unit on the board from all four sides to infinitely steal gil from.
Due to the fact that the Mystic/Orator sleep spells are area of effect spells (targets more than one square), I usually have to cast it on one of my friendly units, with the enemy being in the collateral range. In the event that the friendly unit is also put to sleep, this is where Ramza will be at the ready to throw a stone to lightly damage them back awake. Putting the enemy unit to sleep is priority, and once they are asleep, it’s wash, rinse, repeat with the spamming of Steal Gil and Focus until I accumulate enough JP to master whichever many skills I want.
Like I stated above, this is no quick and easy endeavor, and requires a great deal of time. But the luxury of having FFT on my iPad means that whenever I have a spare 10-15 minutes and I have my iPad on me, I can easily accumulate some JP in my spare time, and chip away at mastering all the skills.
But now that I’ve put the time in already, I’ve got my beast team that’s completely maxed out, equipped with gear that isn’t even available yet, and ready to eviscerate all comers from now until the end of the game. No battle, from Altima the secret Zodiac boss at the bottom of the Deep Dungeon, to a horde of red, black and yellow chocobos is a concern to me at all.
Again, half-assing this method will only lead to heartache.
Full-assing it makes you god.
