Tip for shorter missions (skipping encounters)

[ExcrucioVII]

300 Missions is a bit of a slog (coming from someone who completed the original on PSP), but for the less grind- or tedium-prone among us, there IS a way to breeze through missions by avoiding battles. The same exact trick from a decade ago!

 

Granted, avoiding enemy encounters will set you back in terms of SP, gil, maybe some materials, but if you're doing the bulk of the missions at later stages of the game or just trying to get through as many as possible in one go, saving time feels nice. Here's one simple trick: hug the walls. It doesn't really matter which wall (left/right); 99% of missions involve you reaching one specific mob/objective for an unskippable battle. Interspersed throughout your path are "random" encounters which usually spawn when you walk in the middle of the path as Square Enix intended, e.g. not towards walls. By hugging walls, you basically avoid enemy spawn triggers. If you need to cross over to the other wall for a treasure chest or because your objective requires you to turn in the other direction, you can walk perpendicularly towards the opposite wall in as short a line as possible. You can also kind of infer from the area where "safe" points may be, such as smaller corridors between much wider rooms, indoor staircases (enemies won't spawn in staircases) and some slopes, so use spaces like these to safely switch walls.

 

Another quality of life change to go fast is explained in the myriad early game tutorials: click your left stick (L3) or hold R2 to dash. You can dash while wall hugging to speed things up, just be sure not to stray from the wall.

 

TL;DR: Hold R2, run towards preferred wall, move forward diagonally (into your wall of choice) all the way to your objective.

 

I don't think a video of this is really necessary, but can upload one if someone wants a visual guide/reference for a general idea.

Happy grinding!

[oYazmat]

Yup definitely working!

[Hitman_Spinksy1]

Yup, thankfully figured it out but it still takes an age to slog through all them missions

[PostGameBlues]

This is one thing that I remember from playing the PSP version. Hug the damn walls lol. 

[Banananaki]

I was thinking of making a post about this because it seemed too easy to just skip all the fights. Reminded me of deep dungeons on FFXIV...

 

Another tip is to keep Gravity equipped for some larger health enemies. Granted, some will Guard it, it makes some fights trivial. You can definitely get through some harder missions way earlier hugging the walls and gravity-ing all the HP away from a target, and then tickling it with low dmg until it dies lol. Doesn't seem to do much vs machine enemies or summons, so far.