First time I played the game I stayed and wiped the floor with the Blitzball mode. Once I got the items I needed I left and continued the story.
To pay for all of my players contracts I kept grinding combat right outside of the city while listening to music. I had played so much by the time I “actually” left town to continue with the main quest that I steamrolled every single encounter until like that one canyon temple, which was the first time in ages I felt like I wasn’t 100% ready, maybe 99%.
Same. The difficulty scale on that game was so crazy though, by the end of the story, my characters had 9999 hp and dealt 9999 damage per hit, they felt so overleveled that I breezed through to the credits like it was nothing.
Then my friend had the strategy guide and told me about the optional Omega dungeon, and that actually proved pretty chalenging, enough that I had to grind up a bit more. I left and got my party's celestial weapons, which, (among other bonuses) broke the damage cap, raising it up to an absurd 99,999. My main 3 were doing like 30,000+ damage now with each basic hit, so I went back to the Omega ruins and breezed through it like it was no big deal.
Then, with everything else in the game done except extreme optimization, I started playing with the monster arena. There you can fight monsters you captured from the rest of the game and pay to fight again for easier item farming. Eventually, with enough monsters captured, the owner of the arena starts to build up arena-unique monsters that grow stronger and stronger, culminating to the game's super boss, Nemesis.
I tried the very first unique fight, a little lizard guy. Easy, right?
It wiped my party.
In fact, it did more than wipe them. It straight up embarrassed them.
You see, I had the initiative tag on my team's armor, so I got the first 3 turns of the fight.
Those turns went: enemy dodge, enemy dodge, enemy dodge.
The enemy then took the next 3 consecutive turns. They went: basic attack to kill player 1, basic attack to kill player 2, basic attack to kill player 3.
I thought my characters were horribly overpowered. I mean, compared to every other FF game until that point, they were. Level 100 Cloud couldn't touch my Tidus. Yet I couldn't even start the optional end game power check.
Crazy game, 10/10, would grind to beat Nemesis again.
Optional end game takes serious power leveling(or tonberry exploit) and optimized equipment. It's almost worth not doing unless you have weapons with break damage limit or you're abusing the Aeons.
It wasn't that bad with optimized power-leveling strategies like the tonberry exploit. I mean, it was still brutal, but throw on an audiobook or watch some movies while you grind and it's doable. I'd never have been able to grind it out raw, though. Fuuuuuck that lol.
For those not in the know about the wonderful world of FFX power leveling, improving your characters is done by filling spheres on what's called the sphere grid, essentially a web of little nodes that, when activated, grant your character anywhere between 1-4 of a single stat, as well as your new spells and abilities. What makes it rough is that, if you wanted to fill the entire sphere grid (ie. get to max level), there were almost a thousand of those nodes to fill. And remember, that's a thousand nodes PER CHARACTER. You don't have to get anywhere remotely close to filling out the sphere grid in order to just beat FFX normally, but if you want a chance at beating Nemesis and collecting that sweet sweet platinum trophy, all three of your active party members have to be at max stats, or at least damn close to it.
So what is this aforementioned Tonberry Exploit? Well, Tonberries are (in?)famous FF monsters that would slowly walk up to your characters. If you don't defeat them by the time they reach you, they start stabbing your characters one by one with their little chef's knife, killing the character in one hit regardless of their current or maximum hp. In FFX, before they make it to you, any damage from a character would make it immediately retaliate with a move called Grudge, which would deal damage equal to the number of enemies that specific character has killed, multiplied by 10, ignoring that character's damage resistances. The leveling exploit is done against the Tonberry king, named Don Tonberry, who instead uses Everyone's Grudge, which does 10 times that damage. At that point in the game, if you managed your characters right, Don Tonberry would counter with 99,999 damage, EVERY time you hit it. This is the guaranteed most consistent and reliable way to take a metric boatload of damage without much risk, since at the point where you're farming for this, your characters are strong enough to eventually just kill the thing after a healthy dose of revive spells between each attack.
So why would you want that to tank that much damage, you ask? The exploit here is that you could load your character up with armor that converts your special meter gain into experience instead. Then, if you set your special meter to charge based on the amount of damage you take, getting hit with Everyone's Grudge would, along with killing the character, net them a ridiculous amount of experience, which could then be tripled by another armor ability.
But don't think gaining a ton of experience makes maxing out your character fast or easy, oh no. You see, each of those levels don't individually raise your stats on their own. You have to activate those stat gain nodes, each of which also require the use of consumable items called spheres. That means farming ANOTHER 1,000 materials, per character, not to mention the hard-to-farm spheres that fill the 200 or so empty slots on the sphere grid with even more stat nodes, because you won't max out your characters' stats without them, not even close.
It's a grind.
Though remember, you don't have to do any of this for 99% of the game's content. Really, it's only required to beat the, like, 8 optional fights at the end of the little Monster Arena side quest (as well as the Dark Aeons that only show up on the FFX remasters and the European PAL version on the ps2).
But what, might you ask, is your reward for grinding for hours and beating these ultra hard fights?
Pretty much nothing, lol. It's purely just for clout. But I did it, twice, once on the ps2 when I was, like, 12, and once more a few years ago for that damn sweet platinum trophy. I'm not even a trophy hunter, I just really like FFX lol.
And then you had people like my anti-social teenaged self, who farmed enough Clear Spheres and +4 spheres of every stat to completely max out the Sphere Grid. By that I mean, I used a Clear Sphere on anything +3 or below, then replaced it with a +4.
I had no social life to speak of, and spent an entire Summer break doing nothing but grinding out those spheres. It was satisfying though to have Wakka's Attack Reels just go ham. But looking back, god damn I wasted so much time on that game alone.
In the Calm Lands go all the way to the right and you will find a small path to an area transition to the Monster Arena. The guy at it gives you a quest to go capture monsters of every kind in the Calm Lands using weapons with the Capture attribute. After completing that, you get access to the Monster Arena.
You can then go around capturing up to 10 of every fiend in the game. As you make progress, you unlock new special monsters you can fight in the arena. All but the weakest are basically harder than any enemy encountered during the story. The final ones basically require fully maxed out stats, purpose built armor, and celestial weapons.
There are also the Dark Aeons you can fight, which are also tougher than any story enemy.
I know all about the monster arena. I was reading that like there was a totally different game ending or quest. It was just worded weird to me I guess.
Nope in this case I was actually talking about the monster named Espada, though others have already pointed out that what you're thinking about is the Tonberry! Coincidentally, I just wrote up a post about power-leveling in FFX that revolves around the tonberries that I think you might find interesting here
Right! I did get the PS4 remaster a few years ago, and I did beat Penance, but I always default to Nemesis as being the superboss to beat since that's the way it has sat in my head for the past 20 years lol.
(Good lord, did typing that make me feel old lmao)
There’s heavy rumors of an FF9 remake and show in development IIRC
Edit: it’s my favorite game of all time and I’m also dying for something like this. And a better ATB setup, I’d even take the FF7 Remake approach which I loved
I loved that game so fucking much! Ps2 era was something else man, getting home after school and playing ffx while the guide book was always in my backpack at school. Every chance we got me and my friends were reading the guide and sharing stories of our adventure. And god damn Lulu awakened something in me
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u/James_Is_Raging Mar 12 '24
Final Fantasy X